Technology

37712 readers

187 users here now

A nice place to discuss rumors, happenings, innovations, and challenges in the technology sphere. We also welcome discussions on the intersections of technology and society. If it’s technological news or discussion of technology, it probably belongs here.

Remember the overriding ethos on Beehaw: Be(e) Nice. Each user you encounter here is a person, and should be treated with kindness (even if they’re wrong, or use a Linux distro you don’t like). Personal attacks will not be tolerated.

Subcommunities on Beehaw:

This community's icon was made by Aaron Schneider, under the CC-BY-NC-SA 4.0 license.

founded 2 years ago

MODERATORS

alyaza@beehaw.org

TheRtRevKaiser@beehaw.org

gyrfalcon@beehaw.org

rs5th@beehaw.org

SemioticStandard@beehaw.org

TheRtRevKaiser@kbin.social

Los@beehaw.org

coldredlight@beehaw.org

remington@beehaw.org

178

Are We Watching The Internet Die? (www.wheresyoured.at)

submitted 8 months ago by Gaywallet@beehaw.org to c/technology@beehaw.org

80 comments fedilink hide all child comments

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] HarkMahlberg@kbin.social 12 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago) (2 children)

The author does have a way with words lol. I love this paragraph in particular, emphasis mine:

As we speak, the battle that platforms are fighting is against generative spam, a cartoonish and obvious threat of outright nonsense, meaningless chum that can and should (and likely will) be stopped. In the process, they're failing to see that this isn't a war against spam, but a war against crap, and the overall normalization and intellectual numbing that comes when content is created to please algorithms and provide a minimum viable product for consumers. Google's "useless" results problem isn't one borne of content that has no meaning, but of content that only sort of helps, that is the "right" result but doesn't actually provide any real thought behind it, like the endless "how to fix error code X" results full of well-meaning and plausibly helpful content that doesn't really help at all.

And he describes exactly what I have to deal with on the regular, "content that only sort of helps" that "steals your attention from the content you actually want." Even moving from Google to DDG has only mitigated this problem, it hasn't fully gone away.

But yeah, one of his conclusions seems to be the Death of the Hyperlink? Which, I mean, not even LLM's can kill that. I doubt <a href is going away any time soon.

[–] dgriffith@aussie.zone 16 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago)

And he describes exactly what I have to deal with on the regular, "content that only sort of helps"

Hello, my name's dgriffith. I'm a Fediverse Support community member, and I'm here to help.

Have you tried running sfc /scannow and making sure your antivirus is up to date? That usually fixes the issue that you are describing.

If that does not help, a complete system reinstall often solves the problem you have.

Please mark this comment as useful if it helps you.

Regarding the death of hyperlinks, it's probably more a case of "why bother clicking on yet another link that leads me to another page of crap?".

That is, it used to be the case that you'd put information on the web that was useful and people would link to it, now 80 percent of it seems to be variations of my "helpful" text above, SEO'd recipe sites, or just AI hallucinations of stuff scraped from other sites.

[–] lvxferre@mander.xyz 4 points 8 months ago

Yup, he does. And what he is saying in this excerpt is great (insightful) too, not just how it's said.