We need other ways to discover shit on the internet.
I don't know, maybe bring back the fucking webrings or something.
The Internet Used to be a Place
There are still active webrings:
sadgrl.online webring directory
digilord.neocities.org/webring
webringworld.org
brisray webring listAnd there's still web directories hanging around, similar to the now dead dmoz site.
https://url.town/ and https://curlie.org/ for example
Webrings were so good, I would spend hours clicking through them
Man I miss Webrings.
Man it's miss the nethernet
But Google’s guidance was also telling us that recovery was possible if we just “removed” our “unhelpful” on-page content:
This is very chilling because it means websites will delete content. If the internet archive didn't grab it in time it means knowledge is gone forever. An algorithm is not going to always be accurate in determining what is helpful.
That's right. It's why I began donating to the IA recently.
Google's methods are shitty and exploitative, yes, but this is far from "censoring". And "censor" is not used just for a clickbait title - the author claims "censorship" multiple times in the article before I stopped reading for health reasons (the doctor says if I keep rolling my eyes, my ocular muscles will spasm and eject my eyeballs).
Really wish people would stop wielding powerful words irresponsibly.
Not saying you're wrong but people use words that are useful in conveying to their target audience. Denylisting by the search monopolist is perceived as censorship by many.
Bombast aside, I think the process and its implications are interesting and people need to be aware.
Agreed. It makes some solid points, and it seems well-researched in the way of exposing how the search-result hotdogs are made (at least in the 2/3 or so that I read). I just couldn't stomach the way it was framed as "censorship".
I'm very passionate about "words have meanings" and strongly dislike when words typically reserved to describe mountains are inappropriately used (and watered down) to describe mole hills.
Would you prefer "suppress"?
Also, wouldn't your eyes bounce right back since they're attached with a sort of rubber band?
No, because nothing is being actively suppressed, either. The gist of it is that they're basically being ignored which is completely separate from active measures like censorship or suppression.
They've been doing shit like that* without AI for decades. But yeas, it's getting worse all the time.
* censor | suppress - tomatos | tomatoes
This is why I shut The Den of Amateur Writing down after 25 years of running and developing it. I had written the entire codebase for Googles SEO, rolled out the update so my users would see a bit more traffic trickle in, and then watched them delist all my URLs 3 months later when this change rolled out. I just gave up. It was taking way too much of my life fighting googles bullshit to provide a free community.
I'd not heard of your site before, but it sounds like it was a cool thing while it lasted. That seems to be the trend of the day. The cool things are giving way to very dumb things.
It really was a great thing. It happened naturally too. Started as just a site I posted my writing to, a personal site in 1997, and friends wanted to add their stuff. By 1999 it was renamed from Routhy's Den to the Den of Amateur Poetry, and then the domain was purchased and the site renamed to The Den of Amateur Writing.
I still remember the pre-PHP days. People would email their works to me and I would manually build an HTML page and update the site within 24 hours.
JFC if there a uBlock list I can add to block most AI crap or do I have to get a new addon for that?
Yes but also stop using Google
Fwiw, I've been enjoying qwant for a few months now.
Ublock exists on multiple browsers.
Perhaps this is how they're trying to solve the factuality problem of their LLM? Limit the sources to a known good allowlist. Train the AI answers model on those. If that's what's happening, it would be ironic that they'd have to undo their search results enshittification in order to overcome the LLM's inherent flaws. Of course the regular search results could keep being shitty. In fact they might get worse depending on the cost of the AI Mode.
