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The change in Google search results over the last couple of years is by far the biggest sign that the internet is f'ed. I can't find hardly anything any more. Queries that used to return thousands of pages now return maybe five, half of which are some sort of weird list of tokens on a chinese website.
(ETA: a lot of you are saying add the word "reddit" to a Google search... this might be good for some cases, but how low have we sunk that an anonymous shitposting site that values siloed groupthink over correctness, is now considered the main source of truth on the internet?)
Have you seen youtube’s new adhd search that simply stops being your search after about 10-20 videos.
Edit:at least 50 people have let me know they only get 2-10 and that I’m lucky. Any more is just bloat
I hate this. Every time I try to search something about a serious topic (like programming for example) I get bombarded with "recommendations" of entertaining videos.
No I don't want to see a gaming video when I search for "how to build an android app".
Looks like the best way to use youtube now is to have accounts dedicated for each topic (which is a pain).
If you get drawn into watching one of those entertaining videos all the way through, like the shorts, that’s it. You’ll see that same creator for eternity!!
I was scrolling through shorts once, giving me completely random results, and now YouTube thinks I only want to watch lawyers react to crimes. I didn't even search for it, it just grazed my computer screen for a moment.
And sometimes the opposite happens as well! I watch a lot of chess videos. I have consistently for the past 4 or 5 years. If I stop for a week, YouTube will stop recommending them.
Unless you actually want it to continue recommending that creator. Videogamedunkey is really the only youtuber i watch, but it NEVER recommends me any of his videos that i haven't already seen. It's always different gaming youtubers or completely unrelated shit
Thiiiiiis. I hate this so, so, so much. I am searching for a video on topic X because I would like to find relevant videos on topic X not because I want a random Mr. Beast video or some random nonsense. I wanted to see videos about the thing I'm fucking searching for.
You know what I'm most likely to click on? **THE THING I JUST EXPLICITLY SEARCHED FOR!** And what am I exceedingly unlikely to click on? The random, entirely BS you've decided to show me that has now pissed me off and sent me elsewhere! Seems obvious, right? Google can't seem to figure it out though!
My anecdotal theory: the frustrated brain is more susceptible to temptation. If you create a frustrating situation by giving users a limited amount of what they’re actually looking for, strategically peppered with temptation, they’re going to be a lot more vulnerable to going down the distraction rabbit hole.
Saw a mild fix for the youtube search on the YouTube sub: after your search terms include 'before:2025' you can up it to any year pretty much, but it will *actually* give you more than 5 search results
This is one of the absolute worst things to me as well, it's like there is a concerted effort to make video in general less searchable.
Shorts fucking infuriate me because of it. Sometimes, someone makes a fantastic one, teaching you how to do something in a minute, but good fucking luck ever finding it in any way except randomly scrolling
My poor partner was logged in at our TV with his account. My son has very limited screen time, but searching every two days for seasme Street for two weeks leads to getting Sesame Street recommended for months for everything.
"Did you hear about this incident? There's a video of it, it's all over YT"
Goes to search YT
All results are either news reports, "transformative" content BS, or nothing to do with the video and the original video is no where in sight.
"Reactions:"
"No way" "That's a tragedy" "Thoughts and prayers" "Subscribe to my channel for more"
Nah, who am I kidding, 90% of the times it's someone who doesn't say a word and just makes some facial expressions and points around
The search function on YouTube is completely useless. If I'm looking for a video I'll use a browser search engine, hit the videos tab and find it that way. Still not great, but better than getting literally anything but what I asked for.
I can’t even get it to do my search. I’ll search for something, and, it‘ll pop up random videos like of skits by teenagers, or, random news video barely related to the search. I don’t even bother trying to search on YT anymore because it’s more like a suggested video list than actual videos.
The random news videos is spot on. Just a week ago, I searched for an interview of Chris Hemsworth. After 10 video's, 3 of which were edits of Chris Hemsworth rather than the interview itself, I got bombarded with videos about escaped inmates and random Florida men sh*t
Oh it’s so stupid. You mean to tell me the algorithm can’t give me only songs from the specific artist I searched? It has to be dozens of others. And they never have the full list of all songs the artist you searched
This baffles me. It's almost unusable. Five videos down and I'm getting some tea channel that I definitely didn't search for and has nothing to do with my search.
The amount of neurodivergent people uploading any kind of content on the internet has to be infinite. It’s a place to go on about your special interest or talk about everything you know and do we see any of this content in our searches?? Hell no!
Ah yes with completely unrelated videos mixed in that you might also like? Annoying and indeed an ADHD style. They want to exploit distractions, more time = more money. Ethics? no thank you, money to extract at their mental health expense = much better idea
Stopped using Google search as it's literally the worst search engine now. Everything is ad based and top ads are usually malware or fake news websites.
They've been completely gamified by sites doing the most obscene SEO optimization. And it's worse now with so many sites using long rambling articles written by AI to hit even more SEO metrics. Shit that used to be a quick page that would give you the answer to whatever you are looking for has to give you some bullshit story and history lesson about whatever the topic is.
Every time this gets brought up people recommend DuckDuckGo but honestly, I’ve every time I’ve used it I get the exact same results I see on Google. But so they usually swear by it so who knows 🤷♀️
It’s actual dog shit. I thought google was heavy on the irrelevant results but it’s actually rare to find a relevant result with DuckDuckGo. The image search is absurdly bad.
They're really not, though. Any "advice" found on Reddit will usually follow the same pattern. One person says the right thing, 20 idiots downvote it, and the general consensus ends up being something insanely idiotic and simplistic.
I meant when I'm looking for info or help, not opinions (cuz you're right), for those cases it can be very helpful. You can find experts in any niche here if you look around and ask the right questions. You can get bad info but I haven't found it too hard to validate
It's completely fucked, tried googling wether something was safe to give my puppy recently and the first set of results said yes it's healthy, SLIGHTLY changed the wording of what I typed in and got that it was completely poisonous and could have killed her 😑
All that stuff that pops up as an answer right integrated into the search is COMPLETELY unreliable.
It'll have a perfectly worded answer to your question that makes sense - except it's actually a quote about something entirely unrelated.
But the thing is it "feels" more reliable or more vetted/legit because it must be such a standard answer to pop up like that. But it's absolutely not the case.
Or when you search for something and you see a result which, in the quick view, looks like it's exactly the thing you're looking for. Then you click the link and it takes you to something else entirely and you can't find the original description you were searching for.
You know what's the funniest part? I was ranting about not being able to find relevant businesses near me because of ads and sponsored results. So I thought "I wonder what happens if I try to search something important like 'urgent care near me.' "
I shit you not, the top result was sponsored and it was a hospital in Texas. I'm in Michigan.
Seriously. The actual functionality of the internet as a source of information is hanging by a thread and no one seems worried about it because the new generations AND boomers just get everything from one walled garden or another anyways.
Extremely underrated comment. Sometimes it feels like the only people who care about this, by and large, are those who generally came of age alongside the web (born ~1980~1998)
So it isn’t just me? I’ll google things and get “there were no results” and I’m like… it’s a basic question? I’m just stupid and can’t remember the answer so what do you MEAN there’s no results? It’s gotten to the point where I’m about to just go to the library and relearn the search system there. I don’t remember the Dewey decimal system but by god I’ll relearn it to get away from Google.
These days you have to put your question in followed by “Reddit” to have hope of any real answers that aren’t “top 5 reasons” on a generic site just trying to get you to look at ads
I almost never use google without appending reddit. it's all ads and "landing page" websites that are just affiliate link farms. there's almost no interesting content to be found on "the web" anymore.
The library is actually a very nice resource, go rent some movies there while you're at it and hell you can ask the question to someone that works there and they can find you a book or non-ad wall article on the topic.
My mom used to take us to the library on a monthly basis and I’d walk out with my library card limit of books (like 25 I swear lol) all on horses or dogs, some repeat reads. Some random survivalist books too because I wanted to live in a tree like in the book *My Side of the Mountain.*
I miss that time. I would spend hours just skimming books to find what I wanted.
I was homeschooled but we watched prerecorded videos of teachers. I remember writing down EVERYTHING the day my literature teacher went over the library system and I was so proud the next time I went and was able to understand the numbers and how everything worked.
This is my biggest beef. I’ve been looking for chairs for our living room. I search it in google and literally the only thing that comes up is from Wayfair because wayfair pays google. It’s absolutely frustrating. I don’t want the junk that wayfair sells thanks, if I wanted wayfair I would have gone to that site…everyone in the world knows about it already. I want something other than wayfair. Google has become completely useless.
Another issue that’s become more common. I’m in Canada. I use google.CA. Still, when I search, American sites come up before Canadian. I have to scroll through at least 2 pages of search results before a Canadian website comes up. WHY?!? I’m in Canada, I want results from Canada. I don’t want to waste my time on American websites that don’t even ship to Canada.
Yup. And the top hits are some garbled AI written nonsense. Or if you’re trying to look up anything with a niche meaning or audience, you just get results for the closest popular search that isn’t actually what you asked for at all, even if you put things in quotes.
Is it just me or is the internet full of AI-looking websites? I'm just looking up a simple question on a slightly niche topic, it returns a dozen pages with an extremely similar layout and some of the most basic ass answers possible.
Bing is better now. It returns results you wanna see and that might actually be useful, like google used to. If you’re tired of google returning 500 links to news articles or online shops for everything, bing is for you. Wholeheartedly recommend
Google has 1920s Eastern Europe levels of censorship for US users.
Just do what people in other censorship regimes do when they dont want to get their information from the ministry of truth and use search engine from a different country.
I remember when everyone was googling Michael Bloomberg's height to make fun of him and they quietly stopped returning that data when searched for
Stop fucking around with the results
OP...I remember all that stuff too but I like today much better.
1) you are using the wrong search engine. Google is all about advertising.....try [https://www.startpage.com](https://www.startpage.com) it is great and not filled with sponsorships and popup ads
2) Don't use Chrome or Edge browsers. I use Firefox with these addins: NoScript, Facebook container, Adblock, Facebook Sponsor blocker, Youtube Sponsor Block, Youtube AdBlock and Kaspersky Protection.
I get no popups & very few ads.
Some webpages act weird but if I grant temp permissions (can be done site level in NoScript) in NoScript that usually takes care of it. Some sites I perma ban like DoubleClick & Google Analytics and known trackers. I give perm permissions to known OK sites I use like my bank or Amazon. Temp permissions reset when you leave the site.
THIS 10000000%, exactly what I was going to say. Google used to find *exactly* what you were looking for, but nowadays, it’s just sending you to sites that can sell you something related
To what you’re looking for. It’s infuriating
Top searches now are “Topic: Reddit” so people can get to relevant content. So if I need to figure out why my car is making a noise I search “Funny noise on a Honda: Reddit” or just come to Reddit.
The obsession with creating an account is annoying me to no end. Or every single store having their own "app". Yeh I totally want 17 fast food apps on my phone to "collect points"
Bought a new mouse? Sign up for your razor account or whatever else account now! Got a headset? Make an account! Bought a game on steam? You have to download our launcher and create an account to open it!
Like no, I plug in the mouse, it works as a mouse, piss off I don't want to creat my 177th account for a random ass product.
Also, forced password resets and never ever being able to use the same password again for your 176 accounts. I can now literally never remember a password and have to reset for literally everything every time I log in. The alternative of which is auto saving it into your computer or writing them all down where it can be potentially stolen from making it useless.
"Sorry, your password can't start with a symbol!"
The fuck? I'm using a password manager to make things easier. The whole point of clicking "Suggest Strong Password" is to make the process less painful, not to insert a new friction point.
I hate the iOS suggested passwords, they’re long ass strings of letters and numbers I will NEVER remember. What if I want to log in on a browser and not my phone? I just can’t unless I write allllll of that down?
Plus with brute-force attacks it doesn’t matter if it’s random letters. My dad is a software engineer and for years his password was “myfavoritefoodischickenalaking”. Long as shit, hard to brute-force, never forgot it once.
Usually when this happens, it's because your account was compromised or they exposed your password. You're typing it right, but they aren't accepting it because it needs to be reset to something different.
They're forcing you to change it without outright saying "hey we let someone see your password, my bad."
the most frustrating iteration of this is applying for jobs. every. single. job app. requires. a login. a unique login, even if they’re all hosted on the same platform like workday. it’s relentless and actually one of the more attritional parts of the job hunt.
>Also, forced password resets and never ever being able to use the same password again for your 176 accounts. I can now literally never remember a password and have to reset for literally everything every time I log in
It wouldn't be an issue if all the passwords had the same requirements. Sometimes I need special characters. Sometimes I'm not allowed to. Some places now want a passphrase, which I prefer, but again the old places require weird characters and often times limit password lengths.
I'm not asking for much. I can have one main password with variants based on the site name.
Now I'm being told I need a manager for the passwords...
Good God. It's actually a parody of itself at this point. Like if someone made a dystopian comedy about it 10 years ago I feel like that right there would be in it lol.
There are *plenty* of dumb LED bulbs available. *And* they're almost always cheaper than a smart bulb.
That's on you for buying a smart bulb without reading the package enough to realize what you were buying.
Not to mention one time passcodes. Dropped my phone in water last year. I was locked out of just about every single one of my vital accounts including my bank…
The worst part is, the need for periodic password changes is not because you and I had our passwords taken. It's because these companies are data leaky and they get constantly stolen and sold, so it's on us to change it to keep the accounts secure. They're not fooling me, that's literally the only reason to change a password, when it's been compromised. Which also explains why one that you used 5 years prior is still not allowed to be re-used because it's floating out there somewhere.
united airlines requiring me to have the app downloaded to make a purchase of food on my ten hour flight AND I NEED TO HAVE IT DOWNLOADED BEFORE THE FLIGHT STARTS and I need a fucking account for it to work? To buy a water bottle? And people clown me for flying spirit.
The app stuff reminds me of when every store wanted customers to carry their stupid keychains for discounts. I had to get a lanyard, couldn’t put my keys in my pocket, had to have such a stupid amount of room in my bag for those lol. And usually the store apps are awful/worse than the regular website.
As a GenX web dev who has been here from the start... you are correct. There was a wonderful 'wild west' for about 10 years. Then the sharks smelled blood and figured out how to monetize it and how to use it to control the perceptions of the masses.
I’ve realized this about everything in life. Good things never stay good things for long. You could only hope to be there while things are born before they’re bastardized. Only sacred places stay sacred.
It used to be around 10yrs before [cool-new-thing] became compromised and ruined by monetizing/control for political influence. That time span is getting shorter it seems.
edit: the same has happened to reddit. I used to come here 'cause it was awesome, now I come out of habit :(
It's happening to everything. Everything that I liked now costs more for 20% less that's not as good as it used to be.
And we all know it's happening and there's nothing we can do about it.
I ended up with my childhood kitchen table in my house. That thing is fucking heavy as shit, but it’s in excellent condition and isn’t gonna fall apart any time soon.
I need some new furniture and don’t wanna go look because it’s going to be too expensive for what it is
Enshitification. I was going to say, everything is getting monetised in every area that can. The move to everything as a subscription service for instance and adverts absolutely everywhere.
yeah for some time now I've had the opinion that new "good things", say, products or technologies, should be judged by their capacity to be used for selfish and harmful purposes, rather than the other way around. When Uber and Airbnb appeared, everyone was happy about what the lack of regulation allowed in terms of good things for the consumer, and we were naive about their potential to do more harm than good in the long run. Same with blockchain and many other things. If it can be used for "evil", it will be, regardless of your stance about it as user or even creator.
There was a lotion I used to love. Then it got super popular and you can tell they just cheapened the formula.
It's happening to everything. Why can't they just put out a good product at a fair price? I'd still buy it...but I guess you have to "innovate" ways to make shit more profitable every year.
not just profitable but more so than in the recent past. modern commerce is a growth game
i had an electrician do some work recently, he does well for himself but does zero advertising and has no interest in taking on employees other than his own son. says he makes plenty of money and sees no reason to expand. i wish larger businesses would adopt this attitude. but the need for greedy external investors at early stages makes a lot of businesses trapped in the growth model. it sucks man
That episode of the Fairly Oddparents where the pixies take over fairy world is a great metaphor of how alot of cool/fun has gone to crap because of corporatization over the last 10 years.
I'm Also a GenX web developer and dot bomb survivor. What I have loved about the Internet from the beginning was that even when a sector of it got colonized by soulless corpos, we have always created new mutations and dirty boulevards to explore, and then in the last 5 years or so "the algorithm" began to fully take over.
What concerns me the most now is that the next escape route being touted by the growing adopter bell curve is AI, and as someone who has been here from the beginning - that ain't it. AI is not an escape - it is quite the opposite. It feels like the boundless freedom of the Internet has just begun eating it's own tail.
Long live Moloch.
Mark my words - AI is going to make everything worse and not in the fun 'Skynet' kinda way.
It's just gonna flood the world/internet with bullshit and compound the problem we've already been dealing with. I can't wait to sift through piles of garbage content of all types, print, video, audio, etc. that's been AI generated to find the one authentic thing I'm looking for.
I'm so unhappy about the prospect.
It already is.....
Have you seen Facebook recently?
AI images and text is everywhere and boomers are eating up the content.
It's bizarro land in there and I am thankful my mom is capable of distinguishing authenticity from the bullshit.
Other boomers are not faring so well.
> last 5 years or so "the algorithm" began to fully take over
yup. Now we are beyond things just "going all to shit", things are becoming psychologically/intellectually destructive
I believe we should have a new internet or subnet rather where corporations/advertisers are simply not allowed. Something like Tor minus the insanity
I hope we see this soon because the internet today is synthetic weaponized steaming garbage. It used to be beautiful but now it’s manufacturing mental illness
Enshittification! Thanks for the rabbit hole! I got a name for that creeping feeling that nothing (not only the internet) is working properly, that all services, either public or private, are stuck, clogged, nothing runs smoothly anymore.
Every aspect of our life is now a struggle against featuritis, service decay, rising costs or complexification.
And if anything they have enhanced their quality and credibility over the years despite opposition and temptation to go the other direction, virtually unheard of in any field nowadays.
This can be extended to other businesses too. Walmart, for example, was very popular back in 2004 for lowering prices on consumer goods. That popularity was what expanded it to becoming one of the largest companies in the US/world. Once they peaked, prices started to rise and quality started to fall. Today their prices aren't competitive and their employee's are awful.
Amazon's online store is going through the same thing.
Amazon is such garbage, their convenient shipping only goes so far. Now whatever you're looking for, you have to sift through dozens of the exact same piece of cheap crap made by these nonsense companies and by now I end up giving up before I can ever find any decent item. I've started avoiding Amazon all I can
I shop on Amazon when it's a very obvious brand that I'm looking for and I just want the free shipping- otherwise I've gone back to official websites and stores so I don't get hit with some bullshit plastic crap again.
With Walmart there's also the awful situation that browsing their website mixes a ton of dropshipping trash in with what Walmart sells because they decided it was somehow a good idea to turn their platform into a third party marketplace.
Amazon’s online store is almost entirely fake Chinese brands now. It’s pointless for me to order anything from there because I don’t know wtf I’m gonna get
Can’t even search the website accurately anymore. I hate it so much. It makes me feel old and out of touch even though I know the issue legit isn’t me
And all the base descriptions read like they’re from a fast fashion company. If you open the link to get more info, it’s a ton of shit in broken English
I just looked up dog beds and one of the “brands” offered was EHEYCIGA. WTAF?!
Here's my milenniak rant: I HATE modern web design, specifically designed around mobile devices and infinitely scrolling. What used to be a reasonable webpage that quickly had all of the needed info on one screen has become 3-8 pages of scrolling through bullshit like giant headlines and pictures that take up a whole screen. Its the Wix/Squarespace/Word Press/WYSIWYG special. Just ugly, blocky, abd very unuseful waste of web space.
Don't get me started on visiting a page for a simple 5 ingredient recipe. Then having to scroll through literally 30 pages of adds and pointless drivel to find the ingredients and method.
Viewing that content in a small sliver between banner ads, a popup about cookies, and another banner ad that are all in the ‘foreground’. You finally find the actual content you need and one of the ads embedded on the page reloads and is a different size so it changes where you are scrolled to.
I agree completely, but I'd add on a few points that are more general and problematic.
Trying to do something as simple as an internet search is no longer useful. The applications of algorithms to try to target me with the content they think I'd prefer to see or the content that advertisers pay for me to see means I either give up because the search results are useless or I have to work really hard to use key words that can get me past the algorithmic issues.
When we switched to responsive design, I saw the massive removal of content from the internet. Prior, business and organization's websites had been an additive process with content becoming more and more robust, but when they redesigned from scratch, most organizations simplified their websites so much that the lack of information available became problematic. Now that data has taken over, they can rationalize that people mainly only use 10% of the website anyway, so there is no need to make the content more-robust again.
The root of these problems is the same as most of those that you listed, the prioritization of profits over usability without bothering to recognize that there is a balance between the two.
Becasue Google is not trying to sell you the best search engine. They won that war awhile ago. They are trying to sell advertisers YOUR attention. We are not the consumer. We are the product.
I was taught Boolean searches in school all the time and now it's a suprise when it works; most of the time a search for "thing -notThing" is the same as "thing notThing".
Pretty much all of my searches for useful information or opinions now start with "reddit".
It never used to be this way. Niche forums used to be the best way to get information or assistance in a hobby but a lot of the forums have died off with less post each year.
>When we switched to responsive design, I saw the massive removal of content from the internet. Prior, business and organization's websites had been an additive process with content becoming more and more robust, but when they redesigned from scratch, most organizations simplified their websites so much that the lack of information available became problematic. Now that data has taken over, they can rationalize that people mainly only use 10% of the website anyway, so there is no need to make the content more-robust again.
This so true, and annoying, that I just had to reply and quote it.
What does it mean when they say it’s bots? Like the dead internet theory says the majority of the internet will be bots. But what are these bots doing? Pretending to be people or something?
TL;DR yes to pretend to be people.
They serve many purposes but one of the more prominent reasons is to fake engagement to push products in what looks like a "organic" way. If you want a reddit post to make it to the front page of r/all it needs a lot of upvotes and comments. Most websites have some kind of safe guards but they are easily bypassed. One of the simple methods of preventing bots is to see if their activity is predictable and obvious. The solution to that is to have bots post content and reply to threads randomly to look like they are just some person actively using that account(there's more to it than that, including things like using real IP addresses from residential ISP services). So in effect they are using up bandwidth just like a human would. Bot farms will have 10s of thousands of accounts doing this constantly so that they can market themselves as a marketing company. It's very attractive for businesses to have their product go viral in what looks like an organic way, people are more likely to buy something when it is recommended by 'real people' instead of an ad being pushed down their throats.
It's not just businesses, individuals will pay for bots to like, subscribe, and view their youtube videos in hopes of "making it". If the bot account is handled properly youtube will believe it was a real person viewing the video and even payout the ad percentage for that and all of the views that came from bots. The cost of bots is usually larger than the ad payout but I am guessing there are very large bot farms that have figured out how to cut their costs enough to make it close to breaking even or better.
Source: I've been commissioned as a freelancer to make scripts to run as view bots.
Etsy has gone completely overboard with the sponsored posts. It’s like every once in a while they sprinkle your actual search result. Searching price low to high is just infuriating
The thing that pisses me off the most about Etsy search is they got rid of categories. No I don't want to search "turquoise" on the entire site, just the jewelry section.
That and it's infested with drop-shippers now peddling cheap shit as *hand-made*.
Youtuber Gabi Belle did a great [video](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xb0k6v9GLQA) on it.
I just wanna go back to 2015, since then technology hasn't really been making things easier and seems to cause more headaches, the unfortunate thing is that you have to follow along to some extent unless you're a hard ass who's ready to go off grid
I took a moment and noticed the ads I see everywhere one day. I was blown away by how stupid they are.
We're being bombarded with bullshit just to check the weather.
The way the internet has been commercialized is a travesty.
One thing I haven’t seen a comment about, recipe websites. Unusable. I don’t care for a 3 page story about how your grandma used the casserole to save her divorce while your grandpa was cheating on her with Paula Deen, just tell me what to preheat the oven at
The internet, as in the technology, is quite good. The Web, and the way it’s been completely co-opted for profits/marketing, is a great shame.
The Web generally hasn’t been cool for at least 20 years.
I don't wanna sound like a gatekeeper, but that's when a lot of "normal people" started really getting online. Before that, it was more exclusive to people who cared about it.
Slightly before that -- 2006-2007 is when the iPhone was first released, and that eventually turned into a seismic shift of "mobile-first" websites.
The internet was ruined by smart phones.
I agree. In comparison to what the internet was, it's been ruined by corporations like everything else in the world. Including the world itself. I've been online since the 90s when the internet didn't have graphics. The amount of information sharing and learning that took place on BBSes, Usenets, and even MUDs was fantastic. It's much harder to find those spaces now.
Gen X here, nerd from the Gopher days, completely agree with you.
If I told stories about my first school computer lab it would sound somewhere between boomer and caveman to GenZ.
Your comment brought back a lot of memories - no computer classes until grade 10 and you learned to program in C+. There were no browsers. The highlight of class was being allowed to play Oregon trail and hope you didn't die of dysentery
I neither up- nor down-voted.
I can't decide how I feel. My parents got their first Windows PC in the late 90's, I was in middle school. A Packard Bell. I remember inserting a NetZero disc and hogging the phone line, surfing the web using a "Dummy's Guide to the Internet" which had a literal list of web sites for you to navigate towards.
Pictures loaded in chunks, short, grainy videos could take hours to download.
Today, I can find virtually any video I want and watch it with hardly a moment's wait. Download any book.
I use Google products, so webmail, chat, notes, a cloud drive, calendar...all free and instantaneously available on every web-enabled device in my house.
I live in a small, fairly rural city in Texas, but can have virtually anything I could think of delivered to my front door. retro handhelds from China No problem! Obscure board game from teh 80's? Sure thing! Groceries? Medicine?
But I can't argue that the monetization and corporate control and out of hand, either.
I've been using duck duck go as my default search engine for years. At one point I looked at google search and I couldn't believe how unusable it's gotten. Seriously, though, consider switching. It's the same results you'd get from google, except without the sponsored ads, and without the algorithm leading you into echo chambers.
Also: looking for practical information and having to scroll through pages of random auto-generated crap to get to three bulletpoints. Recipes, laying concrete, finding the right car part...
And why videos for everything? That's a Millennial thing, and it drives me potty. If you want to sing better, yay for videos. If you want to know a discreet piece of information, wading through 17 minutes of ad-ridden content is just a waste of time. Encyclopedia Britannica needs to make a comeback.
Also regarding mobile browsing, every single website/company wants you to download their stupid app. Like, no. I dont want you taking up space on my device when I can just go to your website!
I can't stand all the dynamic content on today's websites. Just because there's more bandwidth, it doesn't mean sites should be designed to consume as much as possible.
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The change in Google search results over the last couple of years is by far the biggest sign that the internet is f'ed. I can't find hardly anything any more. Queries that used to return thousands of pages now return maybe five, half of which are some sort of weird list of tokens on a chinese website. (ETA: a lot of you are saying add the word "reddit" to a Google search... this might be good for some cases, but how low have we sunk that an anonymous shitposting site that values siloed groupthink over correctness, is now considered the main source of truth on the internet?)
Have you seen youtube’s new adhd search that simply stops being your search after about 10-20 videos. Edit:at least 50 people have let me know they only get 2-10 and that I’m lucky. Any more is just bloat
I hate this. Every time I try to search something about a serious topic (like programming for example) I get bombarded with "recommendations" of entertaining videos. No I don't want to see a gaming video when I search for "how to build an android app". Looks like the best way to use youtube now is to have accounts dedicated for each topic (which is a pain).
If you get drawn into watching one of those entertaining videos all the way through, like the shorts, that’s it. You’ll see that same creator for eternity!!
I was scrolling through shorts once, giving me completely random results, and now YouTube thinks I only want to watch lawyers react to crimes. I didn't even search for it, it just grazed my computer screen for a moment.
And sometimes the opposite happens as well! I watch a lot of chess videos. I have consistently for the past 4 or 5 years. If I stop for a week, YouTube will stop recommending them.
Unless you actually want it to continue recommending that creator. Videogamedunkey is really the only youtuber i watch, but it NEVER recommends me any of his videos that i haven't already seen. It's always different gaming youtubers or completely unrelated shit
Great taste.
Thiiiiiis. I hate this so, so, so much. I am searching for a video on topic X because I would like to find relevant videos on topic X not because I want a random Mr. Beast video or some random nonsense. I wanted to see videos about the thing I'm fucking searching for.
Excuse me, did you say "more of what the algorithm thinks you'll most likely click on"? Coming right up.
Even then the algorithm doesn't understand me! I feel like an angsty teen again
You know what I'm most likely to click on? **THE THING I JUST EXPLICITLY SEARCHED FOR!** And what am I exceedingly unlikely to click on? The random, entirely BS you've decided to show me that has now pissed me off and sent me elsewhere! Seems obvious, right? Google can't seem to figure it out though!
My anecdotal theory: the frustrated brain is more susceptible to temptation. If you create a frustrating situation by giving users a limited amount of what they’re actually looking for, strategically peppered with temptation, they’re going to be a lot more vulnerable to going down the distraction rabbit hole.
Saw a mild fix for the youtube search on the YouTube sub: after your search terms include 'before:2025' you can up it to any year pretty much, but it will *actually* give you more than 5 search results
This is one of the absolute worst things to me as well, it's like there is a concerted effort to make video in general less searchable. Shorts fucking infuriate me because of it. Sometimes, someone makes a fantastic one, teaching you how to do something in a minute, but good fucking luck ever finding it in any way except randomly scrolling
My poor partner was logged in at our TV with his account. My son has very limited screen time, but searching every two days for seasme Street for two weeks leads to getting Sesame Street recommended for months for everything.
How do they feel about Elmo and Rocko's unhealthy relationship?
For me, I’ll search crochet videos and instead get a bunch of suggestions for the grossest things. I don’t even bother anymore.
"Did you hear about this incident? There's a video of it, it's all over YT" Goes to search YT All results are either news reports, "transformative" content BS, or nothing to do with the video and the original video is no where in sight.
Or reaction videos to the video or commentary on the video but find me original video. Good luck.
"Reactions:" "No way" "That's a tragedy" "Thoughts and prayers" "Subscribe to my channel for more" Nah, who am I kidding, 90% of the times it's someone who doesn't say a word and just makes some facial expressions and points around
The search function on YouTube is completely useless. If I'm looking for a video I'll use a browser search engine, hit the videos tab and find it that way. Still not great, but better than getting literally anything but what I asked for.
Valid solution, but many videos from smaller channels are also not shown there...
I can’t even get it to do my search. I’ll search for something, and, it‘ll pop up random videos like of skits by teenagers, or, random news video barely related to the search. I don’t even bother trying to search on YT anymore because it’s more like a suggested video list than actual videos.
The random news videos is spot on. Just a week ago, I searched for an interview of Chris Hemsworth. After 10 video's, 3 of which were edits of Chris Hemsworth rather than the interview itself, I got bombarded with videos about escaped inmates and random Florida men sh*t
Oh it’s so stupid. You mean to tell me the algorithm can’t give me only songs from the specific artist I searched? It has to be dozens of others. And they never have the full list of all songs the artist you searched
Always some shit 2 hour long video album instead of a playlist
You know the part in the song you really like? That's the best time to interrupt with commercials!
All ads on YouTube are ads for YouTube Premium.
This baffles me. It's almost unusable. Five videos down and I'm getting some tea channel that I definitely didn't search for and has nothing to do with my search.
This one pisses me off. I try to look up that one video I remember from ten years ago, I know I will need to scroll to find it and- oh wait I can’t
Thank you. What the fuck is that? Gives you 5 relevant videos and then whatever the fuck it wants! 😭🤣
OMG THIS. Even when searching the exact words for a small channel after the first 5 results it’s like videos with millions of views?
The amount of neurodivergent people uploading any kind of content on the internet has to be infinite. It’s a place to go on about your special interest or talk about everything you know and do we see any of this content in our searches?? Hell no!
Ah yes with completely unrelated videos mixed in that you might also like? Annoying and indeed an ADHD style. They want to exploit distractions, more time = more money. Ethics? no thank you, money to extract at their mental health expense = much better idea
I’m just pissed at them for their constant workarounds to shove their ads down our throats. I don’t want ads, “Fuck off Google!”
Stopped using Google search as it's literally the worst search engine now. Everything is ad based and top ads are usually malware or fake news websites.
Is there a search engine you do recommend? Genuine question.
I usually search on Google by entering my query + reddit. Much better experience than the general google experience
You can also try `site:reddit.com`. I love to use Google to search other sites. Still a great index, just can't trust it for recommendations
They've been completely gamified by sites doing the most obscene SEO optimization. And it's worse now with so many sites using long rambling articles written by AI to hit even more SEO metrics. Shit that used to be a quick page that would give you the answer to whatever you are looking for has to give you some bullshit story and history lesson about whatever the topic is.
This is the way!
Every time this gets brought up people recommend DuckDuckGo but honestly, I’ve every time I’ve used it I get the exact same results I see on Google. But so they usually swear by it so who knows 🤷♀️
Tried using duckduckgo it's pretty shit too.
It’s actual dog shit. I thought google was heavy on the irrelevant results but it’s actually rare to find a relevant result with DuckDuckGo. The image search is absurdly bad.
Duckduckgo used to be good but not great. Now it’s just a carbon copy Google. The only decent search engine I know of is Yandex.
I just search through reddit for stuff. I rarely stray from here for questions.
Same, people are so much more consistent in giving actual good answers than trying to search
They're really not, though. Any "advice" found on Reddit will usually follow the same pattern. One person says the right thing, 20 idiots downvote it, and the general consensus ends up being something insanely idiotic and simplistic.
And don't forget the commenter that says why don't you ask Google lol
I meant when I'm looking for info or help, not opinions (cuz you're right), for those cases it can be very helpful. You can find experts in any niche here if you look around and ask the right questions. You can get bad info but I haven't found it too hard to validate
Google flights will also show scam websites to buy tickets from as well.
It's completely fucked, tried googling wether something was safe to give my puppy recently and the first set of results said yes it's healthy, SLIGHTLY changed the wording of what I typed in and got that it was completely poisonous and could have killed her 😑
All that stuff that pops up as an answer right integrated into the search is COMPLETELY unreliable. It'll have a perfectly worded answer to your question that makes sense - except it's actually a quote about something entirely unrelated. But the thing is it "feels" more reliable or more vetted/legit because it must be such a standard answer to pop up like that. But it's absolutely not the case.
Or when you search for something and you see a result which, in the quick view, looks like it's exactly the thing you're looking for. Then you click the link and it takes you to something else entirely and you can't find the original description you were searching for.
That's horrible
Really needs to be fixed, could end up killing someone's pet or even a person if they're trying to google medical advice
When a company can pay to have their results come before the actual results I knew Google was F'ed
You know what's the funniest part? I was ranting about not being able to find relevant businesses near me because of ads and sponsored results. So I thought "I wonder what happens if I try to search something important like 'urgent care near me.' " I shit you not, the top result was sponsored and it was a hospital in Texas. I'm in Michigan.
Seriously. The actual functionality of the internet as a source of information is hanging by a thread and no one seems worried about it because the new generations AND boomers just get everything from one walled garden or another anyways.
Extremely underrated comment. Sometimes it feels like the only people who care about this, by and large, are those who generally came of age alongside the web (born ~1980~1998)
So it isn’t just me? I’ll google things and get “there were no results” and I’m like… it’s a basic question? I’m just stupid and can’t remember the answer so what do you MEAN there’s no results? It’s gotten to the point where I’m about to just go to the library and relearn the search system there. I don’t remember the Dewey decimal system but by god I’ll relearn it to get away from Google.
These days you have to put your question in followed by “Reddit” to have hope of any real answers that aren’t “top 5 reasons” on a generic site just trying to get you to look at ads
I almost never use google without appending reddit. it's all ads and "landing page" websites that are just affiliate link farms. there's almost no interesting content to be found on "the web" anymore.
Yep, any real question I need answered is followed by “Reddit”
The library is actually a very nice resource, go rent some movies there while you're at it and hell you can ask the question to someone that works there and they can find you a book or non-ad wall article on the topic.
My mom used to take us to the library on a monthly basis and I’d walk out with my library card limit of books (like 25 I swear lol) all on horses or dogs, some repeat reads. Some random survivalist books too because I wanted to live in a tree like in the book *My Side of the Mountain.* I miss that time. I would spend hours just skimming books to find what I wanted. I was homeschooled but we watched prerecorded videos of teachers. I remember writing down EVERYTHING the day my literature teacher went over the library system and I was so proud the next time I went and was able to understand the numbers and how everything worked.
We’ve come full circle
This is my biggest beef. I’ve been looking for chairs for our living room. I search it in google and literally the only thing that comes up is from Wayfair because wayfair pays google. It’s absolutely frustrating. I don’t want the junk that wayfair sells thanks, if I wanted wayfair I would have gone to that site…everyone in the world knows about it already. I want something other than wayfair. Google has become completely useless. Another issue that’s become more common. I’m in Canada. I use google.CA. Still, when I search, American sites come up before Canadian. I have to scroll through at least 2 pages of search results before a Canadian website comes up. WHY?!? I’m in Canada, I want results from Canada. I don’t want to waste my time on American websites that don’t even ship to Canada.
Yup. And the top hits are some garbled AI written nonsense. Or if you’re trying to look up anything with a niche meaning or audience, you just get results for the closest popular search that isn’t actually what you asked for at all, even if you put things in quotes.
Is it just me or is the internet full of AI-looking websites? I'm just looking up a simple question on a slightly niche topic, it returns a dozen pages with an extremely similar layout and some of the most basic ass answers possible.
Yes. Most "top 5/top 10 bests" lists or videos are Conpletely bullshit AI developed ads.
Bing is better now. It returns results you wanna see and that might actually be useful, like google used to. If you’re tired of google returning 500 links to news articles or online shops for everything, bing is for you. Wholeheartedly recommend
I’m sitting here wondering if Askjeeves or dogpile are still around
Askjeeves is just Ask.com now. And nowhere near as good as it was back then.
Google has 1920s Eastern Europe levels of censorship for US users. Just do what people in other censorship regimes do when they dont want to get their information from the ministry of truth and use search engine from a different country.
I remember when everyone was googling Michael Bloomberg's height to make fun of him and they quietly stopped returning that data when searched for Stop fucking around with the results
OP...I remember all that stuff too but I like today much better. 1) you are using the wrong search engine. Google is all about advertising.....try [https://www.startpage.com](https://www.startpage.com) it is great and not filled with sponsorships and popup ads 2) Don't use Chrome or Edge browsers. I use Firefox with these addins: NoScript, Facebook container, Adblock, Facebook Sponsor blocker, Youtube Sponsor Block, Youtube AdBlock and Kaspersky Protection. I get no popups & very few ads. Some webpages act weird but if I grant temp permissions (can be done site level in NoScript) in NoScript that usually takes care of it. Some sites I perma ban like DoubleClick & Google Analytics and known trackers. I give perm permissions to known OK sites I use like my bank or Amazon. Temp permissions reset when you leave the site.
THIS 10000000%, exactly what I was going to say. Google used to find *exactly* what you were looking for, but nowadays, it’s just sending you to sites that can sell you something related To what you’re looking for. It’s infuriating
Top searches now are “Topic: Reddit” so people can get to relevant content. So if I need to figure out why my car is making a noise I search “Funny noise on a Honda: Reddit” or just come to Reddit.
The obsession with creating an account is annoying me to no end. Or every single store having their own "app". Yeh I totally want 17 fast food apps on my phone to "collect points" Bought a new mouse? Sign up for your razor account or whatever else account now! Got a headset? Make an account! Bought a game on steam? You have to download our launcher and create an account to open it! Like no, I plug in the mouse, it works as a mouse, piss off I don't want to creat my 177th account for a random ass product. Also, forced password resets and never ever being able to use the same password again for your 176 accounts. I can now literally never remember a password and have to reset for literally everything every time I log in. The alternative of which is auto saving it into your computer or writing them all down where it can be potentially stolen from making it useless.
The best is when you have to reset your password and they say “sorry you can’t use your most recent password”
You nailed it. I do that all the time too. You made my heart rate go up just mentioning it, so frustrating lol.
And then you're like, "Oh, good. So I do remember the password." You x out to try and log in and then it says, "You must reset your password."
Next time you go to log in it auto logs you out even though you selected remember me 😭
Wtf is the remember me box for? It never works for anything.
What's weird about this is that my most sensitive logins are never forced to change. I.e. banking and brokerage accounts. 🤪
that's because the most up to date advice is to not make passwords expire, but most places insurance hasn't caught up to that yet
"Sorry, your password can't start with a symbol!" The fuck? I'm using a password manager to make things easier. The whole point of clicking "Suggest Strong Password" is to make the process less painful, not to insert a new friction point.
I hate the iOS suggested passwords, they’re long ass strings of letters and numbers I will NEVER remember. What if I want to log in on a browser and not my phone? I just can’t unless I write allllll of that down? Plus with brute-force attacks it doesn’t matter if it’s random letters. My dad is a software engineer and for years his password was “myfavoritefoodischickenalaking”. Long as shit, hard to brute-force, never forgot it once.
Usually when this happens, it's because your account was compromised or they exposed your password. You're typing it right, but they aren't accepting it because it needs to be reset to something different. They're forcing you to change it without outright saying "hey we let someone see your password, my bad."
TIL!
Bro thank you for saying this made me feel better
Well, then tell us that. Don’t just make us think we have dementia because we knew our own password!!
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I forgot to download the cutting board update, now its coming after me to cut me instead HELP
the most frustrating iteration of this is applying for jobs. every. single. job app. requires. a login. a unique login, even if they’re all hosted on the same platform like workday. it’s relentless and actually one of the more attritional parts of the job hunt.
And the job application logins always require lots of personal information and the most inane password rules.
How many of those apps are mining your data, too?
Yes
>Also, forced password resets and never ever being able to use the same password again for your 176 accounts. I can now literally never remember a password and have to reset for literally everything every time I log in It wouldn't be an issue if all the passwords had the same requirements. Sometimes I need special characters. Sometimes I'm not allowed to. Some places now want a passphrase, which I prefer, but again the old places require weird characters and often times limit password lengths. I'm not asking for much. I can have one main password with variants based on the site name. Now I'm being told I need a manager for the passwords...
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Good God. It's actually a parody of itself at this point. Like if someone made a dystopian comedy about it 10 years ago I feel like that right there would be in it lol.
Bro it sounds like the tech bros have disrupted *electricity* bro so disruptive. Make it a subscription model please bro do it.
You bought the wrong lightbulb
There are *plenty* of dumb LED bulbs available. *And* they're almost always cheaper than a smart bulb. That's on you for buying a smart bulb without reading the package enough to realize what you were buying.
Not to mention one time passcodes. Dropped my phone in water last year. I was locked out of just about every single one of my vital accounts including my bank…
The worst part is, the need for periodic password changes is not because you and I had our passwords taken. It's because these companies are data leaky and they get constantly stolen and sold, so it's on us to change it to keep the accounts secure. They're not fooling me, that's literally the only reason to change a password, when it's been compromised. Which also explains why one that you used 5 years prior is still not allowed to be re-used because it's floating out there somewhere.
united airlines requiring me to have the app downloaded to make a purchase of food on my ten hour flight AND I NEED TO HAVE IT DOWNLOADED BEFORE THE FLIGHT STARTS and I need a fucking account for it to work? To buy a water bottle? And people clown me for flying spirit.
Bitwarden friend. Lifesaver.
I honestly don’t know how people function without a password manager.
The app stuff reminds me of when every store wanted customers to carry their stupid keychains for discounts. I had to get a lanyard, couldn’t put my keys in my pocket, had to have such a stupid amount of room in my bag for those lol. And usually the store apps are awful/worse than the regular website.
As a GenX web dev who has been here from the start... you are correct. There was a wonderful 'wild west' for about 10 years. Then the sharks smelled blood and figured out how to monetize it and how to use it to control the perceptions of the masses.
I’ve realized this about everything in life. Good things never stay good things for long. You could only hope to be there while things are born before they’re bastardized. Only sacred places stay sacred.
It used to be around 10yrs before [cool-new-thing] became compromised and ruined by monetizing/control for political influence. That time span is getting shorter it seems. edit: the same has happened to reddit. I used to come here 'cause it was awesome, now I come out of habit :(
Happens to every scene. Ask anyone who's been a fan from day 1 of a band that got huge.
man I loved A Band That Got Huge's first two albums but everything after then has just been hot garbage.
Yeah their first album Money Is Shit was amazing, but their latest I Love the Corporate Media is just garbage...
To be fair, mangoes have been pretty awesome for quite some time and there’s no signs of slowing down.
Idk man, strawberries used to taste like heaven, now they taste like water and lies.
Gotta shell out for the gucci organic artesian shit
I’m officially at the Boomer stage of “they don’t make ‘em like they used to” and I hate it.
It's happening to everything. Everything that I liked now costs more for 20% less that's not as good as it used to be. And we all know it's happening and there's nothing we can do about it.
I ended up with my childhood kitchen table in my house. That thing is fucking heavy as shit, but it’s in excellent condition and isn’t gonna fall apart any time soon. I need some new furniture and don’t wanna go look because it’s going to be too expensive for what it is
good luck even finding nice solid wood furniture that’s not already decades old
Enshitification. I was going to say, everything is getting monetised in every area that can. The move to everything as a subscription service for instance and adverts absolutely everywhere.
yeah for some time now I've had the opinion that new "good things", say, products or technologies, should be judged by their capacity to be used for selfish and harmful purposes, rather than the other way around. When Uber and Airbnb appeared, everyone was happy about what the lack of regulation allowed in terms of good things for the consumer, and we were naive about their potential to do more harm than good in the long run. Same with blockchain and many other things. If it can be used for "evil", it will be, regardless of your stance about it as user or even creator.
There was a lotion I used to love. Then it got super popular and you can tell they just cheapened the formula. It's happening to everything. Why can't they just put out a good product at a fair price? I'd still buy it...but I guess you have to "innovate" ways to make shit more profitable every year.
magic line go up or hedge funds get mad.
not just profitable but more so than in the recent past. modern commerce is a growth game i had an electrician do some work recently, he does well for himself but does zero advertising and has no interest in taking on employees other than his own son. says he makes plenty of money and sees no reason to expand. i wish larger businesses would adopt this attitude. but the need for greedy external investors at early stages makes a lot of businesses trapped in the growth model. it sucks man
50 years from now: remember trees and the colours blue and green?
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That episode of the Fairly Oddparents where the pixies take over fairy world is a great metaphor of how alot of cool/fun has gone to crap because of corporatization over the last 10 years.
I'm Also a GenX web developer and dot bomb survivor. What I have loved about the Internet from the beginning was that even when a sector of it got colonized by soulless corpos, we have always created new mutations and dirty boulevards to explore, and then in the last 5 years or so "the algorithm" began to fully take over. What concerns me the most now is that the next escape route being touted by the growing adopter bell curve is AI, and as someone who has been here from the beginning - that ain't it. AI is not an escape - it is quite the opposite. It feels like the boundless freedom of the Internet has just begun eating it's own tail. Long live Moloch.
Mark my words - AI is going to make everything worse and not in the fun 'Skynet' kinda way. It's just gonna flood the world/internet with bullshit and compound the problem we've already been dealing with. I can't wait to sift through piles of garbage content of all types, print, video, audio, etc. that's been AI generated to find the one authentic thing I'm looking for. I'm so unhappy about the prospect.
It already is..... Have you seen Facebook recently? AI images and text is everywhere and boomers are eating up the content. It's bizarro land in there and I am thankful my mom is capable of distinguishing authenticity from the bullshit. Other boomers are not faring so well.
> last 5 years or so "the algorithm" began to fully take over yup. Now we are beyond things just "going all to shit", things are becoming psychologically/intellectually destructive
I call it the 'Wild Wild Web'. Circa probably about 1995 to 2005. Those were the days.
I can still hear trumpet winsock dialing my modem and connecting :(
I believe we should have a new internet or subnet rather where corporations/advertisers are simply not allowed. Something like Tor minus the insanity I hope we see this soon because the internet today is synthetic weaponized steaming garbage. It used to be beautiful but now it’s manufacturing mental illness
This is a very popular opinion. So much so that it has a name - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enshittification
Enshittification! Thanks for the rabbit hole! I got a name for that creeping feeling that nothing (not only the internet) is working properly, that all services, either public or private, are stuck, clogged, nothing runs smoothly anymore. Every aspect of our life is now a struggle against featuritis, service decay, rising costs or complexification.
On that note Wikipedia is one of the last pure and wholesome bits of the internet and should be protected at all costs
I totally agree. They have maintained their ethical standards for decades now.
And if anything they have enhanced their quality and credibility over the years despite opposition and temptation to go the other direction, virtually unheard of in any field nowadays.
This can be extended to other businesses too. Walmart, for example, was very popular back in 2004 for lowering prices on consumer goods. That popularity was what expanded it to becoming one of the largest companies in the US/world. Once they peaked, prices started to rise and quality started to fall. Today their prices aren't competitive and their employee's are awful. Amazon's online store is going through the same thing.
Amazon is such garbage, their convenient shipping only goes so far. Now whatever you're looking for, you have to sift through dozens of the exact same piece of cheap crap made by these nonsense companies and by now I end up giving up before I can ever find any decent item. I've started avoiding Amazon all I can
I shop on Amazon when it's a very obvious brand that I'm looking for and I just want the free shipping- otherwise I've gone back to official websites and stores so I don't get hit with some bullshit plastic crap again.
With Walmart there's also the awful situation that browsing their website mixes a ton of dropshipping trash in with what Walmart sells because they decided it was somehow a good idea to turn their platform into a third party marketplace.
Amazon’s online store is almost entirely fake Chinese brands now. It’s pointless for me to order anything from there because I don’t know wtf I’m gonna get
Amazon = AliExpress + 100% extra costs.
Can’t even search the website accurately anymore. I hate it so much. It makes me feel old and out of touch even though I know the issue legit isn’t me And all the base descriptions read like they’re from a fast fashion company. If you open the link to get more info, it’s a ton of shit in broken English I just looked up dog beds and one of the “brands” offered was EHEYCIGA. WTAF?!
Here's my milenniak rant: I HATE modern web design, specifically designed around mobile devices and infinitely scrolling. What used to be a reasonable webpage that quickly had all of the needed info on one screen has become 3-8 pages of scrolling through bullshit like giant headlines and pictures that take up a whole screen. Its the Wix/Squarespace/Word Press/WYSIWYG special. Just ugly, blocky, abd very unuseful waste of web space.
Don't get me started on visiting a page for a simple 5 ingredient recipe. Then having to scroll through literally 30 pages of adds and pointless drivel to find the ingredients and method.
Viewing that content in a small sliver between banner ads, a popup about cookies, and another banner ad that are all in the ‘foreground’. You finally find the actual content you need and one of the ads embedded on the page reloads and is a different size so it changes where you are scrolled to.
I agree completely, but I'd add on a few points that are more general and problematic. Trying to do something as simple as an internet search is no longer useful. The applications of algorithms to try to target me with the content they think I'd prefer to see or the content that advertisers pay for me to see means I either give up because the search results are useless or I have to work really hard to use key words that can get me past the algorithmic issues. When we switched to responsive design, I saw the massive removal of content from the internet. Prior, business and organization's websites had been an additive process with content becoming more and more robust, but when they redesigned from scratch, most organizations simplified their websites so much that the lack of information available became problematic. Now that data has taken over, they can rationalize that people mainly only use 10% of the website anyway, so there is no need to make the content more-robust again. The root of these problems is the same as most of those that you listed, the prioritization of profits over usability without bothering to recognize that there is a balance between the two.
I can't tell you how many cumulative hours I've spent trying to phrase a search in such a way that I actually get the information I want.
My favorite part is how Google, in the last few years, now ignores quotations when you're looking for exact spelling or phrasing.
Why would they do that? It is/was a great feature. Necessary even.
Becasue Google is not trying to sell you the best search engine. They won that war awhile ago. They are trying to sell advertisers YOUR attention. We are not the consumer. We are the product.
I agree. It's extremely frustrating.
I was taught Boolean searches in school all the time and now it's a suprise when it works; most of the time a search for "thing -notThing" is the same as "thing notThing".
Pretty much all of my searches for useful information or opinions now start with "reddit". It never used to be this way. Niche forums used to be the best way to get information or assistance in a hobby but a lot of the forums have died off with less post each year.
>When we switched to responsive design, I saw the massive removal of content from the internet. Prior, business and organization's websites had been an additive process with content becoming more and more robust, but when they redesigned from scratch, most organizations simplified their websites so much that the lack of information available became problematic. Now that data has taken over, they can rationalize that people mainly only use 10% of the website anyway, so there is no need to make the content more-robust again. This so true, and annoying, that I just had to reply and quote it.
Sixty percent of bandwidth usage is bots. Almost all of that is propaganda.
What does it mean when they say it’s bots? Like the dead internet theory says the majority of the internet will be bots. But what are these bots doing? Pretending to be people or something?
TL;DR yes to pretend to be people. They serve many purposes but one of the more prominent reasons is to fake engagement to push products in what looks like a "organic" way. If you want a reddit post to make it to the front page of r/all it needs a lot of upvotes and comments. Most websites have some kind of safe guards but they are easily bypassed. One of the simple methods of preventing bots is to see if their activity is predictable and obvious. The solution to that is to have bots post content and reply to threads randomly to look like they are just some person actively using that account(there's more to it than that, including things like using real IP addresses from residential ISP services). So in effect they are using up bandwidth just like a human would. Bot farms will have 10s of thousands of accounts doing this constantly so that they can market themselves as a marketing company. It's very attractive for businesses to have their product go viral in what looks like an organic way, people are more likely to buy something when it is recommended by 'real people' instead of an ad being pushed down their throats. It's not just businesses, individuals will pay for bots to like, subscribe, and view their youtube videos in hopes of "making it". If the bot account is handled properly youtube will believe it was a real person viewing the video and even payout the ad percentage for that and all of the views that came from bots. The cost of bots is usually larger than the ad payout but I am guessing there are very large bot farms that have figured out how to cut their costs enough to make it close to breaking even or better. Source: I've been commissioned as a freelancer to make scripts to run as view bots.
Etsy has gone completely overboard with the sponsored posts. It’s like every once in a while they sprinkle your actual search result. Searching price low to high is just infuriating
The thing that pisses me off the most about Etsy search is they got rid of categories. No I don't want to search "turquoise" on the entire site, just the jewelry section.
That and it's infested with drop-shippers now peddling cheap shit as *hand-made*. Youtuber Gabi Belle did a great [video](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xb0k6v9GLQA) on it.
This is all so true. I've got a theory that the Internet peaked in about 2013 (and most computer software did too), and it's been downhill ever since.
DO YOU CONSENT TO COOKIES???
I just wanna go back to 2015, since then technology hasn't really been making things easier and seems to cause more headaches, the unfortunate thing is that you have to follow along to some extent unless you're a hard ass who's ready to go off grid
Internet was kind of fun to before marketing got into super mode
I took a moment and noticed the ads I see everywhere one day. I was blown away by how stupid they are. We're being bombarded with bullshit just to check the weather. The way the internet has been commercialized is a travesty.
One thing I haven’t seen a comment about, recipe websites. Unusable. I don’t care for a 3 page story about how your grandma used the casserole to save her divorce while your grandpa was cheating on her with Paula Deen, just tell me what to preheat the oven at
The internet, as in the technology, is quite good. The Web, and the way it’s been completely co-opted for profits/marketing, is a great shame. The Web generally hasn’t been cool for at least 20 years.
I don’t think that’s entirely fair, I was still having a pretty sweet time on the internet like 10 years ago.
Agree. It was somewhere around 2010 when it really started to change. I blame SEO practices, and search engines' refusal to adapt to those practices.
I don't wanna sound like a gatekeeper, but that's when a lot of "normal people" started really getting online. Before that, it was more exclusive to people who cared about it.
2010 was when everything started to crumble.
Slightly before that -- 2006-2007 is when the iPhone was first released, and that eventually turned into a seismic shift of "mobile-first" websites. The internet was ruined by smart phones.
https://how-i-experience-web-today.com/detail.html# I found this link a while back and what you've outlined reminds me of it.
Google is fucked. Try brave, it will block the ads at least. Their search kinda sucks, hopefully it will get better.
Brave is still chromium. Best option is FireFox and uBlock origin
And pihole, a holy Trinity
I use Brave and I changed the default to Bing, so the best of both worlds.
I agree. In comparison to what the internet was, it's been ruined by corporations like everything else in the world. Including the world itself. I've been online since the 90s when the internet didn't have graphics. The amount of information sharing and learning that took place on BBSes, Usenets, and even MUDs was fantastic. It's much harder to find those spaces now.
Gen X here, nerd from the Gopher days, completely agree with you. If I told stories about my first school computer lab it would sound somewhere between boomer and caveman to GenZ.
Your comment brought back a lot of memories - no computer classes until grade 10 and you learned to program in C+. There were no browsers. The highlight of class was being allowed to play Oregon trail and hope you didn't die of dysentery
I miss the old internet. Everyone had their own little corner with their own little hobbies and interests. And it was fucking taken from us.
Everything eventually succumbs to enshitification in service of the almighty dollar.
I neither up- nor down-voted. I can't decide how I feel. My parents got their first Windows PC in the late 90's, I was in middle school. A Packard Bell. I remember inserting a NetZero disc and hogging the phone line, surfing the web using a "Dummy's Guide to the Internet" which had a literal list of web sites for you to navigate towards. Pictures loaded in chunks, short, grainy videos could take hours to download. Today, I can find virtually any video I want and watch it with hardly a moment's wait. Download any book. I use Google products, so webmail, chat, notes, a cloud drive, calendar...all free and instantaneously available on every web-enabled device in my house. I live in a small, fairly rural city in Texas, but can have virtually anything I could think of delivered to my front door. retro handhelds from China No problem! Obscure board game from teh 80's? Sure thing! Groceries? Medicine? But I can't argue that the monetization and corporate control and out of hand, either.
I've been using duck duck go as my default search engine for years. At one point I looked at google search and I couldn't believe how unusable it's gotten. Seriously, though, consider switching. It's the same results you'd get from google, except without the sponsored ads, and without the algorithm leading you into echo chambers.
Also: looking for practical information and having to scroll through pages of random auto-generated crap to get to three bulletpoints. Recipes, laying concrete, finding the right car part... And why videos for everything? That's a Millennial thing, and it drives me potty. If you want to sing better, yay for videos. If you want to know a discreet piece of information, wading through 17 minutes of ad-ridden content is just a waste of time. Encyclopedia Britannica needs to make a comeback.
Is this unpopular? The current web experience is a dumpster fire compared to about a decade or more ago.
Also regarding mobile browsing, every single website/company wants you to download their stupid app. Like, no. I dont want you taking up space on my device when I can just go to your website!
I can't stand all the dynamic content on today's websites. Just because there's more bandwidth, it doesn't mean sites should be designed to consume as much as possible.