effort

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Welcome to c/effort, the home of effort posts! This is a space where you can write on an topic, as long as it reflects real time and effort to put together.

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Posts are text-only. No images or videos.

2.While the topic can be on anything, posts still require “effort”. While there isn’t a minimum word limit or anything, generally this means it’s longer than most other posts and there’s also that the expectation that your posts required real effort to write up.

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The internet has become nearly impossible to use for information. (hexbear.net)

submitted 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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I need to write a zoology paper on bugs

All search results are for pest control businesses or are AI generated garbage that have wrong information.

Yes, the internet always had problems, but I cannot stress how much worse it has gotten for information over the last ten years.

I used to be able to search a species and get scientific papers or at least articles that referenced scientific papers in the results. None of that anymore. All search results are for someone trying to sell you something, and articles are regurgitated AI monstrosities that waffle on with no real information and no references. If your search even manages to direct you to news articles every news site will have identical, poorly written tabloid hidden behind a paywall. All of it useless for even the most basic academic research.

I literally can't do my job if every search result for species identification is behind a paywall, or an AI generated image of a bug that doesn't really exist.

It's no longer the information age. But not because of Trumpism and other things liberal whine about, it's because capitalism has hollowed out the internet into a husk of what it was meant to be.

I literally had to go and buy an expensive field guide from a museum to finish this paper. I haven't had to do that before.

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[–] [email protected] 31 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago)

I literally had to go and buy an expensive field guide from a museum to finish this paper. I haven't had to do that before.

Big museum smh. In all seriousness though yes SEO and its consequences have been a disaster for the human race. You'll programatically never going to get the best result from a search engine like Google, only the most "engaging" ones that know how to play the system.

I mean, these people also own YouTube where the same thing happens.