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

submitted 4 months ago* (last edited 4 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] 24 points 4 months ago

It used to take so much longer to turn something good to trash. Literally was considered to the 21st century like electricity was to the 20th. We saw a temple and within a decade of its mass adoption it became purely for money changers. I'm not Dr. Computers but like, can't we just...make websites and stuff again? I want personal websites and finding stuff through their link pages again. I want it so when you Google any random thought the results could potentially keep you enraptured for years. I want the damn Time Cubes back. Everything has had every ounce of joy and humanity bled from it and turned into wealth and how fast the internet turned from the greatest invention that would change the world and fix everything became cable TV and tabloid news.