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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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] 7 points 6 months ago (1 children)

While it costs money, the internet has been a lot more usable for me once I switched to Kagi. It has no ads, promotes small web creators, automatically deprioritizes websites with AI content and trackers, and lets you prioritize and deprioritize your own specific websites.

For example, I have right wing websites like Fox News Info Wars, shitty Fandom wikis with better alternatives, and AI art websites blocked. I have websites like high quality recipe websites that aren’t SEO spam and websites I regularly use raised.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 6 months ago

dang, that seems... remarkably not crap after a couple of test searches

I hate the idea of having to pay an extra tax to make the Internet usable again but if it works it works