That was also the situation with asking about stuff on the town square before the internet and even newspapers and radio. And after that too.
Was being solved by library classification techniques, catalogues, encyclopedia.
Bill Gates, however one might hate him, really likes those things and says useful things on them. In general I think he’s hated more than he should. I mean, OK, shouldn’t have used monopoly practices, then he wouldn’t be.
We’ve had like two decades of machines doing that job well enough for us on a limited amount of pathways and subjects, degrading the results, and we’ve gotten used to expectation that it’ll always work.
Search engines (not all of them, but what end users call that) are not sustainable. In general, automated search, solving end user goals, in the open spaces of objects and tokens and associations.
Web directories and web catalogues were. But where with phone books people knew that some things stop being reachable and the person on the other side is too in the real world, and they might die or change address and phone number next day, - with the Internet people have gotten used to some permanence and easiness which don’t really exist.
So - this is all just the life cycle of the global intercommunication, I think the problem will solve itself.
We hate what those companies are doing because that stops being useful for us. When the Internet is only useful for b2b visit card exchanges and digital marketplaces, it’s not the Internet anymore, it’s Commercenet. When it’s enough of a Commercenet, it’ll be the natural incentive for a big enough amount of people to make and use a different system, which won’t turn into Commercenet in the same way, because the Commercenet already exists and attracts its own users. It will probably turn into something else, like Socialnet or Ragenet or Idiocracynet, but then there will be future other iterations of the same process.
It’s the way evolution optimizes, for humans we can think Internet’s architecture is good enough for everyone, but in the nature it’s better for some uses than the other ones. There are different species of cats on the planet, sometimes coexisting in the same spaces. It’ll be the same way.
One can also expect similar developments from portable computers and portable communicators, usually the same thing.
sorghum@sh.itjust.works 1 day ago
LEO has meant something since the 1960s. That’s quite a big hill to climb
Yaky@slrpnk.net 1 day ago
So did “Amazon”… :/
sorghum@sh.itjust.works 23 hours ago
Yeah, the rainforest didn’t sell books afaik