Comment on Google Search is getting even worse for independent sites

FlyingSquid@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

• AnUnusualRelic@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  It sucked back then, but it sucked happily. Now it’s just sad.

  Back then it was messy, you couldn’t find anything, but at least everything worked as intended. Hell you could do a whois on something and actually get data back. You could email the netadmin of whatever place you had trouble with. Now it’s just a wasteland of content free corpo sites.

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  • grrgyle@slrpnk.net ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    I think it works as intended now, but it’s just that the intended audience has changed. We all work for advertisers now.

    At least if you follow the mainstream web experience. Luckily there are still nice places like this! :)

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  • Dozzi92@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    The Internet has been gentrified. Sure, there were some tough places that you had to be careful about wandering into, but there were great experiences. Now it’s this homogenous, cultivated experience.

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  • FlyingSquid@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    Although at least your computer doesn’t slow to a crawl every time you go to the wrong Geocities or Tripod page with a million gifs and a custom cursor. Also, would you like to install Bonzi Buddy?

    Also, for all of you who lived through the Eternal September, “me too!”

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  • rottingleaf@lemmy.zip ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    Power corrupts. And those corrupted by power then redirect it to corrupt all they don’t outright conquer.

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• olafurp@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  There was a pre-Google search that was really bad. Then Google raised the standard by optimising for good results. The trick was to stay one move ahead of SEO devs. First people spammed keywords, then people spammed backlinks, etc.

  The issue is now that it’s very outdated and the best thing for websites to do is go spam AI articles about everything. The obvious move would be to move websites with higher specificity to the search query up.

  The problem is that Google can do that and optimise for fewest actual clicks on links instead of needing to click 3 to get a result. Instead it’s better to click 3 pages with 3 sets of ads then hopefully do it in the goldilocks “enough to be interested but not to stop”. More screentime is more ads, more ads is more money.

  This is peak capitalism guuuys

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• Dozzi92@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  I dunno, I had this conversation in another thread recently. I was 13 in 2000. The web was a disaster then. Sure, there were good parts, but every website was an outright attack on your computer. Java and Flash were everywhere and they were so easily exploited. I’d go to websites and they’d pop up 100 different windows of hardcore porn, audio on, the whole nine.

  But yeah, it’s just a different suck now.

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• Railing5132@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  Like you, I was using the internet before the web. The time before monetization. IRC. USENET. GOPHER. IRC replaced my interest in ham radio - I figured: “what’s the point? With a modem, I can talk around the world and don’t need thousands of dollars and a tower in my back yard!” packet radio, which I used to send and receive messages to my parents, evaporated.

  Even when the web first came to being, it was special. HoTMaiL, the free html mail client, took off like wildfire. There weren’t even ads, because the ad industry didn’t know what to do with this new medium. Search found relevant interests, people were expressing themselves on ISP-hosted websites, and angelfire and geocities gave a more feature-rich experience.

  The initial banner ads were easy enough to ignore. The pop-ups, scareware, and security hell hole that was the early/mid-2000’s was the precipice that the web stepped off and here we are.

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  • FlyingSquid@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    But even back in the IRC and USENET days, there were plenty of asshole Nazis and petty arguments and such that it made the internet pretty unpleasant quite often if you didn’t watch where you contributed.

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    • SoleInvictus@lemmy.blahaj.zone ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      That’s why kid me had a handy stack of DDoS tools. My bot and I defended DALnet’s #sailormoon and its denizens from Nazis, racists, and trolls. Yeah, I was a dork.

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      • FlyingSquid@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

        Which is great until they hit you back. I was lucky in that I was using my dad’s university account which was pretty immune to petty bot DDoS attacks, but I was also not a Nazi troll. I was just attacked by Nazi trolls who thought they could take my connection down.

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    • Railing5132@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      Dude! I see you everywhere! I think you’re singlehandedly feeding the fediverse content! But anyway, yes, there were nazis and trolls, but in my experience, there was a group sense of decorum that we were all in this new utopia together and those folks got flamed by the whole pretty thoroughly.

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• ikidd@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  1995-2010 were the halcyon days. I miss the shit out of the web back then. And I’ve been around long enough that I set up some of the first mail relays and usenet mirrors when I was a teen, besides having one of the largest BBSs in Canada.

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