i think we need Cracked-style articles back. desperately. or like, a guy doing a weird thing and writing a piece on it. sites like those are declining faster than the glaciers.
A lot of informational content is now in video format instead of text/photos. I can barely understand their poor English in those videos.
I can read and skim documents for salient details at 500 - 800 words per minute.
And then someone links me to a twelve minute video on YouTube where 800 words are spoken in total , 300 of those words are “um,so”, and all we’re looking at is either the narrator , or possibly a static slide with a few paragraphs on it… and also an inset of the narrator, narrating.
You also can’t ctrl-f a video. It’s by far the worst format for information.
Exactly this! My hearing problems don’t help the matter at all. Also they’re painfully slow - I read really fast and I rarely need a full intro to something, I usually hunt for a single piece of information in a whole article. Videos are stupid.
whats up guys in todays video I’ll show you how to tie a shoe. First, remember to like and subscribe
So today we’re going to learn how to tie a shoe. I like tying shoes, I tie a lot of shoes and I think other people tie shoes too, so I’m doing a video on tying shoes.
Without further ado, let’s jump right in.
So tying shoes is really important. Lots of people tie shoes every day and so it’s something that you need to know. So in this video we’re going to talk about tying shoes. If you want to learn how tie shoes you’re in the right place! We’re talking about tying shoes.
So without further ado, let’s jump right in.
So in this video we’re going to talk about tying shoes … [5 more minutes of talking without actually giving any information whatsoever]
I guess the catch is that I’d prefer to watch a video for information because the experience is better than the absolutely ad riddled text news sites.
It’s very easy to process an actual article and evaluate whether it actually does what I’m looking for enough to read it properly.
Video doesn’t provide that. It’s a bad format unless what you’re doing is actually visual in nature. Reviewing a video game? Sure, provided you’re spending meaningful examples of the actual mechanics. Reviewing a video camera? Absolutely.
If your video is just you talking at a camera, it almost definitely shouldn’t be a video.
Googling so many “how do I do X?” type of questions have top-results of 10-minute videos where someone has their cluttered Desktop in full 1920x1080 and then they open the tiny command prompt in a small window (it’s clear they have no idea how to record a video), where they clumsily type commands they clearly don’t understand, and fumble through the entire process.
I just needed a single command. It should have been a 1-second result at the top of search, not shitty videos or SEO dynamically-generated shit site that are trying to sell me something.
I miss the simplicity and the focus on the information due to the technical limitations.
Websites just had the information, well presented. None of that blog spam with a massive story on how error code -21 could suck and seriously impact your business and that you should hire professionals. But anyway here’s a command copied from a 10 year old StackOverflow answer that hasn’t worked for 5 years and isn’t actually related to what you were Googling at all, but now you’ve viewed 3 advert videos, scrolled through 10 sponsored ads and closed 2 popups. Here’s the next article on error -22.
Also, downloads were “here’s the link to it on our FTP server”, none of that guess which download button is the real one, waiting 30 seconds for the download to prepare and having to sign up for faster download speeds.
Unless you’re talking even earlier, I did a lot of guessing at which download button was real and downloading pirated games in many parts from shitty download services that only let you download one part per hour and such. In the late 2000s when I was old enough to really use the internet
Early 2000s dial-up. It enshittified quite a bit even that decade. Back then you had like a Pentium 3 with Windows 98, XP just came out but was for people with very good machines. Netscape was still there but dying, Opera was paid and the free version had an ad banner but the browser was actually good and not just a Chromium reskin, but most people had Internet Explorer 4 or 5. DSL was new and expensive. There just wasn’t all that much room to load ads, or even on screen: at 800x600, there’s not a ton of pixels to put ads on. You’d look at your jpegs slowly becoming less blurry.
There was a time when even crack sites, it would just be like a list of cracks that just link to the exe and that was it. Sometimes there wasn’t a page, just an FTP directory listing go find what you’re looking for yourself. Of course there were popups and other crap but the web was just generally cleaner. Larger files were all P2P, it would already take you 15 minutes to download a single MP3 at those speeds.
The centralization and need for monetization for storage and bandwidth came a bit later.
Articles written for people not for search engines. I’m very familiar with SEO and you can see very clearly when article is created for ranking rather than movie readership. Unfortunately when 90% of traffic for many sources is Google you have no choice but to write articles this way.
God yes.
I’m a professional writer for a newspaper. We’re also occasionally asked to put up SEO commercial text for our advertising partners. And good god, they look like they were written by a lobotomised monkey on a malfunctioning typewriter.
One can write for newspaper and not be a journalist. Columnist for example.
"We’ve all been there. You want to make a large batch of cookies for friends or family, but your KitchenAid stand mixer stopped working. When your KitchenAid stand mixer stops working, it inevitably leads to frustration. This is a common problem. Fortunately, there is a solution. I’ll show you a quick and easy way to fix your KitchenAid stand mixer when it stops working.
Believe it or not, the first KitchenAid stand mixer was made way back in 1918…"
This is one of the few cases where I think having an LLM bot straight up plagiarize an article is valid. They’re going out of their way to waste my time, so I’ll gladly have a bot lift the two sentences of the 20 paragraph article that actually answer the question.
If they want ad revenue they can make articles for humans, or they can eat my entire ass.
It’s often not up to publications but up to Google though. Finally Google is collapsing and taking all that spam with them.
One of the main arguments against LLMs is that content creation on the web will dry up but 90% of content of the web is already inaccurate SEO garbage. Maybe accelerationists were right this time.
Search engines with actual results, now every search is about trying to sell you something. Searching for a product used to pull up its manufacturer and specs, now its just where to buy it or something like it.
Have you ever tried Kagi? It’s pretty interesting and I’m giving it a shot.
Googling something and being able to find answers to your questions that you can actually trust instead of being fed a mixture of AI generated articles giving garbage information, ads disguised as articles and pages blatantly trying to sell you something.
"Hello I’m dgriffith, a community support member here at (official support forum) and I’m here to help.
Have you tried formatting your hard drive and completely reinstalling your OS? That often helps when your icons are misaligned on the desktop.
If this post helps, please mark it as useful, thanks!"
Every slightly unusual Windows issue that I research ends up at some Microsoft forum where this kind of post happens. Without fail.
These are bad too. But I was talking about those pages that show up on web results that when you consult them you realize that they’re just a bot-generated page that uses snippets of other pages it picked up on the internet, (badly) dressed up to look like an article written by someone. Often when you read through it you realize it repeats itself with conflicting information too.
Adding before:2023 to the query helps on older stuff. For new stuff i have no idea, all i get is a torrent of SEO AI worthless junk.
