Way back in the early days of the modern internet, there was a lot of hype about "push". Basically, advertisers hated the internet because people would pull and get to see what they were looking for rather than whatever the advertisers were pushing. Only the advertisers, and advertisers are big drivers of just about every form of media, wanted push. Users didn't, and the internet let the pull what they wanted.
Pull continued to work until the various aggregators, search companies and social networks, decided to kill it. First, search eliminated textual search. They'd show you what they wanted to show you whether you asked for it or not. Marketing is a weird science. Imagine someone walking into a well marked candy store and heading for the chocolate and walnut aisle. You or I might imagine that they want some candy, probably chocolate with walnuts. Markets think differently, so they use complex surveillance and data analysis and know 100% for sure, so sure they'll bet money on it, that the guy in the candy store having chosen a pack of chocolate coated walnuts and heading for the cashier really wants to buy a pair of jockey shorts. Salivating at the thought of a delicious chocolate and walnut candy cluster, this guy is caught short when the cashier refuses his purchases and insists on selling him underwear. Monty Python comes to mind. "I'd like to buy this candy." "You don't want candy. You want underwear." This is why marketing people get the big bucks. Maybe, just maybe, they'll let the guy buy his chocolate covered walnuts if he buys a three pack of men's briefs.
Search was neutered a while back as part of the war on pull. Then, they developed algorithmic feeds which are just push of whatever they want to show you perhaps leavened with a bit of whatever one is trying to pull. The internet was about being able to pull up what you wanted, but this clashed with the business model. It has gotten so bad, that some of us are paying for search that lets us do what we used to be able to do for free 15 years ago. Maybe we'll see a return of pay to present social media in some form that offers a chronological feed with a search feature.
It's no surprise that the internet feels empty. Whenever one sinks a hook into it, one never gets a fish. One gets old tires and water weeds. Are there fish in the pond? Possibly, but you'd never know it if you try fishing.
To add to your point of search engines being unwilling to say "I don't know" - I've long explained to myself as Google (and then, following their lead, whoever) seeing it as a no-no that you'd get zero results. Of course, you could get no results just by completely misunderstanding when to use quotes, or typing with copious misspellings - but no matter what the user error, there's a nonzero chance they'd jump to another search engine. Rather than continue to program away those dead ends ("Did you mean _____?"), I think they flat refused to ever have anyone leave Google for another search engine.
Also, try searching these in Google - I love showing these to my students:
calories in meat
calories in vegetables
At least Google Scholar's (black-box) algorithms seem to be untouched by their advertising side (for now...).
Two other sites I've seen fall to the rise of algorithmic feeds are dating sites and eBay. Tinder/OKCupid/etc. have more interest in you coming to their site multiple days in a row, and have employed various measures to effect this, from just plain *not showing you people who are on there* to telling you that you've "liked" too many other accounts.
eBay used to have an amazing front-page feed of your saved searches that, if you refreshed it, would show you any new items matching your searches around ~15 minutes after they'd been listed. For me--and many other rabid vintage toy collectors--eBay ceased being a good tool as soon as they chucked that out the window (around the same time they ceased returning exactly what you asked for in your search, even if you used quotes). There is now no way to control the front-page feed, and you're back to eBay circa its founding, when you couldn't follow certain searches. Oh, and you can no longer remove items from the front-page feed if you're tired of seeing them. So the truck motor part that almost-shares a spelling with some defunct toy manufacturer is there, immovable, forever, on your feed.
Facebook's group algorithms and notifications were also not met with enthusiasm by those in toy collector groups. And I've yet to see anyone point this out about Facebook's AI accounts--most commentary is on the "AI friends" aspect--but 1) this allows Facebook to point to innumerable Black "persons" supporting fascism, and 2) they rolled these out ~around the same time that they changed their policies to allow you to call homosexuals retards. I should have never been on the site made by the college boy who wanted others to tell him which girls on his campus were the best to masturbate to, but at least I can say that I bailed the moment that its robots were allowed to say slurs.
I work in academic libraries, and though the monkeying in searches has been relatively small on the part of academic literature database vendors, it is there, and is increasingly at odds with librarian goals and ethics. There's some troubling groundwork being laid for collecting data on individual users' searches--something my professional organization fought Bush II over and won. If you're interested in hearing about those, I'll email you.
P.S. If you haven't read Safiya Umoja Noble's book *Algorithms of Oppression*, I recommend it. Among other things, it details how Yelp fell prey to the same algorithmic mess you discuss here. And when I heard that Kagi was going to use much the same index as Google does, I had to wonder if that meant they're going to have to, one by one, fix the same problems that Noble talks about Google having to fix.
I recently reorganised my bookshelves, and found a bunch of old time internet era books - The long tail, Purple cow, We the media, etc.
The wide eyed, optimistic naivite is almost funny in hindsight.
But we didn't heed the warning: if you don't own the platform... We gave up the eclectic outskirts and suburbs with misaligned fences and weirdly painted houses and moved into uniform block units. We gave up the RSS feed and chose the automated algorithm.
Finally, we allowed ourselves be convinced that monetizing everything is good idea and it's only worth doing something if you can get some money out of it - although given how a capitalistic society works, can't blame anyone, just staying afloat costs a fortune.
We had a great opportunity but it's gone. I am sure we could get it back, but it requires a lot of effort and most people aren't in the position to put effort into "rebuilding the interwebz", they are busy trying to sane under the stress, trying to make enough money to cover rent, food and utilities, and hanging onto whatever rights they have left.
I don't think it's hopeless, but it's definitely a mission and a half.
I agree with just about everything here, particularly about the need to own your own digital stuff and store it somewhere that you control. The combination of a RasPi or two (and cloudflare for external access) makes this very easy in fact. And if you want more than a pi, a NUC or equivalent running linux has plenty of horsepower and flash and hard disks are cheap.
In some ways that's interesting in that I have a very different internet experience than you do and I think it's fair to say that politically we are in very different camps.
What do I mean by a different internet experience?
Well to start with I've been using DNS level blockers (see e.g. some lists for pihole) to stop a lot of trackers and I also use firefox and noscript heavily which stops even more. I also don't use facebook at all since FB went on a retro-banning frenzy in the post covidiocy times (I got a ban for a meme post back in, I think, 2014 among others that included a ban for a year or two old post about COVID and Wuhan that was subsequently shown to be mostly correct) and have never ever used instagram. Thanks to Xitter banning me for "inauthentic behavior", whatever that is, I don't have a Xitter account either and I usually use xcancel via https://xcanclr.aho.st/ to read stuff on that platform. I also don't do much internetting on my phone just from a convenience standpoint and when I do it is generally still with a DNS block that kills most ads.
My social media is mostly this place, mewe and some private discord servers.
I don't use google as my search engine (though I do still use google maps and translate). I rarely use youtube (generally following a link from someone) and my gmail accounts are mostly used to sign up for websites/services that I expect to use rarely but which insist on a sign up.
Sir, I have responded to every single concern you list with a solution for everything but the quality of content. I also can't control one person using gen ai tools to post lots of stuff.
I've always been astounded by the credulity and servility of tech journalists.
Way back in the early days of the modern internet, there was a lot of hype about "push". Basically, advertisers hated the internet because people would pull and get to see what they were looking for rather than whatever the advertisers were pushing. Only the advertisers, and advertisers are big drivers of just about every form of media, wanted push. Users didn't, and the internet let the pull what they wanted.
Pull continued to work until the various aggregators, search companies and social networks, decided to kill it. First, search eliminated textual search. They'd show you what they wanted to show you whether you asked for it or not. Marketing is a weird science. Imagine someone walking into a well marked candy store and heading for the chocolate and walnut aisle. You or I might imagine that they want some candy, probably chocolate with walnuts. Markets think differently, so they use complex surveillance and data analysis and know 100% for sure, so sure they'll bet money on it, that the guy in the candy store having chosen a pack of chocolate coated walnuts and heading for the cashier really wants to buy a pair of jockey shorts. Salivating at the thought of a delicious chocolate and walnut candy cluster, this guy is caught short when the cashier refuses his purchases and insists on selling him underwear. Monty Python comes to mind. "I'd like to buy this candy." "You don't want candy. You want underwear." This is why marketing people get the big bucks. Maybe, just maybe, they'll let the guy buy his chocolate covered walnuts if he buys a three pack of men's briefs.
Search was neutered a while back as part of the war on pull. Then, they developed algorithmic feeds which are just push of whatever they want to show you perhaps leavened with a bit of whatever one is trying to pull. The internet was about being able to pull up what you wanted, but this clashed with the business model. It has gotten so bad, that some of us are paying for search that lets us do what we used to be able to do for free 15 years ago. Maybe we'll see a return of pay to present social media in some form that offers a chronological feed with a search feature.
It's no surprise that the internet feels empty. Whenever one sinks a hook into it, one never gets a fish. One gets old tires and water weeds. Are there fish in the pond? Possibly, but you'd never know it if you try fishing.
To add to your point of search engines being unwilling to say "I don't know" - I've long explained to myself as Google (and then, following their lead, whoever) seeing it as a no-no that you'd get zero results. Of course, you could get no results just by completely misunderstanding when to use quotes, or typing with copious misspellings - but no matter what the user error, there's a nonzero chance they'd jump to another search engine. Rather than continue to program away those dead ends ("Did you mean _____?"), I think they flat refused to ever have anyone leave Google for another search engine.
Also, try searching these in Google - I love showing these to my students:
calories in meat
calories in vegetables
At least Google Scholar's (black-box) algorithms seem to be untouched by their advertising side (for now...).
Two other sites I've seen fall to the rise of algorithmic feeds are dating sites and eBay. Tinder/OKCupid/etc. have more interest in you coming to their site multiple days in a row, and have employed various measures to effect this, from just plain *not showing you people who are on there* to telling you that you've "liked" too many other accounts.
eBay used to have an amazing front-page feed of your saved searches that, if you refreshed it, would show you any new items matching your searches around ~15 minutes after they'd been listed. For me--and many other rabid vintage toy collectors--eBay ceased being a good tool as soon as they chucked that out the window (around the same time they ceased returning exactly what you asked for in your search, even if you used quotes). There is now no way to control the front-page feed, and you're back to eBay circa its founding, when you couldn't follow certain searches. Oh, and you can no longer remove items from the front-page feed if you're tired of seeing them. So the truck motor part that almost-shares a spelling with some defunct toy manufacturer is there, immovable, forever, on your feed.
Facebook's group algorithms and notifications were also not met with enthusiasm by those in toy collector groups. And I've yet to see anyone point this out about Facebook's AI accounts--most commentary is on the "AI friends" aspect--but 1) this allows Facebook to point to innumerable Black "persons" supporting fascism, and 2) they rolled these out ~around the same time that they changed their policies to allow you to call homosexuals retards. I should have never been on the site made by the college boy who wanted others to tell him which girls on his campus were the best to masturbate to, but at least I can say that I bailed the moment that its robots were allowed to say slurs.
I work in academic libraries, and though the monkeying in searches has been relatively small on the part of academic literature database vendors, it is there, and is increasingly at odds with librarian goals and ethics. There's some troubling groundwork being laid for collecting data on individual users' searches--something my professional organization fought Bush II over and won. If you're interested in hearing about those, I'll email you.
P.S. If you haven't read Safiya Umoja Noble's book *Algorithms of Oppression*, I recommend it. Among other things, it details how Yelp fell prey to the same algorithmic mess you discuss here. And when I heard that Kagi was going to use much the same index as Google does, I had to wonder if that meant they're going to have to, one by one, fix the same problems that Noble talks about Google having to fix.
I recently reorganised my bookshelves, and found a bunch of old time internet era books - The long tail, Purple cow, We the media, etc.
The wide eyed, optimistic naivite is almost funny in hindsight.
But we didn't heed the warning: if you don't own the platform... We gave up the eclectic outskirts and suburbs with misaligned fences and weirdly painted houses and moved into uniform block units. We gave up the RSS feed and chose the automated algorithm.
Finally, we allowed ourselves be convinced that monetizing everything is good idea and it's only worth doing something if you can get some money out of it - although given how a capitalistic society works, can't blame anyone, just staying afloat costs a fortune.
We had a great opportunity but it's gone. I am sure we could get it back, but it requires a lot of effort and most people aren't in the position to put effort into "rebuilding the interwebz", they are busy trying to sane under the stress, trying to make enough money to cover rent, food and utilities, and hanging onto whatever rights they have left.
I don't think it's hopeless, but it's definitely a mission and a half.
I agree with just about everything here, particularly about the need to own your own digital stuff and store it somewhere that you control. The combination of a RasPi or two (and cloudflare for external access) makes this very easy in fact. And if you want more than a pi, a NUC or equivalent running linux has plenty of horsepower and flash and hard disks are cheap.
In some ways that's interesting in that I have a very different internet experience than you do and I think it's fair to say that politically we are in very different camps.
What do I mean by a different internet experience?
Well to start with I've been using DNS level blockers (see e.g. some lists for pihole) to stop a lot of trackers and I also use firefox and noscript heavily which stops even more. I also don't use facebook at all since FB went on a retro-banning frenzy in the post covidiocy times (I got a ban for a meme post back in, I think, 2014 among others that included a ban for a year or two old post about COVID and Wuhan that was subsequently shown to be mostly correct) and have never ever used instagram. Thanks to Xitter banning me for "inauthentic behavior", whatever that is, I don't have a Xitter account either and I usually use xcancel via https://xcanclr.aho.st/ to read stuff on that platform. I also don't do much internetting on my phone just from a convenience standpoint and when I do it is generally still with a DNS block that kills most ads.
My social media is mostly this place, mewe and some private discord servers.
I don't use google as my search engine (though I do still use google maps and translate). I rarely use youtube (generally following a link from someone) and my gmail accounts are mostly used to sign up for websites/services that I expect to use rarely but which insist on a sign up.
Every single oligarchy (tech or otherwise) needs to be stifled down to its dying breath. Divest, build community, touch grass etc.
Sir, I have responded to every single concern you list with a solution for everything but the quality of content. I also can't control one person using gen ai tools to post lots of stuff.
May I introduce Web 3.5 -> Has-Needs https://omdesign.is/has-needs as the next wave of human interaction.
I make it a rule to hold in suspicion any website that withholds the name(s) of who makes it. Good luck with your project!
my name is Om. Did you look at it? Thank you for the well wishes.