- Top of the page is slow loading AI regurgitation of deeply buried real web results, but often wildly inaccurate. No thanks.

- Next are a bunch of YouTube videos you don't want to watch where you have to wade through dozens of ads and hours of content to get the 3 seconds of information you're looking for. No thanks.

- "Related search" nonsense that nobody ever wants to see but if you click on those you will get more of the above. No thanks.

- Some useless unrelated shopping links you almost certainly don't want. No thanks.

- Way down at the bottom, 2-3 real web search results, non-keyword matched, and only from major mainstream outlets that are part of the Trusted News Initiative (Orwell?!) that have turned into glorified content farms which spit out non-expert written content on every conceivable subject for Googlebot (and now most of this content is AI written or from the cheapest possible third world contractors). No thanks.

Those "real web search results" used to be independent publishers that are referenced in this article, which were often topical experts with deep knowledge on their respective subjects, and those people and businesses have been destroyed over the last few years by Google updates that clearly prioritize their own slop and their "trusted" corporate ally content farms over the independent web.

They also disappears tons of content, and anything critical or outside of the mainstream acceptable narrative is nowhere to be found, sort of like searching for "tank man" from inside China, something everyone in the west used to poke fun of and point to as an example of digital totalitarianism.

If I were running Google search I would immediately roll back all of their search changes to somewhere around 2014-2016, which was roughly the last time you could find true keyword matched web results from a hugely diverse array of expert sources, and then very cautiously reassess. Obviously they would never do that, so I am not sure they can recover from their own demise.

BTW I don't find DuckDuckGo or Bing to be much better, they seem to just mimic Google results. Search is in real trouble.

Red flag #2: Who are these people, their claims, and their experience on the subject matter? Marc Andreessen and Brian Armstrong, or "L0la L33tz". Hmm.

Counterarguments are important, but let's not pretend they're anything more than that.

That's what you engage with, so that is what it gives you.

Are you not familiar with social media algorithms?

Shouldn't it be alarming to everyone that Jack Dorsey distanced himself from Bluesky?

The narratives around X are almost entirely inaccurate and/or self-induced. Like all algorithms, what you engage with on X is what you see, and what you follow is what you see. My X feed is very similar to my YouTube feed, which is almost entirely tech, physics, science, health, medicine, with the occasional trashy off-topic engagement bait that I ignore.

If I go onto YouTube and only engage with cat videos, soon my entire YouTube experience is going to be cat videos, even more extreme cat videos, cats doing crazy stuff, cats doing funny stuff, cats doing cute stuff. Does this mean that YouTube has turned into an extremist pro-cat propaganda center? Or is that a reflection on what I engage with? Think a little.

Less censorship is a pretty important feature

To repeat a quote I have seen repeated in dozens of email signatures (below the pronouns, of course!)

"When you're accustomed to privilege, equality feels like oppression."

Do we? No, we don't, not at first, not until we see it enough times to become desensitized to it, and we eventually realize the state/city/population ultimately doesn't care about these people, so we adapt those beliefs too, whether we want to or not.

I watched that happen to many colleagues, friends, family members, and even, regrettably over time, myself.

If you mention the homeless crisis to many people, many of the typical urbanites and suburbanites that populate every major city that is overflowing with homeless and open drug camps, the same people who vote for it to continue and for it to get worse and worse, the ones who vote to fund programs that clearly are making the problem grow and worsen rather than improve, they get very defensive, almost angry that you're bringing it up. Why on earth are you bringing up this topic? Quiet! And if you do talk about it, you better share the acceptable opinions on the subject, anything else is verboten. It's a strange social pressure, completely devoid of humanity.

I don't think it's a real disorder, nor do I think giving people amphetamine is a great idea.

Personally, I have never seen a case where tattoos improved someone's health, or appearance for that matter.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38779442

Points: 7

# Comments: 0

BTW if you have a preferred name for those who are embedding into business and institutions to enforce their beliefs, politics, morality, opinions, and generally limiting knowledge and discourse, I would be happy to use that instead, but I think most people are familiar with the terms "woke" and "Taliban".