I think we're witnessing / experiencing a "Kessler Syndrome" of the #Internet.
#KesslerSyndrome is a cascade effect that can happen in Earth orbit, where there's so much junk and debris flying around, that it keeps hitting/destroying satellites and producing more debris, faster than the existing debris is cleaned up.
It could make it impossible for humans to launch anything into space for generations, and it's a serious risk.
It's not a perfect analogy, but AI-enhanced spam is turning the Internet into a garbage-filled wasteland, where the existing garbage keeps spawning more garbage faster than anyone can hope to clean it up.
If you used the internet in the US in the early 90s, your traffic was handled by Trans Witches! (A TRANSWITCH chip was part of every interface board on the NSFnet's experimental T3 routers.)
The #Internet has all these amazing ways to disseminate information that should be controlled by librarians but keep being taken over and rendered useless by marketing departments.
A #Librarian is trying to help you find what you are looking for. A marketing department wants you to find what they are selling.
This tracking stuff on the Internet is past ridiculous. I notice that when I pull up my Orders page on Amazon, uBlock blocks 133 items. When I pull up Accuweather for my town, it blocks 273 items.
Here on Mastodon, both uBlock and Privacy Badger read zero. Funny how that is.
In an age of LLMs, is it time to reconsider human-edited web directories?
Back in the early-to-mid '90s, one of the main ways of finding anything on the web was to browse through a web directory.
These directories generally had a list of categories on their front page. News/Sport/Entertainment/Arts/Technology/Fashion/etc.
Each of those categories had subcategories, and sub-subcategories that you clicked through until you got to a list of websites. These lists were maintained by actual humans.
Typically, these directories also had a limited web search that would crawl through the pages of websites listed in the directory.
Lycos, Excite, and of course Yahoo all offered web directories of this sort.
(EDIT: I initially also mentioned AltaVista. It did offer a web directory by the late '90s, but this was something it tacked on much later.)
By the late '90s, the standard narrative goes, the web got too big to index websites manually.
Google promised the world its algorithms would weed out the spam automatically.
And for a time, it worked.
But then SEO and SEM became a multi-billion-dollar industry. The spambots proliferated. Google itself began promoting its own content and advertisers above search results.
And now with LLMs, the industrial-scale spamming of the web is likely to grow exponentially.
My question is, if a lot of the web is turning to crap, do we even want to search the entire web anymore?
Do we really want to search every single website on the web?
Or just those that aren't filled with LLM-generated SEO spam?
Or just those that don't feature 200 tracking scripts, and passive-aggressive privacy warnings, and paywalls, and popovers, and newsletters, and increasingly obnoxious banner ads, and dark patterns to prevent you cancelling your "free trial" subscription?
At some point, does it become more desirable to go back to search engines that only crawl pages on human-curated lists of trustworthy, quality websites?
And is it time to begin considering what a modern version of those early web directories might look like?
In the aftermath of Prigozhin's media empire collapse, former employees spoke out about the dark tactics employed, including hiring individuals to portray "victims of Ukrainian Armed Forces” in staged reports that underpinned Russia's fake pretext for the full-scale invasion of Ukraine -- the manufactured "genocide in Donbas."
Do NOT, under any circumstances, link to any of the websites listed here!
"You may not provide a link to this website from any other website without first obtaining Associated’s prior written consent."
"You may only link to our Web site or mobile application with Our express written permission."
"Users may not link any other website to the Website without obtaining the prior written consent of Office of His Majesty’s Coroner for the City of Sunderland."
⛔️🌐 Bloque la pub sur internet et passe le bloqueur à tes voisin·es ! 📢
Pour faire simple et efficace, suis ce lien, ses recommandations et surtout partage le 👉 http://bloquelapub.net/
Le savais-tu ? Plus de 50 % des internautes 🛜 n’ont jamais installé de bloqueur de publicité. 📵 Ce 28 janvier 2024 est la journée européenne de protection des données, A cette occasion, avec @LaQuadrature , nous vous recommandons d'installer un bloqueur de pub !
Short PSA to #WebDev do not, do not, enable #Accessibility overlays! I was just on a website where the AccessiBe toolbar actually made text completely disappear and turn plain text paragraphs into a DIV, somehow, and a hidden element. I'm telling you, seek out an accessibility ready theme instead. #Wordpress has hundreds, and Shopify has them now too. You. Are. Wasting. Your. Money. On these toolbars. #Internet
#Broke & in the USA? You've got until this Feb 7th to enroll in the Affordable Connectivity Program, which knocks 30$/month off of you #internet bill, and offers a 1x tech hardware purchase benefit.
There's a variety of ways you can qualify besides having HH income >200% of the Federal #Poverty Guidelines, including receiving
How to Kill a Decentralised Network (such as the Fediverse) (ploum.net)
Everyone who’s into the fediverse concept should read this article.
FCC chair: Speed standard of 25Mbps down, 3Mbps up isn’t good enough anymore (arstechnica.com)
Chair proposes 100Mbps national standard and an evaluation of broadband prices.
Victims of “Donbas genocide” were paid actors, Prigozhin’s fired trolls reveal (euromaidanpress.com)
In the aftermath of Prigozhin's media empire collapse, former employees spoke out about the dark tactics employed, including hiring individuals to portray "victims of Ukrainian Armed Forces” in staged reports that underpinned Russia's fake pretext for the full-scale invasion of Ukraine -- the manufactured "genocide in Donbas."