Re:When bad UX is good
by resu_nimda on Saturday May 02, 2020 @01:47PM
(#23053518)
Can you provide some examples of this? What types of information are you looking for? Personally I have not found this to be the case, for example I have effortlessly gained tons of information from instructional videos on YouTube that would have been much harder to obtain otherwise.
Are you saying that informational resources are being forcefully taken down? Or that their rankings are artificially lowered in search engines?
search for some exotic aircrafts on google (e.g. "Polikarpov I-3", "Polikarpov Il-400") - all you will find is wikipedia, scale-model ads and the odd pinterest (which isn't usable without an account and often doesn't show what was advertised on the page). I saved some pics when I was building the scale model some years ago and I'm unable to find half of them in a google image search today after scrolling so far that google is putting in non-I-3 polikarpovs for like all pictures... Also I think there was at least one "book" on the type but I'm unable to find any in the first 10 google search pages (who does that today...). For the latter I've had "bookmarked" an altervista-blog full of pictures - it's still ranked high in pictures, but basically invisible in search.
Duckduckgo is worse, it only has wikipedia-fakes...
And after this small experiment I'm reall frightened and staring at my bookshelf for resolve, in parallel searching for the HN article where people recommend "civilization rebuilding" material...
Not a direct answer to the question, but something I don't see discussed often enough: "It seems that Google is forgetting the old web" - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19604135
For a brief period of time, every human with an internet connection had access to a significant portion of the sum total of previously-preserved human knowledge. Web 2.5 has pushed us backwards. After several years now of being unable to easily find relevant results using Google, DDG, etc., I had the crushing realization that, near 30 and for the first time in my life, less truly useful information was available to me, to the average person, than had been before.
This should scare people. Powers that are obfuscating both their rationale and the mechanics of their means are making a play for our collective knowledge base.