On some topics it's nearly impossible: - medicine - cosmetics - cooking/nutrition/recipes
For many other topics, it's only really possible by finding forums where people who are not blog spammer discuss things. This used to be possible by appending "reddit" to a search term, but this is getting harder as Reddit's quality is decreasing.
I recently wanted to understand better the position of the rising and setting sun, and it did an excellent job of explaining where my mental model of the sun was inaccurate.
I'm not really sure that test tells you anything about the state of the web in general, and less the state of the internet, other than (perhaps) how good one site is at one specific query.
Plus you've picked categories (medicine, cosmetics, nutrition) which are rife with commercial interests, endless fringe theories, and plenty of "bad science". And, to be honest, the searches I've done for recipes over the past few years have all been very successful. But hey, maybe I'm lucky.
Why do you think it's better?
I think we have different definitions of "better."
Having to wade far more websites that want to sell something isn't better. My time is a finite resource.
Because of this, its worse.
It's faster. It's always on. I can host at home, I don't need to host on someone's else server. The web part more secure - most everything is over HTTPS now. I can buy almost anything I want online. I can easily find information on just about anything. I can easily find videos showing me just about anything. I can (formally or informally) learn about any topics, to whatever depth I like. I can correspond with people all over the world, in real-time. I can work remotely from home. I can do remote support by seeing people's screens and see what they are doing. I can keep up to date with world affairs by reading a couple well-selected web sites. I can monitor the health of hardware remotely.
I could go on. But if a few web sites selling stuff is your main objection to the whole internet, then, I suggest you're letting imperfection get in the way of magnificent.
It's marginally faster than 20 years ago. There's a 10x raw transfer rate speed up, but I've needed that 5 times for less than 30 in the past week. And even then it was 20% of the the max. I don't want 1Gbit/sec of crap.
> It's always on.
It was always on for me in 2004.
> I can host at home, I don't need to host on someone's else server.
Which I was doing in 2004.
> The web part more secure - most everything is over HTTPS now.
Everything is encrypted now, which better protects randos from looking at it, yes.
> I can buy almost anything I want online.
I though this was great, but was recently reacquainted with how much less work I need to do to see if I liked using something when I played with it in the manner I wanted to use it for.
I don't know where I stand on it.
> I can easily find information on just about anything.
I'd actually say this has gotten a LOT harder than 20 years ago because people keep wanting to sell me things when I'm not looking to buy something. I don't need storefronts when I am looking up how to use something I already own.
> I can easily find videos showing me just about anything. I can (formally or informally) learn about any topics, to whatever depth I like.
I read faster than I can listen to someone. And if I'm searching for something, I want to find it and then get on with my life.
> I can correspond with people all over the world, in real-time. I can work remotely from home. I can do remote support by seeing people's screens and see what they are doing. > [...] I can monitor the health of hardware remotely.
These were all things I was doing 20 years ago. Yes, I can now do it from the passenger seat of a car, but those are improvements in infrastructure unrelated to any of the major players on the internet.
> But if a few web sites selling stuff is your main objection to the whole internet, then, I suggest you're letting imperfection get in the way of magnificent.
Its not just "a few web sites selling stuff", its the fact that "a few web sites selling stuff" have caused everything else to die on the vine.
That's just a matter of practice. Average reading speed is ~230 WPM, listening speed can easily reach 300 WPM (YMMV of course). Note that speaking speed is ~170 WPM. I'd wager you can easily reach 2-3x on most voiced content after a few weeks of practice.
Also note that audio processing is computationally much cheaper than video processing, which I don't think is just a coincidence.
the physical technology can improve independently of the (imho decline of) quality of the sites you visit.
I'm always grateful I was endowed with a full brain, I'd hate to be so easily impressed. My condolences.
Then, companies like reddit came on the scene with tons of borrowed money. Suddenly those forums were less attractive because, why pay money to host it somewhere on vBulletin when reddit was free? Just make a subreddit. And reddit was cool with that, for years. That's what it was for, afterall, and it barely ever made any damn money but the users didn't care. Why should they? It's not their problem. And Imgur came alongside it, too, to provide image hosting.
Then, the money dried up. Interest rates started creeping up. Suddenly all these services that had been free to use^1 for a decade or more suddenly had to put on grown up pants and be profitable, and not just regular ordinary profitable, but VC profitable. They had to go public and be big corporations and be worth billions of dollars. Then the enshittification starts. Service quality suffers. They start walling things off that had been free for again, a decade or more. Staff get fired and replaced. Companies are bought and sold. And soon all these "FREE" services are not only not free, but are markedly shittier than they were before.
And before the free market peeps come roaring in to explain how nothing is free, yes it was. It was free for YEARS, no not for everyone, you needed someone willing to buy an instance on a hosting service or whatever. But these sites came in to service a userbase that was already getting everything they needed for free, also for free, but centralized. And then once everyone moved over, only then did they put their hand out and demand money for doing exactly what enthusiasts already were, except they did it with massive platform sites that were bloated as fuck, mired in technical debt, subject to constant and often unwanted changes, scrutinized by advertisers with zero investment in their users who could blow away everything they'd put together in an instant because it was unsuitable to run Toyota ads beside.
So yeah, I get it, Reddit needs to make money. But maybe that being the case, they shouldn't have gone into a business that was demonstrably, provably unprofitable.
1: Yes yes you aren't the customer you're the product congratulations for having the most obvious observation about the economics of social media hot off the presses from 2011. Good for you.
Secondly, it's not like reddit is the only forums on the internet. The internet is as full, probably fuller, of communities than it's ever been. If you're only used to reddit (which clearly you're not, since you're here) I encourage you to explore a bit and find out where else you'd like to hang-out.
Thirdly, it's easier now than ever before to host your own forums. That way you can offer the free service you desire to many other people. And it'll cost you next to nothing since you can literally host it from home.
The change that is constantly happening brings opportunity.
I think that depends on what you value. I've been on the internet from well before it was open to the public, and it's absolutely worse for me now than it has ever been. And getting worse every year.
But I say that because it's worse for the purposes I want to use it for. For others who have different purposes, it may very well be better. That doesn't change the fact that it is dying in terms of how well it meets my needs.
These days, the greatest utility I get from the internet is to use it as a dumb pipe between end points.
The article us a rebuttal to [1] where someone is complaining that Reddit is going public. For some reason this strategy, or indeed the need for reddit to earn revenue, seems to be shocking to the author.
To anyone with half a brain, and has seen the internet since it was an infant in the 90s, its obvious the internet is not dying, it's "growing up". It's waaaay better now than it has ever been, and a pale shadow of examples it will become.
Yes we can pause to reminisce, yes we can fondly remember the yesteryears of carefree childhood, we can fondly really the lazy days of summer. All while forgetting the sound a modem makes when connecting.
[1] https://www.wheresyoured.at/are-we-watching-the-internet-die...