https://www.citationneeded.news/we-can-have-a-different-web/
"As a lifelong lover of the web, it's hard not to feel a little hopeless right
now.
Search engines — the window into the web for many people — top their results
with pages containing thousands of words of auto-generated nothingness,
perfectly optimized for search engine prominence and to pull in money via ads
and affiliate links while simultaneously devoid of any useful information.
Social networks have become “the web” for many people who rarely venture
outside of their tall and increasingly reinforced walls. As Tom Eastman once
put it, the web has rotted into “five giant websites, each filled with
screenshots of the other four”. Within those enclosures, the character limits,
neutered subset of web functionality, and constant push to satisfy the
enigmatic desires of an algorithm tuned to keeping eyeballs on the platform
encourage sameness, vapid engagement farming, and rage bait while stifling
creativity.
Newspapers, whose evolution towards online models once stoked optimism for more
accessible and dynamic journalism that could lead to a more informed and
democratically engaged citizenry, have become luxury goods as aggressive
paywalls and expensive subscription models are increasingly deployed by the
hedge funds and other profit-hungry entities that control these papers. Some
use the excuse that they're trying to protect their journalism from the
unsanctioned scraping by companies training ever-hungrier artificial
intelligence models. Yet those same media outlets hasten their own demise with
wave after wave of layoffs, or by chasing harebrained schemes like churning out
tedious clickbait or their own AI-generated soup even as their executives
continue to cash huge checks.
Many websites now require one to steel themselves for battle against the
advertisements and trackers and GDPR cookie consent popups and AI-powered
chatbot windows that interrupt you to offer to helpfully bungle whatever you
ask of them. AdBlock is no longer optional, and even with it, trackers and
advertisements slither through the cracks. Browsing the web brings with it the
ever-present feeling that you're being watched — your activities and
preferences and habits all being logged and funneled into a giant vat of
horrifying data soup, all just to help more companies serve you more of these
intrusive ads that you must endlessly swat away as you try to find whatever it
was you were looking for.
It is tempting, amid all of this decay, to yearn for the good old days."
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
