Tag: Facebook

Internet search is completely broken

I can’t find anything on the internet anymore.

I began to notice the deterioration of internet search several years ago. I possibly noticed it first with programming queries. I do a lot of computer programming, and as any programmer knows, you spend a lot of time searching for how to do things on Google. Often it’s quite simple things – things you’ve done before – but with so many languages and standard libraries, you can’t quite remember how to do it with this programming language and this standard library.

First it became harder to find the answers to more obscure questions – okay, I thought, maybe it’s just harder for Google to understand what I’m looking for. Then it became harder to find the answers to easy questions – sometimes dead easy questions. And it’s at the point now where I have to trawl through five, six, seven websites to maybe find the answer I’m looking for – even for the most basic questions, like those about for … of and for … in loops in JavaScript.

What’s infuriating is that often I know that there is a webpage with the answer – because I’ve looked it up before and found it, but I can’t quite remember it exactly so I just need to look again – but that webpage is now nowhere to be found – it has completely vanished from the search results. About 10% of the time I can find the page again after about 10-15 minutes of searching. The other 90% of the time, the page is lost forever.

I am far from the first to comment on this phenomenon. Others have suspected that the reason behind it – specifically when it comes to Google – is just plain greed. Google wants to make more money, so they show you more paid search results instead of the actually good and accurate ones.

I’m not entirely convinced. There is a certain attitude that can creep in at technology companies – particularly large and prestigious ones. This is the attitude of everyone wanting to have ‘their thing’. Everyone wants to have ‘their thing’ on the live site – their idea, their feature. Everyone at these companies knows that they’re going to have to change companies after a couple of years, so they want to have some idea or feature that they can claim to be theirs that they can talk about when applying to other companies. It doesn’t matter if that feature is actually what the users want or what’s good for the site – these people don’t really care about the site – they’re not going to be working on it for long anyway. They just want something to put on their curriculum vitae. This attitude leads to the constant shipping of new features – there’s always a new feature, a new project, a new complete redesign of the site. It inevitably results in sites being bloated with features – like Facebook is – Facebook has far too much random junk on it. Companies overshoot their optimal product by just adding more and more things.

Meanwhile, the core features get ignored. There’s no glory in the core features. Carefully maintaining a system over years doesn’t look nearly as good on paper as adding a new feature – your feature.

And this certainly applies to Google Search. The Google Search results page is now just filled with shit. If I search for something simple like ‘the Moon’, I am shown an information box at the side, an interactive diagram, a ‘people also ask’ section, even though I didn’t ask a question, a whole block of news stories about the Moon. Somewhere in amongst all of that I might be able to find a search result or two. Has Google forgotten that one of the original appeals of their site 25 years ago the fact that it was free from clutter?

I have a suspicion that another aspect of the collapse of internet search is control. 15 years ago, it was widely – if not universally – believed that the user knew best. It was not for the company to tell the user what they should have or what they should want. If users wanted a certain setting, they got it. If users wanted a certain feature, they got it. Then sometime in the 2010s – around the time that TikTok became popular – it changed. Technology companies decided that they knew best. The user didn’t know what they wanted – not really. The user couldn’t be trusted to make their own decisions. What video do you want to watch next? Oh, you don’t get to decide that. YouTube has already decided that for you, and we’ve also already set the video to autoplay, even though you didn’t tell us to do that. Oh what’s that? You don’t want to restart your computer at this exact moment in time? You’re working on something important? That doesn’t matter. Microsoft has decided that your computer will now shut down and be updated. No, you can’t change this setting.

At the same time, technology companies were increasingly filled with censorious people. Along with this idea that users couldn’t be trusted to know what they wanted technically, they also couldn’t be trusted to know what they wanted in terms of the kinds of content – sites, posts, images, videos – that they were getting. Users couldn’t be trusted to go to the right websites.

As soon as a search engine has an opinion about what you should and shouldn’t be seeing, its algorithm stops being about accuracy. Search is power – the power to look at something that isn’t what the company wanted you to look at, and that can’t be allowed.

This censorious impulse has been very obvious on YouTube over the years – it’s so bad on YouTube that I have to have a Chrome extension that allows me to block entire channels – because YouTube started very heavily pushing channels that I wasn’t interested in but which clearly fit YouTube’s bias. I have no reason to think that this censorious impulse hasn’t also affected Google Search.

Of course, usually when we ask ‘Which of these causes is what caused this?’, the answer is all of them. And perhaps that’s true here. A greed for money, a need for pride, and a lust for power.

Anyway, it’s at the point where internet search is so bad that I would happily pay for a better search platform, but when I try to search for one …

Threads vs. Twitter – The Jury’s In

I’ve been wanting to write this post for at least the last six months, so the jury’s been in for quite a while.

When Elon Musk bought Twitter, I was sceptical. I heard tales that he was compelling the remaining staff there to work extremely long days – introducing an extremely brutal culture. I don’t know how true this information was, and I don’t know how true it is now – maybe Musk has taken his foot off the pedal a bit – but I am very against this kind of culture at technology companies, and didn’t want to use a platform that was built by it. I had no intention of deleting my account – that makes it possible for someone else to take your username and impersonate you – I was just going to leave it there and not tweet very much.

Conversely, when Threads was created I was very optimistic. Being an author, I am naturally more inclined to social media platforms that are word-based, rather than those that are image-based, like Instagram, or video-based, like YouTube, and I hoped that Threads could be all of the things that Twitter hadn’t been over the years.

It is almost two years since Threads was released, and the jury is in. Threads is absolutely shit, while Twitter has become possibly the best social media platform on the internet.

Even within the first few days of Threads being released, I could see that those people who were famous, or who already had large followings elsewhere, were able to get much further ahead on the site than anyone else, replicating and reinforcing the kind of celebrity-non-celebrity class structure that existed on Twitter prior to Musk buying it. What’s the point of starting a new social media site if you’re just going to do that again?

But that was far from the worst of it. One of the worst things about Threads is that it appears to be filled with absolutely insufferable cunts. Sometimes I will post something incredibly mild – almost banal – and I will get random people from across Threads – people I don’t know, people I’ve never interacted with, people I don’t even have common interests with – going on a crusade against it. And the most obnoxious instances of these are when they decide to ‘quote’ (or whatever it’s called on Threads) the post, complaining about it, rather than saying anything directly in response – as though to say ‘Look!!! See this disGUSTing thing this person has said!!! What a disGUSTing person!!!!!’.

It’s difficult to decide which aspect of this is most obnoxious. When I see a post online that I disagree with, if it’s by someone I don’t know or someone who isn’t generally well-known, I just ignore it and move on. It’s the refrain that sane people have been saying since the start of the internet: ‘You can always just not watch it / not read it.’. Why is Threads filled with people without this ability? But just as obnoxious is that it is an insane way to interact with someone you don’t know and have never interacted with before. You would never do this in real life.

Related to this is that Threads seems to be filled with people who are surprised that they will be blocked if they are cunts. If someone is acting high-and-mighty, and rather cancel-y, over a very mild post, I will block them. And yet endlessly these people say ‘uGH!!! I can’t beLIEVE that OP blocked me?!?!?! i GuEsS tHaT sHoWs ThAt He DoEsN’t ReAlLy HaVe An ArGuMeNt!!!1’ – no, it’s because you’re being a cunt – and you’re still being a cunt by discounting the possibility that your very obviously cunty behaviour might make people think that you’re a cunt.

But possibly even more annoying about Threads is that the algorithm has a very obvious left-wing bias. I mean it’s more than that – it’s a woke bias. If you post woke shit on Threads, you will do well; if you post anti-woke stuff, you will not do well. You can see how many views a post gets on Threads, and I can tell, before posting something, whether the algorithm will like it and boost it, and how high that view count will be. Oh, you used a swear word? Demote. Oh, you referred to something from traditional culture? Demote. Oh, you talked about how you didn’t like something? Disliking things is hatred, and we don’t allow hatred in our hugbox. Demote. Oh, you suggested that there’s a right and a wrong way to do something? That makes people feeeEeEel bad. Demote. Meanwhile it will push the sloppiest slop from content farms in Vietnam to millions of people.

Twitter, on the other hand, has gone from strength to strength. There is endless self-congratulatory consternation from mainstream media types and Leftists these days about how Twitter is ‘oooooh it’s … it’s a very dark place now … it’s … there’s … there’s a lot of “””hateful””” stuff on there’. Quite frankly anyone who says this has either become so used to their mind being numbed by the fluffy, microfibre cushions of moderation that exist on other sites, or they don’t use Twitter.

Are there some awful people and awful opinions on Twitter? Yeah. D’you know what you do about it? You just ignore it. You keep scrolling. You don’t, in fact, have to absorb every opinion you see. If you think otherwise, that suggests that you are lacking in a vital cognitive ability – and your lack of ability to form your own thoughts is not a justification to limit what the rest of us can do.

Twitter is the Wild West. You’ll find crazy people there, idiots, and some people who are just downright evil. But guess what? You find all of that on Threads too, but it’ll only be the crazy, idiotic, and evil from the political left. What you’ll also find on Twitter is some of the greatest insight and in-depth discussion you’ll find almost anywhere on the internet. You won’t find that on Threads, or Instagram, or Facebook, or Reddit, or BlueSky, or in YouTube comments – all of which are heavily policed by wokescolds and whingelords – be they biological or electronic ones.

You can tweet on Twitter knowing that it won’t receive more or less attention just because it has the ‘wrong’ ideological bias. You can see the analytics for a tweet on Twitter too – and Twitter shows you far more than Threads does – and you can easily see that the algorithm does not wildly vary how much attention it gives a tweet based on whether some super-Sharon thinks it has the right ‘tone’.

I was sceptical about the change to ‘verification’ on Twitter – making it so that anyone could buy it. But actually this change has been brilliant. The old system – where verification was for journalists, celebrities, and politicians – created a class structure on the site. If you were in the ‘verified’ class, you could actually use Twitter to promote things. If you were in the ‘unverified’ class, you were just the audience – you would never have any reach or say or influence – you were there simply to applaud and cheer on the exalted few. The new system is actually far more meritocratic.

I have also been impressed by how Twitter now will pay you to tweet, if you have a premium account. It was absurd that, for so long, Twitter and so many sites like it would make money off of your content without paying you. We do not accept this from YouTube, so why do we accept this from other social media sites?

Twitter is actually enjoyable to use. Threads is not. Threads is suffocating. You cannot do well unless you resign yourself to pushing endless multicoloured slop – but even if you did that, there would be no benefit anyway, since you don’t get paid, and you can’t put links out to other things on the internet because Threads will pummel those posts into the ground too. And at any moment, a haughty non-person may decide to make complaining about you to their three followers their life’s purpose just because you asked a question about the origin of a word.

So here we are, two years later. Threads is vile. It has no reason to exist. Twitter remains the champion.

The absolute trash fire that is Facebook

I remember first hearing about Facebook. I was in secondary school at the time. I think at that time it was still exclusive – you could only create an account if you were at a certain educational institution.

Making it exclusive in that way certainly worked to make the site enticing. When finally we could create accounts, me and everyone I knew did so. We’d all already had accounts on Bebo and MySpace, of course – a story almost every millennial will tell you – but that’d never really gone anywhere.

Facebook was so different in the early years. It seems bizarre, looking back to 2009-2010, that it did mostly consist of talking – in a very indirect way – with your friends – that was mostly who and what you saw on there. And it was such a simple website too. (At least, that’s how I remember it. I think there were groups and direct messages at the time, but for the most part what you saw when you went to the site was your ‘wall’.)

Having a Facebook account wasn’t an essential part of life at the time, but nor was it an irritant.

Jump forwards in time to now. My goodness is Facebook an absolute trash fire now. The site is barely useable. I mean that in two senses – firstly in the sense that the site breaks – A LOT – and secondly in the sense that the site is filled with a blistering concoction of useless, unrelated, and inconvenient features.

I mean, let me go to the main page (I can’t remember what they’re calling it nowadays – the ‘news feed’? – I don’t know). I am immediately presented with about a thousand different things, absolutely none of which I want. The first thing I see is a post from a page that I don’t follow and have never followed and which none of my friends are following. The reason I don’t follow it is because I’m not interested in it and this post is shit. This post is the most generic piece of ‘content’ I’ve ever seen – derivative, banal – it’s not even formatted correctly. Why are you pushing this shit, Facebook?

I scroll down, and the next thing I see is – oh – another post from a page I don’t follow – no, wait – it’s from a group I’m not in. For some reason Facebook has both ‘pages’ and ‘groups’, even though they seem to do the exact same fucking things. This utterly demented post is showing me what is quite obviously an American McMansion, but describing it as some kind of architectural gem. What the fuck is this, Facebook? Is this rage-bait? Are you showing this to people because you know they’ll comment about how ugly the house is? Why are you even showing me this in the first place – neither I nor any of my friends are in this Facebook group, and I have never shown any interest in being in this group.

I scroll down again. What’s next? Oh, it’s some shorts videos. Fantastic, Facebook – because I haven’t been bombarded with those enough from every other website. One of the videos is about cutting a fish. Look, one of those is interesting, Facebook – two is excessive. Another seems to be about making boiled sweets. Again, Facebook, one is interesting, two is excessive.

The next item? Another post from a page I don’t follow. The one after that? An advert from a clothing brand. And it goes on, and on, and on. More posts from things I don’t follow; more shorts videos (or whatever stupid name they call them on Facebook); more covert adverts.

And what if I divert my gaze away from the endless diarrhœa? On the left there is a list of … things? ‘Memories’ is one of them. I’ve never clicked that. I don’t need to, Facebook, I have memories in my head. ‘Saved’ – I’ve never clicked that, either – I don’t think I’ve ever ‘saved’ anything on here. ‘Video’ – what even is that? All video? Or just short videos? If I want videos, Facebook, I’ll go to YouTube. Obviously. ‘Feeds’ – isn’t that what I’m already on, Facebook? If I click on ‘See More’, the list becomes even more bewildering. ‘Climate Science Centre’ – why the fuck does Facebook have a ‘Climate Science Centre’? What even is that? ‘Meta Quest 3S’ – I don’t know what that is, Facebook – why is it there? ‘Ray-Ban Meta’. What?! I just – I don’t even know what I’m looking at, and why is any of this stuff here? Why is any of this stuff considered to be important enough to have on the main page?

Below all of that is a list of ‘shortcuts’ – possibly the only useful thing on the page. On the opposite side is a list of ‘contacts’ – don’t you mean my actual friends, Facebook? Or have we given up on that word? It would be nice if the list were ordered in a way that wasn’t entirely random. There’s also a message button in the top right – with a lightning bolt through it. It’s not entirely clear how this is different from the list of contacts – they seem to do the same things.

That’s just the main page. The experience of it is like pouring battery acid in my eyes and then going on a guided tour of the Museum of Fresh Turds – with a tactile exhibit. What is any of this for, Facebook? Why would I want any of this? WHO is it for?! Is anyone actually using this?

You might be wondering, at this point, why I still have a Facebook account if I hate the site so much. I suppose it’s just out of the belief that, if I delete my account, it would be easier for a scammer to impersonate me on the site. I mean, that’s it – that’s why. How low Facebook has fallen for that to be the only reason left to keep an account on there open.

Sometimes I think that another reason to keep it open is so that I can contact old friends on there should I need to. But actually I think most of my friends on there have long since stopped using Facebook altogether.

(I also keep my Facebook account so that I can promote various things I do – books and videos and the like – on there. But I’ve never been very good at this – in large part because the site is so ungainly to use.)

I won’t go through every page of the website and examine all the ways in which it is shit – suffice to say that every other page of the site is filled with problems too. Over the years, I’ve tried using Facebook ads for various things. I have never persisted with them for very long – in large part because the ads manager system was just completely broken – I honestly don’t know how anyone used it. Pages would fail to load; links would lead in loops; nothing was where you’d expect it to be. This was a few years ago, but I honestly don’t know how Facebook has ever managed to make any money with such a broken ads platform.

I think that Facebook has suffered from a problem that many technology companies suffer from after a time. You see, everyone who works at a technology company wants to put their mark on the technology they create. They want to have their feature – the thing that they added – it was their idea or they implemented it. It’s a status thing – they can forever boast about how they were the person who added that thing to the technology. The result is, over time, such pieces of technology inflate with features that are not useful or necessary. Facebook reeks of this. Elon Musk takes plenty of flak for wanting to make Twitter some kind of ‘everything app’, but Facebook has already been trying to do this for years, it seems.

Oh you know what, to finish, I’ll roast another part of the site. Managing a Facebook page is an absolute fucking nightmare. Every time I try to do anything for my ‘Benjamin T. Milnes’ page on Facebook, I just give up. I am just presented with a bewildering selection of crap that I don’t want.

When I go to my page, I’m asked a question: ‘How healthy is your Page?’. I don’t care Facebook. Not least because one of the options in this box is to ‘Link your WhatsApp account’. Are you insane, Facebook? Why would I want to do that?!

There’s a link that will take me to my ‘Professional dashboard’, whatever that is. Let’s see. Ah, here’s a new page – never seen this one before (clearly the masterpiece of another demented ‘product manager’ at Facebook). The first box has the heading ‘Weekly challenges’. No other information is presented with it – just a progress bar saying ‘0%’. Fucking marvellous, Facebook.

On the left there are some options. Apparently there’s an ‘Inspiration hub’ – whatever the fuck that is. I can ‘Earn achievements for creating reels’. Oh really, Facebook? What are these ‘achievements’ you speak of? Unless it’s money, I don’t really give a shit. Under ‘Tools to try’, I can click ‘Stars’. Oh wow, Facebook, ‘Stars’?! How magical! How special!

I haven’t the faintest idea what this shit is, and I don’t care, but let’s click on it anyway. Clicking on it takes me to a page titled ‘Monetisation’ – right, Facebook, because it was obvious that that’s where the link would lead. I’m presented with a ‘Status’, where I’m told that I have ‘No monetisation breaches’. Well fan-bloody-tastic, Facebook.

Under that is, again, ‘Tools to try’, where it says ‘Stars’ again. This was the wrong page to take me to, Facebook – make your links work properly, you absolute morons. Here, at least, there is a brief description of what ‘Stars’ are. They are a kind of pretend currency that Facebook has made up. In a million years, Facebook, I would never have guessed that that’s what they were.

And by this point, I’m completely lost. I could not tell you what part of the Facebook website I have found myself on.

Meanwhile, I can’t even remember the last time I saw a post from an actual friend on this site.