Tag: internet

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.

Aischomania – The obsession with making oneself ugly

You’ve either noticed it or you haven’t. If you haven’t noticed it, then there’s probably nothing I can do to point it out to you. If you have noticed it, then you probably already know what I’m talking about before I explain it.

Over the last few years, there have been a number of people – a very small number as a proportion of the total population, but very noticeable online – who seemed have developed an obsession with making themselves ugly.

Again, you either know who I mean or you don’t.

This is not something I saw coming. I think it is an internet phenomenon – it’s a phenomenon, for the most part, created by the internet – social media in particular. But ten years ago I would never have seen this coming.

Why do these people do it? I think it’s driven largely by a desire to be different – to be unique. Our society values individuality, which means that anything that shows you as not being like other people is desirable. It’s a fashion to show how you aren’t following the trend – how you’re doing something different – how you’re setting a new trend.

Of course, all of these people end up looking the same. Every generation has had this: a group of people who think that they are all different and special and unique, but who ultimately all end up looking the same. In the 90s and early 2000s it was the Goths. In the mid and late 2000s it was the Emos.

But unlike the Goths, who were (as far as I can tell) just obsessed with black dyed hair, eyeliner, black nail polish, and black clothes, and unlike the Emos, who were just obsessed with eyeliner and a brightly-coloured streak of hair sweeping across their face, covering their eyes, this latest cohort seems to be just obsessed with making themselves ugly. They favour mullets (a hairstyle that I’m sure a few years ago we all agreed should never make a return) – or more often a mullet with the front half of their head shaved. They favour nose piercings – like the ones that cows sometimes have. They reject the idea that people who are slender and muscular are generally better-looking. Like their predecessors, they are obsessed with coloured hair, but it is often a garish mixture of colours that do not go together.

I think this is driven by the desire to look different, but also with the presupposition that there is no such thing as objective beauty – that beauty is wholly subjective. This is a curse that has afflicted the Anglosphere for some time. The reality is that beauty is not wholly subjective. It’s not wholly objective either – it’s partly objective and partly subjective. That explains why humans have such a terrible time understanding it – we like absolutes – absolutes are easy to remember. It’s the same with fine art – paintings and the like – the beauty of a painting is not wholly subjective. The beauty of a building is not wholly subjective. The quality of a book or a movie is not wholly subjective. All of these things are partly objective.

If you are not yet disavowed of the idea that beauty is subjective, consider this: ask a thousand people who is better looking: Chris Hemsworth or Boris Johnson. You already know, roughly, what the results of such a survey would be before you see them. You could try the same survey with many such pairs of well-known people. You would, very often, be able to roughly predict the results. How are you able to do this unless there is a pattern to them? That pattern is simply an objective fact about human beings – what human beings consider beauty to be. That pattern might vary slightly from one society to another, but it cannot be wholly gainsaid. You also may not be able to predict equally as reliably how an individual person might respond to the survey, but that does not negate the pattern for a large population. Beauty is partly objective.

And I think all of these people who are obsessed with making themselves ugly, on some level, know this. What they do is about rebellion. It is using rebellion, as fashion, as a signifier of how virtuous they perceive themselves to be (where, in a society that values individuality and self-expression, non-conformity is considered a virtue). In a society that has mastered beauty (through cosmetic products, digital photo editing, the millions-strong filter for beauty that is Instagram, and even plastic surgery and weight loss injections), ugliness is the only form of aesthetic rebellion that remains.

I have seen this phenomenon enough times now that I find I need a word for it. As always, the best English words are constructed from Latin or Greek elements. There is an Ancient Greek word, αἶσχος, aiskhos, meaning ‘ugliness’, but also ‘disgrace’ or ‘disgraceful deeds’. This would seem to be the perfect word, so I name this phenomenon aischomania – ‘the obsession with making oneself ugly, usually as an act of social or cultural rebellion’. (I have tried to mimic the usual pattern of consonant changes when words travel from Ancient Greek to English, but I might have gotten it wrong.)

This word could also be applied metaphorically to the obsession with ugliness seen in other areas of modern life. Brutalist architecture – and a lot of later styles – is an example of aischomania. Modern art is, often, an example of aischomania. Even some contemporary styles of music are.

Aischomania – the obsession with and desire for ugliness, often with the belief that there is a kind of moral purity that can be found only through disgrace and self-degradation.