When ARPANET (the proto-internet) was created, it was mainly made for communication during the aftermath of a nuclear attack, it was also made to easily obtain information. While it’s debatable how effective that’s been over the years, I don’t think it’s an unpopular opinion to say that finding information on the internet has gotten so much worse.
Example 1: Type in any question on to google. Chances are, the first article you are going to get is a garbage article that starts off by telling you what you already know with a recap, but then afterwards padding everything out with fluff and just barely scratching the surface of the topic. That article was not made to help you, it was made to get revenue for some person.
Example 1a: You are hungry and looking for a recipe. The author really feels the need to waste your time by telling you about their life and you scroll with despair (and hunger) just looking for the ingredients.
Example 2: You look for a hobbyist forum on the internet. Since reddit has swallowed a good chunk of forums, chances are, your only hobbyist community is only on reddit. Let’s use the Sega Dreamcast as an example, though it has many good surviving forums elsewhere. When you go to the Sega Dreamcast subreddit, instead of posts about dreamcast hacking, homebrew, new releases, its games, a good majority of the posts are: “Look guys! I bought a Sega Dreamcast!”. Reddit intentionally and unintentionally by design is built to promote posts like these over others. I cannot tell you how much I loathe reddit’s upvote system.
What I’m trying to say with all this is that when finding information on the internet, you are best getting very small factoids about things. Learning about larger topics is much harder, and you often run into articles that just barely explain what you want to know. When you you go to hobbyist forums, a good chunk of the time you might get some useful facts here and there, but you are often surrounded by people who don’t fully understand the topic either, and posts are usually filled with beginner questions.
It’s really weird that despite the internet being made for information, the best way to use it to get that information is to download books off of it. Somehow, someway, in the year 2023, the best way to gain information is by book, and books are often paywalled. Some of the best information you can find outside of a book on the internet is also paywalled. Wiki’s are decent for getting information, yet a good chunk of the time they still don’t fully cover a topic.
There has to be a way that we can make wiki’s that are super indepth and will answer most questions people have about a topic.
Or maybe not even wikis: In some cases I wonder if it’s best to confine information to just text, that can more easily fit into hard disk space and be read on any device, old or new.
What do you all think about this?
There is a difference of information and knowledge. For example, morse code is great to transmit information but it is useless to transmitir knowledge. It is great for quick news but terrible for philosophy.
While screens (especially interactive screens) are better for entertainment. Even lectures made for screens tend to use entertainment language to adequate the content with the media (to make it less boring for the screen, because screens create expectations for constant movements and changes of frames).
The Internet is perfect for information and it is full of information, and it has information pollution, and is a problem for “relevant information” and knowledge. But using the Internet to read a book or to watch a academic lecture (without distractions), the Internet can be good for knowledge. The problem, as mentioned before, is that screens are always a media that fits better for distractions (entertainment), and so quick information, and less fit for knowledge.
Information is just data that we can consume instantly while knowledge is obtained with time, it requires a kind of stillness that books offer, so we can better digest the content, the long informations that are focus to a common subject, with out distractions.
That said, books are still the best media for knowledge. The Internet is the best media for quick information, factual news, entertainment and datas.
http://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/
One of many excellent clearinghouses of actual information accessible through the internet.
I agree with the central idea that there’s a lot of noise out there, but if you want to get beyond ELI5 the resources are there and just as easy to find as a cat video.
In many ways the internet has come to resemble the lowest common denominator, but the serious information sources are still there, same as ever, if not better since most old paper content has been scanned and indexed now.
I’m just old enough that my undergraduate research was done in the paper journals (using computerized indexes instead of card catalogs) and my graduate work was more aided by electronic journals.
Yes the internet is a cesspool but in some ways the complaint is analogous to being annoyed you have to walk by the lifestyle magazine rack in the library on the way to the reference material section. If you get distracted by the cover of the latest People magazine, that’s not the librarians fault.
You’re missing a point though. You used Pubmed as an example of good information being available, but it’s only useful because you know it exists.
In your example, there’s a real life librarian who would walk you past the lifestyle magazines to show you where the ‘real’ information is. On the internet, the search engines that act as the librarian take you directly to the lifestyle magazines and tell you that they’re the best source of information available, because they’ve been paid to do so. If you push them, they might show you something better, but it can be hard to find.
Google has a specific search engine to only return scientific journals and similar ariticles: https://scholar.google.com/
That’s a handy link, thanks 🙂
Fair enough, yes there’s a lot of noise and reliable guides and teachers are rare. However, I don’t think the responsibility is on the ‘internet’ to get people to ask better questions. That’s the role of mentors, educators, librarians, etc. as you describe.
The meme-based analogy is the difference between the questions:
How is babby formed?
-and-
What are the biochemical mechanisms at work during conception?
Both questions originate in the same curiosity but on G**gle the latter is going to take you quickly to sources like PubMed. The first one is only going to yield Flash-based internet jokes from the old days.
I think what I was trying to express is that if you want to use the internet for real, deep learning, you have to learn the question-asking and information-filtering skills common to any scholarly discipline. There’s just no substitute for this literacy and you are right, it’s hard work. As a lazy man, believe me, I’ve tried to find shortcuts too.
No matter how good the search engine, a vague or overly general search phrase will yield poor results. If one desires to move beyond being a passive consumer of lowest-common-denominator content, change starts within because the information is out there waiting to be found.
Sometimes I wonder whether the internet as we know it is eventually gonna collapse on itself or if it’s just gonna keep getting worse and only a handful of people will take refuge in the gophersphere or some place separated from the regular web.
What I’m trying to say with all this is that when finding information on the internet, you are best getting very small factoids about things.
The thing that worries me the most is that this might be a big contributor to the spread of misinformation. Every week there’s a new discourse and most people are receiving only enough factoids to put them in the sweet spot for the Dunning-Kruger effect, making them think that they’re on par with literal experts.
Somehow, someway, in the year 2023, the best way to gain information is by book, and books are often paywalled.
With the exception of Open Library, which publishers are trying to sue into closing down. 🤦
Or maybe not even wikis: In some cases I wonder if it’s best to confine information to just text, that can more easily fit into hard disk space and be read on any device, old or new.
Look into the Gemini protocol, it’s designed with exactly this idea in mind. Someone even made a wikipedia front-end for it.
Extra points for mentioning Gopher, my favorite Minnesota-flavored information sharing protocol.
Society has an institution called University that is supposed to create such in-depth knowledge and document it, however their out-put has been captured by for-profit publishers and other ways to privatize the knowledge created. Recently people started to change this by insisting on open-access publication models.
They often tend to gatekeep knowledge by wrapping it in obscure terminology, we have to translate it back and make it our own again.
If you want specialized knowledge you have to learn some specialized vocabulary.
I agree, in some cases it’s necessary terminology. But there is also a tendency in academia to prefer complexity - after all in a simple world you don’t need academics, do you? So very gradually specialized language might turn more complex than it really needed to be.
World Wide Web != Internet
The solution is make forming healthy human relationships easier. As a supportive community will quickly spread good ideas and novel perspectives and help fill in gaps in understanding. The only problem is I don’t know how to do that at a global scale. And the new places where that seems to occur tend to have connections to already healthy communities like the Free Software Foundation and the GNU project.
Rules like the GPLv3 tend to result in forking of groups but that ultimately enables healthier communities as the thing they are based around are now something they can take control of personally and move in the direction they want.
Very interesting. I agree with you. Internet search as become basically a major SEO fight between any website covering a topic, terrible lists that are basically information compilation by some author on a topic he didn’t investigate very much and sites making the content very simple to create snippets for Google.
Reddit did manage to handle the issue but was very dependent on the moderators so it depends on the subreddit but since the API changes I just consider Reddit a bot website from now on.
I think the fediverse may win back the Internet but it will take some time. Given the decentralized nature of the fediverse even if eventually corporate shills start to creep up in here with paid instances, instances riddled with ads, etc… there will always be instances that reject that and so users can always move there without loosing connections. In my opinion decentration is the true nature of the Internet.
For myself I now follow this formula for information search:
- Chatgpt if I can’t really express what I’m looking for or don’t know anything about it.
- Wikipedia for more comprehensive historical or scientific stuff
- Google for commercial stuff
- Duckduckgo to avoid Google ads and tainted result order
- Books - annas-archive.org will change your book search forever.
- Scientific articles - Scihub (search scihub proxy)
Have a look at Perplexity.ai for replacing Chatgpt. It provides sources for the information it gives you.
Just tried and it’s pretty good! Even technical and coding problems! Thank you!
I think people care about information are so little. Taking your example I see someone who don’t really looking for the precise information but mostly to get in touch with something or someone. This happen even in real life when the granny ask the recipe for the apple pie to another granny. Do you really think that recipe matter? It a trivial human nature that want to share without care to get back the perfect recipe, even better if the wrong one because it become more useful as experience for a human try and fail, feeling to have do something, or learn, without istruction, make the granny proud of a special apple pie. What you wish is out of human legacy, it belongs only to IA to collect and use.
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