Le Livre d'Argent

Honestly the state of the internet is miserable if you're trying to learn things.

Like, you want to learn how to care for an animal? Well, every Google result is a bot generated fake blog. Maybe try YouTube? Well, you have a few new options: there's the person who just got this animal for the first time talking like experts about them. Or there's the literal child telling you what they learned about caring for hamsters from the bot generated fake blogs they just looked up.

This goes for almost anything anymore. There's no expertise, the only advice is just from whoever is the best at SEO, which is often not an actual person. But if it is they probably know as much as you do.

In the last 6 or 7 years I've found myself more and more just digging up ebooks from people who know what the fuck they're talking about.

And the most infuriating thing is, if you're older and have been online a long time, you know that the information is out there. There's ten billion websites out there on how to raise goats by people who have done so professionally for decades.

You just aren't allowed to find them anymore.

@lori @Sylvhem Well, I'd say that's not the “state of the Internet”, but the state of Google's search engines (both Google Search and YouTube are).

Google isn't our friend and the fact that so much people are dependent of it to access the web is a huge concern by itself, but maybe search engines aren't a good tool to learn things either and we should think about other ways?
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@elzen It’s true that most interesting ressources I happen to find this days, I do it organically through humans and not with a search engine. Like all the good YouTube channels I watch have been recommended to me, or I have discovered them through another channel.

@lori

@Sylvhem If you want to read some books, you have mostly four ways:
– Follow recommandations from other books,
– Use your library/bookshop's search engine,
– Walk randomly into the library/bookshop's shelves,
– Talk to your librarian/bookseller.

We may need some more ways to walk randomly into the web's shelves.
We definitely need more web librarians/booksellers.

@lori