The infographic at the top showing the layers of the web really resonated with how my internet use has shifted over the past decade. The open web has become largely unusable, as perhaps best shown...
The infographic at the top showing the layers of the web really resonated with how my internet use has shifted over the past decade. The open web has become largely unusable, as perhaps best shown by the trend of appending "reddit" to any search in a feeble attempt to find something written by a person instead of some bland SEO spam article. I've noticed that I've shifted much more into using private and public-but-small chats as my main mode of interacting with people online, which really calls back the old IRC days for me.
What's funny is that's not the only way I've run to older technologies to solve new technological failures in the past few years. I've gotten into the habit of collecting old digital recipe books, encyclopedias, and textbooks for my retro computers because in many cases that old reference material is either all that's needed or is a much less annoying starting point. I know food websites are maybe unfairly low-hanging fruit on the level of local news sites with how many adtech vultures perch on them picking even the tiniest scraps of value off their digital corpses... but stuff like Sierra MasterCook Suite running on an old Windows 3.1 install, despite being around 30 years old, is such a refreshingly straightforward experience compared to the clear web and its bulky, ad-cluttered, tracker-laden re-re-re-plagiarized content.
The infographic at the top showing the layers of the web really resonated with how my internet use has shifted over the past decade. The open web has become largely unusable, as perhaps best shown by the trend of appending "reddit" to any search in a feeble attempt to find something written by a person instead of some bland SEO spam article. I've noticed that I've shifted much more into using private and public-but-small chats as my main mode of interacting with people online, which really calls back the old IRC days for me.
What's funny is that's not the only way I've run to older technologies to solve new technological failures in the past few years. I've gotten into the habit of collecting old digital recipe books, encyclopedias, and textbooks for my retro computers because in many cases that old reference material is either all that's needed or is a much less annoying starting point. I know food websites are maybe unfairly low-hanging fruit on the level of local news sites with how many adtech vultures perch on them picking even the tiniest scraps of value off their digital corpses... but stuff like Sierra MasterCook Suite running on an old Windows 3.1 install, despite being around 30 years old, is such a refreshingly straightforward experience compared to the clear web and its bulky, ad-cluttered, tracker-laden re-re-re-plagiarized content.