The internet is becoming increasingly useless. Yes/No?

FoxEye

FoxEye

FoxEye

Caporegime
Joined
17 Feb 2006
Posts
29,263
Location
Cornwall
OK, maybe a slight exaggeration.

But I remember a time when 90% of sites weren't "fake" - existing only to get you to install malware, or just wanting you to land on their page for a couple seconds for advertising revenue. And the number of these sites - but more importantly their percentage of the total, seems to be rocketing upwards.

A (somewhat trivial) example: you used to be able to search for coupons to use on e-commerce sites and... actually find them. There were only a few sites doing this to start with, and you could get genuine coupons from them, easily.

These days 99.9995% of all the "voucher code" sites indexed by Google are either attack sites, or just advertising sites, getting money for clicks. They don't offer any genuine voucher codes, and you can pretty much tell straight away when they appear in Google as "90% off that thing you want! Get deal fo sure! 100% gen-u-ine. No fake site, honest! 90% That big number! You click me please!"

Add to that the amount of misinformation that everyone and his dog is now repeating on their "blog" or twitter or random Facebook junk page.

Even supposed technical sites like Microsoft's TechNet are filled to the brim with automated/scripted responses that don't even try to answer the question. Just people/bots going through the motions, filling the 'Net with more useless crap. More unanswered questions. All recorded for evermore.

And Google! Remember when it actually searched for what you asked it to search for? Before you had to click "Verbatim" just so it didn't ignore your search terms? Remember when it didn't just guess what it thought you might have wanted, and shown your results for that, instead of what you actually searched for? And now it even ignores stuff I put in quotes, when it thinks it knows best. Thanks, Google.

Maybe I'm just an old git, but it seems we've gone past "peak internet usefulness". Now it's becoming/has become a tool for generating revenue from us, whether we like it or not. And fake sites/attack sites/data miners/social engineering sites seem to make up the bulk of it now.

Feel free to disagree ;)
 
This is a problem with the advertising internet model .

Clicking on crap counts the same as finding something useful .
Possibly more so as if you get crap you click on something else.
 
No I think you're right. Problem is that technology has advanced to a point where it's so incredibly easy to set up malware/nonsense websites that it only takes a few minutes
 
Answer to thread title.
Yes

I must admit the internet has developed rapidly in the past 10 years from what was AOL, MSN, free ringtones etc to more modern "Hey this site relies upon you viewing our ads, turn off your adblocker or donate" and the same news pages posting yet the same information in some mad copy paste session. The old browser games now long dead apart from the odd forum, facebook and the odd google i cant find a reason to load my browser much anymore
 
The trouble is people have come to expect something of nothing now and there seems to be little appetite for quality services which carry a subscription/one off fee. We're left with a huge percentage of content being malicious/misleading/crap in an effort to generate huge amounts of revenue where made up crap can make someone as much money as a well thought out and seriously researched piece.
 
I think you need to split the physical parts of the internet from the garbage that is the "WWW". A packet switching network for the delivery of data is (and still is) one of the wonders of the modern world. Don't dismiss the core because people use it to share pictures of cats.
 
Personally I would say the opposite, the internet is becoming increasingly useful. (Though most of your complaints seem to be about the WWW rather than the internet...)
 
Can we leave the pedantry for another thread, please. It was 100% obvious what I was talking about.

People who say, "It's not a Hoover, it's a vacuum cleaner!" are not necessarily wrong, but they are boring.
 
i think it's a case of there's plenty of information out there from good quality sources, but the issue is you need a certain level of background knowledge in order to establish wether or not your source is saying something that's reputable.

this isn't so hard in the case of technical information, but where it's most noticable is in information that is either new, or commentary on a subject rather than a factual statement.

perfect example trying to order an item online:
i need a specific item and i know how to properly describe it- you find it instantly
i don't need a specific item and i don't know how to properly describe it- find something that's close enough pretty quickly
i need a specific item but i don't know how to describe it- good luck buddy, you're never finding it, or you'll find what you think is right but turns out not to be
 
I’ve had a similar feeling recently with the news and how redundant it’s become. It’s didnt really warrant its own thread but I saw this a year ago and it still feels of the moment, in a very ‘Brass Eye’ sort of way.

(As a minor warning FYI it contains one instance of ‘surreal violent imagery’ (as shown in the screen cap) but it’s satiracle and overall OcUK suitable!)

 
FoxEye said:
Can we leave the pedantry for another thread, please. It was 100% obvious what I was talking about.

People who say, "It's not a Hoover, it's a vacuum cleaner!" are not necessarily wrong, but they are boring.
Click to expand...

It does actually matter in this case though as quite a lot of the useful services that use the internet are not at all related to the www. The web has it's problems, but it is considerably more useful on a day to day basis now than it ever has been.
 
There's just more on it these days. So for every brilliant site there are 10 average ones and 100 totally rubbish ones.

The internet is amazing for booking holidays, transport, finding things for sale, looking at cars, getting reviews, getting news on niche subjects etc. On the flip side theres so much click bait and advertising on the most used sites like facebook that you have to be searching for what you want to find it.

And on the topic of search its a thousand times better now and whilst google have the targeted sponsored monopoly there are other options that don't.

Plus explicit content...
 
RDM said:
Personally I would say the opposite, the internet is becoming increasingly useful. (Though most of your complaints seem to be about the WWW rather than the internet...)
Click to expand...

Yeah, depends how one uses it.

iamdjdz said:
There's just more on it these days. So for every brilliant site there are 10 average ones and 100 totally rubbish ones.

The internet is amazing for booking holidays, transport, finding things for sale, looking at cars, getting reviews, getting news on niche subjects etc. On the flip side theres so much click bait and advertising on the most used sites like facebook that you have to be searching for what you want to find it.

And on the topic of search its a thousand times better now and whilst google have the targeted sponsored monopoly there are other options that don't.

Plus explicit content...
Click to expand...

I remember lots of crap way back in the early 00s.
 
You can partially solve quite a few of the problems with the web that you refer to by not using google. I use duckduckgo for web searches. It's not perfect, but it's a significantly more useful search engine than google is.

EDIT: The other thing, obviously, is to use some form of security software that by default blocks cross-site scripting and scripts being run from other sites. That deals with most of the security problems when using the web. I use NoScript on Pale Moon. It's not officially supported, but it works fine. It requires you to choose which sites can run scripts on your computer and some people see it as being a bad thing to have that choice, but I don't. The drawback is that it has the side effect of being an adblocker even if you don't want it to be because the method of serving ads on the web is inherently insecure. But if you want to give numerous sites free rein on your PC so that a site can advertise at you, you can. And hope that you don't get any malware installed as a result.
 
Last edited:
RDM said:
Personally I would say the opposite, the internet is becoming increasingly useful. (Though most of your complaints seem to be about the WWW rather than the internet...)
Click to expand...

I would say that it's becoming more useful as well, but that the percentage of useful to useless is decreasing rapidly. It's all a matter of perspective.

Look at the pro's overall:

Near instant communication with anyone anywhere in the world.
Online education.
The ability for companies to work together from various locations including from home.
Distributed computing projects for research
Crime detection/fraud detection
research material freely available.

The problem lies in that we've moved away from the internet being the home of the geeks and it's now easily available to the general public, who are mostly stupid. "I HAZ CHEEZBURGER!" for instance, not funny but shared millions of times. Website creation dumbed down to point and click that anyone can do it results in zero quality control. they are also the reason you get so many advert/malware sites.

One of my main issues is the amount of old data out there on old websites no longer being maintained or updated. Granted some of it is really archive material that is useful but I bet a massive amount could be removed and no one would miss it.

Then you have the www and the dark web which is a different story altogether.
 
IS damn useful. But if you can't discern clickbait From real it makes things difficult. So much junk on it but it's stillstill useful
 
I visit the same 5 websites I have done for 20 + years, with pihole and strands for chrome. Never see an advert, never have a problem with google. Internet is fine from my perspective.

My own internet is obviously very narrow though. No social media, virtually no shopping... news and steam only.

The few times I do go off track, I must admit I get peeved off at every site demanding I unblock them, donate, or sign up for their spamletter. If I've gone to the bother of blocking stuff, it's pretty obvious I won't undo that (or that their current model needs looking at if so many folk feel the need to take action).
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top Bottom