[samtho]

One thing that I can’t help but to lament the loss of is the wealth of information contained within public forums. Everything is shut away in Facebook groups, discord servers, and other such private-by-default means. Most public forums, and many open Facebook groups, are relegated to answering the same basic, ill-informed question from the hopelessly clueless that appear to operate in a universe absent of any sort of critical thinking.

I would bet that one of the main reasons why organic (non-sponsored) Google results are filled with SEO optimized, nearly incomprehensible drivel is because there’s not enough content that’s valuable for its own sake. Going back to the hopelessly clueless, this makes it difficult to ask the right questions because anything they ask will be some word-spun or ai-generated nonsense that talks in a circle with no specificity and totally devoid of substance.

The troubling part is that this is going to get worse before it gets better. This “content” is going to be recycled through the digestive system of LLMs over as over again in the style of “human centipede” until there we reach the singularity of popular thought causing the entire World Wide Web to become somehow less useful than an airport newsstand self-help book.