[rightlane]

One of the last bastions of good games journalism, and the only good mobile gaming site. Another casualty of the garbage listicles and AI generated garbage that fills up search results. I would do anything to have the old, fun, internet back. This monstrosity we have now just isn't doing it for me.

[thierrydamiba]

Can you explain to me what you mean by this? What about the internet today isn’t fun? There are plenty of websites that don’t have garbage listicles and AI slop, they just aren’t as popular.

[mercacona]

But they don’t get attention-public-funding enough to be profitable because of the garbage. The garbage is burying them in search results but also literally.

[firebirdn99]

i don't know if they were ever profitable. But certainly i think there's been a paradigm shift to commercializing everything (mostly through advertising) the last decade or two and if you fall behind, whatever growth you were aiming for goes away and revenues shrink.

And also almost all advertising revenues have probably become centralized with google search, social media by facebook, and youtube, etc. That combined with rising costs, and higher opportunity cost to instead do something else means these sites are biting the dust.

[thierrydamiba]

You’re just complaining that the average person doesn’t like what you like, which seems silly. I’m sure the average person thinks what you like is garbage. Who gets to be the judge?

[mercacona]

My only complain is on the low value of the search results the average person gets, which is easy to judge: passive advertising, SEOsites, etc.

I don’t care what they search, read or watch.

[thierrydamiba]

Yeah but once again-who gets to be the judge? I’ve used ddg and other search tools. I think the results are poor. That’s my opinion. I’d rather use Google. You think the results are low quality-I don’t.

Who is right? You for not wanting to scroll past 27 sponsored links? Or me for not wanting to have to go through 27 useless links to find what I’m looking for?

[93po]

literally what?

[johnnyanmac]

Well if you wanted a whole deep dive: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_8ZCzhoeQMg&t=828s

But I can distill it down to

1. social media coalescing to maybe 5-7 different sites in the country, which all have a similar "minimalist" feel, based on non-controversial UX designs and trend chasing (TikTok being the current trend).

2. search engines (so, Google and Bing) steering people towards SEO optimized slop over the proper quality blogs/websites. You're incenivized to clickbait to get attention. you need to dig real deep to find the gold these days, and the pile is only getting deeper.

3. Monetization forcing more and more ads for companies to survive, if at all. Some sites went the paywall route instead, but news these days is very hard to monetize for the mainstream (again, social media will deliver it)

4. few/no personalization. The Myspace era shifting towards the Facebook era really killed this idea of having a real, unique brand and identity (due to #1).

5. Social media became both lonlier and more hostile, somehow. You don't really make "friends" on the internet the same way you may have been able to in the 2000's where you just find some MMO or chatroom and bond with others. But at the same time, everything is so loud. People aren't talking to each other on insagram/tiktok/twitter, they are at best talking about themselves as a brand (so, advertising themselves. Or maybe literally advertising on behalf of a company), or talking at other people about whatever little drama of the day/week is going on. When's the last time you had a proper conversation with a rando on Twitter?

The internet is vast though, so you can indeed still find the fun. But you are becoming an excavator day by day to do so. And if you're into any more niche hobbies, I wish you the best of luck in finding others these days (the coalescing of groups to reddit and FB is a whole other rant).

[raxxorraxor]

It is still fun, but some services are severely degraded. A lot of sites require accounts, Google search quality is extremely bad, chatting and communities are behind shitty corporate platforms and I include GitHub and Discord here. Open social networks are often full of crazies, so that more people remain in private groups...

[nolist_policy]

> A lot of sites require accounts

This is mostly for fighting spam.

[PhasmaFelis]

Can you name some? I know they exist, but in my experience 99% of them are small personal blogs maintained as a hobby. In 2024, it is practically impossible to focus on solid journalism and turn a profit, and every site I've seen try has either gone under or been forced to sell out to bottom-feeders and adopt listicles, etc.

[austinjp]

Some of it might still be here:

https://search.marginalia.nu/explore/random

[amadeuspagel]

Did you ever do anything to support that website?