The ad-supported internet has turned to garbage. The academic and hobbyist internet is fine, and not that much different from the old days. The governmental internet depends a lot on where you are, but .gov.uk is really rather good, and vastly better at what it does than snailmail and Post Offices were in the old days.
YouTube, and dreams of monetization, have infected the hobbyist internet too. I am active in some niche travel hobbies. It used to be that people in this subculture would write detailed text blogs with tips about various routes and definitions. Now, people think video is the default medium for sharing one’s information, and so they make YT videos that have lots of whizbang effects and GoPro shots but aren’t very information-dense. You have to sit through many minutes (or up to an hour) of a guy stuttering “Uh... So...” to eventually glean details that might help you. It sucks. For a while the people who made these videos would also spam Reddit and specialist forums with links, clearly interested in the prospect of monetizing, but now everyone seems to understand that YT is not a reliable path to financial success.
The decline of text blogging is also partly Google’s fault, in that lots of hobbyist blogs are now excluded from search results even if you try to search for the exact terms you know are found in the blog entry.
Interesting; I wasn't aware of that. Do you know whether alternative search engines like DDG have the same problem?
How people decided to default on the absolutely least effective medium for doing this is beyond me, but oh yeah, I’ve seen this.
For me it’s a clear sign of worthless content not worth my time.
If it’s not text, I’m not going to consume it. EOT.
Maybe one day there will be a platform that makes following blogs as convenient as following youtubers
There was such a platform: the RSS ecosystem. Unfortunately, Google managed to attract something like 80% of the market to its offering, Google Reader, and then it shut Google Reader down, which basically killed off RSS. RSS does remain today, but it is a shadow of what it once was.
Old days: random cool stuff, sea of garbage, impossible to find anything.
Middling days: random cool stuff, sea of garbage, Google!
Now: random cool stuff, sea of garbage, impossible to find anything.
It’s still gotten easier to put things on the Internet than ever before. There are still even more hobbyist sites than ever. Google hasn’t actively rolled those things back, it’s just taken us back to the garbage fire of the old days.
I called the agency, they said, "You should print out the PDF, fill that out and bring it to our office."
Can you believe that?? There aren't enough programmers to make the .gov stuff work right because FAANG is buying them all. So, I'm not sure you are right on that.
You should also look at volunteering with Code for America.
There are enough. There certainly are in the US and likely so other places. It's that government often pays peanuts compared to private sector and adds poor management and poor advancement prospects on top.
If people aren't willing to work for you because your working conditions suck, it might be worth considering better ones.
The joke is they can easily pay a contractor 150$/hour though. But can’t pay an employee hourly wage of 100$/hour
I agree with you. This is just a huge side conversation.
Also, there is a TON of great educational content on youtube produced by governments. Google won't show me those videos on web pages at the government website, but they'll show me the youtube video with ads on it.
Secondhand anecdotes recount fistfights in the office and the unfireable-until-the-election official viewing porn during working hours and continually infecting their desktop and the intranet with malware.