
The Internet is Shit (2003) - chroem-
http://www.internetisshit.org/print.html
======
userbinator
_If I can operate Google, I can find anything_

Or the collorary "if I can't find it on Google, it doesn't exist" \- which
seems to be the perception among people these days, and in some ways it's
quite scary how much power Google has over what information people can find on
the internet. I've noticed a decline in the diversity and breadth of their
search results over the years, where sites that I used to visit containing
detailed technical information - many of them are still around - have
basically disappeared from the search results, overtaken by highly SEO'd sites
that have only superficial information (a lot of the time they contain words
that only approximately match some of the query, which makes it even worse.)
It seems that in attempting to prevent spam, a lot of the genuinely good
content (that just "wasn't SEO'd enough") has been buried too. The mundane,
shallow, and practically worthless content is emphasised over the detailed,
in-depth information that I believe certainly exists out there. If the
internet was shit in 2003, it's even more shit now.

~~~
leephillips
Most of those high-quality sites that contain detailed technical information
have something in common: they don't carry Google's advertising, so Google
earns no revenue when you visit them. Despite Google's protestations over the
last few years, I haven't heard a better explanation for the shift in the
nature of the results they return.

~~~
vertex-four
In reality, the issue is simply that the sites that contain in-depth writings
don't get updated as often as the blogs, forums, and content farms that
contain superficial information. Google's engines are tweaked to always prefer
sites that are updated very regularly, so as to sift out obsolete information.

~~~
graeme
Why is this? In many fields, information does not become "obsolete".

Google's policy on this issue seems to be pushing the internet in a
superficial direction.

~~~
pixl97
Google is a tech company, tech is seemingly outdated as soon as it arrives.
They push the tech line of thinking everywhere they go, even if it doesn't
belong.

~~~
rtkwe
Well to be fair, trying to differentiate between information which does become
outdated and information which is static is non-trivial to do algorithmically.
Choosing between promoting new and updated information and promoting static
information I think the former is a better choice for most things.

------
TillE
"I can walk into any public library, no matter how tiny and underfunded, and
find facts, stories, amazing information I would never touch in a month of
webcrawling."

This remains absolutely true. Wikipedia and the internet in general has done a
great job of making shallow information readily available, and providing
access to out-of-copyright works.

But for the vast majority of topics, it hasn't come close to providing the
kind of information available in books, except when Google is actually
scanning and OCR'ing those books.

~~~
nly
> Wikipedia and the internet in general has done a great job of making shallow
> information readily available

Wikipedia is an encyclopaedia. The word 'encyclopaedia' literally means a
volume of shallow, broad-base, all-round knowledge.

> But for the vast majority of topics, it hasn't come close to providing the
> kind of information available in books

I disagree strongly. Writing a book is an incredibly time-consuming and
difficult endeavour, and not all people who have knowledge worth sharing have
the skill or time to do it. By praising books as a supreme medium you put
authors on an intellectual pedestal while suffering from (or being blessed
with) their editorial choices and interests. Some great things have come from
people scribbling on napkins, exchanging letters, or scribbling in journals.
The Internet means these sorts of mediums can proliferate. If you want depth
on the Internet, go to discussion forums, go to IRC, send e-mail, read mailing
lists, watch talks, go directly to the personal blogs of experts, post
comments, download electronic journals... these are the alternatives the
Internet provides to going to a library. Don't wait for someone to patch
Wikipedia.

In all honesty, there are only two valuable aspects I have ever found and love
in a library: geographically local reference material, like newspaper archives
etc, and a nice quiet place to study, away from distraction.

~~~
jjoonathan
It depends strongly on the subject. For the majority of science and
engineering subjects, books win hands down. Some recent examples:

1\. Chemistry. Want to know the details of a common battery chemistry? The
regular google results aren't helpful -- they're a combination of grade-school
demos and premeds incorrectly explaining electrochem MCAT problems to each
other. The google scholar results aren't helpful because the relevant
literature is too old to be indexed, the trail of scientific discovery is too
difficult to quickly and correctly follow, and/or it's in german (with shit
OCR so google translate doesn't work).

Meanwhile typing "battery chemistry" into the library search system brings up
several relevant tomes, the first one of which has exactly the discussion I'm
looking for condensed into the space of several pages. A quick google search
reveals that this page was never posted to the searchable internet.

2\. Math (or Chemistry or Physics). Want to know the precise definition of a
symbol you keep seeing? Too bad: google doesn't know how to search for
formulas or symbols (btw, I'd love to be wrong here). Naturally, the journal
article you're reading doesn't bother to define it, so you're SOL.

Unless you find a similar discussion in a book -- in that case, you just look
in the front or the back and 80% of the time you'll find exactly the precise
definition you need. The other 20% of the time you have to binary search
backwards until you find the point in the book at which the symbol was
defined. Easy enough.

3\. Engineering. Want to find a cohesive discussion of X? If you go to google,
you'll find 30 ppt presentations with piss-poor production value, big useless
unexplained formulas with undefined terms and not enough discussion to fill in
the blanks. In contrast, if you check out a book you can find a cohesive
introduction via the index. If you're lucky, it even includes motivation: "we
argue that X is a linear transform, we project it onto basis Y, blah bla blah"
rather than a big nasty tensor equation. Maybe you read the first few
paragraphs in the chapter if it's too hard and you need pointers to further
supplementary info.

4\. Computer Engineering. If nobody is willing to pay to make good digital
documentation, sometimes engineers are still able to get funding for a book. I
learned about Mach and mDNS this way -- the books were amazing compared to the
digital docs and well worth 5x their price (by which I mean their printed
price, not the $0 I paid to check them out).

5\. Open Source. Books are a great open source business model because two
magical things happen that wouldn't happen otherwise: 1. the author of the
documentation gets paid, 2. the culture of bookwriting imposes minimum quality
standards on their documentation. You get to learn the story. You feel like
you're along for the ride, not someone who got dropped into a room full of
people who already know what's going on and cantankerously respond to your
questions with "google it" despite the fact that your post documented the
search terms which failed to produce useful results.

\----------------------

Books have a degree of cohesion and completeness that websites and journal
articles lack. Since it sucks to follow printed citations, authors err on the
side of including everything you need. The culture of bookwriting figured out
long ago that you need to include the boring stuff too -- and that's a lesson
the internet has yet to learn (if it ever will).

Also, the internet hasn't been around for long enough to capture every
subject's burst of initial excitement + willingness to write about it. The
list of things the blog-o-sphere doesn't know or care about (literally) fills
libraries.

Science & Engineering bloggers willing to write highly informative articles
are a scarce bunch. Historically, that communication happened in books, so
that's where you often need to go to get what you want. The situation _a lot_
better in computer engineering; y'all don't know how spoiled you are :P

~~~
ethbro
I think the bigger gripe (and summary of your comment) is the following: books
and the internet present information in a completely different way.

A book is by definition an end-to-end, self-contained experience. Even on
highly-specific scientific topics, try to find one that doesn't bookend with
context.

The internet has evolved into a place where it's normal to create an extremely
specific piece of content without context. After all, that's what linking is
for ("Or they could always go read Wikipedia!" Ha). Moreover, I would argue
that the expert context that's necessary for ideal grokking in fact doesn't
exist. On a information-wide scale, no one creates just context for other
things: Khan Academy provides it by building end-to-end learning experiences,
and blog posts create it in an extremely limited and piecemeal manner (we've
all been fortunate to read one of those "Eureka!" expert blog summaries).

Indeed, it may not even be possible for such content to self-generate without
external impetus. Where do shallow articles come from? Lay-persons (for lack
of a better term) researching and writing for other lay-people (minimal time
investment, maximum audience = $$). Where do hyper-specific articles come
from? Trained-persons writing for other trained-people (maximum time
investment, minimum audience = $grant$).

Does anyone have a motive for where and why "trained-persons writing for lay-
people" (e.g. deGrasse Tyson or Sagan: maximum time investment, quasi-maximum
audience) would be created? Aside from altruism and digitized introductory
academia?

If you want to find a tragedy of the internet, it's the fact that it never
evolved a systematic context-creation process. And so we don't have any. There
may have been proposals in the original design of hyperlinking, and there were
the 90s/00s "curated human indices of links". However, the "good enough" of
modern search engines seems to have precluded the time investment necessary.

~~~
jjoonathan
Exactly! It's half a problem of legacy and half a problem of motivation.

Books and review articles (if you're lucky) are the only things I know of that
plug the gap.

------
stewdio
Why did you change the link to the plain single-page version? The pacing and
design of the original was very intentional. This is how it was meant to be
experienced: [http://www.internetisshit.org/](http://www.internetisshit.org/)

Also, for fun you ought to WHOIS the domain name. Here’s a sampling:

    
    
      Registrant Name: alain a-dale 
      Registrant Organization: iis 
      Registrant Street: Sherwood 
      Registrant Street: Forest 
      Registrant City: Nottingham 
      Registrant State/Province: State 
      Registrant Postal Code: 111111 
      Registrant Country: US

~~~
marquis
I still find it refreshing that you can buy a domain name without publishing
private contact information. I do not look forward to the day I go to buy a
random domain and find that they want a verified ID.

~~~
aaronem
There are proxy registrars for that, if you're worried about it. After all,
it's not required that your actual contact information be present in the WHOIS
record, only that you can be reached via the contact information provided
there.

~~~
marquis
Absolutely, and I also make use of these when needed. But they cost extra
money and for quick and dirty projects it's refreshing to not have to pay for
privacy. We now live in a world of "real names" and "show me your passport to
use my service".

~~~
aaronem
I see your point, but WHOIS contact information requirements are hardly a new
thing.

------
placebo
It might be a good headline to get attention but the Internet is not shit.
When I was first exposed to it (in 1989, even before the World Wide Web was a
thing) it blew my mind. My first thought was that this is going to be as
powerful as the invention of the wheel. This incredible tool, as might be
expected when understanding it's immense scope and potential, has over the
years become more and more a mirror of the civilisation that uses it. This of
course causes it to include unbelievably huge doses of shit (content which is
shallow, stupid, ignorant, petty, immoral, illegal etc.), but also gives us
access to an unparalleled abundance of deep, interesting, educational,
inspiring and fascinating stuff on any topic at unbelievable speed.

Of course you might still find things in libraries that you can't find on the
Internet but what I know is that today I can find in seconds what would have
taken me days to find once in a library (and this is assuming the library even
had enough information on the specific topic I'm interested in). There are
things I can (and do) find today and people I can contact with a quick search
which I never could have found or known to exist in the "library only" era. It
might require honing your search and "shit filtering" abilities but that's a
small price to pay for what you get.

The article seems to be expressed disappointment of the disappearance of the
"good ol' days" but I was never one to reminisce about the "good ol' days",
I'm only interested in the good new days and believe that, taking everything
into consideration, they're only getting better. Exponentially so.

~~~
noobermin
I for one am tired of people ripping the medium, whether it be cellphones or
instagram or the internet, people need to realize that it's the message, not
the medium.

Wait, OP said that. Ironically, that very statement is a fantastic
counterargument to everything s/he says. Saying that the internet is
unreliable is like saying books are unreliable. It's such a general statement
that it can't be taken seriously.

~~~
InclinedPlane
People often forget that most of life is just boring or trivial, so when
they're exposed to a new medium they see all the boringness and triviality and
then dismiss the entire medium. In reality a representative example off
literature is a shitty fantasy novel, not Shakespeare. It's only because we've
had centuries to accumulate lots of great material and billions of hours of
work putting into judging, reviewing, and curating works of literature that
are of value that we value and respect the medium.

------
jchrome
"Fiction is self-perpetuating."

I've found really interesting ways that this manifests itself.

I'm a film-camera lover. Well, my Fuji GW690 mk3 is fantastic, except that
when I trip the shutter, there's an awful "ping" sound that it makes. I read
forum after forum and watched youtube videos that all said the same thing:
"Remove the counter assembly and it will remove the ping."

Getting a hair up my derrier, I decided to do this and found, after much work,
that the ping sound was in the shutter assembly and could not be mitigated.

Check the work here.
[http://www.rangefinderforum.com/forums/showthread.php?t=1447...](http://www.rangefinderforum.com/forums/showthread.php?t=144759)

Anyway, just one internet myth amongst millions I'm sure. I was just so
surprised that people would parrot other peoples lies like that. If that's the
case with something so minor, I can only imagine the amount of misinformation
out there (where people have something to gain).

~~~
userbinator
Thanks for providing an actual example of this. As someone whose hobbies
include fixing and improving things, that sounds like a spring that's ringing.
I think you could dampen it if you could identify the exact one and put some
sound-absorbing material on it, or if you find the end-stop some part is
hitting sharply on, put something soft on that.

As another datapoint, service manuals for various equipment (including
cameras) are another difficult thing to find, as Google _really_ thinks you
want the usual brief and increasingly useless instruction manual even if you
very explicitly type "service manual" in your query.

------
PhasmaFelis
...And it's only gotten worse from there.

You know what I miss? Personal home pages. When's the last time you saw one of
those? Somebody taking a bunch of stuff they'd made or written about,
embedding it in HTML, and slapping it up on the web?

The closest thing we have now is blogs, and they're not all that close.

~~~
ARCarr
Every university professor's web page is like that. They all look awful.

~~~
kissickas
Funny. Respectfully, I think they look great.

I always get the information I need - books and research they've been involved
in, career history, a few personal details (family, hobbies, interests, where
they live), and some links to more websites I never would have found
otherwise. Maybe they don't have exciting animations, memorable logos, or even
colored backgrounds, but it beats searching my university's over-engineered,
information-starved profile on them.

------
InclinedPlane
"Fiction is self-perpetuating"

There are several ways that people react to this. One way is to see it as a
fundamental and unique fault to the internet and use it as a reason to write
off the internet as a useful or serious medium. This is a mistake. Another is
to see it as an opportunity to reevaluate our assumptions of trustworthiness
in general.

The truth is that no encyclopedia is more trustworthy than Wikipedia, no news
medium is more trustworthy than the internet. We've merely been willing to
abide by the faults and biases of familiar media. But what you see on tv, what
you read in the paper, what you read in books; all of it is just as vulnerable
to persistence of fiction as the internet. In some cases we tend not to be
aware of such things merely because it's harder to check.

------
bad_user
> _But still we praise the internet for everything, from mobilising global
> protests to creating the latest trends_

Except that's true and it's much more apparent today than in 2003. What
happens throughout the world is that the mass-media is basically owned by
oligarchies, with journalists being sellouts shaming their profession.

And for example, what happened in my country for several times has been mass
censorship of opinions and facts that went contrary to the whims of the
established power. Not by any decree mind you, it's not that kind of
censorship, I'm talking about major television and newspaper channels simply
ignoring events or twisting facts in gross manipulation attempts. Imagine
30,000 people protesting on the street with no media coverage. Imagine people
standing in line for 8 hours to vote at the London embassy, while the major
television channels and the government's spokesman were reporting that there
are no lines.

And so in my country at least, the only channel for reaching the truth really
is the Internet. And it may be full of shit in general, but that goes with its
open nature, as an Internet that isn't full of shit is not the kind of
Internet I want.

As to the points raised, those kind of scream "first-world problems". If you
have public libraries within reach, stuffed with useful material, you may not
realize it, but you're lucky.

~~~
Mimu
I think you are right and the OP comparison is not very relevant.

She (?) compares a library (so a place that stores only the relevant /
interesting books) to the internet in general. I mean 90% of everything ever
written is probably shit too, it's just not in the library.

However I observe a kind of "wikipedia I know everything" generation, I think
it is somewhat connected to the article and it's very sad.

~~~
gshubert17
The idea that "90% of everything is crap" is often attributed to science-
fiction writer Ted Sturgeon.

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sturgeon%27s_law](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sturgeon%27s_law)

------
drcode
The problem with the internet is that its positive attributes are so awe-
inducing that they make it impossible to realize its limitations.

I believe we could have something much, much better, and there are concrete
steps we could take to improve things.

For a concrete exploration of how much better things COULD be, I suggest the
following video:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GJGIeSCgskc](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GJGIeSCgskc)
(BTW I am just saying these people realize the internet is shit and are trying
to do something about it, I'm not suggesting their particular solutions are
the ones that will win out in the end.)

------
thewizardofmys
Why did he use internet to communicate it to such a large number of people? He
should have written a book and stuck it in some unknown underfunded public
library.

~~~
jokoon
I guess because he'd like to see a better internet

------
agumonkey
Anything of mass will have taints I guess. That's I like low bandwidth medium
(ML, IRC), they allow less bloat. Makes me reconsider the meaning of progress.

------
jokoon
I wonder if there's a discussion about net neutrality somewhere in there.

Although I really think the real issue with the internet right now is its
monolithic, centralized, html oriented architecture. I want more decentralized
technologies.

I'm curious, but I don't think the amount of websites increased like the
amount of internet users did.

Also the fact that people are alone despite the success of social network, is
the proof that the internet is failing.

------
codeshaman
This was written when 'Internet' meant Internet Explorer 6, before Facebook or
the iPhone or youtube.

Sine then, shit has evolved. The smart phones brought 'the shit' into
everyone's pockets and the social networks made the shit ubiquitous. We now
have access to all the movies, music, documentaries (back in 2003, broadband
was still surfacing, HD video streaming was a still a wet dream back then).
Basically, anyone, anywhere can consume everything that was ever learned or
created and communicate with anyone anywhere on the Planet. This is
incredible.

The awesome part of the Internet (and technology in general) is the part of
the iceberg that's above water. Below water lurks a chunk of ice so big and
dark that few people want to look at it or acknowledge that it is indeed an
iceberg, not a fluffy white mountain of awesomeness.

Below water there is misinformation, mass surveillance, information wars,
espionage, monopoly and control on a global scale.

But the darkest part is that we are totally addicted to this shit. We sleep
with our phones. We 'go online' (2003 term) when we wake up and offline when
we're asleep.

We have to read, watch, comment and discuss everything and then go ahead and
forget everything the next day, because, well, there's more shit to read,
watch and comment on.

By 2014, the Internet, with all it's infinite amount of information, has
created a generation of clueless, spoiled information and entertainment
junkies who live in a system of control beyond any dictator's wildest dreams.

I've seen a stroller with a smartphone holder yesterday and the 1-year-old was
watching videos while his father was pushing the stroller through the park.
Instinctively I understand that that is fucked up, but I can't explain why,
because I know "that's the future".

Part of it. But there are other parts of the same future that scare the shit
out of me. The fact that it has accelerated the rate of planetary destruction
to unprecedented levels, by making globalisation possible and required. The
fact that tech is now controlled by several corporations with mantras like
'don't be evil', which is telling, because it means that it is possible to be
evil with this tech and the amount of evil that can be done is equal to the
amount of good that it brings. This tech is godsend for evil people and in
many countries, control of the Internet is the most important condition for
holding power with an iron fist.

Maybe, just like the splitting of the atom, the Internet is one of those
things that shouldn't have been invented?

------
greenyoda
Single-page version:

[http://www.internetisshit.org/print.html](http://www.internetisshit.org/print.html)

~~~
dang
Thanks; changed.

Interestingly, the previous post was 7 years ago:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=159353](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=159353).
I wonder if that's a record.

------
XorNot
Obligatory "everything today is terrible and it's those kid's fault" quotes
from every single time period, in every single culture, since the dawn of
recorded history.

------
anotheryou
It says "the medium isn't the message", yet the article is happily criticizing
its content, but speaking of it as the medium.

~~~
anotheryou
also s/he should have published it in his local library :P

------
chbrown
Is it ironic that this guy bought a domain name specifically for this? or does
he just know his audience.

~~~
monochr
"A URL is not a mark of quality. It's not proof of honesty or approval from
the FDA."

------
wilson0x4d
i'm just waiting for a sun spot to fry half our tech infrastructure (again!),
perhaps then we will see the value of alternative channels for education,
information and social function.

------
ommunist
Yeah, that's a problem. You cannot be happy in the INternet. Only with other
people.

