

Ask HN: Is the quality of the Internet rapidly going downhill? - jmilinion

I don't know if it's me getting wiser or if the Internet is just becoming worse.  A decade ago, I could find good, somewhat reliable advice from the Internet.  It wasn't always true but it was easy to separate good from junk.  A quick search would find the hardcore enthusiasts of whatever I was looking for.  Sometimes I couldn't find anything and that was fine.<p>Today is a different story.  What took me 15 minutes to find several years ago now takes me hours upon hours.  While I can find anything, what I end up finding is mostly Junk beyond Junk!  I literally have to filter bad advice upon bad advice upon just plain dangerous advice.  Finding the hardcore enthusiast who spend hours testing each stuff is a nightmare now replaced by people who say "from my experience, this is the absolute best" when you later find out their experience is nothing more than Uncle John's 4th friend told them it was great.<p>I would rather have no results then awful results which pretend it's the best results.<p>What's happening here?
======
dmschulman
I would have to agree that it's a little of column A and a little of column B.
Though there are always little known pockets of gold that exist on the
internet (hard to come by through normal means but instantly useful the moment
you find them), I think that the quality hasn't declined so much as the amount
of noise out there has increased.

A lot of the noise relates to stuff people find socially relevant (celebrity
news, people blogging about food, mom forums, whatever other mind junk food
you can think of), there is a huge increase in all of this kind of material.
The flip side that the real intellectual/technical gems of material are being
outpaced by the other types of content out there.

Also Google's drastically changed the way search works over the last few years
(some might argue decade). The "organicness" has kind of been drained from
search and has instead been replaced with Google's idea of convenience. The
amount of chance and "freshness" in your results has been replaced by, not
only SEO oriented content, but also by Google's expectations of what they
think you wanted to find (a wikipedia article, an IMDB entry, a Google places
listing). It works for some concrete stuff, but on the whole I think it's done
a disservice to the core of what makes "the internet" the internet.

------
sfrechtling
I don't have an answer - but is the quality of the internet declining, or the
quality of search declining?

I would rather hope it is the latter - in response to SEO and increasing
volume.

------
lifeisstillgood
It's called an opportunity to unseat google.

If humans want High Quality Automated Advice on their context-specific
problems, then that's the next search engine.

Solving it - hard. But you can see the outlines of a solution with semantic
web, auction sites, that annoying pop up on stack overflow, etc

~~~
manidoraisamy
+1. But, is automating that a necessity?

~~~
lifeisstillgood
I would guess the shape as follows:

\- build a Prolog and FSM combo with search engine, DuckDuckGrouse.

\- when any one human consults or advisees another, capture the advice as part
of the mediated transaction - this would essentially need online start points
(I have filled in my tax form so far what do I put in box three) and the logic
process behind the endpoint (43,000 - your income for the year)

\- rinse repeat and extract.

After a while it will look like AI

