Need to let loose a primal scream without collecting footnotes first? Have a sneer percolating in your system but not enough time/energy to make a whole post about it? Go forth and be mid: Welcome to the Stubsack, your first port of call for learning fresh Awful youā€™ll near-instantly regret.

Any awful.systems sub may be subsneered in this subthread, techtakes or no.

If your sneer seems higher quality than you thought, feel free to cutā€™nā€™paste it into its own post ā€” thereā€™s no quota for posting and the bar really isnā€™t that high.

The post Xitter web has spawned soo many ā€œesotericā€ right wing freaks, but thereā€™s no appropriate sneer-space for them. Iā€™m talking redscare-ish, reality challenged ā€œculture criticsā€ who write about everything but understand nothing. Iā€™m talking about reply-guys who make the same 6 tweets about the same 3 subjects. Theyā€™re inescapable at this point, yet I donā€™t see them mocked (as much as they should be)

Like, there was one dude a while back who insisted that women couldnā€™t be surgeons because they didnā€™t believe in the moon or in stars? I think each and every one of these guys is uniquely fucked up and if I canā€™t escape them, I would love to sneer at them.

  • sc_griffith@awful.systems
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    3 months ago

    turns out duckduckgo does AI search result summaries too, although at least you can turn the little bastards off

    • self@awful.systems
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      3 months ago

      itā€™s unfortunate that all the Google alternatives big enough to matter are all-in on making the exact same mistakes as Google at roughly the same time, probably in hopes that one of them can swoop in and take the top dog spot when the monopoly ruling finally makes Google stumble

      and if that sounds like a fucking stupid plan, youā€™re right, and thatā€™s why neither of us are advertising executives

    • BlueMonday1984@awful.systems
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      3 months ago

      Off-the-cuff prediction: there probably wonā€™t be one dominant search engine after Google stumbles, for a few reasons:

      • All of them are making the exact same mistakes as Google, as self noted (when they arenā€™t having their own unique dumpster fires)

      • AI has made it much easier to spam searches with SEO shite, so any attempts at algorithmic search risk being spammed to death in short order

      • Public trust in tech is utterly shot to hell - not sure how much people trust search specifically, but I suspect people are currently trusting word-of-mouth (e.g. Reddit, TikTok) over whatever any of the major search engines are providing right now

      • zogwarg@awful.systems
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        3 months ago

        In retrospect google since itā€™s inception, when it was still good, google always actually relied on human curation. Primary component of pagerank were:

        • ā€œhow much have people linked to this?ā€
        • ā€œhow much have reliable sites linked to this?ā€
        • ā€œhow good quality are pages from this site usually?ā€

        (Which is still a way to get value out of google by adding ā€œsite:www.reliable-website.exampleā€ tags)

        It was definitely a useful product, but ultimately it relies on human labor to surface quality results closer to the top.