Modern Web Woes - I'm mad at the internet

[Dante Alighieri]

I like to use SearX and cycle through instances every so often to prevent being bubbled, but recently it seems all of the SearX instances have been reduced to utter uselessness. Quotes, synonyms, specifying site, doesn't matter, the results are completely irrelevant to the search query, or just an error.

Is there some kind of result poisoning happening? It's strange that not a single instance (and I'm not picking any of the gay-sounding ones) can perform simple queries any more.

I self host my own instance and very rarely do I run into any problems.

 

[Merton J. Dingle]

Since youtube shorts and ADHD slop bullshit is a hot topic nowadays, I notice the same trend with chatrooms and even communication. Discord is the worst offender of this with how its now the new "community hub" for a lot of fandoms and fanbases, but you are forced to try and be in a conversation with 50 people talking over eachother at high speeds. Unfortunately this is the most popular thing now.

With forums, you can at least take your time to read posts and put together thought out responses, but some communities have completely abandoned forums in favor of this high speed bullshit.

That really says something about Discord. It's so shitty that it makes Reddit look good by comparison.

 

[Maggots on a Train v2]

I logged into my PayPal account to transfer some money between my accounts. The site has been redesigned yet again. I clicked the "transfer money" link off the main page, and it took me to a page of just account information. So smart. I had to browse around for several minutes before I could find the real link. Every single time they redesign the interface they fuck this up.

 

[Final K]

I don't understand how the fediverse is so bad. I've revisited it over the years and I've never been convinced to make an account, because the biggest instances are always terrible political nonsense and the small to medium instances used to be dead, but now they have a lot of activity. The strange thing is that there's a lot of posts and the timelines are active, but almost no one is interacting with any of it, no replies, nothing. And most of the posts are just pictures and short videos, it's like a ghost town tiktok of people and bots interacting with no one. Mastodon, misskey, pleroma, etc. all the same, I don't understand how it is so active and so dead.

 

[Gog & Magog]

me search google 5 year ago
"duck"
me find exact duck picture

me search google CURRENT YEAR
"duck"
"duck rare"
"rare duck dance"
"rare duck dance -buy -sell -purchase -$ -ai -A.I. -generated -news -politics -market -tiktok -instagram -stockimages -stock -facebook"
STILL HAVE NOT FOUND PICTURE

 

[stares at error messages]

Great communication. A pleasure to do business with you.

Leave it to Poojeets to automate groveling on Jeetbay feedback. All the drop down menu options are equally as ridiculous. I never chatted with the buyer. If I actually put that it would come off bad as sarcastic. These AI loving nigger jeets are so completely empty headed. Also it's not proper grammar to end with a preposition. Just proving only again, that Pojeets do not speak English and instead speak some sort of nigger pidgin.

Poojeets are not human. They are talking plants. That's why they love poop so much. It's good fertilizer.

 

[Kosher Dill]

Leave it to Poojeets to automate groveling on Jeetbay feedback.

Eh, I can't complain. Feedback on Ebay has been a joke for far longer than it's been meaningful - it's a holdover from the days when person-to-person transactions still dominated. Some storefront with 10000 sales a day is not going to have any individual, personal feedback for me no matter what.
Really, feedback should just be a positive/negative checkbox at this point. Despite that, it seems like they're trying to wring a bit more data mining out of it lately, to feed AIs. ("Write more! Add a picture!")

 

[Overly Serious]

I like to use SearX and cycle through instances every so often to prevent being bubbled, but recently it seems all of the SearX instances have been reduced to utter uselessness. Quotes, synonyms, specifying site, doesn't matter, the results are completely irrelevant to the search query, or just an error.

Is there some kind of result poisoning happening? It's strange that not a single instance (and I'm not picking any of the gay-sounding ones) can perform simple queries any more.

I mention it from time to time, but in the spirit of "If the product is free, you are the product", there's a paid search engine called https://kagi.com/ that has no ads, no tracking and a whole bunch of nice features. Produced by some clever Serbians and growing by inches. People rely on search so much day to day, I honestly think it's worth a few quid a month to get something other than Bing or Google.

I've never looked at SearX and maybe I should, but honestly I think something like a search engine - to be both good and private - needs money. It's like that old NASA joke but with privacy, quality and free: "Pick two".

 

[Kiwi Lime Pie]

I really don't know why they even bother to hack an account since it seems like you can create as many obvious spam accounts as you want and they all just stay up forever.

What sucks is seeing bot accounts posting links to fraudulent sites in a group and reports coming back with responses of "This user hasn't broken the TOS, sorry." Whereas someone who sneezes the wrong way eats a 30-day ban.

They take out sales tax automatically at checkout.

I can't recall if this was before or after COVID, but there was a US court case that allowed states greater latitude to collect sales tax from out of state online sales. Some states now require sales tax to be remitted when it exceeds a threshold, others do it if the company exceeds a certain number of transactions involving state residents, and some I believe have a combination of both rules. Sales tax audits are not fun, so I imagine the bigger companies are doing their best to comply with the web of interstate taxation.

I also don't like how you have to "send a verification code" to do stuff like signing into e-mail or bank sites.

It makes no sense when banks require the code for personal accounts but not business accounts, or vice versa. It should be done for all accounts if they want to do it at all.

It seems like every other month there's a new critical CVE in either firefox or chrome that immediately renders any prior version before a fix not only outdated but directly hazardous to use, and since every existing browser is dependent on those two you get constant updates. Browsers just do so much shit now that there's bound to be messed up code somewhere that can be maliciously abused. Worst part is they aren't getting any less complicated either.

I mentioned elsewhere how it's awful that software is coded so shoddily now that updates are so buggy that we're seeing updates to fix updates. I also hate the trend of apps that want to do everything poorly instead of one or two things rather well and solidly.

Oh yeah, on Amazon you can't read reviews without signing in. Why is signing in to view comments even "needed"?

Maybe it's to keep random people from seeing negative reviews for the products that are genuine crap .

 

[ToroidalBoat]

There is this one clock site which looks very much like something out of Idiocracy without an ad blocker: the time is surrounded by ads, and a number of which are video ads.

(The time.gov site is a better clock site, BTW.)

 

[stares at error messages]

I can't recall if this was before or after COVID, but there was a US court case that allowed states greater latitude to collect sales tax from out of state online sales. Some states now require sales tax to be remitted when it exceeds a threshold, others do it if the company exceeds a certain number of transactions involving state residents, and some I believe have a combination of both rules. Sales tax audits are not fun, so I imagine the bigger companies are doing their best to comply with the web of interstate taxation.

https://archive.ph/LcVmb It was South Dakota v. Wayfair in 2018.

I don't hate that Ebay changes sales tax to their buyers any more than I hate the concept of sales tax. All stores to do it, I don't expect Ebay to be different. The problem is that Ebay takes the total amount that the buyer pays for their selling fees calculation instead of only the sale price. It would be more predictable for the seller if Ebay only used the sale price for the selling fees and not the total amount the buyer pays. The buyer may pay more based on where they are because how expensive it is to ship there and what that jurisdiction's sales tax is.

I'll give an example: The buyer bought an item for 16.95 with shipping of 10.00 and sales tax on the total 26.95 at 4%. So that's 26.95*1.04 = 28.02 total to the buyer. Ebay takes out a 13.6% fee on most of the types of items you can sell. If the total is 10 or over then add 40 cents to the fee, if it's not then only add 30. That fee is applied to the 28.02 number and not the 16.95. The Ebay fee for this transaction would be 3.81 + 0.40. If they only applied the fee to the sale amount and not after the shipping and sales tax applied, then it would only be 2.30 + 0.40, and the seller would know that regardless of who is the buyer. The seller can't really control how much it costs to ship an item or what the sales tax is going to be, so adding those numbers to the amount hit by the Ebay fee means the Ebay fee will always be a function of who the buy is and what their sale tax and shipping will cost. If a different buyer bought the same item, then the sales tax might be different and the shipping might be different too. In this example, those costs are passed on to the buyer. With Ebay's current fee calculation formula if your buyer lives far away (expensive to ship) and in a high tax jurisdiction then you pay more fee though no fault of your own. On Ebay sellers can not say, "I only want buyers who have a 7% or lower sales tax and 10 dollars for shipping." You have no control of who your buyer is by those values, so you can't easily predict how much you will actually be changed in fees.

Remember this is an example, so I'm making up these numbers accept for the Ebay fee formula. It would make selling on Ebay more predictable if they only applied the fee to the sale price and left out the shipping and sales tax from the calculation because those amounts can then be passed on to the buyer and don't effect the cost of the transaction to the seller.

 

[Harvey Danger]

me search google CURRENT YEAR
"duck"
"duck rare"

I am researching an obscure technical question for a coding side project. Google sucks, surely Brave search will enlighten me.

Top results are all Youtube videos and reddit, with a Wikipedia article on the side. The expected searchslop. And then they suggest "similar" searches:



I can't prove it, but this feels like the concept of searching itself has been pajeet-ified.

 

[Zeftax]

I can't prove it, but this feels like the concept of searching itself has been pajeet-ified.

I've heard many people complain about how useless search has become these past few years, some switched to using LLMs as a "search engine" instead.
I may be too conspiracy-brained, but I fully believe this is not a coincidence - I think these engines are purposefully shooting themselves in the foot to funnel their users into using their LLMs instead.

 

[Harvey Danger]

I've heard many people complain about how useless search has become these past few years, some switched to using LLMs as a "search engine" instead.
I may be too conspiracy-brained, but I fully believe this is not a coincidence - I think these engines are purposefully shooting themselves in the foot to funnel their users into using their LLMs instead.

TBH I think it's the other way around. Search engines lost the war against spam, tried to cover it with their "authorized sources" boosting after the 2016 election, and wound up enshitifying themselves into uselessness. They didn't have a solution and still don't. Then the AI boom came around, and their wholly inadequate engineers realized the only thing that surfaces useful information from their indexes now is training an AI on it.

Search engineers aren't fixing their still-declining search because they can't; AI is just providing them cover.

 

[ToroidalBoat]

Took me awhile to notice, but one of the search engines automatically added to the browser's search engine list was "Perplexity", which looks to be some LLM-driven bullshit.

Why is Big Tech so intent on pushing LLMs or "assistants" on everyone anyway?

 

[Dante Alighieri]

I fucking hate Cloudflare. One of my extensions is breaking it, and I can't fucking figure out what setting is doing it.

 

[Hakase Shinonome]

Why is Big Tech so intent on pushing LLMs or "assistants" on everyone anyway?

My reasoning is that people really fucking love putting personal information into LLMs.
"What's the quickest route from my house to McDonalds?" "Could you recommend some gyms near me?" "Are there any dietitians near me for cheap?"
From that chat alone, we've gathered that this user: likes McDonalds, doesn't like to walk far, is worried about its health, isn't in the best of financial conditions, can't do things by himself and, generally with most people that use LLMs, is probably lonely.

People use LLMs/Chatbots for therapy, a "person" to chat with, sexual deviancy, things most people only do privately, but they just outright share their sensitive information to the robot of their choice, for free, without asking. Companies like Microsoft force location tracking, advertising IDs, telemetry, people complain, blabla, but with chatbots, it's "private", Big Tech never asked for my credentials or info! But you do give them out for free.

 

[Kosher Dill]

Search engines lost the war against spam, tried to cover it with their "authorized sources" boosting after the 2016 election, and wound up enshitifying themselves into uselessness. They didn't have a solution and still don't

I don't think that's true. SEO spam really hasn't advanced that much in the past 20 years, apart from LLMs replacing pajeets for anyone bothering to make "homegrown" spam. The last time Google bothered to try fighting spam, they succeeded pretty well. It's just that they haven't bothered again in 15+ years.

And I'm willing to bet the AI companies aren't training their trillion-dollar chatbots on full-spam copies of the Internet. They probably de-spam it internally, and anyone running a search engine could do the same if they cared.

Really, even the simplest measures like blocking spam domains would still work today. DuckDuckGo just introduced the weakest, lamest version of this feature (limit of 5 domains blocked client-side) and that's already enough to bring searches on a specific topic back to usefulness.

 

[Dante Alighieri]

I fucking hate Cloudflare. One of my extensions is breaking it, and I can't fucking figure out what setting is doing it.

Update: Cloudflare now works, after me going to bed after getting nowhere. What changed? No clue! Fuck Cloudflare!

 

[Nitro!]

I self host my own instance and very rarely do I run into any problems.

It seems like this is the recommended route:

Public instances listed here may yield less accurate results as they have much higher traffic and consequently have a higher chance of being blocked by search providers such as Google, Qwant, Bing, Startpage, etc. Hosting your own instance or using an instance that isn't listed here may give you a more consistent search experience.

So public instances are at-your-own-risk which I didn't know. I might set one up - the instructions are straightforward - but I assume some privacy is lost when your queries aren't mixing with everyone else's. Tor Browser route of blending in with the crowd.

I mention it from time to time, but in the spirit of "If the product is free, you are the product", there's a paid search engine called https://kagi.com/ that has no ads, no tracking and a whole bunch of nice features. Produced by some clever Serbians and growing by inches. People rely on search so much day to day, I honestly think it's worth a few quid a month to get something other than Bing or Google.

I've never looked at SearX and maybe I should, but honestly I think something like a search engine - to be both good and private - needs money. It's like that old NASA joke but with privacy, quality and free: "Pick two".

A couple bucks here and there for quality search results I wouldn't mind paying for but I'm a spiteful man forced to use Google's and Microsoft's products elsewhere and scraping their results without giving them tracking data balances the scales to me.

I'm trying a meta-SearXNG instance. It highlights how wildly inaccurate the results can be (why do I get the homepage of Google and YouTube for unrelated queries) but after a handful of tries you hit on an instance that hasn't been strangled by bots lately or assaults you with another Anubis prompt and you'll get what you want.

Typing this out I'm making a pretty good case for ponying up the cash.