Why is every goddamn webpage on the net like this these days? Just moronicly written, popups everywhere, moving shit, banner comes up blah blah subscribe. I hate it. I so fricking HATE it. It didn't used to be this way.
A lot of sites are clearly AI generated as well. Like one that ran through all the permutations of what to do with pineapple core, including just eating it raw. Stupid. Total bullshit. The whole net is becoming bullshit.
pajeet made-for-advertising sites
This is the correct answer. I see it on YouTube videos too. Pajeet-written scripts poorly spoken by AI script readers. I fricking hate India and I hope Pakistan nukes them off of the map. If there were ever a war in indochina I would sign up to fight against India like the moronic redditors signed up to fight against Russia in Ukraine. Except it would be a bloodbath and I would sit on top of thousands of poo corpses. And I would softly whisper in their ears “The Amazon package you ordered finally arrived.”
It’s a whole industry ran by kids on Instagram. They tell you to make sites or videos like this and become millionaires. Get some interesting keywords, order cheap domains, let AI write the text, add ads, buy google AdWords and watch money come in to ‘escape the matrix’. Throw in some Amazon affiliate links too.
A 13 year old can do it from their home, and many do it. There’s also a second layer scam where the ‘gurus’ sell $1000 online video courses that tell you the above, and promise you can make $4000/week from it as long as you ‘grind hard’ and stay dedicated
I did some work for an Italian SEO company, WordLift. I can attest that about 90% of "content" on sites is generated by third-parties (i.e., third-worlders) or AI, like GPT... and if that isn't true yet, soon it will be. The big shift the heads of WordLift were working on before I left was AI-izing everything. Even descriptions of products are generated by AI now. It's cheaper than hiring actual writers when you can just ping the OpenAI API for 28 cents and get an entire how-to guide or a product description.
>It's cheaper than hiring actual writers when you can just ping the OpenAI API for 28 cents and get an entire how-to guide or a product description.
wouldnt they have to hire a writer to proofread it?
As a person who has to write text descriptions that go together with drafts of building's HVAC installations, I can assure you it's way faster to proofread than to start from scratch.
But I'm afraid that a lot of AI slop on the web never geta proofread.
I see what you did there
The Internet is broken.
It’s the hardest on us that grew up on the glory days.
This. The only thing close to the raw internet glory days is this place (PrepHole as a whole not just the DIY forums) and a few other forums that aren't completely cucked but there aren't many of those left... Basically i visit here, irate4x4 and craigslist and facebook for the marketplace and i still.get spammed with liberal propaganda at every turn on facebook... I hate it.
What are some other decent raw/uncensored/uncucked forums left that you guys know of?
I know quite a few german sites dedicated to cars from the early times of internet.
E30.de is a good example of it
Tons of handwritten instructions with good pictures that are all still available.
Some posts are 15 years old, the creators are still active and you can even send them a mail and ask something.
Another german dude took the wikipedia design and created a page for the Volkswagen T4. This stuff is gold.
My favourite one is rollertuningpage.de, it's everything good that's described itt
newbie
>The only thing close to the raw internet glory days is this place (PrepHole as a whole not just the DIY forums) and a few other forums that aren't completely cucked
you're so deep inside the cuckhole that you don't even know what being uncucked would be like.
https://www.windchimecalculator.org/
Here friends, do want to make a wind chime? Enjoy. Don't let them take this from us
SOVL
I deeply miss when the Internet was commanded by high level autists who weren’t drive by profit but by the quest to share esoteric knowledge.
Now we've inverted that phenomena.
Much of them are redirecting into the offline.
>when the Internet was commanded by high level autists who weren’t drive by profit but by the quest to share esoteric knowledge.
Ah yes, the days of USENET, when high level autists would scour the internet for unsecured rugby team servers so they could spam alt.dolphin with troll threads.
Yes
Sounds pretty kino to me
>Prettier than any modern website
>Faster than any modern website
>Just gives you the information you want instantly, no fluff
Holy fricking based, I don't even remember the last time I saw a site this good
Use yandex
I hate how everything is designed for mobile, and gives zero feedback on things not working, no error codes or whatever to diagnose it
>I hate how everything is designed for mobile
This is 100% true, everything is designed mobile-first these days. But that's not necessarily a "bad" thing, because mobile phones encourage very accessible designs. Yes, you aren't a literal moron with Parkinson's, so it feels kind of condescending, but that literal moron with tremors does need the help.
>gives zero feedback on things not working
That is bad design, true. Not only should give feedback, but should do it in several ways at once (flash the button red, display a readable text description of the problem, make a noise).
>no error codes or whatever to diagnose it
Fight you to the death on this one though. Nothing should show you anything more than the most basic HTTP error code. I've penetration-tested websites for fellow developers, and error messages leak like a sieve. If you are browsing a website and get a raw error message, delete your account and send their chief privacy officer a letter to confirm it was done.
>It’s the hardest on us that grew up on the glory days.
I, too, miss the days when moronic advertisers threw money at our industry without expecting anything in return other than "# of impressions."
No you fucming mong,.I miss going to googke or yahoo searching for my chainsaw year and model number and coming to chainsaw autist Chet's geocities page where he somehow has a 10mp photo with a macro lens and a ruler in frame of every part of my chainsaw.
Everything is in forms and tables but it works fine. It's readable.
We internet 4.0 nao. Chet's page is still there and hasn't been updated in 20 years. Now there's 40,000 pages, none are as good as chet's. Virtually all of them are AI derivatives of the previous derivative so now it's a finely tuned machine to get picked by Google first time everything someonensearches for chainsaw but it tells you fricking nothing.
I miss Chet.
Internet 5.0nisnwhen we all have a local AI bot in our closet that comes through all this bullshit for us and fights the other AIs for us and gives us a nice summary page in our preferred type setting and it's going to have all the stuff Chet had originally
i want to let you and everyone else in on a secret. Chet's geocities page may very well be gone (if hosted on such a defunct service) or buried, BUT you can maintain some semblance of this searching ability.
the game has changed, so must your google searching abilities. so everyone in the back can hear:
ADD "FORUMS" ONTO THE END OF WHATEVER YOU ARE SEARCHING, IT WILL TRY TO FIND WEBSITES WITH "FORUMS" IN THE NAME, WHICH ARE USUALLY AUTIST BARNS FILLED WITH PEOPLE LIKE YOU WHO WANT TO KNOW THE PART NUMBER FOR A GASKET FOR A MOTOR THAT HASN'T BEEN MADE IN 60 YEARS
this has saved me many times. it's not going to find a non-forum style info page like you were describing, but likely some autists were discussing that shit on a forum (or a forum has a hopefully not-dead link to it) before it became an info page
This, this is the real secret. People who put "reddit" in the search are doing the moronic version of this which still functions better than a regular search.
Also, using multiple search engines can be a good idea.
Here's the search engine meta as far as I know:
Startpage uses google for their backend but it's somewhat less restrictive on censorship.
Ditto for DuckDuckGo, but with bing as the backend and WAY fewer safety rails.
Bing images is better than google, but Yandex has the top tier image engine by a long shot, both for getting pictures and for reverse image searches.
Searx is a bit janky but it combines search results - a metasearch engine - from many engines (also VERY configurable); sometimes useful and never the worst option, but usually a specific engine will beat it.
Google still supports operators like " " (double quotes, will only return exact matches for words inside), intitle:<words must be in page title> and site:<url> . Google also supports the negate boolean operator, put a - (minus/hyphen) in front of a word and it won't show results with that word; you can combine this with other operators E.G. I was getting nothing but youtube results for a search, so I got rid of all of them by adding -site:youtube.com. I could have used -youtube, but that's lazy and would have also removed results from other webpages that have the word 'youtube' anywhere (forum with 'check us out on youtube!' etc).
One last piece of google-fu, you can use site:<url> to search only a specific website so long as google actually crawls it. many forums have their robots.txt configured to block this unfortunately, but for other sites a google search will beat their own built-in utility. For instance: google is a better search engine for youtube than native youtube search itself. You can use date operators on google to constrain the results to only certain years (GREAT FOR BROWSING OLD YOUTUBE/WIDER INTERNET FOR NOSTALGIA). Happy searching, kill all indians.
Thank you seeker anons, you've given a tech moron insight on something that has infuriated him on a semi regular basis since he was 16.
glad to help, just hope i can keep finding work-arounds and don't lose too much fidelity over time
for me it's the "inurl:" operator. so inurl:forum and inurl:reddit is generally all you need. quotations don't work like they used to -- you have to go to the "tools" menu, then change "all results" to "verbatim" to force recognition of the quotes.
thanks for the verbatim tip
google still respects quotes most of the time though, and for when it does occasionally ignore them I figured out that hilariously enough if you enclose the word in multiple sets of quotes """""like this""""" it'll start working again. I'd laugh every time I did it, if I wasn't so pissed when google ignores quotes on the first search. it's funny in retrospect at least
and I still think intitle: wins over inurl: since some of the websites I use (e.g. sciencemadness) don't have 'forum' anywhere in the URL for the forums, but it does show up in the pagetitle.
I wish there was a better subtractive search option to get rid of the obviously bot-generated spam top 10 lists, instead of appending "-best -top -list" etc to every search
using the tools to restrict results by date to before 2016 works alright for some things, but it's not applicable in a lot of cases
oh shit wait a second I checked sciencemadness and it doesn't have 'forum' in the URL, but it DOES have "viewthread" which basically *every* forum also has; that may be the actual goated inurl: term
was going to post this Forums is the key.
German ones:
Haustechnikdialog
for plumbing/heating
mikrocontroller for electronics
elektrikforum for residential electrics
motorgeraete-forum for op's chainsaw
www.wasser.de/telefon-alt for 1950s telephones.
Screencapping and sharing these posts for posterity. Also because "autist barns" makes me giggle.
>be me
>click on forum search result
>"Sweet, I'm not the only one with this issue"
>click on thumbnail
>"You must register to download attachments"
Every time.
>Image no longer available
>Image uploader exceeded bandwidth
>Hey I know the exact fix or that - PM me for details!
>Nevermind guys, I figured it out!
>Hey so I have this very specific problem with this specific model, any advice? WELL FIRST OFF YOU SHOULD HAVE BOUGHT (flame war ensues, original post ignored)
>Every answer on a manufacturer's forum is a stock tech support answer with troubleshooting steps the OP already did
>Hey we already talked about that, the answer is in this thread here! (link points to previous version of forum and no longer works)
>Yeah this video should walk you through it (video taken down because there was a Beatles song playing in the background)
Yeah nah forums blow sometimes. Pic related is the bane of my existence.
>We internet 4.0 nao. Chet's page is still there and hasn't been updated in 20 years. Now there's 40,000 pages, none are as good as chet's. Virtually all of them are AI derivatives of the previous derivative so now it's a finely tuned machine to get picked by Google first time everything someonensearches for chainsaw but it tells you fricking nothing.
The problem is that sites like Chet's required middle class white and asian guys with time and money to spend on passion projects. That entire class of people is gone. It's not just the internet that's dead. It's the cultural demographic that made it worthwhile in the first place.
unironically the internet is full of several types of Black person now. before we had smaller, niche groups. now every tyrone, shanequa and puneet has access and every megacorp and the chinese are trying to sell, or use them. it doesn't help that they're completely and utterly oblivious to it, even going so far as to unintentionally or even purposefully embrace the manipulation. it doesn't help when you have unimaginably huge conglomerates like blackrock using their enormous hordes pursuing fricked up social manipulation, driving the divide in the morons on the bottom.
i want off this gay earth.
This just makes me miss the days of webrings and affiliates. Chet's site could have led to so many more oddly specific sites that were vaguely similar.
AI and SEO designed for AD revenue.
Yeah. I'm leaning towards the death penalty.
These started becoming more and more common in search results over the past few years to the point you now have to scroll down to find something written by a real person. I avoid using Google, Bing or Yahoo as they're the worst for this. I use multiple engines like Mojeek, Yandex, Wayback Machine instead.
Ok boomer
This is not a new phenomenon, you still see hand-written scholarly articles and phd theses that start out with “the internet is becoming popular” bullshit filler talk.
Some companies are still talking about the “digital revolution” like we’re just starting to come out of the tube era (even though some tubes were used for digital applications), so they’re living in the early 1900’s.
AI/pajeets. even israelitegle itself (which has been commandeered by the street shitting menace) admits that their search engine is worthless without "site:reddit.com"
https://www.cnbc.com/2023/06/26/google-execs-hope-new-search-feature-will-help-amid-reddit-blackouts.html
http://www.dansmc.com/
The only motorcycle repair website you will ever need. God bless Dan.
Yep.
https://dkb.blog/p/google-search-is-dying
yea the internet is absolute shit now, you have to put reddit at the end of every search otherwise you get these types of garbages webpages that say nothing
what if manufactures actually provided access to service manuals for the shit
They're written by bots. They're designed to SEOMAXX for clicks, and to have so much useless shit on the page they have extra space to plug in ads you'll have to scroll past (or block) to find the one sentence in the novel of an article that has any relevance to what you're searching for.
God I fricking miss the old html websites packed with content.
Every once in a while a visit castbullet.com and read one of the 40 or so articles about a poorgay boomer enjoying the outdoors.
In Germany there is still a diy forum "Haustechnikdialog" left, where you're called an imbecile and notified, that V3 in your heating system is not installed according to specs and you should delete yourself.
On the other hand you can post about your '88 Siemens dishwasher leaking and within a day someone replies at 2:30am :" That's the gasket #4711 parts number 08-678-4SD. Use hooked pliers #02 for easier installing"
Every time I look for "best xyz" just to get an idea of what I should be looking at, the first 50 fricking articles are the same poorly written shill posts. "the best chainsaw is this one that's coincidentally on Amazon. The second best is also on Amazon!" oh how fricking weird all the other articles are the exact same. The internet has become almost useless
gotta type 'reddit' or 'forum' at the end
Either AI or pajeet generated. It's been like this for a few years now. Almost all search results are like this of you're trying to find help with anything. Then the ones that aren't AI generated are still vague and empty because they're trying to sell amazon links. Best you could ever do is talk and ask questions to real people, ie coming here
Ai generated content farms.
Internet is long dead.
It's safer
more effective
and it lasts longer ;^)
Just like my wiener in your mom's pussy, baby.
Christ these sound like a 5th grader trying to get through yet another persuasive essay writing prompt on a standardized test.
Hate it.
What happen with it???
because even HTML is too hard for zoomers...computers are literally moving backwords despite revolutionary hardware advances due to shitty software...not to mention the operating systems are literal malware
next generation won't even touch a web browser, it'll be like a corded phone some weird old tech you had to manually use instead of just screaming a question at your phone and getting some goyslop answer
RIP Internet. We had some good times back then.
because of SEO, and no one has time to make tight focused content that is good, so they go for google, cause thats what they read or did as kids.
dig around on some OEM sites for Tawain companies that have US locations, and you will be in a gateway to the past, the good and the bad.
https://aceronline.net/
is my most recent discovery, as we are getting one auction buy online, and my coworker who happens to the Master of Drag Racers (like he's a huge race guru,is older than hell, and a cool dude) is helping me get it working.
>Why is every goddamn webpage on the net like this these days?
Why aren't you asking on PrepHole?
>A lot of sites are clearly AI generated as well.
Put down the crack pipe.
http://wiby.me/ enjoy
Remember in the old days of neopets people used to customize the hell out of their stores. Like you would be looking for a burger then get greeted by stone cold's theme with a bunch of gifs of edge and christian hitting people with chairs, and the people making this stuff were like 8.
this is a big part of why google is largely worthless nowadays. keyword-ridden AI-generated sites with an ad between every two paragraphs.
interesting thread. i set up an instance of searx on my computer last year, but it's kinda cumbersome cuz i have windows. any other search engine tips? i've also been pretty annoyed by it. i don't think it's all because of the shitty AI generated sites. some of it is google and youtube searches... promoting things .. or for some reason purposely not working? not to get political, but definitely part of it is a poorly/stupidly executed attempt to remove misinformation relating to political and controversial topics.
I'm not sure what glory days of the internet people are talking about. In the late 90's I had dial up which was suffering to load pictures. Instead of going to YouTube you had to find some persons personal website for the projects they were doing. No Wikipedia so information was so scattered you didn't even use the internet you used Encarta encyclopedia on cd.
>go to youtube first
This thread is for people woth.more than a 10th grade reading level
And also for people that dismiss the tremendous resources they have at their disposal today. It is so easy to get a video of whatever you are trying to do. Back in the 90's the best we had was Chilton and Haynes repair manuals.
>It is so easy to get a video of whatever you are trying to do. Back in the 90's the best we had was Chilton and Haynes repair manuals.
I wish I had a Haynes manual for my 2013 VW Beetle TDI, haven't found anything online that compares.
>I wish I had a Haynes manual for my 2013 VW Beetle TDI
Check your local library. I can't remember if it's Haynes or Chilton but one of them has literally all their manuals in pdf and you can access them online through your library account. It's kind of a game changer.
I got a bootleg of my volvo software from some Chinese shop and it's a lot better than haynes, includes the whole printed guide.
There isn't one for that car, VW doesn't let Haynes make their manuals anymore.
Well that's fricking gay
>video is shaky and filmed at 11pm by a mexican
I'll stick with text
>I'm not sure what glory days of the internet people are talking about
I would say the time period where the internet had become popular and accessible, but not yet devolved into big tech echochamber. Something like 2003 to 2013, maybe all the way to 2016. 2016 certainly was a landmark year for the ruination of the internet.
Prior to '99, the internet was relatively inaccessible and not very important to most normal people. This higher barrier to entry and lack of social media platforms made it an entirely different kind of place. More like a digital "city", and less like a massive knowledge repository (e.g. encarta or wikipedia) or a virtual middle school (e.g. Twitter).
The biggest issue I see today is that so much valuable knowledge and discourse is now being pushed off the indexable web, and into private, closed door chat rooms: Discord.
Special interest groups existed in newsgroups, then web forums, and then subreddits. All of those things have been archived and are still found via a Google search 30 years later. Discord, however, is very closed off by nature, and thus in 5, 10, or 20 years, much of that specialty knowledge will be lost.
I think you're spot on with the dates. As a kid I had internet access in the late 90's and it was painful sometimes trying to find information. Yahoo was generally bad, Google hadn't really kicked off yet, and there was a million independent search providers like Northern Lights which was my go-to in middle school until they started charging for it. Then the internet gained popularity and with more people came more useful info. Then tech companies realized the sheer value of ad revenue and analytics data that could be gained with increases in processing power, and we ended up with what we have today which is mostly slop intended to garner views and clicks.
does facebook have incentive in making information from their groups hard to find at a later time?
sorting through old post on groups is near impossible. why do they intentionaly do this? jw
>Discord, however, is very closed off by nature, and thus in 5, 10, or 20 years, much of that specialty knowledge will be lost.
so what is discord about?
>why do they intentionaly do this?
They are social media, not a knowledge base.
they don't want people that are only there to look something up quickly and then leave, they want people to sit and refresh or endlessly scroll and load new ads over and over
wow, terrible. i hate algorithim based feeds over timeline based feeds.
basically anything algorithm based is using you as advertisement customer as opposed to providing you a service in providing information.....
>youtube
I hate when people refer me to a youtube video for information
1. my computer is slow and takes a lot of time to load this shit.
2. you have to manual skim the whole video for information (pita with an old slow computer)
on a regular website (even with bloat) you can skim through looking for keywords and sentences leading you towards desired information.
I hate searching for information on videos and that is always the first place people recommend.
gotta say the absolute worst place to find information is recipe articles.
i wish i could get some insight from the editors of these articles. they target women and must be effective becuase theyre all horrible.
Wrong board
You need an AI to summarize the blah-blah text for you.
The real problem is that the search engines are garbage which is why these sites persist.
Recipes have it worst. Foodnetwork seems to have actual recipes instead of 30 page blogs.
If you don't already know the site to get the information from you are pretty much fricked.
Just click the "jump to recipe" button or use something like kitchn/spruceats/serious eats/. I actually find more small blogs/specialty sites and better info looking for recipes than I do any other subject.
But you are right and even with alternative search engines, it's mostly the same results as the big ones.
>Just click the "jump to recipe" button
Ctrl+f searching for common measurements and ingredients might work, too.
pAIjeets running SEO-optimized scripts. IDK what the frick happened with Google image search, when they copied TinEye they were functional, then they started guessing the context of the images instead of just fricking finding the image. Recently they dialed that up to 12, making the search utterly useless. Luckily there's Yandex, and it has a browser rightclick extension too.
>when they copied TinEye they were functional
>Luckily there's Yandex
TinEye still exists. I usually use TinEye, Yandex, Bing, and Google reverse image searches in roughly that order because I get different results with each service.