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

8 points by jmilinion 13 years ago | 6 comments

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.

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.

I would rather have no results then awful results which pretend it's the best results.

What's happening here?

dmschulman 13 years ago |

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 The amount of chance and "freshness" in your results has been replaced by, not only SEO oriented content, but also by Google's expectations of what they think you wanted to find (a wikipedia article, an IMDB entry, a Google places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 13 years ago |

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 13 years ago |

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

jmilinion 13 years ago | |

Can it really unseat Google? From what I can see from the replies of many of these places, a lot of of people are satisfied with the bad advice they find.

manidoraisamy 13 years ago | |

+1. But, is automating that a necessity?

lifeisstillgood 13 years ago | | |

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