non-linear flow of thoughts on the internet and recurrence:

im older than google

i was literally born in the last century

(this is slightly irrelevant but funny to say)

pre google it was search engines like Dogpile, Ask jeeves, altavista etc

this was long before corporate web consolidation, which imo only really got started in the late 00's w facebooks's ascendance over myspace, google buying youtube, digg being eclipsed by reddit

generally - less sites, you go less places online

previously it was the case that if you wanted , say, mods for Severance Blade of Darkness, you looked around till you found some cool nerd who had their own website

I still remember "big truck" from canada (a fansite exists here as the old one is gone :( https://bigtruck.altervista.org/ )

bookmarks *mattered* because you'd not necessarily just be able to search for the site and find it again

webrings helped you find stuff *from* sites you liked

you'd likely know usernames of site creators+trust them

you had an interest in something -> you'd talk to people irl or online / you'd do some searching for it -> you go through a few bad and find a few good sites -> you'd branch out from there

you'd find out who NIN were because some post on a quake fansite would mention them (it happened to me anyway :D)

you might drop into random chatrooms and get band recommendations from complete strangers (how I found out about Laibach)

etc

there was a kind of erratic motion through the earlier internet..... like crawling through a ....web, you might say

and then obv more people got online, businesses got advertising, sites got loaded with popups etc and everyone and their aunt signed up for facebook

the web shrank as it expanded

and now

now whenever I search for anything on google im getting "ai" text-generated websites instead

we have a qualitatively different problem but yet similar to a pre google era

back then it was just difficult finding anything

i remember spending over an hour looking for the name of the intro song to Soul Reaver (its a version of ozar midrashim by information society) and was overjoyed when I found it, im glad places like wikipedia exist for that kind of basic info *now* but the problem we have is trying to

1. step beyond the walled garden (FB, Google, Twitter etc)
2. actually find something created by a human

we might need to go back to webrings at this point, link friends to stuff we know is actually decent

im not kidding

tangent - I really miss stumbleupon, something about the curation of topics / interests was great and now is absent

other tangent -

you have doubtless failed to notice that half the shit anywhere is a screenshot from a different site?

screenshots of reddit/tumblr posts on twitter and vice versa, tiktoks using old twitter jokes read by a foetus, etc etc

isnt that ... grim?

back on topic -

if search engines, esp google, cant actually find a way to deal with text-generated websites clogging the results with plausible sounding nonsense results (which has RUINED my ability to find things) AND search engines like duckduckgo are (apparently) simplifying what operators you can use (as well as straight up lying about privacy https://www.digit.fyi/duckduckgo-tracking-controversy-explained/)

we might need to consider some type of mass curation, some kind of web of trust (thought not WoT because they were tracking people, lol https://www.pcworld.com/article/410966/web-of-trust-browser-extensions-yanked-after-proving-untrustworthy.html)

site note - while searching for these stories I hit several dead links, several "not available in your region" and paywalled stories

the current web really sucks

im not sure if im going to start banging the drum for "we need shitty web 2.0 self-hosted websites

but god, arent you just fucking sick of loading a site, getting a cookies gdpr form, a bunch of pop-over SUBCRIBE TO OUR NEWSLETTER FOR 5% OFF + autoloading&playing vids

I feel like the entire fucking internet is screaming at me

(I have a basic ass website at this point, but more needs to be done with it https://mollynoise.neocities.org/)

I *adore* this site https://powderpaint.neocities.org/ (so what if they are my friends)

and yes, its 00's maximalism or w/e but its not selling me anything other than the music im there for !