kilésengati eredeti hozzászólása:

TL;DR: The Internet is dying as more and more forums and wikis keep shutting down, with their philosophical process broken and knowledge lost forever. Once heralded a new bastion for knowledge and unknowledge, it is now devolving into a meaningless content delivery system catering to corporate and government interests instead of seeking the truth.

You're 100% correct.
There are fewer and fewer living forums nowadays. Thankfully cars forums seem to be going strong, but many others have fallen and, even in the rare case where the first page isn't AI-generated articles, we get some moron's opinion on reddit with a few other people circle jerking that opinion.

kilésengati eredeti hozzászólása:

The Internet is Rotting!!

Over the past years I found search engines to become increasingly useless. Whenever I search something - particularly knowledge resources about older games - I often don't find what I need anymore. It's all either meaningless advertisement/scam sites with algorithm-generated crap or just general information sites. Either way, I'm none the wise after skimming through search results. I easily put this off to just search engines getting paid to show these results, but it's not only the big search engines, it's all search engines and indices!

Then it dawned on me: It's not only the search engines getting bad, it's the entire Internet rotting from the inside out!!

I've just found out that a major forum and wiki for modding and 3D arts recently got shutdown since the owners decided it is no longer viable to run a forum and a wiki and focus on the instant massaging service Discord instead. The original site used to be a gold mine of knowledge.
But at least they gave a prior notice and fortunately most of the important stuff seems to be saved to the Web Archive. I see more and more forums, wikis and their knowledge disappear, sometimes over night, and sometimes be replaced by stand-ins.

But why though? Services like Discord are great for direct person-to-person interaction and can complement already existing communities quite well, but the knowledge generated there might not exist at all, since all communication there is fleeting, information is not as browseable to users and sure as heck not available to the general public. With such services, for the gained knowledge to be preserved and accessible for future generation, the final result would need to be published and mirrored much like a book. And even if it doesn't reach the outcome that the original participants were looking, it still would need to be published because that failure might help someone else to find their solution. That's pretty much the way forums and wikis operate. They are the gold standard of scientific discussion online and the logical evolution from mailing lists and Usenet groups. If anything, any attempt at replacing knowledge bases to instant massaging is a massive step backwards. We might as well go back to spreading knowledge through scriptoria and merchants again. Is another dark age upon us?
Instant massaging and other types of short-form communication media that have become popular over the past couple years, no matter how fleshed-out they are, are simply not meant to replace a forum, let alone a wiki. As a knowledge base, a Discord "server" (it isn't a real server you own) is absolutely inadequate and guarantees for any effort in maintaining knowledge to be futile. And any knowledge deemed unfit for whoever's interest wiped from the actual servers and lost to the aether.

Forums and wikis are the worlds digital common memory. Our papers of record. Our library of Alexandria?

If we keep treating our digital records as we are today, and the philosophical processes keep decaying as they are, we sure are heading into an idiocracy.

Do you think forums and wikis will be increasingly replaced by short-form media and communications instead.

Are we living in an age of digital book burning? (Not in the politically loaded sense, ffs!)

Will entire digital generations' knowledge be memory-holed and replaced by corporate-friendly nonesense?


TL;DR: The Internet is dying as more and more forums and wikis keep shutting down, with their philosophical process broken and knowledge lost forever. Once heralded a new bastion for knowledge and unknowledge, it is now devolving into a meaningless content delivery system catering to corporate and government interests instead of seeking the truth.

Valve didn't give notice that they were shutting down the old SPUF and until people complained, Valve turned the servers back on for about 3 weeks to let people archive what they could before Valve completely shut it down for good...

https://na.alienwarearena.com/ucf/show/1614523/boards/gaming-news/News/spuf-shut-down-valve-gives-us-a-lesson-how-to-alienate-your-most-loyal-users

https://steamcommunity.com/discussions/forum/1/2741975115083672977/

https://steamcommunity.com/discussions/forum/7/2333276539600694752/

https://steamcommunity.com/groups/TheDailySPUF

A big mess.

agree. hard to find useful articles much less useful forums even some of the og forums i used for mountain biking are no longer any good these days either and my local forum for my state shutdown years ago and with that lost was nearly a decades worth of local race pictures, news discussions and tracks.

Outsourcing memory ultimately can't be trusted. People will save whatever they think is worth saving. Networking technology nevertheless allows people to share information more quickly than ever before, even if things appear diluted.

Forums and wikis have now been replaced by social media, just look at content like TOP 10 for something or How fast to or How to do "this" etc.

It can be said that the information that is on the Internet in this decentralized state, simply smaller websites cannot survive long. There are many good examples even from large companies that no matter how good they are at what they do, something bad happens.

Probably Web 3.0 and good old P2P file sharing technology are the ways to keep these services online.

kilésengati eredeti hozzászólása:

Over the past years I found search engines to become increasingly useless. Whenever I search something - particularly knowledge resources about older games - I often don't find what I need anymore. It's all either meaningless advertisement/scam sites with algorithm-generated crap or just general information sites. Either way, I'm none the wise after skimming through search results. I easily put this off to just search engines getting paid to show these results, but it's not only the big search engines, it's all search engines and indices!

Then it dawned on me: It's not only the search engines getting bad, it's the entire Internet rotting from the inside out!!

I've just found out that a major forum and wiki for modding and 3D arts recently got shutdown since the owners decided it is no longer viable to run a forum and a wiki and focus on the instant massaging service Discord instead. The original site used to be a gold mine of knowledge.
But at least they gave a prior notice and fortunately most of the important stuff seems to be saved to the Web Archive. I see more and more forums, wikis and their knowledge disappear, sometimes over night, and sometimes be replaced by stand-ins.

But why though? Services like Discord are great for direct person-to-person interaction and can complement already existing communities quite well, but the knowledge generated there might not exist at all, since all communication there is fleeting, information is not as browseable to users and sure as heck not available to the general public. With such services, for the gained knowledge to be preserved and accessible for future generation, the final result would need to be published and mirrored much like a book. And even if it doesn't reach the outcome that the original participants were looking, it still would need to be published because that failure might help someone else to find their solution. That's pretty much the way forums and wikis operate. They are the gold standard of scientific discussion online and the logical evolution from mailing lists and Usenet groups. If anything, any attempt at replacing knowledge bases to instant massaging is a massive step backwards. We might as well go back to spreading knowledge through scriptoria and merchants again. Is another dark age upon us?
Instant massaging and other types of short-form communication media that have become popular over the past couple years, no matter how fleshed-out they are, are simply not meant to replace a forum, let alone a wiki. As a knowledge base, a Discord "server" (it isn't a real server you own) is absolutely inadequate and guarantees for any effort in maintaining knowledge to be futile. And any knowledge deemed unfit for whoever's interest wiped from the actual servers and lost to the aether.

Forums and wikis are the worlds digital common memory. Our papers of record. Our library of Alexandria?

If we keep treating our digital records as we are today, and the philosophical processes keep decaying as they are, we sure are heading into an idiocracy.

Do you think forums and wikis will be increasingly replaced by short-form media and communications instead.

Are we living in an age of digital book burning? (Not in the politically loaded sense, ffs!)

Will entire digital generations' knowledge be memory-holed and replaced by corporate-friendly nonesense?


TL;DR: The Internet is dying as more and more forums and wikis keep shutting down, with their philosophical process broken and knowledge lost forever. Once heralded a new bastion for knowledge and unknowledge, it is now devolving into a meaningless content delivery system catering to corporate and government interests instead of seeking the truth.

Technically yes more knowledge is being lost, however we aren't at a Library of Alexandria 2.0 moment yet, there's still time to prevent such scenario. Thankfully many things are saved through many internet archives & local hardware type copies in some cases.

So besides organizing group of average citizens to preserve knowledge. maybe bringing the topic to local govt / local library might be a good conversation to have, even if it isn't in the current overton window.

Zebrant eredeti hozzászólása:

kilésengati eredeti hozzászólása:

TL;DR: The Internet is dying as more and more forums and wikis keep shutting down, with their philosophical process broken and knowledge lost forever. Once heralded a new bastion for knowledge and unknowledge, it is now devolving into a meaningless content delivery system catering to corporate and government interests instead of seeking the truth.

You're 100% correct.
There are fewer and fewer living forums nowadays. Thankfully cars forums seem to be going strong, but many others have fallen and, even in the rare case where the first page isn't AI-generated articles, we get some moron's opinion on reddit with a few other people circle jerking that opinion.

Car forums really depend on the manufacturer and model lines. If they have a cult following, their forums are evergreens. For example, stuff like Golf and Transporter forums seem to never grow old.
And well, Reddit is a content delivery system disguised as a forum after all. I'm not gonna say it's totally useless, but it's not adequate as a knowledge base either.

cSg|mc-Hotsauce eredeti hozzászólása:

Valve didn't give notice that they were shutting down the old SPUF and until people complained, Valve turned the servers back on for about 3 weeks to let people archive what they could before Valve completely shut it down for good...

https://na.alienwarearena.com/ucf/show/1614523/boards/gaming-news/News/spuf-shut-down-valve-gives-us-a-lesson-how-to-alienate-your-most-loyal-users

https://steamcommunity.com/discussions/forum/1/2741975115083672977/

https://steamcommunity.com/discussions/forum/7/2333276539600694752/

https://steamcommunity.com/groups/TheDailySPUF

A big mess.

What I find rather weird, they shut down the SPUF only to replace it with another similar forum.
This one.

At least it's archived.

kilésengati eredeti hozzászólása:

cSg|mc-Hotsauce eredeti hozzászólása:

Valve didn't give notice that they were shutting down the old SPUF and until people complained, Valve turned the servers back on for about 3 weeks to let people archive what they could before Valve completely shut it down for good...

https://na.alienwarearena.com/ucf/show/1614523/boards/gaming-news/News/spuf-shut-down-valve-gives-us-a-lesson-how-to-alienate-your-most-loyal-users

https://steamcommunity.com/discussions/forum/1/2741975115083672977/

https://steamcommunity.com/discussions/forum/7/2333276539600694752/

https://steamcommunity.com/groups/TheDailySPUF

A big mess.

What I find rather weird, they shut down the SPUF only to replace it with another similar forum.
This one.

At least it's archived.

They replaced it in 2012 but left SPUF until 2017. I get it but the way they did it was very poorly thought out.

kilésengati eredeti hozzászólása:

Zebrant eredeti hozzászólása:

You're 100% correct.
There are fewer and fewer living forums nowadays. Thankfully cars forums seem to be going strong, but many others have fallen and, even in the rare case where the first page isn't AI-generated articles, we get some moron's opinion on reddit with a few other people circle jerking that opinion.

Car forums really depend on the manufacturer and model lines. If they have a cult following, their forums are evergreens. For example, stuff like Golf and Transporter forums seem to never grow old.
And well, Reddit is a content delivery system disguised as a forum after all. I'm not gonna say it's totally useless, but it's not adequate as a knowledge base either.

Every car I've ever owned had a dedicated forum full of passionate people, it's actually kind of amazing.

Yeah I mean I ~have~ learned good things from reddit, but more often than not it's full of self-righteous losers who love the smell of their own farts.

The internet isn't rotting and the problem isn't new, OP. This is the Internet you wished for, but you're only starting to feel the effects that we were silenced for pointing out for years.

Still think you're on the right side of history?

NoMoreUnderscores() eredeti hozzászólása:

Outsourcing memory ultimately can't be trusted. People will save whatever they think is worth saving. Networking technology nevertheless allows people to share information more quickly than ever before, even if things appear diluted.

Particularly not to organisations with an agenda. Just imagine what a knowledge base ML algorithms could be if we would just feed it with unfiltered, uncensored and unregulated data.
Such an algorithm wouldn't be a fluffy corporate pet, but a workhorse for the people to cease the means of digital production.
Guess who doesn't want that to happen.

The corpo-govs want us to be good little consoomers.

cSg|mc-Hotsauce eredeti hozzászólása:

kilésengati eredeti hozzászólása:

What I find rather weird, they shut down the SPUF only to replace it with another similar forum.
This one.

At least it's archived.

They replaced it in 2012 but left SPUF until 2017. I get it but the way they did it was very poorly thought out.

Yes, I haven't used it, but it appears to be basically the same thing. What could've stopped them to just migrate the vBulletin system to their own? Probably just shedding what they considered dead weight.

Zebrant eredeti hozzászólása:

kilésengati eredeti hozzászólása:

Car forums really depend on the manufacturer and model lines. If they have a cult following, their forums are evergreens. For example, stuff like Golf and Transporter forums seem to never grow old.
And well, Reddit is a content delivery system disguised as a forum after all. I'm not gonna say it's totally useless, but it's not adequate as a knowledge base either.

Every car I've ever owned had a dedicated forum full of passionate people, it's actually kind of amazing.

Yeah I mean I ~have~ learned good things from reddit, but more often than not it's full of self-righteous losers who love the smell of their own farts.

One of Reddit main issues (besides not being a real forum and the stereotypical Reddit user being under the influence of content delivery systems), is that old threads get locked after a while, so you have to start a new one, even if you just have an additional question or even some knowledge to add. Also, for some reason, older threads are oftentimes Swiss cheese because users and all their posts get deleted often for reason unrelated to the topic.

kilésengati eredeti hozzászólása:

Over the past years I found search engines to become increasingly useless. Whenever I search something - particularly knowledge resources about older games - I often don't find what I need anymore...

This is the great problem hitting many search engines and I've noticed it as well. The incentive to run a search engine is money and pushing the definition of "relevant" to someone's desired search is often very influenced by that engine's owner.

There's also the increasing problem of "static" that gets heavily multiplied by marketing efforts the engine may not even be a part of. As time progresses and more unrelated topics crop up, all heavily promoted by third-party interests, the static gets louder.

The other day I was searching for some obscure thing and, unfortunately, it seems there was a recent movie with that name... I can't even remember what it was I was searching for, but ALL I could get was crap about that darn movie. I tried filtering - It didn't do diddly and my search results were still a bunch of movie crap.

Be a 'net vet, I was eventually able to squelch most of the static. But, the tools that I was provided by the various engines sucked at doing what they were supposed to do... I had to enter into verbose mode just to craft a search string that was still meaningful while barely being able to give me the needed results.

This has happened with increasing frequency through the last few years.

And, IMO, this could be something "AI" could help with. "Could." The worry there is that engines will only be motivated by it to steer users where they want them to go.

Every site that pushes info to a user in an attempt to influence their behavior is running into this problem as content increases.

Go ahead - Search for "Skateboarding" videos or some crap on Youtube and the rest of your session and, perhaps, whatever meta youtube has assigned you to regardless of whether you close your browser or not, will force-feed you "skateboarding" videos all darn day... Click on one and there will be an endless repetition of crappy skateboard vids no matter if you're researching rocket-science or not. AND, if you do look up "Rocket Science" a host of UFO-Wingnut vids will happily accompany the rest of your feed.

Unless there's some regulatory, enforceable, standards set that prohibits it, AI will be used to the same purpose. That's a bit frightening.

(What 3D site/forum was shut down?)

... most of the important stuff seems to be saved to the Web Archive....

This is exactly why the Web Archive exists - To preserve otherwise empty bits of potentially valuable, historical, information.

The problem is well-known and is considered to be very serious, so many governments are working to preserve "data." This is going to be a necessity as the money pushes both creators and publishers/hosts into the digital realm where decades of knowledge can be completely erased by one keystroke...

Just saying - It is acknowledged by The Powers That Be as a serious problem and there is some effort to do something about it, some by sites like Wayback Machine/etc. Others, by journals forcing print-copies and physical archiving and the like. These days, a piece of appropriate paper, properly stored, could last more than a lot of digital storage media. (Wide variety, there, and improvements have been made in some digital storage media)

But why though? Services like Discord are great for direct person-to-person interaction and can complement already existing communities quite well, but the knowledge generated there might not exist at all, since all communication there is fleeting, information is not as browseable to users and sure as heck not available to the general public. With such services, for the gained knowledge to be preserved and accessible for future generation,

It's a "service." Someone there is making money for hosting it. When THEY decide, they can remove it with a keystroke. Several large companies have made bids for it because of its social presence and the varied connections it has with its userbase.

But, no matter how much interaction there is valuable, it can all be erased - It is as impermanent as the rest of The Internet and that is exactly what the very real problem is.

So, when Discord disappears in a few years or gets wiped and its userbase is move, outside of their control, to a more insulated product that can more easily trap them in a web of consumption... then what?

TL;DR: The Internet is dying as more and more forums and wikis keep shutting down, with their philosophical process broken and knowledge lost forever. Once heralded a new bastion for knowledge and unknowledge, it is now devolving into a meaningless content delivery system catering to corporate and government interests instead of seeking the truth.

The "internet" was never about "truth" just as it was never constructed for privacy - It's about facilitating the exchange of communications.

Just some random info-links fed to me by Google when I used my badly-formed search terms... Just reassuring you that others do recognize the problem:


https://www.internetsociety.org/blog/2018/01/preserving-future-one-bit-time/

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/06/21/opinion/digital-archives-memory.html

https://techcrunch.com/2015/08/27/the-internet-is-failing-the-website-preservation-test/

In a hilarious bit of irony, the Techcrunch article about preserving "teh interents" is 404'd : https://loc.gov/preservation/about/mission.html

it is to lol

kilésengati eredeti hozzászólása:

The Internet is Rotting!!

Over the past years I found search engines to become increasingly useless. Whenever I search something - particularly knowledge resources about older games - I often don't find what I need anymore. It's all either meaningless advertisement/scam sites with algorithm-generated crap or just general information sites. Either way, I'm none the wise after skimming through search results. I easily put this off to just search engines getting paid to show these results, but it's not only the big search engines, it's all search engines and indices!

Then it dawned on me: It's not only the search engines getting bad, it's the entire Internet rotting from the inside out!!

I've just found out that a major forum and wiki for modding and 3D arts recently got shutdown since the owners decided it is no longer viable to run a forum and a wiki and focus on the instant massaging service Discord instead. The original site used to be a gold mine of knowledge.
But at least they gave a prior notice and fortunately most of the important stuff seems to be saved to the Web Archive. I see more and more forums, wikis and their knowledge disappear, sometimes over night, and sometimes be replaced by stand-ins.

But why though? Services like Discord are great for direct person-to-person interaction and can complement already existing communities quite well, but the knowledge generated there might not exist at all, since all communication there is fleeting, information is not as browseable to users and sure as heck not available to the general public. With such services, for the gained knowledge to be preserved and accessible for future generation, the final result would need to be published and mirrored much like a book. And even if it doesn't reach the outcome that the original participants were looking, it still would need to be published because that failure might help someone else to find their solution. That's pretty much the way forums and wikis operate. They are the gold standard of scientific discussion online and the logical evolution from mailing lists and Usenet groups. If anything, any attempt at replacing knowledge bases to instant massaging is a massive step backwards. We might as well go back to spreading knowledge through scriptoria and merchants again. Is another dark age upon us?
Instant massaging and other types of short-form communication media that have become popular over the past couple years, no matter how fleshed-out they are, are simply not meant to replace a forum, let alone a wiki. As a knowledge base, a Discord "server" (it isn't a real server you own) is absolutely inadequate and guarantees for any effort in maintaining knowledge to be futile. And any knowledge deemed unfit for whoever's interest wiped from the actual servers and lost to the aether.

Forums and wikis are the worlds digital common memory. Our papers of record. Our library of Alexandria?

If we keep treating our digital records as we are today, and the philosophical processes keep decaying as they are, we sure are heading into an idiocracy.

Do you think forums and wikis will be increasingly replaced by short-form media and communications instead.

Are we living in an age of digital book burning? (Not in the politically loaded sense, ffs!)

Will entire digital generations' knowledge be memory-holed and replaced by corporate-friendly nonesense?


TL;DR: The Internet is dying as more and more forums and wikis keep shutting down, with their philosophical process broken and knowledge lost forever. Once heralded a new bastion for knowledge and unknowledge, it is now devolving into a meaningless content delivery system catering to corporate and government interests instead of seeking the truth.

Can we have a ... oh... look.. a TL;DR, thanks OP

The only thing worse then too little information... is too much information...

The Internet was never about "seeking the truth" ( whatever that is ) it was always about just passing information along quickly and efficiently in small amounts between two parties.

Unfortunately information has outpaced it's own usefulness... there's such a quest for information but of only one's interests and bias that anything otherwise is deemed "useless"

But that's not the "corporate" or "government interests" fault... as more the people inquiring and interested in meaningless content delivery...

People care more about a certain celebrity's hot-take on a current political / social issue... then if important and useful information gets stored and saved for future generations education.

TL;DR

The Internet stopped being a tool of information and turned into a entertainment IV drip a long, long time ago... it's a shame really, but that's nobody's fault but who's using it, like everything else it's only as good as it's useful for.

The laws changed allowing results to be tampered with. You now only get shown what they want to sell or promote.

They can even tell you places don't exist that still do if they don't think you are "allowed" to go there.

Google became useless for general information a few years ago and it has been getting steadily worse. Other search engines can help a little.. but basically get an overlay that hijacks results.

A&A ✠ eredeti hozzászólása:

Forums and wikis have now been replaced by social media, just look at content like TOP 10 for something or How fast to or How to do "this" etc.

It can be said that the information that is on the Internet in this decentralized state, simply smaller websites cannot survive long. There are many good examples even from large companies that no matter how good they are at what they do, something bad happens.

Probably Web 3.0 and good old P2P file sharing technology are the ways to keep these services online.

Forums are more social than social media: Change my mind!