Item — HN Reader

Unfortunately, the internet hasn't been for humans for a long, long time. I think of recipe sites where the actual recipe is waaaay down the page, low density articles needlessly fanned out across multiple pages, or YouTube videos on fixing your dryer with 10 minutes of useless lead-in. These patterns are now so common we almost forget how much better it all once was.

I point so many questions towards GPT / Claude that I used to google search and it feels so much more like I'm getting an answer than a scavenger hunt. Just the facts, you know?

I'm not sure how content authors work in this new reality, but things needed to change. I miss the early internet that was just experts sharing knowledge because they loved the topic and wanted to help and educate others. The best example to me of what the internet once looked like is Inspectopedia: https://inspectapedia.com/aircond/HVAC_Blower_Fan.php

2 comments

> I miss the early internet that was just experts sharing knowledge because they loved the topic and wanted to help and educate others.

That internet didn't end willingly, it was intentionally starved to death by search engines for the sake of the ad-ridden sludge.

It still exists to some extent, and is impossible to find. You can't even find a book review or discussion of major, influential works (not fucking fiction and entertainment, which we're deluged with), stuff you could find easily in the internet 20 years ago. All you get is Amazon and Goodreads, also owned by Amazon. The only reasonable book reviews I can find these days are contemporary reviews in journals, because at least journals are still indexed. If it weren't for sci-hub, an illegal project and enemy of the state, I wouldn't even be able to read those.

I feel sorry for kids these days. At least we had libraries. The libraries that I went to as a child have had successive remodelings where each has resulted in fewer and fewer books. And those books tend to be fiction, or condescending lectures by middle-class morons about how you should feel about other people.

When the pull the plug on google books, archive.org, sci-hub, anna's archive/libgen etc., which are basically outlaw sites, there will be nothing worthwhile left.

A dear friend of mine, now sadly deceased, created a filter for just the sort of obnoxious recipe site you describe: https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/recipe-filter/ahlcd...

There's a Firefox version as well, and it works.