I hear they are always looking for high-quality editors.

I really wish there had been a Zach Snyder's Justice League 2. Batman v Superman is one of my top favorite movies.

Support and protect

Rec

Wikipedia continues to use terms like "pseudoscience" for approaches like energy psychology (EFT/tapping) despite over 100 controlled studies published in peer-reviewed journals. The founder, Jimmy Wales, even called the members of a professional organization with over 500 MDs and PhDs "lunatic charlatans".

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/349158766_Harvard_Doc_To_Wikipedia_You're_Not_Playing_Fair_On_Alternative_Trauma_Therapy

So no news source is perfect, and discernment is always useful.

access site archives, especially newspapers. Find some missing, others are behind paywalls.

I like to go to AI - but even Grok 2 is biased- but at least they will get you besides Grok’s answer - 15 relative web pages.

The powerful combination of the wealthiest people in the world being able to amplify their political positions (through their control of social media) to the billions of people on earth can’t be underestimated. Their plan is one of distraction and amusement for the general populace.

I don’t know if we will ever change the web due to its ability to distract. You can still find outstanding knowledge but you have to want to so look. Maybe Americans just don’t want to look anymore.

That's the thing, you can, but it's getting harder and harder and I can no longer be sure on a variety of topics. It's becoming more and more blurred. And we're at a threshhold on video, the AI videos are just becoming real enough looking.

And the volume of the fake content now just drowns out the legit stuff. The amount of "fake" websites is just astounding. And the variety of topics with fake stuff is just astounding too. I am a former electronic music DJ, I am still a fan of that culture, I constantly get fake photos of DJs who have never played together on my feeds. This volume suggests to me that AI is off on its own creating fake stuff, no one is telling iit to create some of this fake content, they're tasking it with creating fake content in general and maybe guiding some of the topioc, but there's no way a human is "approving" these thousands and thousands of fake tidbits.

Last edited Wed Jan 15, 2025, 09:26 AM - Edit history (1)

Once I have landed on the official or trusted, e.g. Wikipedia site I have business with. The rest of the Internet has become useless. Worse than noise, because it contains crumbs leading with disinformation into downright misinformation. Targeting the most vulnerable and least able to recognize that they are being canalized for fleecing. The aged and barely computer literate being the main targets.

What’s even more revolting is that it’s a deliberate warping of something that was once what people were directed to by those they trusted as a wise thing to do.

I switched to the DuckDuckGo browser on my phone a while back and I’ve been really liking it. I tried your Justice League 2 test and got some articles about why it never happened. Then I switched back to Safari and searched with Google, and it was as you said — AI garbage, fake trailers, etc.

...in our endless development of communication methods, eventually it will be just be like a big flashy newstand crowded with tabloids and romance novels with some serious journals hidden away somewhere.

As for Wikipedia, I agree it's an excellent info source, mostly because of the references listed with each page (that's usually the best research tool), but remember Wikipedia pages are compiled by volunteer editors, and so eventually cons and propagandists will start flooding the pages with more nonsense, because that's what they do.

is even the word "misinformation" has been weaponized. People claim "misinformation", when it's really information they don't like. Information they want to get so muddied up it gets questioned and lost. It's made us really start to question everything. Everyone. Every source. Getting a factual story is near impossible.

The only reason the internet survived when it first became really accessible to the public was porn. Now mostly red state legislatures are blocking it to the point that some of porn is pulling out.

There are three industries that immediately seize upon new technology to communicate- from drawings to movable print to audio to visual to internet:
Porn (sexual content)
Violence (wrestling)
And Religion (gotta spread the word)

But, yeah, I can see it happening. Exactly like broadcast television and radio. Propaganda disguised as a 24/7 telethon.

With Moses Mike in the speaker’s seat, you just know it’s going to happen.

and he’s coming in after decades of RW bashing and intimidation of the “left wing media” and its corporate elements.

Christian rock is big money BTW
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christian_music_industry

Marshall McLuhan's first chapter in 'Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man' (1964) observed that a communication medium itself, not the messages it carries, should be the primary focus of study. I don't think even McLuhan could have foreseen the hypnotic power of the internet on device screens.

the beliefs and plans of the tech lords behind it.

404 Media: https://www.404media.co/
The site has accounts on both Twitter and Bluesky, as does editor/founder Jason Koebler, who used to edit Motherboard at Vice. They're also on Facebook but have sometimes been censored there.

Gil Duran - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gil_Duran - writes for various publications, especially The New Republic, but also has his own blogs/newsletters - https://www.thenerdreich.com and https://www.theframelab.org/ - and accounts on Twitter and Bluesky.

Someplace we took a wrong turn.

Without it I would not be able to manage my environment.

So no. The internet isn't going anywhere. I am sorry your experience is so bad.

My personal self-curated internet playground is still huge.

YouTube is my major vice. I pay for the no-advertising version and aggressively use the "don't show me any more shit like this" options. They generally don't, which implies that the algorithms can be taught to identify shit.

My wife and I subscribe to several electronic newspapers, my favorite is The Guardian. We also donate to Wikipedia.

I don't have any tolerance for talking head news and opinion and block it anywhere I encounter it, including here on DU, where I don't even see it.

The internet has been a firehose of raw sewage since March 1994, when AOL opened access to it, and frankly it wasn't all that great before then. It's always been a dangerous place for those who lack critical thinking skills.

Unfortunately the billionaire class, which includes many political despots, has decided that teaching our children critical thinking skills is unprofitable and a serious threat to their political ambitions

Internet reflects humanity. There is a lot of garbage in humanity. And the Internet allows this garbage to amplify and organize orders of magnitude stronger than before. That is all true, and mostly bad for the civilized world.

But that is not the full picture. The Internet also has the ability to democratize things and to crowdsource things. For the entire history of this country, there has been rampant corruption, with only the tiniest fraction of the corruption exposed and prosecuted. There have always been crooks, scoundrels and cheat, even very evil people. Prior to the Internet, they could fly under the radar for their whole lives, with the public never being the wiser. The "professional media" has never been able to keep up with any of that. In their best days, they only covered .001% of the worst corruption.

With the Internet, we have millions of eyes watching now. We don't have the power to prosecute, but at least we have the power to expose. The rich and powerful still believe that they are immune, and they mostly are. They never really had to try to hide any of their crimes, frauds, and abuses. They were generally safe to exploit people and then boast about it in their private country clubs.

That is changing. We can't prosecute them, but we can make sure they are exposed. I believe there will be a cumulative effect of this exposure. The electorate didn't respond well to what Democrats were selling in this past election. But that does not mean the country is happy. On the contrary, the country is extremely angry. They just don't believe Democrats will do anything about the things that they are angry about.

Most of the anger is about economic unfairness. Democrats need to understand that. It isn't mostly about abortions or which bathrooms we can use. It is about inflation. It is about health care. It is about jobs exported overseas. It is about the rich making all the decisions. it is about huge corporations paying no taxes at all. It is about the news media being controlled by a few fantastically rich corporations. it is about the cost of education. it is about day care.

Harris probably mentioned every one of these things during the course of her campaign, but she failed to finger the real problem and never offered any concrete actions that the public could get behind. The public understands most of our problems come from the 0.1% that has been systematically shifting the wealth of the nation from the middle class into their pockets. The public is in an "Eat the Rich" mood. We need to crystalize everything we do and say around that framework. The Internet can be our ally in this. But we must focus on the core issue.

One of the things I am seeing though is that the internet is becoming less a reflection of humanity, and more a reflection of AI bots creating ridiculous and useless content. It's not every subject, but some searches get answered with a giant pile of AI created nonsense. And there's evidence of this effecting AI powered search engines negatively too.

As far as the political effects, obviously, we've seen fascists rise across the world and in America due to the lack of a shared reality that this misinformation creates. I think if the internet continues down this path of being less usefel for fact finding tasks and the public realizes that, Democrats would do well to prepare for what's next for sources of information. Do we go back to more organic media and libraries? Or will smaller and more independent social media type things because more trusted.

Republicans are counting on regular people knowing less and less truth. The way to counter that is to promote something that can be the new trusted shared truth.

And I don't think it is productive to think of a return to the old days when people read books and talked to one another in coffee shops and all that.

I think the only real answer is to try to promote parts of the Internet that are good for mankind and to promote vigorous debates about the role of Internet publishers (FB, Twitter, Substack, DU, Youtube and all the others.) A case in point is Wikipedia, which is largely helpful. We can do a good thing by making sure Wikipedia is well funded. Substack is emerging as a home for intelligent discourse, and perhaps we have an ally there in terms of preserving some adherence to truth on that site.

The other side of the coin is the legacy media, which has done some good in the past, but has now been almost completely swallowed into the bowels of the most abusive, corrupt corporations. We should not just observe that their time is passing, but we should think of 2025 as the time when they need to fail, but we need to be building something in their place.

We won't get rid of the evil bots. But we can stand up new institutions that will take over for what the legacy media used to be.

Just that it's going to be rendered less effective. There's a number of good articles talking about this exact thing recently, how generative AI is ruining things by just generating an overwhelming amount of garbage content.

And we could have prevented much of this, but no one had a clue how to start regulating this and the Tech Bros decided to buy our political system before we figured it out.

We can't stop AI and bots. I don't get flooded with Twitter trash because I don't use Twitter. I do use FB. Zuckerberg is all about cramming commercials at users I have not seen a lot of RW garbage on FB, but maybe that just means that FB is getting good at targeting. But it is flooded with commercials for things that are loosely connected with interests of mine. That is annoying as hell, but I needs to be on FB because there are several product support groups that are important to me.

Perhaps we need something like a "Good Housekeeping seal" that set standards for Internet sites. We have movie ratings. We have the BBB. We have Underwriters' Laboratories. Why not an "Internet Trust" badge for sites. And maybe we cold eventually compel the search engines and browser makers to penalize the sites that don't deserve trust, much like the operating systems pop up warnings like "This is not a trusted site, click this button to proceed at your own caution." Sadly, any such system would probably have to originate in Europe because the US system is pretty much in shambles now.

I learned in 1999 that I was not the only one on the planet that had a serious case of brain fog after taking the weekly dose of methotrexate. There was a lady in Nebraska on the same email board that got a cold and took Robitussin the same day as the methotrexate, and didn't have the trouble that week. I talked to my doctor. We talked to some other doctors... it turned out to be true. In fact one had actually figured out the minimum Robitussin dosage that helps. The following 2 years for me was significantly better.


I learned in 2003 how different blood pressure meds actually work. When a doctor insisted I give hubs ALL the meds prescribed after getting him home after heart attack, in spite of the fact nurses had been pulling meds for 3 days straight, that knowledge helped me ask the right questions. When we got home I knew how to juggle the meds for the 2 weeks between the hospital discharge and that first appt with hub's new cardiologist.

I learned in 2015 that Coreg can cause trouble for the heart's electrical function. A few months later hubs was "acting weird". Sure enough, his heart rate was bombing. Got him to the ER in time and they put a pacemaker in. If I hadn't read that and squirreled it away in the back of my noggin, I unsure I would have had that last 5 years with hubs.

YouTube showed me how to fix the sensor on the garage door. How to light the pilot on the furnace. How to anchor a step ladder on a hill so I could get the gutters and how to take links out of a watch band so I could wear hubs watch after he passed.

The internet taught me how to use Excel and gave me a longer working life... mo money.

Someone I never see anymore on DU helped my sister get her husband's UAW benefits straightened out.

This is long, but that's only a few things. I expect within 5 years the internet will be so full of trash info that getting to anything helpful will be next to impossible.

than BACK IN THE DAY

If these parasites vanished entirely from existence (which is distinctly unlikely) the Internet would be better off. Social media is a separate invention from the Internet itself, which has many, many other, far more essential, uses.

It's perfectly alright to ignore any social media you wish -- and probably good for you. They will continue to exist -- but you don't have to spare them any of your time or energy.