My experience is that this works for following semi-intuitive man-made flowchart type activities (e.g. fixing a car). For truly novel endeavors with high-risk (e.g. if the risk is breaking something irreplaceable), the planning is essential.
This is why libraries are amazing - they are objectively funded so that “free” really means “so essential it’s funded for you.” In the case of vulnerable populations that are driven to free services (like the socioeconomically disadvantaged or especially kids), it relieves the pressure to engage in selling one’s self to receive some “free” service. This was more widely accepted in the past when services like NPR and PBS were publicly funded. You know, when we cared about education.
I have absolutely been adding ‘Reddit’ to my queries for 2+ years and waiting for this kind article to bring some discourse about shit google results.
“This [AI-created content being widespread] isn’t true (yet), but it reflects some general sense that the authentic web is gone.”
It isn’t gone, but it is different. Reddit is essentially a site of blogs turned inside out. Each post produces individual comments that are often really blog posts tied to commentary/chat discourse. Problem is, each post and it’s daughter discussion/blog posts isn’t useful for continuous coverage of a topic (e.g. cooking). Thus the subreddits exist with quality control through mods that curate content.
Yet, something is missing when there is a single umbrella organization with power over these fief post blog chats. I don’t want to read archives from 2005, but it is the last time it feels like the kind of personal blogs I find here on HN were prevalent and searchable through places like Google. Each article is presented in the context of the user/owners wider work and enriched and enriching for being presented that way.
The ‘authentic web’ of 15 years ago was better, more pluralistic, and more diverse in literary and artistic design when there were more ‘online magazines’ in this way.
This death of Google feels unlike the way Usenet died. I was less broken up about that death when it happened precisely because the web offered a broader, richer landscape. What I Think we are being taught, though, is that perhaps USENET and the web should’ve existed together and been supported, since Reddit is just Usenet, after all, in many ways.
Google is like a former ritzy neighborhood that has been corporatized, had the blood sucked from it, is falling into disrepair, and now is ghettoized and awaiting gentrification, which will probably mean a return to the walled gardens of yore when they start charging for improvements (as in Youtube Premium).
