Search results are useless, AI is poisoning Wikipédia. While I do have the patience to read primary sources in my field of study, it becomes a nightmare to repeat this process for every bit of information I want.
I’m almost signing up for Encyclopedia Britannica. I don’t know what else to do.
really you don’t. you read forum posts and try to guess to what degree the information is credible.
the problem is finding those forum posts
Google doesn’t return them anymore. I have much more luck with duckduckgo when I want to find an answer to a specific question
Yeah, forum posts are becoming really useful again. A few years ago whenever someone posted a question to a forum you could often find the same snarky remark in the comments: ‘just google it’. There was even a website created to add to the snark (let me google that for you). And there was some truth to that comment. Usually you could find the answer pretty easily with a quick search.
But that’s not the case anymore. With AI slop, search engines are getting less and less helpful. Slop has polluted our search results just like plastic has polluted our oceans. It’s at the point now where search engines are almost useless for large subsets of common queries. So we are slowly returning to a pre-search engine era. In this new, post-search engine era, forum posts provide a very useful way of providing information. Long live the forum.