A great, fresh Reddit thread on users outgrowing Linux communities and Reddit itself, which applies to a lot of the internet. [archive.org Reddit thread]
(web.archive.org)
from TheAnonymouseJoker@lemmy.ml to linux@lemmy.ml on 19 Sep 2023 19:30
https://lemmy.ml/post/5188433
from TheAnonymouseJoker@lemmy.ml to linux@lemmy.ml on 19 Sep 2023 19:30
https://lemmy.ml/post/5188433
I think many will love the summarisation of the Internet’s information value.
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Just another old dude complaining that his interests and the internet spaces that discuss them has become more accessible in the last thirty years. This type of greybeard elitism got in my way when I was trying to learn and if I hadn’t been self motivated to keep learning, that might have been the end of it. The biggest takeaway from this discussion is that Google is regressing in usefulness and that discord was always a bad place to store information.
That plus many other useful infos is why I shared the thread, it is a nice summary of us closing in on, in some ways, end of the internet as we know it.
Accessibility of information has also caused a problem of academic rigour getting removed with the higher barrier cost of learning curve.
Search engines becoming useless might not be a good thing, since to me Yandex is too valuable, giving me uncensored search results unlike Western ones.
At least now I can just ask a question and get a decent answer without needing to dig through manuals that leave me more confused than before or going the roundabout route of saying “Linux sucks, you can’t even do thing on it” and waiting for someone to correct me with a painstakingly detailed explanation.
We might have to come up with ways of curating answers or making that curated content more accessible too, but until we have a universal linux advice chatbot that can answer natural language questions and clear up nuance, people will keep asking questions on public forums.
Google can’t understand all nuances of the question and latches on to keywords instead. If I search for “Thing does not work in context”, I get answers for how to do thing in context, but not what to do to troubleshoot it if it refuses to show me any decent error message (or doesn’t produce an error, simply unintended results running counter to every one of those answers, including the fucking manual, which I did read thoroughly, several times).
Greybeard elitism used to have much more substance back when not just anyone with a webbrowser and a beard could voice in.
Thank you for sharing this. It’s hit home.
Sounds like this person has graduated from being a linux n00b to someone with enough knowledge to find most linux posts boring. It happens.