effort

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Welcome to c/effort, the home of effort posts! This is a space where you can write on an topic, as long as it reflects real time and effort to put together.

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2.While the topic can be on anything, posts still require “effort”. While there isn’t a minimum word limit or anything, generally this means it’s longer than most other posts and there’s also that the expectation that your posts required real effort to write up.

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The internet has become nearly impossible to use for information. (hexbear.net)

submitted 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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I need to write a zoology paper on bugs

All search results are for pest control businesses or are AI generated garbage that have wrong information.

Yes, the internet always had problems, but I cannot stress how much worse it has gotten for information over the last ten years.

I used to be able to search a species and get scientific papers or at least articles that referenced scientific papers in the results. None of that anymore. All search results are for someone trying to sell you something, and articles are regurgitated AI monstrosities that waffle on with no real information and no references. If your search even manages to direct you to news articles every news site will have identical, poorly written tabloid hidden behind a paywall. All of it useless for even the most basic academic research.

I literally can't do my job if every search result for species identification is behind a paywall, or an AI generated image of a bug that doesn't really exist.

It's no longer the information age. But not because of Trumpism and other things liberal whine about, it's because capitalism has hollowed out the internet into a husk of what it was meant to be.

I literally had to go and buy an expensive field guide from a museum to finish this paper. I haven't had to do that before.

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[–] [email protected] 28 points 6 months ago (2 children)

If it makes you feel any better, I've ran into the same problem with construction. I used to enjoy looking up new techniques and materials in a whole range of contractor work, now though it's all DIY and companies selling unregulated products with no real guarantees. The amount of people who self-post themselves fragrantly breaking the law with illegal systems or dangerous builds not up to any type of standard code is mind blowing. Without fail there's thousands of upvotes and hundreds of replies thanking the person for the horrible tips. I can't imagine the number of people who have died because of it, I don't think there will ever be any type of regulation or support for factual and safe information.

[–] [email protected] 14 points 6 months ago

I'm trying to get into gardening, and its so damn hard to get basic facts that I know for a fact were readily available years ago. Nothing fucking works anymore. It's not just the net, it's everything

[–] [email protected] 5 points 6 months ago

For construction stuff I've found the This Old House forum and a couple of other forums to be a great source of information. As well as the building sciences forums. So, I usually add "forum" or "building science" to the search and it sometimes helps. Not for videos, though, which are extremely unreliable