It used to be that you would do a search on a relevant subject and get blog posts, forums posts, and maybe a couple of relevant companies offering the product or service. (And if you wanted more information on said company you could give them a call and actually talk to a real person about said service) You could even trust amazon and yelp reviews. Now searches have been completely taken over by Forbes top 10 lists, random affiliate link click through aggregators that copy and paste each others work, review factories that will kill your competitors and boost your product stars, ect… It seems like the internet has gotten soooo much harder to use, just because you have to wade through all the bullshit. It’s no wonder people switch to reddit and lemmy style sites, in a way it mirrors a little what kind of information you used to be able to garner from the internet in it’s early days. What do people do these days to find genuine information about products or services?
Use your critical thinking while reading to differentiate between scientifically sound claims and nonscientific marketing paroles.
It only works at the low level and for the really brainless stuff.
There are a lot of things which beyond a certain level require domain specific expertise to spot the bullshit.
One of the first things the genuine skeptic figures out is the limits of one’s own capability to evaluate information.
You can use some heuristics to try and spot greedy/marketing bollocks even in domains you don’t understand in depth (for example: cui bono - if those pushing a message benefit from others believing it, it instantly goes into the “untrusted” mental bucket) but even that only goes so far (it’s not by chance that, for example, in politics and economics most Think Tanks hide their sources of funding: it hides the direct link between “studies” they publish those who fund them benefiting if the public and politicians believe those “studies”).
In summary, do it whilst being aware that we’re all limited and as smart as one is there are plenty of equally smart people who make money from swindling others.
And everyone gave me shit for keeping my feedly account.
The Reader died, but the feeds do live on, between mastodon, lemmy and feedly I got plenty to read.
That’s just consumption.
How do you research something?
I guess it’s training. In german we have a word for it that translates to “media competence”, something way not enough people have.
It contains several things (some already mentioned before):
- learn how to search, good and bad phrases, etc.
- over read all the pages that look like crap (only gained from experience)
- never trust one source, always double check, maybe with a different search engine
It hardly depends on the topic you want to research and mostly depends on experience.
I think in English that term might be media literacy, but as you observe, it’s not terribly common, which is frustrating given that it’s been needed even prior to the internet’s emergence.
Is “media literacy/competency” taught much in Germany, but perhaps not well? Either way, your advice is good even if it wasn’t taught or taught well!
No unfortunately not. There are some movements that try to get it into the learning plan of schools but with not much success yet.
So right now parents have to teach their kinds, but many of them don’t have any competence on their own, so no teaching happens on times were the negative movements learn (or already learned) to use this lack of knowledge to manipulate.
Phishing is one of the best examples.
I feel how I get frustrated while writing :D
Go digging? That hasn’t really changed has it? If a report pops up in my feed speaking about some scientific study, I try and go to the journal or the arxiv to find the study itself so I can read the summaries. If I really can’t find anything first party, if I’ve got some personal knowledge on the topic I might just write the paper’s author and ask for a copy (they’re often very willing and excited to share) or use my library provided JSTOR access?
Google scholar still mostly works as well… but yeah I only use it every other week or so.
Like this isn’t new, science twitter has mostly moved to mastadon so most of the time there’s an arxiv link in the “Study released today…” toots etc.
There are some new youtubers trying to spread the word, but yeah like the same way you’ve always researched?
ChatGPT for general knowledge and programming questions. Mostly straight to the point answers without 500 word drivel and 6 ad blocks on a single page for a 3 line answer you find on most blogs…
Literally the worst source for anything…
It has no understanding, it just craps out things that look right, absolutely awful for code generation beyond boilerplate. (And I do pay for the better model. )
Eh, I found it quite useful in giving me relatively well known information. As for code, it’s great at telling me what functions and such do without having to traverse the documentation for a library and such, and also explaining stuff I am confused about. It is faster and more convenient for a lot of stuff, as long as you double check important info (but you have to do that anyway, never use a single source etc etc).
Its more like its only as smart as the average person… Which isnt that high of a bar so yeah for anything even mildly specific its dogshit
It isn’t “smart”, it’s a language model.
You ain’t smart >:(
But in an age where were considering fridges smart, I think a language model at least contends
I mean, it doesn’t even produce compilable code half the time. Even if you give it feedback about which error it produces, it might not fix it after 3-4 corrections. I’ve ended up in loops where it cycles through incorrect suggestions, apparently forgetting that all previous answers are incorrect.
Hey all I gotta say is do you think 50% of people can properly code? Cause otherwise it should be ass at it.
But ask people to write the general structure code might take, and it does give you some boilerplate (but again might also be ass)
I wonder whether ChatGPT can evaluate trustworthiness on the fly. A lot of the complexity of modern search engines is to try to prevent gaming the system. Maybe an AI heuristic would be less predictable/gamable
I use www.presearch.com
people are gave some good answers.
it boils down to various large sites.
wikipedia(app) and reddit(app) are my top.
often time i just bang out a search and pinpoint the answer and trash the rest.
[deleted] stackexchanges and ycomb are some other popular sites.
quora used to seem attractive but information is questionable and the whole experience is trash.gemini,bookmarks,chatgpt are some others. also libgen .
deleted by creator
UK version of Consumer Reports is which.co.uk
If you’re buying appliances etc it’s well worth the money
We’re gonna put that to the test!
I think it’s becoming a lost art … but basically, you need to go by reputation. Pick well known sites that you trust, compare what they say about the subject, don’t even base your opinion on just one random blog article or tweet / reddit / lemmy post.
For some, Wikipedia is trustworthy since it (usually) cites its sources and has a pretty good track record, while for others it’s not to be trusted, cause anyone can edit it. In the end it’s up to you what you trust. Another example: The CDC (in the US) can be considered trustworthy for health information, being an official government agency, but many also don’t trust it as it has become more politicised and so, biased. Again, you decide what to trust, and always consult at least two trusted sources, more is better.
For product reviews, I simply don’t pay much attention to the star rating, but instead, read the actual reviews, and sort them chronologically so I read the most recent ones. Check that they are actually reviewing the product / service you think they are, as there are ways to get good reviews then “switch” the product listing (amazon) and other similar tricks. Check if it seems plausible, level-headed, or if it’s just someone being angry, or likely fake. Like I said, it’s an art, not a science. Sometimes, you have to actually buy the product / service and judge for yourself, then compare your experience with the reviews, and you’ll learn to tell the truthful reviews from the fake or unreliable.
A tip regarding Wikipedia is to check the edit history if the last edit was made very recently since it could be spam that no one spotted yet.
It is also a good idea to make sure the article is not the subject of an edit war.
It is so ironic that SEO has become the very problem it was invented to fix: all these jokers gaming the system have all but plunged us all back into prehistoric internet times, before search engines appeared and people had to remember which specific sites to go to find information online.
The problem is that monied interests want to control the spin on information, just as General Electric was able to strictly govern television news during the cold war, and the George W. Bush administration and the military industrial complex wanted to control the newspapers and news sites during the war on terror (and game reviews occasionally gave below 7.0 out of 10)
Truth leaks to the people though novel means of communication, sadly with all the rumors. And any time a fact-checking service develops a reputation for veracity, it’s going to face pressure to close, such as Snopes; or pressure to adhere to company marketing guidelines such as Wikipedia, for whom Kelloggs Company and the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints both have a marketing subdepartment devoted to assuring no controversies or elaborations will stay on their respective Wikipedia pages without a generous dollop of hagiography.
So yes, figuring out the real deal is still an art form like processing data to get intel. For old stuff (e.g. Brigham Young’s randy exploits seducing young girls with religious mandates) we look for the theses that point to primary sources. But for new stuff, we cross-examine multiple news reports for the consistent facts, and avoid interpretation.
As for product information, yes it’s often to find out important stuff like how secure your IoT appliance is. You can assume it’s not unless they can specify how they made it so without buzzwords.
SEO solved the problem it was meant to fix, i.e. “users arent looking at our site enough.” You’re fooling yourself if you think it was ever about making searches more useful for the user.
The very conceit of SEO defeats the purpose of a search. The idea is the search combs through sites, finds what the user wants, and returns it to them based on what it believes is the closest match to what the user wanted. It’s a process between two parties: the user and the search engine. The second the websites start trying to inject themselves into this process by adjusting their content to the search, it corrupts the process.
Picture yourself in a library looking through the card catalog. You’re searching for something, using a system to locate it. Imagine if the books you’re looking for spontaneously changed their titles or authorship just to “help you find them” while you’re flipping through cards. Imagine if you’re walking down the shelves and books are literally shifting around like fucking Hogwarts, trying to get in front of you.
That is the inherent issue with SEO. No one but the user knows what the user wants to see, the content trying to adjust itself to appear in the results more consistently isn’t about helping the user find what they want, it’s about making sure the user sees that specific content.
Because every website wants traffic. That’s all it is.
Every site wants traffic, and I’ve been guilty of gaming search results myself in the past, but also don’t forget the other big conflict here:
Google wants ad revenue.
As such, if you are small and do it honestly, you have very little chance of getting any actual traffic your way because Google sends everyone to the “big end of town” and search engines / internet marketing has become a pay to win platform.
Back links made sense when we were all linking to each other early on because it was how you found good content, but nobody is linking to anyone anymore - unless it’s for some return to the linker, such as making a high traffic blog post with affiliate links etc - and it’s time to come up with another method.
Right now most effective for me to get information / reviews is add “Reddit” to the search and you get a discussion of the pros and cons. I’ve been using chatgpt for a surprising amount of “I just need to know this general info” kind of stuff. Ie I used chatgpt to work out the temperature and time it would take to dehydrate lemons in the oven, and also how to clean said oven with what I had on hand. Both of these would have been much more time consuming to do the traditional way, and I would have been bombarded with ads and people’s life stories before they get to the “just use vinegar” part
Trying to rig the cards using book titles.
First you get a ton of books whose name starts with “AAA” and a whole race-of-ever-more-As.
Eventually they figure out people are actually searching for other letters so you get the same in other letters: BBB…, RRR…, III… and so on.
Then people start jumping over that big fat bulk of titles which start with just the one letters repeated tons of times in the first cards of any letter, so they start misusing the most common and searched for words, for example a book about digital coins with a title that starts with the word “Cooking”.
And so on.
Doesn’t it sound strangelly familiar (maybe not the explicit techniques but the “slimy arms race” aspect)?!
SEO solved the problem it was meant to fix, i.e. “users arent looking at our site enough.” You’re fooling yourself if you think it was ever about making searches more useful for the user.
You’re not wrong, but if searches quit being useful, people will quit using them.
That’s accurate and doesn’t contradict the person you replied to. What they are saying is that SEO was never about fixing a search engine user’s problem; it exists to solve web host’s problem of “we aren’t getting enough ad revenue.”
The same is going to happen with these LLMs once they rely more and more on searching the web: folks are going to find out how to poison the results in a way that pushes users toward their products/services/ads.
SEO should always have been called index poisoning, because that’s exactly what it is.
You’re right. I was thinking SEO was action taking by the search engines, not actions a web site is taking to move up in the search results.
This is exactly the reason I’ve been considering if it’s possibly the time to start and launch a brand new search engine, especially now subscription based systems are so common.
With at the core a pledge to not record and/or share any user data or interaction and supported by a subscription service for who wants to pay and really oldschool tier selfhosted “sidebar” ads for the rest.
None of this “insert ads into content” shite.
For the algo, also far more oldschool “less intelligent”, where keywords and content matter (backed by a curation of good/bad sites) and options for users to report sites, that will then be re-curated.
For adding sites, allow subscribers to suggest sites that then get listed to other subscribers (or if it grows large enough to support employees, subscribers AND employees) for validation.
If a site is then later found to be questionable, everyone that suggested and validated it can get a negative validation score, which will be used for future reference when selecting users to validate new sites.
Something like they get +1 for every validation they do.
But -1 for 1 bad validation, -11 for 2, -31 for 3, -61 for 4, -101 for 5, etc, so if they validate 100 sites and validate 5 incorrectly, they are no longer allowed to validate new sites.
And for validation, once there are enough subscribers, you take 100+ random subscribers, of which 50% needs to respond to validate and if 90% of responders validate positively, it passes. If less than 90% validate positively, it goes for manual review by the administration.
Etc etc.
The problem with search engines isn’t the search engines themselves. The problem is that sites game the system. Everybody want to be at the top of the search results, so they do whatever it takes to get there.
You can start a brand new search engine, but if it get popular enough it will also be gamed to the point it’s useless again.
There just needs to be actually human eyes on this kind of shit. Especially if it’s a subscription service like dude was saying. Algorithms will get gamed. Everything will get gamed. But a gamer can spot another gaming faster than anything I know of. You need a bullshitter to call ballshit on any and every letter-not-the-spirit of the rule, bad faith motherfucker out there. Ban hammer vigilance almost always wins out, and besides a person’s data can be cross referenced to pings in cell towers. A crafty bot (maybe not entirely leeeeegal) can auto block from IPs around marked IMEIs, so wherever bitchass goes, if he’s got his phone, no go.
And if you wanted too, by the time they got wise and got a new number, you’d already know their habits and have deduced the number switch anyway. People are amazingly, and frighteningly easy to identify by just a few repeated locations in a week.
Don’t stick to one channel. Don’t get your news from social media, because social media is an echo chamber.
Use an RSS feed aggregator app to consolidate boring news articles from multiple boring publications. This will give you an even spread.
You will see the same news stories from different news outlets with different spin. You will quickly come to understand various news publishers biases and how extreme they are.
Always go into an article with an understanding of the publishers biases that might be at play.
If you must do the news on social thing… Only use social to discuss stories you already understand to some degree. Or as a place to research the news topic deeper.
For the most part, just use social to hang with your communities… you know… like a social network :)
You can also check out ground.news for the same bias-check aggregator thing.
deleted by creator
I use ImproveTheNews.org for this.
What do you recommend for an RSS app?
Inoreader
I’ve been using Nunti (FOSS, Android only) for a few months now. I love it’s adaptive learning feature which does a good job of filtering articles that I don’t care about.
Do you happen to know how long it may take the “adaptive learning” feature to kick in? I gather it may take some extended usage, however if that feature does seem to work I may have to reconsider Nunti, as I was initially put off by the absence of some other features when last I looked at it.
You can access it after you like/dislike 50 articles
Thanks! I must’ve missed or forgot that since I only briefly looked into it (and looking with a different feature in mind).
I’ve just recently found iOS app “feeeed”
I could use android and desktop Linux recomendations too
Inoreader RSS app for Android.
I’ve been using FocusReader on Android.
NewsBlur is great.
Search for open source rss feed readers. There are a few good ones.
QuiteRSS
iOS & MacOS recommendation Free: NetNewsWire Paid: Reeder 5 (one time payment)
I use NetNewsWire (on iOS) and swear by it. Super simple and easy to use.
The developer has an intensely focused vision for simplicity that I love and think is pretty wise too.
Uh yeah but also I think I get a chance to get out and buy one yet or not to bad people I know you are going to be a little more than I do you know.
Definitely. You’d love Allsides.com btw. Gives great info on how a topic is covered across the spectrum and summarizes them really well. There’s an RSS feed for it too.
deleted by creator
Research journals along with a university based Library search engine to find them.
I have found some pretty neat information here on Lemmy, specifically talking about Android, Firefox and Linux.
We have stuff that is not Linux, too.
I don’t know where we keep any of that, but I’m like 80% sure we have it somewhere.
Haha I felt this comment.
I seen someone suggest Lemmy’s porn is better then Voldemort’s website now. I was like, lemmy has porn?
I think once topics have labeles with multiple similar instances or something to that effect it’ll get much more organized and hopefully factual as a result. The propaganda is thick on lemmy.
Edit: spelling
Dude, you had me seriously wondering what kind of Voldemort porn exists out there… I understood the reference… Too late.
Keep a log of anything you do successfully find that you may need later.
I’ve started bookmarking anything I do find genuinely useful as there’s a chance that the a similar search would yield different results that wouldn’t help at all.
I’ve also installed archivebox on one of my home lab pcs to grab a snapshot of any sites and pages that I want to keep (you never know if you’ll go back and it’s gone).
Retaining good information for yourself is just as important on the web now given all the bot spam and affiliate laden shit out there that Google and Bing seem to be promoting these days.
I’ve started doing the same, but instead I keep a “personal wiki” .docx -document. Updating that is less frustrating than realizing again and again that you can’t find the thing you found a month earlier, using the same search terms, because of SEO optimization and other random bullshit thats apparently going on under the hood.
Have you looked into personal wikis like Tiddlywiki or Zim, by any chance? They may be a little better suited to the task than your .docx document.
Personally I’ve found for a local, offline only approach, Zim is rather nice & pretty easy to pick up. Nevertheless, if your method is working well for you, disregard this!
I havent, but I’ll be sure to check them out if they could be usefull to me. Thanks for the tip!
Or create your own Zettelkasten using Logseq or Obsidian, it’s a very cool thing.
I go on 4chan and insult the product/thing/person that I need info on. Then I wait, rubbing my uhhh hands like a perv behind the tree.
4chan has proven surprisingly useful as of late. A hell of a lot more than reddit and Google.
I would give you lemmy gold for this comment if it existed…
I guess rule 7 (Anon is still able to deliver) applies here
