okaysomevampires
Member
There used to be some interesting information I found on the internet about the rise of oligarchs in the late soviet union. It was fascinating to read about how the reformation and collapse of a political order opened opportunities for black marketeers, or how leaders of industry disguised their corruption. Now I can't find the source because le Russia, le Ukraine, le oligarch boat seized have covered it up. It is easy to forget how surprising and embarrassing it was for american academia with soviet expertise to wake up to the soviet collapse they never predicted.
Similarly, the recent wave of AI has buried not just old information about AI, but a lot of useful web results with Search Engine Optimized garbage articles. The not-quite-worst part is that you can read them and feel like it's plausibly good information, and then you reach a paragraph where it reverses the true/false valence of a statement three times and doesn't link them together in a coherent, logical way. (e.g. with "However" preceding a supporting statement, "Furthermore" preceding a caveat) The actual worst part is the prospect of an article slipping past your filter because it lacks these mistakes. You can prefer sites that don't have as direct a financial incentive to keep you reading at expense of their good reputation, like wikipedia... but there aren't that many such sites and they all have agendas.
It's hard to know what you're missing if you show up once the mud has settled. I have no clue if there was interesting stuff to read about the history of Israel/Palestine that I'll now only find if I read entire books or filter thousands of duplicate news stories. For all I know there was similar stuff about bioweapons/biosecurity/pandemics before covid or election security/transparency before 2016/2020 elections.
It's not a matter of controversy or hiding wrongthink exactly, it's not even exactly big media outlets crowding out the little guys. I remember finding a blog on the first page of search results that had the old internet "plain old text file" aesthetic and was all about donald trump and his supposed guilt over "Sochastic" (stochastic) terrorism. This was certainly an amateur because he wrote sochastic hundreds of times without spellchecking it into a real word.
I can still go straight to books to read about stuff, or find dedicated websites for more popular topics. For all it's faults, wikipedia is good for giving you a survey of things that exist and are relevant to a topic. But, it isn't as easy as just being there before the normie content washed it all away.
Do you know of anything interesting or important that has been buried by tangential media coverage or carelessly automated content?
Similarly, the recent wave of AI has buried not just old information about AI, but a lot of useful web results with Search Engine Optimized garbage articles. The not-quite-worst part is that you can read them and feel like it's plausibly good information, and then you reach a paragraph where it reverses the true/false valence of a statement three times and doesn't link them together in a coherent, logical way. (e.g. with "However" preceding a supporting statement, "Furthermore" preceding a caveat) The actual worst part is the prospect of an article slipping past your filter because it lacks these mistakes. You can prefer sites that don't have as direct a financial incentive to keep you reading at expense of their good reputation, like wikipedia... but there aren't that many such sites and they all have agendas.
It's hard to know what you're missing if you show up once the mud has settled. I have no clue if there was interesting stuff to read about the history of Israel/Palestine that I'll now only find if I read entire books or filter thousands of duplicate news stories. For all I know there was similar stuff about bioweapons/biosecurity/pandemics before covid or election security/transparency before 2016/2020 elections.
It's not a matter of controversy or hiding wrongthink exactly, it's not even exactly big media outlets crowding out the little guys. I remember finding a blog on the first page of search results that had the old internet "plain old text file" aesthetic and was all about donald trump and his supposed guilt over "Sochastic" (stochastic) terrorism. This was certainly an amateur because he wrote sochastic hundreds of times without spellchecking it into a real word.
I can still go straight to books to read about stuff, or find dedicated websites for more popular topics. For all it's faults, wikipedia is good for giving you a survey of things that exist and are relevant to a topic. But, it isn't as easy as just being there before the normie content washed it all away.
Do you know of anything interesting or important that has been buried by tangential media coverage or carelessly automated content?
