Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: Web-surfing tips for strange times, published by eukaryote on June 1, 2024 on LessWrong.
[This post is more opinion-heavy and aimlessly self-promoting than feels appropriate for Lesswrong. I wrote it for my site, Eukaryote Writes Blog, to show off that I now have a substack. But it had all these other observations about the state of the internet and advice woven in, and THOSE seemed more at home on Lesswrong, and I'm a busy woman with a lot of pictures of fish to review, so I'm just going to copy it over as posted without laboriously extricating the self-advertisement.
Sorry if it's weird that it's there!]
Eukaryote Writes Blog is now syndicating to Substack. I have no plans for paygating content at the time, and new and old posts will continue to be available at EukaryoteWritesBlog.com. Call this an experiment and a reaching-out. If you're reading this on Substack, hi! Thanks for joining me.
I really don't like paygating. I feel like if I write something, hypothetically it is of benefit to someone somewhere out there, and why should I deny them the joys of reading it?
But like, I get it. You gotta eat and pay rent. I think I have a really starry-eyed view of what the internet sometimes is and what it still truly could be of a collaborative free information utopia.
But here's the thing, a lot of people use Substack and I also like the thing where it really facilitates supporting writers with money. I have a lot of beef with aspects of the corporate world, some of it probably not particularly justified but some of it extremely justified, and mostly it comes down to who gets money for what. I really like an environment where people are volunteering to pay writers for things they like reading. Maybe Substack is the route to that free information web utopia.
Also, I have to eat, and pay rent. So I figure I'll give this a go.
Still, this decision made me realize I have some complicated feelings about the modern internet.
Hey, the internet is getting weird these days
Generative AI
Okay, so there's generative AI, first of all. It's lousy on Facebook and as text in websites and in image search results. It's the next iteration of algorithmic horror and it's only going to get weirder from here on out.
I was doing pretty well on not seeing generic AI-generated images in regular search results for a while, but now they're cropping up, and sneaking (unmarked) onto extremely AI-averse platforms like Tumblr. It used to be that you could look up pictures of aspic that you could throw into GIMP with the aspect logos from Homestuck and you would call it "claspic", which is actually a really good and not bad pun and all of your friends would go "why did you make this image".
And in this image search process you realize you also haven't looked at a lot of pictures of aspic and it's kind of visually different than jello, but now you see some of these are from Craiyon and are generated and you're not sure which ones you've already looked past that are not truly photos of aspic and you're not sure what's real and you're put off of your dumb pun by an increasingly demon-haunted world, not to mention aspic.
(Actually, I've never tried aspic before. Maybe I'll see if I can get one of my friends to make a vegan aspic for my birthday party. I think it could be upsetting and also tasty and informative and that's what I'm about, personally. Have you tried aspic? Tell me what you thought of it.)
Search engines
Speaking of search engines, search engines are worse. Results are worse. The podcast Search Engine (which also covers other topics) has a nice episode saying that this is because of the growing hoardes of SEO-gaming low-quality websites and discussing the history of these things, as well as discussing Google's new LLM-generated results.
I don't have much to add - I think there is a lot here,...

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