I believe so. Whenever I have a problem, I look for an answer in the following order: search engine > reading a forum post > documentation > writing a forum post. I usually don’t work on bleeding-edge software, so somebody probably has already asked my question and received an answer too. If it hasn’t explicitly been asked yet, it might have already been answered in the documentation. Furthermore, as you said, Stack Overflow would much sooner delete your post for being a duplicate of a 21-year-old post than provide an answer to your question. There are other (and sometimes newer) tools out there that can provide the same answer without putting up so much resistance to you simply attempting to use them. If they want their traffic back, they could start there, instead of “rebranding”.

How pathetic. Not only do they still keep the genocidal state in (except for that other one!), they don’t even dare to face the music. Cowardice on all fronts.

P.S Mossad bot farm bested Estonia, Rest In esPresso _/s

That’s where I think this will really shine. I agree that I wouldn’t get this to only play video games on, but they seem a LOT cheaper than the Mac Studios/Minis that are used for portable, heavy-duty compute.

!nottheonion@lemmy.world

Or pizza, or adrenochrome.

Using the more-than-zero-click internet of today is like sticking your dick into the mysterious mush at the bottom of a dumpster; maybe it’ll feel good, but it will also certainly feel absolutely disgusting no matter what.

This is unironically how half of the planet uses the internet. Do you notice anything that might turn them off from clicking on another 5 links to find an answer to their question? Just one reason for them to all flock to ChatGPT for all of their browsing needs? I don’t, because I’m part of the other half that uses an adblocker, that has an objectively better experience of the internet. But now that Google is turning the screws on the browser extensions, that half might also stop clicking altogether.

Then there are the cookie banners, the email-begging popups, the login walls, the top 3 or 5 or more search results being barely-relevant sponsored garbage, the dark patterns and so on and so forth. It just becomes too much to bear. Maybe not everyone is equipped with the understanding of the existence of enshittification, but everyone sure is sick and tired of it.

And finally, there’s the dreaded paywall:

Everyone complains day and night about people not fact-checking information across multiple sources, but how on earth are we expected to do that with every single story when all of the journalism websites want you to whip out your credit card (they don’t even take my bank’s payment processor) to sign up for yet another subscription that STILL HAS ADS. Of course I’m going straight to the Wayback Machine (which is under attack from hackers and lawsuits) or paywall removers (which seem to work less and less). However, once again, most people don’t bypass them or don’t know how to, so they either pay up or or try to find another way.

Today, our way of life requires us to ask countless questions which we simply don’t know the answers to. The fastest way to find them is through websites via search engines, but since shareholders value growth over profit, they all must be chock full of the aforementioned crap and bloat. The zero-click internet offers all of the benefits without any of the drawbacks. The nonzero-click internet simply doesn’t compete in time or convenience, even if it does in accuracy. If they want to have their users back, they’ll need to make their services not painful to use.

What else bothers you? I’m curious.

Yeah, I didn’t properly understand how a clutch actually worked before I helped my family rip some bushes out of the ground with a small tractor some time ago. I usually stalled the engine when I was forced to stop, as I would forget to push the clutch in. I was also somewhat shocked that I just got to partake in traffic after driving around for 30 minutes in a rather empty area. The hardest part was when I went into a neighborhood where almost half of the road was taken up by parked cars. My instructor and I were very satisfied with how it went, and I also found it fun, even if it was stressful at times.

I just had my first driving lesson! I only stalled the engine a few times.

You’re entirely correct, I discussed this with someone else after writing my comment and they raised the exact same points. Banning and blocking won’t solve the problems, only education will.

I once remember reading either an article or a comment here somewhere about a different solution that could be easier for nearly everyone.

Despite every country having their own laws/standards about how old people must be to view certain things on the internet, we can all at least agree on what categories we may want to restrict (e.g adult content, social media, user interaction, etc.). After defining all of these categories, we could add a HTML tag in the header of all of our websites that tell us which of these categories apply. The only thing that would need to happen on the user side is for them to instruct their browser which of these tags should not allowed to be loaded. Instead of each of these websites needing to collect IDs and face scans to verify an age, they could simply tell the user which categories of content they are, have the client device compare it to the list of restricted content and act accordingly.

A quick example: Client connects to Instagram -> Instagram’s HTML header contains the tag “social_media” -> Client’s browser sees that “social_media” is in the blocklist -> User only gets a restricted content screen

While the technical side would be easy, this solution still relies on the websites to be honest about their category and for the user to enforce this blocklist. The Australian government would not have a hard time making sure that Instagram and other widespread social media websites are honest about their website content, but the sheer volume of other websites on the internet would be impossible to enforce. This would either require trust in the goodwill of others (which is not easy to find in an enormous anonymous space) or to have automated crawlers try to guess the tags or just to rely on the many public blocklists to fill in the gaps. The second half of this solution is for the tags to actually be blocked by the browsers. Since these restrictions only ever apply to children, we should task their parents with ensuring that their children can only use web browsers with these blocklists enabled. I assume that any operating system worth their salt has options to restrict installation of other software, so the only change that would need to be made is for browsers to also come with parental controls that allow parents to set these blocklists and prevent them from being changed without permission. “User interaction” and the names of the other tags are likely alien phrases to many parents out there, so the browsers should probably offer simple blocklists that state their purpose, e.g “Australian social media restriction for children under 16”. If parents really want their children not to be on social media, they shouldn’t expect technology to do all of the parenting for them. We can give them simple, safe and secure tools to allow them to control their children’s access to their devices, but they should still be responsible with actually using them and ensuring that they aren’t being circumvented.

What do you think about this? Can we rely on websites honestly tagging their content, devices coming with working parental controls and parents properly using them? Or must we really scan everybody’s face and ID before letting them use social media? My solution does place a lot of (maybe misguided) trust in websites and parents, but I think that this is the easiest way for every restriction on children using certain parts of the internet to be enforced, while still respecting people’s privacy.

___

What, are you telling me that there aren’t any red-haired merpeople in the lakes? Disney lied to me!

Aaaand the whole circus starts once again!

It also illustrates how nice and fat my blocklist is, as I keep trying to expand threads that never load.

Spoken like Fuckerberg and Co. to keep the shareholders happy.

Me: Checks RSS feed
RSS feed: nothing new

Me: Checks RSS feed again, later in the day
RSS feed: nothing new

Me: Opens Lemmy
Lemmy: Here’s that new article!

Why do I even bother using RSS, if the Lemmings post it just as quickly?

Does anybody want some toast?

How’s the experience? Asking for a buddy