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?
Honestly, niche YouTube channels. The problem is sometimes you don’t want to sit through a 30-45 minute video to find the information you’re after.
I haven’t found Google useful as a search engine for years and now Youtube is squeezing creators and pushing so many ads it will become unusable for me once the anti-ad-blocker policy is fully implemented. Paying for Youtube premium isn’t the answer either, it will cost as much as Amazon Prime just to watch YT videos, then the price will continue to rise after we subscribe to the service.
We must remember that Alphabet Inc, the parent company of these services is an essentially an advertising company that also sells the data they collect about us to virtually anyone, including police in right-wing states looking to arrest abortion seekers.
https://telegra.ph/How-Big-Tech-Revenue-and-Profit-Breaks-Down-by-Company-12-09
https://www.androidauthority.com/youtube-anti-adblocking-feature-3354930/
https://www.businessinsider.com/police-getting-help-social-media-to-prosecute-people-seeking-abortions-2023-2
They are also removing features like downvote count and raising prices. Fuck google and YouTube.
I would agree, you can still find unbiased stuff on YouTube, though depending how popular the thing you’re looking up is, you might also have to go through a bunch of sell-outs first.
Also the only thing I still go to the Rxx website for.
Anything notorios for hype, has its hype based marketing shills that drown out the real information and honest voices. Excelant example is anything involving sex
I would agree. And I love those videos with timestamps.