Used to get about 200+ pages of search results. Now it's about 30 actual results and half of them are fake / malicious / useless. Google as a company was once an innovator, but is now mostly a barrier to any kind of progress or improvement.

Yes. Truthfully for the last 2-3 years I have been dismayed with the direction social media in general were going, not only Reddit. Here were the 3 major issues I had: 1- lower quality of content & the volume of bad content drowning out the good, 2- the corruption of the companies themselves, and 3- the toxic social environment with nasty behavior becoming the norm. I think that fragmenting the web into smaller and more distributed communities, with a slower pace, will probably be a good thing at this point in time.

PS I'm happy to admit the web has always had a dark side, but it had gotten noticeably much worse in recent years.

I actually think that Android has gone downhill in a big way, but I still won't go to Apple's closed ecosystem, and I don't care what teenagers think.

Probably belongs in the "local observations" thread but all of the employers in my area (Midwestern USA) are doing at least partial RTO -- it started midway through 2022 and picked up momentum since. Obviously SWE can easily be done from home with digital meetings, and so it's just a lot of time and energy wasted commuting. I could see 1x/2 weeks for a sprint meeting or something but the way they are doing this is just absurd. It's all to shore up control and their CRE which will collapse anyway.

All of which goes to clarify the fact that, pay aside, corporations are really just not the place to be when it comes to innovation or forward thinking.

I'll say. The kings of proprietary code grifting, but they sure want YOU to share all your code on GH, which they own (so that corporations can rip and run with it).

Proprietary software has basically just turned into a giant grift and it makes me not want to use any of it anymore.

I'm not surprised. An instance of this would be the monarch butterfly which was abundant when I was a child. Then there were years where no one saw them and they even were presumed extinct in our area. Finally in 2016 I saw them again in a different part of the same state I was living at the time, and slowly they returned. But the overall volume of insect life in general is down. I would guess a large part of it is owing to both destruction of habitat and excessive use of pesticides. Suburbanization in my region has accelerated this process.

Yeah, they should have the resources to hire pretty much the best devs, it's not like they are a startup or in some kind of backwater situation. They're an old company with a big name and a lot of money.

The piece is generally good, although I'd take issue with the statement that there's no historical precedent for decline such as we are about to see. The main difference is in the global scale and population numbers in civilization now as versus previous known collapses, e.g. the Roman Empire, the Lowland Mayans, the "Bronze Age Collapse" and so on. But in all those cases, very high population densities were achieved that pushed the limits of their carrying capacity as much as ours do now. And other trends not unlike our context, cultural decadence, mass migration, falling birth rates, etc all made their appearance as well.

Also the "life expectancy not exceeding thirty" claim is commonly repeated but is mistaken. The number was obtained because they did not omit infant mortality from the statistics, whether out of an intention to mislead or simple error I'm not sure, which was much higher in premodern times. Once that is accounted for, Europeans of the so-called "Dark Ages" lived to between their 40s-50s and occasionally 60s. It did represent a falloff of life span but not quite so drastic as is claimed here.

In America I see complacency continuing, because I've learned from experience that as long as an oil boom is in progress, you cannot get Americans to accept energy descent as a concept. It will take another Great American Oil Bust like in 2015-20 to wake them up a bit. Even then I don't know whether Americans can accept the reality of limits, because they have a natural optimism that is hard to pierce.

Observing American health care firsthand thanks to ill relatives, I can say that it still functions but it is probably a few years at most to collapse. Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services budget is about 15% funded and getting worse each year. Wait times for specialty appointments are months, surgery a half-year at least (unless urgent/life-threatening), care impossible to access -- many people have to go to the ED just for diagnosis. Life expectancy down significantly in the last 10 years. We won't escape Canada's fate.

The homeless population increasing in a geometric ratio is something I have also seen in the USA. Luckily it has been a very mild winter or we would likely have large numbers of people freezing to death here as well.

It's actually scary that most of the world's potash comes from 4 countries and 3 of those are currently in hostilities with the USA.

I doubt we will ever see complete shortages even if there are embargoes because they will just sell potash to us via third parties but still... not an antifragile situation at all. And you have to wonder how much is left/how sustainable is the current production.

Splintering communities suffer from major attrition events that lower their value. We already have a model for where Twitter and Reddit are going -- FB. Compared with 10 years ago it is a graveyard. If it weren't for their ownership of IG, it would be far worse for them. It is now a site for older people and for an awful lot of fake accounts. Twitter and Reddit are headed this same direction, but it's probably a 2-3 year timeline before it is really obvious. More generally, the model of centralized social media has already peaked. I am not disputing that they will still have large user bases but there will be a slow grinding down.

I believe that Western Europe's population at the dawn of the 17th century was about 20-25 million and this did not represent a base case for preindustrial organization -- in fact it was quite scaled up and organized in its own preindustrial way, with population having been significantly less at certain places and times before that. So that gives an idea of where things may be headed, and that doesn't take into account the accumulated damage to the biosphere that we can expect on the downside of the slope which did not have any parallel in the preindustrial world.

Sorry to practice thread necromancy to respond, but what the internet is really good for at this point is aggregating the previous output of culture. Social media has gotten way past the point of "too much noise" but sites like archive dot org are gems, and there are a bunch of private curated libraries like that as well. So in other words, the internet is good for learning if you are a self-directed person. But that's about it, and so that's what I use it for at this point.

It's also an interesting question to ask what will happen to the web in a declining net energy world, over the next 1-2 decades. Probably a slower, text-only internet could be preserved well into the future. But the question is will it be? The corporate stewardship of the internet has been very poor.

I downvoted because the poster didn't back up any of its claims and these kind of hit and run, insulting posts are getting more and more common. I am starting to suspect there's a concerted effort by green energy shills to infiltrate these message boards and spread nonsense. We know there are organized efforts by bad actors to spam sites and spread discord and misinformation, and these kind of attacks have become so frequent that one really becomes suspicious. Green energy has big, institutional money behind it and a vested interest in lying to the public who subsidizes it about its viability, so there's plenty of motive to misuse sites both large and small for this purpose.

I also think there will be financial crashes, and likely more than one -- just as the last leveraged bubbles collapsed in 2008 and 2020. Of course, he is right that this will lead to them adopting an inflationary model to "solve" it, which will result in a worse version of the same dynamic with time. Eventually I think we will get the dreaded hyperinflation if it goes on long enough.

The wild card is that the demographic collapse and energy descent trends will be highly deflationary no matter what government does, but that's a longer term issue.

My general theory is that yes this was true for the Cold War era when there was a "trilateral" system of the USA with arms in Europe (what eventually became the EU) and East Asia (Japan, SK, Taiwan, etc) against the communist bloc. But since the 2000s, right before the GFC the EU was getting to be as big GDP as the USA and turning into a serious competitor and with more viable productive industry. Ever since then, I think US policy has been to harm the EU more and more. The US wants subservient allies, not self-sufficient ones. Alienating EU's energy ties to Russia has been more damaging to European industry than to Russia thus far. And as far as I can tell US oligarchs mainly care about the Ukraine because of the agricultural potential of that land and the US policy of controlling world food supplies. Supposedly some millions of hectares of Ukrainian land have already ended up owned by various Western companies like Cargill or Bayer (not sure if this has been proven but I'd not be surprised).

I think it represents people being fed up with both institutions in the real world and the decline of the quality of the internet since the last couple of decades. As for them tuning in to something else, I have seen much more interest in DIY, hard skills, personal projects and such of late, but nothing societal beyond that which would really bring people together. I think that's the best we can hope for at this time -- at least people learning useful skills or not sacrificing their whole lives to corporate ambition is a plus.

But they lost the best 10% of their posters and content. That's devastating. Same thing as happened to Twitter, FB, and others before them.

Yes, this is a good idea. Farmed salmon in the USA was fed in such a way that they had much diminished Omega-6 content versus wild-caught. However, I am not sure if practices have changed since I first looked into it, which was in the later 2000s. It is harder to track down suppliers to verify in the USA because of the supermarket phenomenon here.