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?
I know! Five years ago, I got so much shit for keeping print encyclopedias and other reference material. “It’s all on the Internet,” they said.
The joke is on them: the Internet is run by humans and humans are idiots.
I’ve got some bad news for you about who the beings are that wrote those encyclopedias.
If it’s written down AND printed out it is correct.
How to verify? I just printed the above comment. Printers have an objectivity-gizmo that disallows the printing of anything incorrect, y’know!
I lived through 2 weeks without power once after a storm. Made me realise how valuable physical information/ entertainment is.