HN Explorer

Google is pants and the narrowing of collective imagination

8 points by shisisms ↗ HN
Searching for parenting advice and being a veteran searchaholic, you realise that 99% of people (me very much included) will end up reading the exact same 10 pages of advice as everyone else. With virtually no idea who has written them, with a massive cognitive load to filter that advice.

When you apply that at scale you realise that on something as important as parenting advice the narrowing of our collective imagination is a dystopian nightmare.

It’s not even a debate, as the technical nuance and the philosophical complexities are just too strained.

This is part rant, part cry for help, part exhaustion, part there must be a need to surface the issue.

11 comments

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Finnucane
Google is the wrong trousers?
PaulHoule
I think it's British for "Google sucks"
shisisms
Google is the “wrong trousers” maybe the almost perfect translation.
legrande
site:old.reddit.com "query"
shisisms
Standard response, but it’s not true is it. Again, level of trust in the person posting is minimally measured, so again the cognitive load is placed on the searcher. Which means that at scale it devolves into nonsense.
cercatrova
> the cognitive load is placed on the searcher

That is how it's always is, when searching and researching anything. One cannot really trust the source so one should always verify that any claims made are true.

shisisms
Agreed, but what if it wasn’t. Google, non-gamed, in the earliest days implicitly surfaced trust. That’s now lost. Reddit has the same problem, it doesn’t surface trust (karma isn’t the same thing).

Real life communities have trust built in through a range of mechanisms. That’s missing from search today. Which is trying to rapidly answer a question, rather than deliver a trusted response.

gnz11
At this point in the game, I would be shocked if parenting advice was anything other than pure blog spam. Best to take any advice you find online with a grain of salt anyway.
WorldPeas
I would say it takes a little research beyond "tell me what to think, tell me what to do". My best advice would be youtube. This can go from something like looking at how someone like mark rober inspires little children to make, to genuine advice channels. you could also try wiby.me for an oldweb search.

EDIT: as someone who grew up on the internet sort of how it is today, I would strongly recommend you restrict your child's socialization online to only friends they know in real life. being able to talk to others is something you aren't ready for at that age and it can lead to serious mental harm. I'd also recommend you throttle their bandwidth so they can't get addicted to streaming video.

gwnywg
I was in the same boat when my first child was born. Pick any topic, you almost always have first few pages filled with same content which I found common sense rather than really useful pieces of advices. At the time I managed to find what I was looking for on 10+ page. This made me to start collecting books on topics instead of relying on internet tomake it available to me.
muzani
I give it about 5 years before something like web rings reemerges. It's not just Google being pants. FB, Twitter, Discord, and Reddit are all pants too.

Trust continues to decline in all these information aggregators. Eventually, people find sites they like, and use those sites to find other sources, and it'll be web rings all over again.