anenefan (u/anenefan)

anenefan commented on Ask HN: Did you notice any change in DDG's search quality over the last years? · Posted by u/basilikum

anenefan · a month ago

You are not mistaken. DDG search has degraded considerably the last year or so.

As a recent example, I needed to quickly find the zone b tax offset for tax this year. (In Australia.) I note their search today with similar queries is behaving in a manner that most would consider passable (still no result that is going to satisfy what I was after then) - but when I searched a few weeks ago, no matter if I put 2025 or zone b in quotes, were the search results getting any more specific ... google I might mention, failed just as badly. In the end -- yandex for the win, and their first page of results, the first three I thought were hopeful, which got me confidently close enough to the simple bit of information I needed.

I feel sorry for those who haven't noticed how lacking search engines have got the last few years and I recently explained to a youngster who thought it's got just so good ... it's like being out at night looking at the stars and ... marvelling at the handful of bright stars, as well as the multitude of lights from their city's buildings and street lights ... never realising that once if they'd looked up there'd be hundreds of stars easy to see.

anenefan commented on Ask HN: What are you doing this week? · Posted by u/SafeDusk

anenefan · 2 months ago

Paperwork for the tax man.

Once that's off the plate implement a suitable Win 7 compatible database or accounting suite for record keeping that a computer illiterate senior could use with some minor help without too much hassle - figuring simple spreadsheet for their data output they will need in the end.

If I've time after all that, I'll put thoughts how to best reach Australia's weather bom site's [1] designers who for accessibility moved their site's performance from great or excellent to total crud. Even the android phone does not display any better. If I ever needed an example of enshitification ... They need a fall back for those who's devices don't work well or just want to use less bandwidth every time they check their local radar.

[1] www.bom.gov.au

anenefan commented on Is my new idea dumb? · Posted by u/66633

anenefan · 2 months ago

Interesting but I'd suggest something a little simpler. Pricing means hassle but it is a means to stop big content droppers, not just AI or big companies. Rather than per article perhaps just limit how many posts an individual can post a day - thus it urges people to make those posts count.

Pay fee per year or more, a small one, that allows posting a small number of posts a day, and reporting only one or two times a day - otherwise people and bots will abuse it.

Asking the public to validate what goes is one of the problems of the internet at the moment. Instead it's better to have people who naturally fact check stuff to provide links to other proper sources online they are aware of, or at least some idea why whatever might be wrong. That's the other problem the net has at the moment, people truly don't engage apart from yappers who really don't care how fluffy their content is.

anenefan commented on What Happened in 2007? whathappenedin2007.com/... · Posted by u/AJRF

BoredPositron · 2 months ago

Doesn't make any sense if you look at provided data points. The IQ, test scores and sleep quality of people fell because they couldn't have anonymous flame wars on Facebook? The laws you imply happened in 2007-2008 were all introduced in the 2010s. Facebooks real name crackdown happened in 2014...

anenefan · 2 months ago

Echo chambers are not a recent phenomenon, but social media turbo charged it refining the engagement factor. The fact moderation by and large in social media platforms were able to utilise a report button and a script, rather than live human moderators was all thanks IMO to the changes as per 2006 (see reply to AJRF [OP], 2007 is when iirc I started to notice the stark changes to the rest of the discussion areas and occasion angry ex Facebook user. The near humanless moderation apart from the occasion cookie cutter, was particularly conducive for designing algorithms to exploit people, especially young impressionable people.

Additionally no one was really closely monitoring the sleep quality of those who frequented the net, or those who were really engaged (near omni present) on the net pre 2005, but I don't recall thinking the conversations had back then were anything as borked as some ... most of the crud in some social media areas. I'm left with a sense, sensibility was much higher a couple of decades ago ... or one knew that they were going to be called out on whatever they said if it was in error.

anenefan commented on What Happened in 2007? whathappenedin2007.com/... · Posted by u/AJRF

AJRF · 2 months ago

I made this site, and I am not wedded to the idea that smart phones are the only reason these trends started to turn weird.

I try to say as much on the site - and while maybe I place a lot of blame on the relationship between the iPhone -> Increased adoption of internet usage -> Social Media usage going up == lots of detrimental effects I think you've an interesting thread i'd like to pull.

Do you have any more information or reading I can do on this and I can add it to the site?

Something changed between 2007 and now, there is just too much evidence to support that, and I think there is a very strong claim Smartphones are a very large contributing factor, but as you will be aware, the causes are very hard to extract.

anenefan · 2 months ago

Smart phones probably allowed a greater saturation of a person's time with the internet, esp social media areas purposely stoking engagement with the user. I personally know too many people in real life practically married to their phone who recite any number of things from someone they absolutely believe, wholeheartedly accept the person has some apparent title of expertise, rather than the facts as per a well accepted book or area of printed knowledge. It's perplexing but I know the same ... er ... tool with their apparent title were saying the same in an area back in 2004 for instance, they'd be rubbished via a fairly active discussion vetting most of their inaccuracies - some people used to just have nothing better to do at nights than fix up BS.

I wish I could find more and clearer discussions in regard to when this came in and why. ( I lament the lack of a decent search engine present time - there were at least in 2007 numerous discussions in regard to the changes made in the US at the time, the follow though with software updates in regard to terms of service etc.)

Turns out it started in 2006 [1] [2 - is a bit fuzzy but] ... I though should recall the time as I was following the proceedings and when the decision was announced I was frankly appalled and ranted numerous times when the subject came up at various discussion boards lamenting Facebook seemed to have buttered up the legal areas to save them a lot of money on real live moderators to manage disagreements.

But 2007 seems stuck in my head though, as to me it was 2007 when the real fallout started when it started to roll various discussion sites that engaged in freer speech with robust discussions, occasional flames - to the point forum admins and staff of various message boards, forums using software such as phpbb had to decide the best approach to keep everyone happy and not end up dealing with legal threats.

Now getting back to noted decline in common knowledge and people more readily believing BS and why this law changed how dynamics of how fact challenges worked in Facebook. Once the anonymous common intelligence fighter might have posted factual informative links on someone's facebook wall that's ignorantly alleging total BS ... or maybe by purpose running a scam ... and factual challenges generally irritated them and blocking didn't generally work in the long run as it wouldn't be long before someone else was offended by their sheer lack of fact checking ... but after the rule change - the honestly deluded, the scammer or the bullshitter merely had to hit the report button on the anonymous users comment ... and that anonymous account was more or less gone, not a threat to challenge any BS on Facebook until they legitimised their account. Again it was 2007/8 I recall a number of former Facebook users expressing their dismay they'd lost their anonymous Facebook account, given they preferred their relative anonymity.

[1] https://forums.matrixgames.com/viewtopic.php?t=84680

[2] https://volokh.com/archives/archive_2006_01_08-2006_01_14.sh...

anenefan commented on What Happened in 2007? whathappenedin2007.com/... · Posted by u/AJRF

anenefan · 2 months ago

The biggest thing for what plagues the net, society in general, did occurred in 2007 / 8 - it was not the phones - it was what the US govt did in response to Facebook's rather dire lack of real mods over "bullying" ... the move to ban anonymous people arguing and flaming - this flowed though eventually via the new terms of service US based software for forums, boards, and hosting sites required to abide by the new laws. Many forums I used to frequent slowly disappeared being unable to adapt to different software and hosting sites that were happy to ignore US laws.

A real name when challenging the status quo unfortunately attaches the risk of retaliation from either the intended organisation or person, or their fanboys, via direct or creative sets of problems designed to waste time and / or money. Sadly the internet is a bit more fuzzy when it comes to trouble and those dishing it out. Social media of course, had welcomed the new rules, and any anonymous account speaking out against a popular idea could be quickly reported and thus indirectly permanently banned until they complied with real life details.

anenefan commented on Improving numerical measures of human feelings: The case of pain sciencedirect.com/science... · Posted by u/cainxinth

anenefan · 2 months ago

The study acknowledges there remains differences between how people rate pain, just their approach is supposedly more accurate.

Yes one persons 6 might be another's 2 - and that score can be altered by the individual's pain threshold on the day or a person's life experiences of pain (one might have once rated their worst night ever migraine as the worst and very high on the scale until they have had a few episodes of cluster headaches and meh lets call that night a 6, maybe it was closer to 5 ... )

But almost always most people haven't got past pain as just pain and there in lies the biggest problem, pain isn't just physical pain, there's a mix of how much one is agitated / bothered, anxious / worried for themselves or others if whatever their problem goes south, how alert and cognitive they are / distressed and a couple other factors.

The other issue is the slope or gradient of the pain scores [3] which more often is overlooked by doctors and other medical professionals rendering assistance to diagnose and treat those in their care. Personally, mine is fairly steep.

Some robust links for older browsers -- The origin article (6th March 2025) [1] - which includes access link to full 18 page pdf paper. For a summary [2] medicalxpress article / summary

[1] https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.03.05.25323444v... [1a] https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.03.05.25323444v... [pdf]

[2] https://medicalxpress.com/news/2025-09-price-pain.html

[3] Not everyone ends up with a purely linear scale (for example high numbers on my scale a 9 is many times more painful than a 8, 8 is around 3 times more painful than 7 ... and so forth, however lower scores on my scale follow a more linear convention until 4 or so.) But for those who are fortunate to have a linear scale, their gradient isn't necessarily exactly 1 either.

anenefan commented on Wikipedia Can Save the Internet with Advertising techpolicy.press/how-wiki... · Posted by u/mooreds

anenefan · 3 months ago

The internet, referring to public facing websites, is far too fractured to be saved - there's no search engine that's even close to offering, for free, what was available back in the 00's. This isn't just because the search engines got slack, it's because so many different shiny things have been added to the point, wrong browser, apart from the site using sucurishity sentinels patrolling for various things like users of old browsers that could have the inexplicable power to cripple their clients site permanently -- the site's pages plainly do not render as they ought to. Sometimes it's a nothing more serious than sloppy poor coding for image sizes, but just too many sites are more or less too complicated for ensuring a good break down of the pages' content by the search engine, instead relying primarily on seo tagging, erroneous or not.

In some sense though, Wikipedia could improve the internet if they allowed third party advertising, every time some advertising GA web coder submitted their sub par schlock for their ad, it would be refused and pointed to appropriate resources on how to better form their code - till the point for whatever browser wikipedia works with, so would the ad.

anenefan commented on Ask HN: Stuck on Cloudflare's Human Verification · Posted by u/emerongi

anenefan · 3 months ago

Cloudflare does not play well with mozilla (for many it won't load site) and that topic has come up numerous times. If you're using some other browser it might be something else cloudflare has got all exccited about.

It sort of sucks since it's what I use ... am I going to bow down and use some other browser - nope. Some business are losing a lot of customers ... it's their choice and cloudflare are not going to fix it since this problem has been dragging on over a year iirc.

anenefan commented on California age verification bill backed by Google, Meta, OpenAI heads to Newsom politico.com/news/2025/09... · Posted by u/heavyset_go

anenefan · 3 months ago

The bill is a bad idea. Of course big tech likes it, more id equals higher value data they can scrape. When (if?) it arrives it'll be two seconds before some places on the web will need more to be sure the person who set up the entire phone or app is actually not under age, thus the person setting it up will have to provide id ... the bill is a anonyphobes wet dream come true.