And internet changes

 I remember the kerfuffle that led up to the article I'm going to cite here: Knitting(dot)com had been idle for a while, a couple of guys with a misapprehension of what knitters were bought it, thought they'd "disrupt" knitting, not banking on the fact that (a) many knitters are highly tech-savvy and skeptical of such things and (b) knitters want community, they don't want to be 'splained to and sold stuff they already have sources they prefer to use.

But I was reminded of it today because the author of is on Bluesky, and she posted a link to it today.

And you know, this fits in with other stuff: she notes how Reddit is in revolt over data-scraping, and sellers are leaving Etsy over its increasing its fees. 

And also, today: in the lawsuit against Google it was revealed that they apparently used code that altered a person's search to direct it to specific advertising sites. I hadn't *really* noticed; I don't use Google for shopping advice - I have sources I trust and use (like for books and for yarn) or for more unusual things I will ask someone whose opinion I value. 

But I HAD noticed that searching for information has gotten steadily worse and the results are increasingly-less-related to the actual question I was asking.

And yes, I know, duckduckgo or some of the other alternatives. But it's hard to retrain yourself, and also, firefox uses it as the default search. But SEO has made it pretty worthless for a lot of the scientific stuff I want to do. 

And yes, there's a word for it, which I'll euphemize here as enpoopification. But it's really all an old, old problem - doesn't it say in 1st Timothy that "The love of money is the root of all evil"? Well, that's part of it: everyone wants to "monetize" now, to squeeze as much coin as possible out of the site's users. 

Julia Malleck, the article's author, notes: "Site owners are increasingly, and more aggressively, seeking ways to monetize online spaces for their own profit...." And yeah. That's the enpoopification. They don't care about providing good service; they care about getting the most money for the least service possible.

And that's also in some cases why blogs went away: people were encouraged to try to get money for them, or that writing for free is the domain of blockheads (as Samuel Johnson once said). And yeah, I'm a blockhead, I guess. But I don't care: as I said yesterday, I don't have enough people here who share my interests and it gets very lonely, so the occasional comment or the occasional response to what I've written is valuable to me.

(I also have no illusions that my writing here would be worth money; I know it's not that good and a lot of times it's just boring, because my life is boring).

But yeah- those two "techbros" (as described in the article) basically thought they'd.....well, COLONIZE knitting, and strip it for resources, and profit. And they didn't seem to really care (even later, after they had recanted a bit, they didn't seem to bother to learn the terminology, referring to "purl stitches" as "pearl stitches" instead. 

And their dismissive crack - which I remember - about "some grandma who's had a little blog for 20 years" - well, I'm not a grandma but I'm technically old enough, and I have had a "little blog" for more than 20 years now. 

But also, I bristle at "disruptors" and do somewhat see them as colonizers (in the most negative sense) - people who care about money more than what they're disrupting. I've sat through seminars I was required to attend on campus where I was told "MOOCs are the future! The 10% of you who are superstar teachers will still have a job, the rest of you will earn minimum wage working as graders or will have to find new work!" (which, I would note, is a TERRIBLE message to give your hardworking profs two days before a semester starts, and I wonder how much they paid that dude to come in and discourage all of us). 

And yeah, I admit I'm cynical, and maybe some "disruptors" do good, but I've seen too many situations where, for example, the juice extractor was cheap enough but the proprietary packages of fruit (which were the only things that would work in it) weren't, and then the company went bankrupt, and you were left with an inconvenient doorstop. And it DOES seem all too often that it's basically people coming in and wanting to cut open a golden goose, grab all the eggs, and run, and not share even a crumb of shell with the people who originally tended the goose. 

But yeah. It seems like we're living through a time where certain things are getting worse - more expensive, good things are harder to find, trustworthy information more difficult to come by. And I don't know. I admit these past few years have driven me farther down the spectrum of "pessimism" and I hope I'm wrong. But I also know no one ever went broke banking on the greed of others. 

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In happier news, here's the very simple hat I'm working on. I'm about halfway to where I do the decreases. It's just a 1x1 rib, but it seems these days, simple things are all I can do. (I really do wonder if I've suffered some cognitive decline; many days I can't play the piano as well as I might want).