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How do people find good information on the internet these days? (programming.dev)

submitted 1 year ago by catch22@programming.dev to c/technology@lemmy.world

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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?

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[–] Aceticon@lemmy.world 8 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

It only works at the low level and for the really brainless stuff.

There are a lot of things which beyond a certain level require domain specific expertise to spot the bullshit.

One of the first things the genuine skeptic figures out is the limits of one's own capability to evaluate information.

You can use some heuristics to try and spot greedy/marketing bollocks even in domains you don't understand in depth (for example: cui bono - if those pushing a message benefit from others believing it, it instantly goes into the "untrusted" mental bucket) but even that only goes so far (it's not by chance that, for example, in politics and economics most Think Tanks hide their sources of funding: it hides the direct link between "studies" they publish those who fund them benefiting if the public and politicians believe those "studies").

In summary, do it whilst being aware that we're all limited and as smart as one is there are plenty of equally smart people who make money from swindling others.