Earlier tonight I was looking up a song's lyrics on Genius.com. There was an interpretation at the bottom of the page, I think accompanied by some words from the songwriter himself. But when I scrolled down to read it, within a few seconds I'd be bounced back up to the top of the page and the scroll bar would disappear. After that everything was frozen.
This is not a great tale of woe. Before the page froze a third time I did a highlight all (Ctrl + A) and copied/pasted onto a blank unsaved word document. It turned out the material wasn't particularly earthshaking.
But it is kind of a revealing picture of the state of the Web. The deep pockets are jabbering about how AI is going to change everything. Meanwhile the sites that people use are prone to becoming nonfunctional. Their priorities have little to do with ours.
2 comments:
I can't say I looked something up on Genius.com only to have what was supposed to be there and what I wanted to see fail to open I have had similar experiences mostly with having whole web pages temporarily disappear.
I usually assume it's a hosting problem but sometimes (like trying to open Strategic Culture) the strong possibility is that the site itself has been attacked because somebody doesn't like general slant the place takes. It's hard to tell but you're right the state of the Web seems less accessible than it was a few years ago.
The thing I've taken issue with lately is that google has an AI providing an answer in the first spot no matter what question you may have while right underneath the exact same response from a known Web page has taken second place.
Nevertheless, the www continues to be a wonderful resource.
Genius is one of those sites that doesn't generally run very deep but I look in on it here and there. The particular problem I reported was short-lived but a lot of ad-supported sites are frustratingly buggy.
Strategic Culture is an interesting site. I just read a thoughtful article on the recent annulment of the election in Romania ( https://strategic-culture.su/news/2024/12/14/real-reason-for-annulment-of-romanian-election/ ). It wouldn't surprise me if they had outside parties trying to interfere with them. In the web as it stands it's hard to tell.
These AI answers are incredibly frustrating. Yes, if it weren't there the top result would be something just as informative. Only now you're just supposed to accept the answer and not dig further.
It's a good resource but shouldn't and ultimately can't be the only resource.
Post a Comment