The death of Stackoverflow is one of these events where the site has been completely killed by AI and yet its contents is completely necessary for AI to know about solving programming problems. Its death will mark the end of AIs ability to learn how to solve programming issues. Its cannibalizing itself in the process, as it destroys its sources it destroys its own ability to learn.
this post was submitted on 25 May 2026
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It's not just that, it's shitting where it eats. People are using it to fill the internet with disinformation, then it trains itself on it's own disinformation, and breeds even worse disinformation. This is why AI can never be smarter than it was in 2021.
On top of that, due to the indiscriminate DDOSing of the entire internet by AI bots, websites have been blocking any web crawlers that are not Google, which just contributes to their monopoly.
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Friends don't let friends use Google.
I can't remember the name, but when the internet was just starting and there were a lot of search engines with no dominate ones, there was an aggregator program that you could input many search engines into, then use it as the searching tool. It would query all the engines and combine, sort, rank, and remove duplicate finds.
Edit: more specific - It was much like an FTP or torrent program but you'd load up what search engines to use and your search words, and it would actively pull the info then provide a single page with all results.
The reason I mention it is because we're sort of back at that point. Google is failing, Bing never was great, and all the alternatives have their issues, usually with not having the same database to work with. So if you gathered all the best ones, the ones without ties to corporate or AI, then put their results together, maybe you'd have something like what Google was at its peak before "do no evil" got painted over.
Incidentally, Google became what it was/is because it gobbled up a lot of those early search engines' databases. I miss you, Hotbot. You were a good one.
Search used to be so good. I had an old Honda civic that suddenly wouldn't start. It wasn't the starter, alternator, or battery. I managed to find a forum post with my exact issue, which was that a small rubber piece on the clutch pressed a button to "tell" the starter it was okay to start. Twenty minutes later I had zip tied a piece of plastic into place and had a working car again.
If I tried to diagnose that same issue today, it'd be dozens of SEO garbage slop sites without any actual useful information.
I was thinking the same thing recently. It's not the place it once was. But in general the internet has changed a lot. And it's not just AI.
- All sorts of paywalls especially in news sites.
- Everything is getting centralized into a few sites and they're usually eithe poorly indexable or not at all (Discord, facebook, X, Instagram and so on)
- Fediverse (Lemmy, Mastodon) also struggles with search engines.
- People trying to sell you shit, create a brand even more than before. Because of this all sorts of SEO optimization crap is done like writing BS articles nobody cares about.
- AI slop.
- Search engines have gotten better of getting rid of "illegal stuff".
- A lot of sites are just presentational bloat with no substance. Very cool looking landing pages with all sorts of cool animations but when you need to actually find the information that you need... the same UI usually gets in the way.
Oh and now we're getting into age verification crap also yay
An example of number 4, there's a poster I've seen on reddit that's posting very relevant content, but then every post ends with "@xxxxxxxx on all socials". It just takes the whole thing from content I might want to engage with to the exact opposite.
They are literally walling off all this information that used to be easy to access and for the public. It’s our data that we the people decide to share with the world and these rent seeing corporations are hiding it away so they can start charging us "tokens" to access our own public information.
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DuckDuckGo and Ecosia?
Ecosia have planted 250,000+ trees so far and publish their accounts every month. I can’t think of a better option, unless there is a niche requirement.
they burn all their efforts by pushing genAI tech on their platform
Isn’t that hyperbole rather than truth? They’re still carbon negative.
They don’t provide AI by default (at least, I don’t get it). So people like us can continue to not use AI and the hundreds of million who use it every day can still support tree planting.
I don’t like AI, but if they don’t add it they could risk limiting their reach and environmental goals.
AI companies do not release any numbers themselves for carbon emissions. Therefore, companies that use AI cannot in any certainty claim to be carbon negative or neutral, because they have to count the supply chain emissions as well.
not adding AI does not stifle environmental goals, in fact you can only truthfully claim to strive for carbon goals if you do not use AI. After all, there is a reason that Microsoft abandoned their emission goals with AI as the cited reason first and foremost, which shows how incredibly dirty AI can be, even if no one releases any sensible metrics.
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Go to https://ecosia.org/ in a private browser window. It says "AI that answers to the planet". Search something and the AI Overview on top is enabled by default.
I use them with AI disabled, but it should be the default setting.
Edit: I just did a couple test searches and didn't get the AI overview. Don't know what triggers it.
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Startpage and Mojeek.
DDG has contracts w Microslop.
Startpage uses google btw, Mojeek is decent. (I like Mojeek backend with SearXNG.)
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More Perfect Union did a video on Google's descent into evil. I think it's this one
TLDW: Once Google pivoted from being a search service to an advertising agency, it was motivated to keep users from hyperlinking away from Google, and so offered summaries and alternatives controlled by Alphabet that allowed it to keep offering you ads.
So this AI service is just a natural iteration.
he means reddit mostly. AI SLOP GENERATOR, TRAINING ON SLOP like reddit. with a little of plagiarizing from authors, and artists.
I called to schedule a play date at my local dog daycare/boarding, it went to an AI answering service. I asked if it was AI since I could hear noice in the background (literal fake background chatter and noise), when she said yes, hung up. SO tired of AI everywhere. Fuck it all.
lmao, I bet they trained the stupid thing on recordings from massive call centers. It probably thinks that all the 'background' noise is just part of how humans communicate.
it probably thinks
It doesn't think. People need to stop anthropomorphizing the statistical probability machine.
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ah yes, reddit, the most well-mannered and measured of social media platforms that never indulges itself in spreading hate in misinformation.
It is normal to glue pepperoni to your pizza to keep it from sliding off when baking.
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It's the same arc every monopolistic corporation has taken before it, AI is just accelerating the pace of consuming your customer/product because profits must always increase.
There will be no large scale shift from these experiences because most people are either ok, apathetic or blissfully ignorant to the situation, the best you can do is to remove yourself from the exploitation of the userbase. Linux instead of Windows or Android, Almost any search engine other than Google, fediverse instead of reddit, etc.
I don't understand how these companies want to seem and think they are so smart by choosing new niche data (scraped) to train AI in a bid to try and make it "smart"....
Has any other living being become "smart" by only ingesting information directly from the Internet? You can train other animals to perform many tasks and can probably say they are smart when they perform them as expected. I doubt any of the training methods is to tape headphones, a screen and sometimes a microphone to their faces forever (I kinda don't wanna know if this false 😶).
The best example we have, is ourselves, and even though we use the Internet, babies are not taught how to walk and talk by only interacting with the Internet.
I feel like I might be saying too much, but I think the best AI we're gonna get is to unplug it from the Internet, and then fucking raise it for 20 years like a normal, super fast-thinking child prodigy. Then just make copies of that and train further by having it go to school for the things needed.
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It's a self defeating strategy as more people turn to ai, less content gets produced so ai becomes static.
I truly believe the token model will kill AI, it will become too expensive
It already is too expensive and adding more compute doesn't make it cheaper lol it just causes a race to the bottom among data center providers and an eventual crash there too.
We put this real question to AI Mode, "Why does Google Search suck now?" And you won't believe the answer! (Actually, you won't be surprised.)
The Chocolate Factory's AI search substitute offered this completely trustworthy reply:
"You are definitely not imagining it. Users, tech critics, and researchers have documented a measurable decline in Google Search quality. The core issue is that the search engine no longer feels like a tool designed to find the best corner of the web; instead, it feels like a vehicle designed to keep you on Google-owned properties or clicking on monetized links.
"The degradation of Google Search stems from a mix of aggressive monetization, an ongoing arms race with web spammers, and the disruptive introduction of AI features."
AI is gonna be the same path. Once people trust it, it'll stop mattering if it give the best info, what matters is if people buy products and believe advertisements/propaganda.
There just will never be as much money in providing nonbiased and accurate answers as there is in manipulating people. So as long as capitalism runs everything, the end goal will always be manipulating people for someone's profit.
It's not an accident, it's not "enshitification", it's the natural and inevitable result of unregulated capitalism. The only way to avoid it, is to heavily regulate capitalism. Acting like it's a separate problem that can be avoided without regulating capitalism just makes people think we can make unregulated capitalism work, if we could it would be working already.
We more less vibe-coding and more coders with thigh-high striped socks.
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Google has been cannibalising the net for a decade or so now
Only a minute away until Google starts a Soylent Green subsidiary company
Honestly I think Google is pretty fucked in the long term
Nobody google anymore. They just ask chat
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