Dumb-Ass Workarounds

There's a saying I picked up in my traversals of the waking world: "If it's stupid and it works, it's not that stupid." Originally found on the pages of Buck Godot by Phil Foglio. Found again and again in various places, and oft paraphrased depending on the intended audience. And let me tell you, it is good fucking advice. Sometimes, stupid problems need dumb-ass solutions.

1970-somethingorother...

My primary school had an ongoing plague of... let's call them "head-pets" for those of delicate sensibilities. Newsletters to parents of the children who went there, letting them know about the issue did very little. And in this particular era, not every household had a phone. For perspective, my mother signed on to get a landline when she was expecting me and didn't actually get the phone connected until after I was two years old. But I digress.

The problem was with a certain cadre of parents who were convinced that their blood was too pure or their little darlings too pristine to bring home inhabitants on their darling little heads. So no matter the interviews, the consultations, the requests to please check, they would not budge. They wouldn't even look at their kids' heads. Of course their little darling couldn't get them.

Enter the work-around. The headmaster sent out a new newsletter, informing the parents that any child found with "head-pets" would be sent home with a note, and the parents then had three days to act or they would be reported to Child Protection for neglect.

The "head-pets" problem was solved in a week.

1990-somethingorother...

Web pages were a new thing, and interested folk running various pages wanted to join up, as nerds do. This wasn't like the newsnet forums, where you could just comingle by going to the same simple address. And this was before reliable search engines, so a different solution was made.

Web rings.

Websites would effectively link hands and help people interested in a thing find more stuff about that thing from various friends. Some people became ring nexii, linked through varied interests through several rings. And there was always the chance of someone else popping up with something new if you journeyed down the right ring.

2020's

Long gone are the days when a certain search engine company reminded all employees to not be evil. Now, money is all, and delivering advertising at best and slop at worst is more important than delivering what the searcher is looking for. And a lot of well-known places are employing plagiarism machines in the lust to overwhelm users with slop.

Some places are employing plagiarism machines without having any real use for them. Strictly out of FOMO.

It doesn't matter if the people who go there want it. Hell no. It just matters that it's the hot new thing and a lot of places want to make the line go up. And that's the current way to imitate infinite growth in a closed system.

So now people are looking at other ways to get what they really want.

Peertube and the Vidiverse are exactly like YouTube used to be before any algorithms made things bad. Full of real people sharing the things they want to share. Not for profit, but for joy.

Invidious helps you watch YouTube without any algorithms, censorship, or adds preventing you watching the things you want to see.

DuckDuckGo doesn't trace your searches for profit, and Kagi is an advertising-free search engine where you are the customer (yes, you pay for it) and not the product.

The Fediverse is still there. So is Tumblr. And it's looking like creative people who don't want to go anywhere near the plagiarism machine might start thinking about web rings.

[Psst! If you want to start one with me, my hub site is internutter.org okay? Send me your link and I will link to you in turn]