this post was submitted on 22 Oct 2026
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A meme is an idea, behavior, or style that spreads by means of imitation from person to person within a culture and often carries symbolic meaning representing a particular phenomenon or theme.
An Internet meme or meme, is a cultural item that is spread via the Internet, often through social media platforms. The name is by the concept of memes proposed by Richard Dawkins in 1972. Internet memes can take various forms, such as images, videos, GIFs, and various other viral sensations.
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Wait, what? Now it's easier than ever to find information on the internet, what difficulties do people have?
Is this person the one who writes "pls help me" in YouTube comments and doesn't ever explain their problem or come back?
I strongly beg to differ
3 years ago, when I searched for something I found it. Even the esoteric little details buried in an old forum weren't that hard to find
Now? It's fine if you want the most common information, but it's impossible to find the little details
And those little details are critical for developers. A single sentence can give you an answer that could easily take hours or days to figure out
Programmers aren't only switching to AI because it's easier... The old way of doing things has been crippled
I just checked, my man pages are still there.
Cool, those would be common information. Easier to find than ever
Hell, if you search it it'll come up multiple times. Hell, the AI summary will include exactly the lines I'm looking for. Hell, I probably don't even bother, most of the time I'll just click through in my IDE and read the relevant bit of the source code myself.
If the answer is in the man pages, the problem is so simple I won't remember there was a problem
I'm still going to need that single forum post where the author of a framework makes an offhand comment that tangentially hints at the cause of the bug I'm hitting my head against
No amount of man pages are going to tell me I need to downgrade a library, or change a configuration value no one bothered to properly document
That was never easy to find, Google was never good at finding tangential hints. And nowadays you can ask a (local, if you want) agent to analyze the whole library and tell you where the library is crashing. Or open a github issue with the framework to have the author, or the community give you the hint. Good luck doing that on sourceforge.
It absolutely used to be, it was a huge part of my workflow. You put in the framework/library and one or two related terms, and it would bring up pages of information. If you dug through that, maybe make the terms more general once or twice, you literally would find some random forum post that gives you exactly what you needed. Usually someone else who solved the problem, but occasionally it was just a little detail in something unrelated. Or sometimes there just really was nothing, now it's all the time
Hell, you used to be able to paste the error directly with the project name and get that specific error through the stack and line numbers. Now, it just sees an error message and abstractes it into "any error message". After the first few results, it'll be random stack errors now also from completely different projects
And I have tried to use a local LLM to dig through results, the problem is the information no longer comes up. Between sites closing themselves off to prevent scraping and Google intentionally demolishing their search capabilities, that entire branch of development skill is just gone
It was a stark change, just around 2 years ago I noticed it happening, and it's only gotten worse
At this point you really need an AI to read through the source if you don't want to do it yourself
I guess you could contact the developers, but it's generally faster to figure it out yourself, so I never got into the habit
Yeah, digging through that is the opposite of easy...
Easier than the alternative multiple times over... and these were examples of how powerful it used to be. These were esoteric problems that couldn't be worked around, either new libraries we were using to do something wired or legacy code we had to interface with
Like I mentioned, normally you could just Google the stack trace and find a discussion on your error immediately. AI is a decent replacement for that at least
This was published in 2011: https://xkcd.com/979/
This was the rule, not the exception. I remember spending a whole afternoon with a PHP error where the error message was in Hebrew. It was bad.
You are seeing the past with rose colored glasses.
It is not easier to find information; real information exists still, but it has been drowned out by garbage. Consider Borges's "The Library of Babel", or watch the Fractal Philosophy video concerning "surviving a dead Internet".
There is also the issue of knowledge being paywalled. Consider the Guerilla Open Access Manifesto and its context.
I have no problem finding all the information I need, from the documentation of this weird python library, to the opening hours of my local restaurant, to the composition of a weird moon of jupiter, to the latest shenanigans of that politician.
I don't care about tiktok content being fake and Instagram being taken over by bots, there never was useful information there anyway.
Consider that yours is not the only use case of the Internet.
My original question was "what difficulties people have?". Try answering that instead of being /r/iamverysmart.
I provided you two good resources to answer your question in my original comment.
Yeah, I'm not watching a video for an answer the can fit in a comment.
If you watched the video, you would know the answer would not fit in a reasonably sized comment.
Yeah, I'm not watching a video for an answer that can fit in a comment.
As I already stated, it would not reasonably fit in a comment. You cannot disagree from an informed perspective without watching the video. I have no qualm with you choosing not to watch it, but your repeated assertion that it could be a comment is inane from your current perspective of having not seen the video.
Skill issue. Any topic can be summarized.
True, any topic can be summarized. I did not claim this topic can't be summarized. I claimed that it can't be summarized while maintaining enough useful thought in the space of a comment.
Try to have some intellectual humility and politeness. It goes a long way in having meaningful discussions.
There's no discussion possible if the answer is "go watch a video". Again, skill issue.
There are an enormity of discussions which require one or both parties to research. Your point is a non sequitur.
You are right, an enormity. Too bad... this is not one of them. No one needs differential equations to talk about Googling stuff.