My phone rang today. I didn’t recognise the number so although I pressed the big button to answer the call, I didn’t say anything.
I didn’t say anything because usually when I get a call from a number I don’t know, it’s some automated spam. If I say nothing, the spam voice doesn’t activate.
But sometimes it’s not a spam call. Sometimes after a few seconds of silence a human at the other end of the call will say “Hello?” in an uncertain tone. That’s the point when I respond with a cheery “Hello!” of my own and feel bad for making this person endure those awkward seconds of silence.
Those spam calls have made me so suspicious that real people end up paying the price. False positives caught in my spam-detection filter.
Now it’s happening on the web.
I wrote about how Google search, Bing, and Mozilla Developer network are squandering trust:
Trust is a precious commodity. It takes a long time to build trust. It takes a short time to destroy it.
But it’s not just limited to specific companies. I’ve noticed more and more suspicion related to any online activity.
I’ve seen members of a community site jump to the conclusion that a new member’s pattern of behaviour was a sure sign that this was a spambot. But it could just as easily have been the behaviour of someone who isn’t neurotypical or who doesn’t speak English as their first language.
Jessica was looking at some pictures on an AirBnB listing recently and found herself examining some photos that seemed a little too good to be true, questioning whether they were in fact output by some generative tool.
Every email that lands in my inbox is like a little mini Turing test. Did a human write this?
Our guard is up. Our filters are activated. Our default mode is suspicion.
This is most apparent with web search. We’ve always needed to filter search results through our own personal lenses, but now it’s like playing whack-a-mole. First we have to find workarounds for avoiding slop, and then when we click through to a web page, we have to evaluate whether’s it’s been generated by some SEO spammer making full use of the new breed of content-production tools.
There’s been a lot of hand-wringing about how this could spell doom for the web. I don’t think that’s necessarily true. It might well spell doom for web search, but I’m okay with that.
Back before its enshittification—an enshittification that started even before all the recent AI slop—Google solved the problem of accurate web searching with its PageRank algorithm. Before that, the only way to get to trusted information was to rely on humans.
Humans made directories like Yahoo! or DMOZ where they categorised links. Humans wrote blog posts where they linked to something that they, a human, vouched for as being genuinely interesting.
There was life before Google search. There will be life after Google search.
Look, there’s even a new directory devoted to cataloging blogs: websites made by humans. Life finds a way.
All of the spam and slop that’s making us so suspicious may end up giving us a new appreciation for human curation.
It wouldn’t be a straightforward transition to move away from search. It would be uncomfortable. It would require behaviour change. People don’t like change. But when needs must, people adapt.
The first bit of behaviour change might be a rediscovery of bookmarks. It used to be that when you found a source you trusted, you bookmarked it. Browsers still have bookmarking functionality but most people rely on search. Maybe it’s time for a bookmarking revival.
A step up from that would be using a feed reader. In many ways, a feed reader is a collection of bookmarks, but all of the bookmarks get polled regularly to see if there are any updates. I love using my feed reader. Everything I’ve subscribed to in there is made by humans.
The ultimate bookmark is an icon on the homescreen of your phone or in the dock of your desktop device. A human source you trust so much that you want it to be as accessible as any app.
Right now the discovery mechanism for that is woeful. I really want that to change. I want a web that empowers people to connect with other people they trust, without any intermediary gatekeepers.
The evangelists of large language models (who may coincidentally have invested heavily in the technology) like to proclaim that a slop-filled future is inevitable, as though we have no choice, as though we must simply accept enshittification as though it were a force of nature.
But we can always walk away.
