Hi fellow Lions,

Today I wanted to share something that I came across which I found quite disturbing!

Deleting the Internet

Now that I've pulled you in with the quasi-clickbait title, let's see if you agree with me! Lol.

I don't know if this is nefarious or if it's simply the massive companies are running out of storage space and processing power to index all of this vast amount of information. Knowing what it takes to index things, albeit on a smaller scale, I know that it gets quite complicated sometimes! So here's what I did for an experiment after watching this video the other day. Disturbing to say the least!

So the premise of the video is they are deleting things from the internet. Are these companies and governments trying to limit information intentionally? In some cases abso-fucking-lutely! Just see how the Corona situation has played out over the past nearly three years and you have clear evidence of this history scrubbing.

So what I wanted to do was transform this from something dystopian related, over to something we can experience here on Leo and the Hive blockchain to see if we are subject to the same gatekeeper stuff that other, more popular search terms are subject to. What you have to do is a websearch and then see how many results populate in the search. With Presearch, I wanted to see how the next generation, web3-esque search engine performed on this scale.

Straight forward, searched Leo to see what the results were.

I scrolled down and saw that there were 6 pages of results. Not the best but I don't know if they are limited with bandwidth or what.

So they limit the searches a little bit which is fine, I didn't expect anything crazy here.

Now let's go and search this same query on the evil beast Gulag (Go*#$gle [not giving them any SEO or hits for money, screw them!])

Alright not bad, 178k results and #Threads is even the top 3 on the search result! That's awesome and a huge win for Khal and the team, I think! Let's dive deeper though, and see what they are doing for the results.

Spent 5 minutes trying to do what I wanted and hit a wall.

What those little creeps did was entirely change the way the searches work and it doesn't do pagination where you can see the number of pages at the bottom, but rather it continually scrolls now. I think that's definitely intentional trickery! Instead of being able to directly go to page 3 or 5 or something back further, they just do continual scrolling which is poor performance but I think what's worse is that it is intentionally removing people's ability to see more than just the top 50 or so results.

Alright so moving over to the next popular target, Microsoft's Bing. This is the behavior I was expecting of Gulag. Searching Leo is good, you get 20.5 million results which is likely expected! However those numbers are incredibly deceiving.

Going on here, it looked like we were going to get all kinds of stuff back however we are at page 19 in where I'm at now. Going from page 19 onward to 20 and 21 returns the exact same results every single time which is very odd and suspicious.

This is what we are getting and that's it. Pages and pages of that utter junk and useless information. I thought we had 20.5 million results though for Leo?!? What the hell gives???? We only hit results 214-217! How could there possibly be 20 million of these results?!

Ah the devil is in the details.. and fine print..

They nest this lovely little statement at the bottom. It is innocuous enough but then you dig into it a little bit more and then it's where we can see the sketchiness begin. This is where I think that the companies like Gulag and others are providing the number of things they did index but they do not provide the legitimate information that is stored out there, because it has been deleted in one way or another. We know that we can't delete Leo or the blockchain however we can delete it's visibility to the larger audience.

What it boils down to is they are limiting the pervasiveness of the internet and the ability for people to search for things freely and in a fashion that doesn't get restricted by someone feigning a high ground.

In one way I respect their need to do this on some grounds. Curb the reach of abusive content such as murder, child p*rn, mutilation and a host of other of the worst parts of humanity. However what is offensive about a platform such as Leo Finance, where most of the posts are about cryptocurrency, finances and many other things? I think this is a coordinated reduction of the information that is available on the internet, which is evident in many other places as well. In this instance I think it’s a reflection of the threat of places like Hive and Leo to the legacy companies that are fighting tooth and nail to maintain power and control.

This gives more credence to using alternative platforms as much as humanely possible! Places like Leo, Presearch, Hive, DEX's and many other places that are not within the scope of control of the centralized beasts that are trying to shut down alternatives. Most of us here on Hive and Leo know that we need to absolutely focus on the alternatives and grow them as much as possible but this thought experiment scared me, because of the implications of it. Let's get out there and spread the decentralized nature of information as much as we can, so we have a fighting chance and can tip the balance of power back towards people!

^-CmplXty. _{Real human written content, never AI.}

Connect with me!

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https://www.presearch.org/signup?rid=513043

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Posted Using LeoFinance ^Beta

Posted Using LeoFinance ^Beta

Posted Using LeoFinance ^Beta