A brief word of thanks

Hi y'all. Long time poster, owner, etc. here. Lately I've been thinking a lot about the place that platforms have been in our lives, and in increasingly ****ty ways that don't serve people. I think a post I made on PointBuzz kind of summarizes it well.

The Internet is weird now. What started as a pretty great way to stick it to the corporations with independent media has unfortunately reverted to corporate reliance, which is based on engagement instead of user-driven needs. It sucks. But for whatever reason, y'all have continued to stick around here and post stuff. The revenue to pay the bills has completely fallen apart (because of the Google monopoly), but you're not giving money to Zuck to build another house on Kauai, so I'm grateful for that.

Some of you may know that the Facebook AI arbitrarily decided I'm advocating for child porn or something weird like that (because while "CP" means Cedar Point to us, apparently it means something very different to pedos). I was ready to leave it anyway, because there's almost no "friend" content anymore, just ads and algorithm bait. It's made me realize that the best parts of the Internet are still independent, even if they are increasingly rare. I gave some dollars to a pinball site recently just because I'd rather see them continue than see another Facebook group dominate the topic.

So I'm not going anywhere, for now. I can afford to keep the lights on, and I'll continue to do so, if only in protest. Thank you for visiting.

CoasterBuzz is my life. Seriously. I have visited this site almost every day for the last... Umm... 26 years? Half my life, so far.

Jeff, you don't even know me, but you have done something that has been a huge part of my life. Thank YOU!

Discussing coasters on Facebook sucks. The other day, I saw a post that asked something like, "What are your top ten favorite roller coasters?" I chuckled and thought to myself that a question like that would never even get asked on CoasterBuzz. The really funny thing is, a dozen people or so were rattling off a bunch of random coasters that they like. So pointless.

Long live CoasterBuzz!

So, what are your top ten favorite coasters?!

Jeff:

...I'm advocating for child porn...

Man, maybe Facebook wasn't wrong. 😉

And the fact that this thread now includes the actual term typed out, you should have an influx of the universe's worst in no time. SEO!

I was wondering where you'd gone. Shout if you're over my side of the pond.

Thank you for keeping this site alive! I love it! I've been visiting it every week since its beginning!

Lord Gonchar:

you should have an influx of the universe's worst in no time. SEO!

Except that no one follows the links anymore because of the AI summaries. Nothing like having tens of thousands of pages indexed in Google that no one will ever visit.

Mulfinator:

So, what are your top ten favorite coasters?!

1. RRR
2. Son of Beast
3. Steel Phantom (before they neutered it by taking out all the loop-d-loops)
4. The Beast (before they neutered it with all the trims...current version is dead to me)
5. Superman The Escape (wait, not a coaster...never mind)
6. Old Indiana Fun Park's Mad Mouse (my first coaster, I think)
7. Invadr (the one coaster I designed, i.e. scribbled in CAD)

I've only ridden those 7, so my ratings apparently don't count, which is such a garbage, elitist policy, amiright?!!

Jeff:

Except that no one follows the links anymore because of the AI summaries.

I have not thought of that, but now that you mention it I would guess it is the new reality. Why click a link when the answer is the first thing that you see.

As a card-carrying member of the virulently anti-Facebook/Insta/Twitter/whatever, I appreciate you keeping this place rolling, Jeff!

Jeff:

I gave some dollars to a pinball site recently just because I'd rather see them continue than see another Facebook group dominate the topic.

You on Pinside as well?

Later,
EV

Shades:

Why click a link when the answer is the first thing that you see.

My Google use in general is WAY down. A fraction. Then once I'm there, man, MAYBE 1-in-10 become a click-through.

It's already an outdated idea in the same way that the old ways of finding information became inefficient and obsolete when Google indexed the internet for all of us. But that's just it. Google is just an index. Just like a library. All it did was make finding the info infinitely easier. Otherwise, we are just using a digital library/card catalog.

Now the library contextualizes the information as well. The idea of it just sitting there and me having to sort through it all is quickly becoming as inefficient as driving to the library, searching the card catalog, physically locating the books (which weren't guaranteed to be there), finding the specific info in those books, gathering it into one place, then conceptualizing it into whatever your task was became when Google started cutting most of that workload from us 25 years ago.

But AI ****s up a lot, Gonch.

Yeah. It does. But it does the all the work of the travel, finding, gathering and contextualization of the requested information and then gives sources. Checking those is where the workflow begins now...instead of googling and sifting through countless pages of search reaults and even more websites and clicking and digging in like I have been since 1999...which I started doing then instead of hitting the library and the card catalog and running around a huge building looking for the printed pages that contained the info like I had been since 1973.

SEO is dead.

You have to get the AI to cite you now. Long live GEO! (Generative Engine Optimization)

I have seen mixed results with AI. Much of it is good. But some of its results are wrong. If I know its wrong (because I know the subject matter well), makes me think twice about using it for subjects with which I am less familiar without some other type of verification. Greater the consequences of being wrong, the greater the chance I go beyond the AI summary.

Bakeman31092:

1. RRR
2. Son of Beast
3. Steel Phantom (before they neutered it by taking out all the loop-d-loops)
4. The Beast (before they neutered it with all the trims...current version is dead to me)
5. Superman The Escape (wait, not a coaster...never mind)
6. Old Indiana Fun Park's Mad Mouse (my first coaster, I think)
7. Invadr (the one coaster I designed, i.e. scribbled in CAD)

I've only ridden those 7, so my ratings apparently don't count, which is such a garbage, elitist policy, amiright?!!

No Dragon Wagon? Or Maverick? Sucks.

Lord Gonchar:

Long live GEO!

Hell yeah!

But seriously, thanks for this.

Dude. Since I've come out of the Muppet Babies closet in the other thread, I'm just gonna say there was a place and time I actually thought a Geo Storm was a cool car.

My wife once had a purple Geo Metro, simply because the manual version got like 58MPG or some ridiculous amount like that. It was 3 cylinders. Way too many hills in Pittsburgh for that.

The Geo Storm was actually a rebadged Isuzu IIRC.