Technological/practical "backward steps" we all just accept now

Google search results for straightforward, one word answer queries being a whole page of links with nothing but SEO clickbait text as a preview, so you have to click a link and navigate the cookies/newsletter/notifications gauntlet, plus one handy promoted "Google snippet" which confidently answers the wrong question with something that isn't true

the garbageness of search results is def a whole huge category for this thread at this point. has anybody besides ILX noticed? i feel like it should be on the front page of Time magazine with a worried headline and a photo of a frustrated person at the keyboard, head in their hands. "Searching: What's Gone Wrong?"

as noted, just stop using google. we all switched to google bcz it was good, it’s okay to switch away bcz it sucks!

i have a similar if not identical set of problems with duckduckgo

but i'm also saying, this problem with Google should be famous at this point, ppl shd be leaving it in droves, seeing someone Googling shd be like seeing grandpa using Yahoo or Bing or whatever, and i don't think that's happening.

yah true

ddg isn’t as good as peak google was, but it’s vastly better than current goog

Wait, what's ddg. What should I be using instead of google?

duck duck go

My favorite aspect of Google these days is that it increasingly assumes that I am illiterate. 'Did you mean ____?' is annoying enough (no, I did not mean ____, stupid) but when it just full-on searches for something completely different than what I typed because what I typed couldn't possibly be what I meant to type, well...that's just a whole 'nother level of special.

Yeah, very frustrating that the verbatim search option can’t be set as the default option.

tbh i find ddg to be less helpful as a search engine for certain things (like finding more recently published articles on things) but ddg is V helpful as a fuck google destination

my entry for this is when my phone autocorrects a word that is a real word that i spelled correctly but my phone guesses is not the word i wanted. and it waits until i have typed the next word to do this, so i can't just go back and change the one word back, i have to delete two words and rewrite. if anyone knows how to turn off this one specific feature on the iphone while still having it correct actual spelling mistakes please let me know.

related to this, when I go back and write the word again and it "corrects" it again

I just have zero time for patronizing 'ahem, I believe you mean'-ing software/platforms in general. My gf has been taking classes this year and having to engage with Word for the first time in forever and she keeps asking 'what's wrong with this thing Word wants me to correct?' and I'm like 'nothing, Word is a piece of trash that thinks it understands English better than it actually does'.

Also whatever dipshits developed the main UI I use for work failed to include any place names in their bank of recognized words so, for instance, every state name I type winds up with a red squiggle underneath it. But that's a whole other dipshit issue.

I just turn all those things off like right away, as much as I can ... I get super annoyed when they actually make it difficult/impossible to turn off

which brings me to: software that you pay for that shows you ads for add-on things, and the advertising makes the software run more slowly. ... it's like reading a magazine and instead of one or two of those subscription postcards, there's like one inserted between every other page

When Word is all chummily colloquial like "your margins are pretty small there buddy" I just want to give it a fierce backhand and scream HOW DARE YOU BE SO FAMILIAR like a stern Victorian patriarch

i actually did have a good google experience yesterday that also involved MS Office -- i wanted to get a long list of file names and put it into a spreadsheet, and it actually came up with relevant instructions in the first 5 results!

I blame word for the stupid obsession with (avoiding) the passive voice, imagine if excel told you off for using the number 3 because it looks a bit like a bum

actually ... word otm

I need to figure out how to turn off the autocorrect on PowerPoint; when I write a French word that's identical to the English word except for an accent mark, it helpfully removes the accent for me, and the change is so small that sometimes I miss it.

xp also wtf is up with my email telling me to edit out all of the qualifiers; I put those in deliberately bc they are a convention of work emails and if I take them out I'll come off as demanding.

it depends on what you're writing though -- contextually, it could be stupid, if the conventions of your profession expect the passive voice. I just remember taking writing classes prior to the existence of MS Word, and avoiding the passive voice was a key lesson.

also wtf is up with my email telling me to edit out all of the qualifiers; I put those in deliberately bc they are a convention of work emails and if I take them out I'll come off as demanding.

okay, your email is totally overstepping. I can have a word with it, if you want.

the passive is a core part of the English language and writing is stilted and unnatural without it

Sometimes people who are trying too hard to sound businesslike overuse the passive, and I can see that Word is trying to correct for that, but when you know perfectly well which voice you want to use at a given moment, it's irritating. Like, if I write "my dog was hit by a car" I don't want Word suggesting I change it to "a car hit my dog."

it depends what you're writing! I see a lot of people use passive voice because they don't really know what they're talking about, or they lack confidence to assert something, or their thoughts aren't organized yet. ... Yes, there are some contexts when you want to and need to use the passive voice, but there are plenty of contexts where it weakens your presentation.

like anything else there are times where it's the better choice and times when it not, but focusing on avoiding it as a key lesson leads to writing which sounds like a list of assertions

xp I agree, but "this is frequently overused in certain contexts by inexperienced writers," is very different from "this is a mistake," and once Word starts flagging it every time, that nuance gets lost imo. It starts to look like the passive voice is always a mistake rather than a potentially - and only potentially! - iffy style choice.

It's like how some writing teachers will go through student work and cross out every adverb. Do some people overuse adverbs? Sure! Does that make adverbs a mistake? No, they're an essential part of the English language, and there are plenty of writers who can use them without sounding like a Bobbsey Twins book.

related to this, when I go back and write the word again and it "corrects" it again

this just happened to me. i don't know the place to turn it off. i use slide to type fwiw

Google search results for straightforward, one word answer queries being a whole page of links with nothing but SEO clickbait text as a preview, so you have to click a link and navigate the cookies/newsletter/notifications gauntlet, plus one handy promoted "Google snippet" which confidently answers the wrong question with something that isn't true

OTM. Once I stupidly googled the opening times of a huge store and just went by what Google told me. Won't do that again.

when I write a French word that's identical to the English word except for an accent mark, it helpfully removes the accent for me

The fact that you have to hold the alt button, press e and then press e again to get an é -- how in the world is someone going to accidentally make that typo?

I turn off all autocorrect and autosuggest features immediately upon using any program. They're useless trash.

^ my people!

this is all very well but no one is explaining how to turn this particular feature off in iOS

you write a word (spelled correctly), it takes, then you write the next word and the moment you've finished writing the second word the PREVIOUS word CHANGES to what the phone thought you wanted to write. it's diabolical

i don't know if this only happens with slide-to-type fwiw, or if it happens using normal hunt n peck as well

is it a more advanced version of the thing where it will change the next letter after a period into a capital letter? ... what is slide to type?

yeah i would turn it off but ideally i'd like to keep regular autocorrect where it fixes actual typos

i also use slide-to-type, if that's what it's called

yeah, the annoying thing is that I actually like some of the autocorrect/autosuggest stuff in Word when I'm writing in French, because I make stupid mistakes which it catches. But PowerPoint, unlike Word, can't figure out on its own which language you're using, and it's way more aggressive with the autocorrect.

that is indeed what apple's built-in version of swiftkey is called NA

anyone who doesn't use some version of slide-to-type is an animal imo

is that the thing where it suggests three words above the keyboard thing and you can just pick one rather than type the whole thing out?

no it's where you slide to type

your finger, that is

like if you want to type “the” you put your finger on the “t”, slide it to the “h”, then slide it to the “e”. each word is like you’re drawing a little squiggle that the keyboard can recognise as a word

i have never used this. I also don't use my thumbs to type on my phone.

I think of it like cursive typing lol

I am an animal though as I find that sometimes it's much faster and sometimes it creates long strings of scrabble-cheat weirdo words

another annoying thing about google autocomplete is it will start to fill in my intended search, and in the time i take to stop typing, usually a second or so, the autocomplete disappears even as i'm filling it in verbatim, leaving me to have to type out the whole thing anyway

I have a flip phone so I have to use T9word, which has a very long list of words it doesn't know and also, due to a glitch, briefly flashes an antisemitic slur at me every time I type the word "like."

I think I just try to replicate the same motions I use for typing on a computer keyboard on the phone keyboard because it is designed to be a facsimile of a computer keyboard ... thus, I type on my phone with the index and pointer fingers ...