What prevents it is that the web in 2026 is very different than it was when OG pagerank became popular (because it was good). Back then, many pages linked to many other pages. Now a significant amount of content (newer content, which is often what people want) is either only in video form, or in a walled garden with no links, neither in or out of the walls. Or locked up in an app, not out on the general/indexable/linkable web. (Yes, of course, a lot of the original web is still there. But it's now a minority at best.)
Also, of course, the amount of spam-for-SEO (pre-slop slop?) as a proportion of what's out there has also grown over time.
IOW: Google has "gotten worse" because the web has gotten worse. Garbage in, garbage out.
Thanks for the reply. I mentioned tech, but forgot about time. Yeah, that makes solid sense.
> Or locked up in an app...
I believe you may have at least partially meant Discord, for which I personally have significant hate. Not really for the owners/devs, but why in the heck would any product owner want to hide the knowledge of how to user their app on a closed platform? No search engine can find it, no LLM can learn from it(?). Lost knowledge. I hate it so much. Yes, user engagement, but knowledge vs. engagement is the battle of our era, and knowledge keeps losing.
r/anything is so much better than a Discord server, especially in the age of "Software 3.0"
I drive a hybrid with a weird size/shape 12V battery. (It uses the traction battery for starting, so only needs a smaller 12V for e.g. accessories and simple bootstrapping of electronics.) Though I normally do my own maintenance at this scale, when it went bad I went to the dealer because they both had the right battery and didn't charge much more than parts. Plus drove me home after dropoff, and drove me back there when it was done (a few hours later? fuzzy memory), at no extra cost.
IME the modern web is not amenable to user scripting like it was ~10 years ago. Then, most things were a simple static HTML document, more templated then generated. Now virtually everything (whether it's useful or not) is a heavy complex "app" that pops in at various times, only has arbitrary/volatile identifiers, and is generally harder to interact with as a user script.
While building this, we've had to do a lot of debugging. You think "Hey, this is a pretty simple request, why did it fail?" Then you actually dig into the archive that is 98 files of HTML, JS, and CSS, inlined and minified with obscure variable names and no comments. Thankfully many sites do still have relatively stable selectors + aria labels, but I am honestly amazed everyday at how well some of this stuff manages to works.
And that isn't even to mention all the guardrails the sites put in place today: content security policies, untrusted html, dynamic refreshing, etc.
For Greasemonkey proper (which has always only been a Firefox extension) the big pain point was Mozilla's forced migration to new extension APIs (2015: https://blog.mozilla.org/addons/2015/08/21/the-future-of-dev... ). This required a major rewrite, taking over a year, and not to add new features but rather just to not bit rot away. Then what felt like right after that, they completely deprecated classic extensions, forcing only web extensions (2017: https://blog.mozilla.org/addons/2017/02/16/the-road-to-firef... ). This required an even more thorough rewrite again, and made it not difficult but actually impossible to keep all functionality.
Greasemonkey has been stable (not abandoned, but not worked on very much!) since then. No forced MV3 yet in Firefox.
While I agree the word could be appropriate, I'm asking a meta question about how it is typically used, and whether or not we're conveying something unintentional by using it in this context as well. I don't consider "variants" a good thing because I lived through a few years of COVID.
Sibling already mentions this, but the wording of the article almost directly but not quite says it's "Spy vs. Spy" based. I'm not aware of an official link to document this but
Also, of course, the amount of spam-for-SEO (pre-slop slop?) as a proportion of what's out there has also grown over time.
IOW: Google has "gotten worse" because the web has gotten worse. Garbage in, garbage out.