Information camouflage

See Information camouflage on buttondown.email/hillelwayne

Update 6 April 2023: I found the video

It’s annoying how hard it is to find specialized knowledge on search engines at times. Hillel calls this internet camouflage which:

…is when piece of information A has a name similar to another, very different, much more popular piece B. This makes searching for A difficult because you always get results for B instead.

There’s a few examples of this like Chicago, Zimbabwe which I’ve never cared about as Zimbabwean, though I might have passed through on my way to Bulawayo. Flights between Harare and Chicago are more relevant to me.

He has a few ways to fix this but the most interesting way is to just crowdsource the answer. Ask the internet and someone will respond. If that doesn’t work, I guess you can post the wrong answer and hope for people that correct you¹.

Tangent

This camouflage does affect how we present ourselves online. There’s an author I know who despite having many pictures of themselves goes by a pen name since her real name is generic. It also reminds me of an episode of Kim’s Convenience where Jane struggles to get her photography out because of her generic English name.

It’s also reminds me of how products on Amazon are incredibly unwieldy to cram in as much SEO juice as possible. There’s a whole raft of things this applies too, including porn, where you’re either a teen or a MILF, as this guy explains it [VIDEO: 2:10].

In general, it’s funny how algorithms change the way we talk. On TikTok, which really wants to be a fun place to waste time, people also discuss serious topics which TikTok suppresses. To get around it, people get very crafty, calling sex work Shrek’s work for instance.