And he describes exactly what I have to deal with on the regular, “content that only sort of helps”

Hello, my name’s dgriffith. I’m a Fediverse Support community member, and I’m here to help.

Have you tried running sfc /scannow and making sure your antivirus is up to date? That usually fixes the issue that you are describing.

If that does not help, a complete system reinstall often solves the problem you have.

Please mark this comment as useful if it helps you.

Regarding the death of hyperlinks, it’s probably more a case of “why bother clicking on yet another link that leads me to another page of crap?”.

That is, it used to be the case that you’d put information on the web that was useful and people would link to it, now it 80 percent of it seems to be a variations of SEO’d recipe sites and AI hallucinations.