Subj : Re: Community
To   : Adept
From : tenser
Date : Mon Oct 03 2022 12:41:33

On 02 Oct 2022 at 05:32p, Adept pondered and said...
 
 Ad>  te>  bo> Google got BIG, and now it sucks as a search engine.  It ruined 
 Ad>  te> Nope.
 Ad> 
 Ad> I kinda think that Google is "ruining the web" with various choices
 Ad> being made with Manifest v3, which is a problem because of Chromium
 Ad> controlling almost all of the browser market.

Perhaps, but that's a technology thing, less a "google drives
content to suck because of SEO" sort of thing.

 Ad> But Google the search engine... Well, even there, if they're really
 Ad> awful, it's probably not _too_ hard to make a palatable option. As it
 Ad> is, I use DuckDuckGo (and thus Bing), though mostly because I try to
 Ad> keep my usage varied.

Search is a hard problem and requires vast capital resources to
address in a meaningful way.  Most of the web is still outside
of the walled gardens of Facebook et al, and indexing it is not
easy, let alone making the search corpus available to people.

In some sense, Google benefited enormously because, when it
started out, the web was much, much smaller and so it could grow
_with_ the web.  Not so much these days.

(Disclaimer: I worked at Google for a long time, though as a kernel
person doing experimental next-gen OS stuff, not really search.)

 Ad> I tend to figure one could stop there. People went on the internet
 Ad> because it allowed you to do a lot of new and interesting things,
 Ad> including with graphics, and it didn't depend on what was available in
 Ad> your local calling area.

Yes.  As anemic as we thought the web was at the time it was
introduced (HTTP was laughable; HTML seemed like a huge step
backward compared to something like texinfo or even man pages),
it was frankly better technology than what most BBSes sported.

 Ad> ...I think I get your point, but with how people are on the internet...
 Ad> 
 Ad> Well, even just thinking about the little Napoleons on Wikipedia...

In some senses, we're all people on the Internet now.  Just as
the POTS phone system continues to slide from relevance, BBSes
are just services running on the Internet now.

 Ad> But more broadly than that, there tends to be a lot of discussion about
 Ad> what various sites on the internet allow or do not allow.
 Ad> 
 Ad> Maybe less controlled by a single individual, though.

Yeah, early on there was a weird mix of hippy libertarianism
where anything went in the marketplace of ideas, but no person
or organization owes anyone a platform, so you see AUPs in a
way that, say, you didn't back in the USENET days.

 Ad>  te>  bo> That being said, I'm quite interested in the PTT Bulletin Board 
 Ad>  te>  bo> Taiwan, as it has 1.5 million registered users, with peak usage 
 Ad>  te> Why not login and try it?
 Ad> 
 Ad> ...wouldn't it be in Chinese?

I think there's a lot of English there.  I logged in once and
could find my way around.

--- Mystic BBS v1.12 A47 2021/12/24 (Linux/64)
 * Origin: Agency BBS | Dunedin, New Zealand | agency.bbs.nz (21:1/101)

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