[HN Gopher] The web starts on page four
___________________________________________________________________
The web starts on page four
Author : cpeterso
Score : 267 points
Date : 2022-02-01 17:37 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (christianheilmann.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (christianheilmann.com)
| gtsop wrote:
| Food for thought/discussion: I don't see what prevents the author
| from having the experience they had back in the days. Tcp, http
| and ipv4 are still standing strong. I am sure there are more than
| plenty people around who would like to retain the old ways as
| well.
| mouzogu wrote:
| I remember UX good practice was that the top half (or viewport)
| is the key for UX design. The info you need should be clear and
| visible instantly on load.
|
| It's funny that now i have a reflex to immediately skip the top
| half and scroll to the bottom in a vain attempt to find what i'm
| looking at/for.
| frouge wrote:
| I've became so used to ignore useless stuff on pages that I
| sometimes don't even know what I came for originally. The
| modern web makes me totally mindless.
| scim-knox-twox wrote:
| O, someone wrote down my thoughts :D
|
| Since few years I hate using Internet, with every year I using it
| less and less.
| frouge wrote:
| Lucky you!
| mtrovo wrote:
| As much as I agree I think you also have to consider that things
| change, and what once was something that only nerds and weirdos
| used now it's the mainstream way of consuming information.
|
| Which means that something that for you as the 99% tail is not
| good anymore doesn't matter for my mom that doesn't even know
| what you're talking about as the web being different before. It's
| the digital version of the old "Nobody goes there anymore, it's
| too crowded".
|
| That being said I believe a major part of the problem is the
| asymmetry between consumption and creation of content. If
| creating content was somehow harder you would find way less auto
| generated attention grabbing websites.
| simula67 wrote:
| > Even worse are image results.
|
| > The problem is that search engine results - especially on
| mobile - are not how you find that any longer.
|
| I think the biggest story of the web in the last decade is the
| slow but steady decline of Google.
|
| Google has fallen victim to spam. Goodhart's Law wins in the end.
| Almost every site on Google's front page is there because people
| have spent a lot of time and money optimizing it for search
| engine ranking. But just because a page is good at gaming
| Google's algorithm does not mean it is the most useful anymore.
| Google put up a good fight, but it seems like they have finally
| lost.
|
| It also seems like the company has lost it's way. I was recently
| using Yandex mobile browser to browse some Russian sites and it
| can translate text inside images and now even voice inside
| videos. Chrome on the other hand often fails to detect other
| languages and therefore does not translate even text. It feels
| like even 15 years ago (when I was becoming a Google fanboy, I
| have since grown out of it) I would have expected Google to get
| there before some obscure Russian company. I get it, Russian web
| is smaller than English web and therefore it is probably more
| useful for Yandex, but Google's revenues are many times that of
| Yandex, they should ideally be getting there by now.
| secondaryacct wrote:
| You also maybe navigate a larger web with different needs.
|
| What knowledge cant be found with appending "wiki" to any
| keyword, what person cant you find with linkedin, what movie
| cant you find on a private bt tracker, what news cant you have
| from reddit ?
|
| I think people over estimate what the web was before Google and
| under estimate how much easier it s been to find anything.
|
| Name me one thing you struggled to find on google and Ill
| probably be able to describe you the nightmare it would have
| been 20 years ago
| marginalia_nu wrote:
| Google me up a review of a mechanical keyboard that isn't
| sponsored, doesn't have ads, isn't on reddit, doesn't have
| affiliate links, and isn't trying to sell me anything.
| lanstin wrote:
| That sort of question you want answered by friends or an
| organization you pay to represent ypu, like Consumers
| Union.
| marginalia_nu wrote:
| Why couldn't a search engine look out for the searcher's
| interests before the interests of the content-producers?
| willmw101 wrote:
| Seems pretty useful and non-spammy to me:
|
| Edit: This is a better example:
| https://www.mechtype.com/category/reviews/
| marginalia_nu wrote:
| Would you expect someone selling a product to give an
| accurate review? They have a conflict of interest. Give
| me a review from someone who does not have a conflict of
| interest.
|
| I'll show you what I'm looking for:
|
| https://labs.tomasino.org/mechanical-keyboards/
|
| https://www.paritybit.ca/blog/vortex-vibe-keyboard
|
| https://wiki.installgentoo.com/wiki/Mechanical_keyboards
|
| https://www.vegard.net/the-ultimate-keyboard-
| part-2-switches...
|
| http://boxbase.org/entries/2015/nov/30/ergodox/
|
| Where are those types of search results?
| willmw101 wrote:
| They have links for every single mechanical keyboard they
| review or list. What is their incentive to give better
| reviews to some than others?
|
| This is probably a better example:
| https://www.mechtype.com/xiaomi-yuemi-pro-
| mk02-review/#more-...
|
| There are some basic economic realities underpinning why
| most people take the time to create content like this. I
| don't think it's reasonable to assume that just because
| someone expects to make a small amount of money from
| creating a review like that (with either affiliate links
| or buy links), that that person's opinion is inherently
| at conflict with honesty just because there's a monetary
| element. It may be true for many sites and many people,
| but it's pretty straightforward to parse whether someone
| is writing a review earnestly and passionately rather
| than for $.
| marginalia_nu wrote:
| > They have links for every single mechanical keyboard
| they review or list. What is their incentive to give
| better reviews to some than others?
|
| Given Sturgeon's law (90% of everything is shit), why are
| most of the reviews 4/5 or above?
|
| > There are some basic economic realties underpinning why
| people take the time to create content like this. I don't
| think it's reasonable to assume that just because someone
| expects to make a small amount of money from creating a
| review like that, that that person's opinion is
| inherently at conflict with honesty just because there's
| a monetary element.
|
| I updated the post with several examples of the type of
| content I want you to find.
|
| > This is probably a better example:
| https://www.mechtype.com/[...]
|
| This one has affiliate links
| willmw101 wrote:
| >I updated the post with several examples of the type of
| content I want you to find.
|
| The point I'm making is that I think your underlying
| premise, that all sites which have any kind of monetary
| element to them are fundamentally corrupt in terms of
| intention or conflict of intention, is flawed. I've now
| read multiple reviews on
| https://www.mechtype.com/category/reviews/ that are quite
| clearly the work of a keen mechanical keyboard hobbyist
| with sufficient details, knowledge and effort to lead me
| to believe the work is genuine and useful rather than
| merely financially motivated alone or spammy. There are
| many examples of what you suggest, and I agree that many
| sites with affiliate links and ad popups are disingenuous
| and fall much closer to the spam end of the spectrum. But
| there are still useful results if the user is remotely
| competent at parsing information. If your argument is
| that users shouldn't need that competence, and search
| engines should be kinder to less competent users in that
| regard, then that's a separate (and probably more
| interesting) conversation.
|
| That site also has a clear affiliate disclosure along
| with this:
|
| https://www.mechtype.com/disclosures/
|
| >Paid Reviews/Sponsored Posts. MechType does NOT accept
| paid reviews or sponsored posts. All thoughts expressed
| within our reviews are our own opinions. However,
| MechType may on occasion accept product samples for
| review. When a product sample is provided for review it
| will be clearly and fully disclosed in the post along
| with the company/persons who provided the sample.
| marginalia_nu wrote:
| You were the one who claimed to be able to find anything
| on google, so I provided you with something difficult to
| find. Don't tell me I'm asking for the wrong thing,
| especially given I've demonstrated that pages matching my
| criteria do indeed exist.
| willmw101 wrote:
| >You were the one who claimed to be able to find anything
| on google
|
| I did not in fact claim that. You are confusing me with
| someone else in this thread. I agree that some things are
| hard to find on google, but I reject the notion that
| anything with a financial element is fundamentally
| corrupt in terms of intention.
| marginalia_nu wrote:
| Ah, my bad. My post was basically intended to call
| bullshit on that particular claim from the guy I
| responded to.
| lanstin wrote:
| Maybe there are good actors but anytime people are
| spending money the market will arrange for a lot of
| people to try to fleece uninformed buyers, and on the
| internet to uninform the buyers.
| nend wrote:
| >What is their incentive to give better reviews to some
| than others?
|
| One incentive would be that they earn more money through
| affiliate (or the company is paying them) to promote one
| product over the other.
| perihelions wrote:
| Incidentally, this comment chain is Algolia's #2 result for
| "mechanical keyboard review", and it does in fact have an
| assortment of useful review links (namely the ones you
| listed under "I'll show you what I'm looking for:")
| kaetemi wrote:
| Reviews of recent consumer scanners with actual samples of
| scanned images at high resolutions.
| eloff wrote:
| I recently had to research and compare analytics services for
| work. Type in Heap vs MixPanel and look at the results, the
| entire first page is garbage comparison sites. I really
| struggled to find any impartial, real reviews.
| habibur wrote:
| > Name me one thing you struggled to find on google
|
| Ad less pages. That provide the content without trying to
| monetize it.
| Swenrekcah wrote:
| I don't even mind ads if I get the content. What I get now
| however is 90% ads and 10% content, and of those 10% about
| half of that is actually promoted content. Oh and the ads
| are also spying on me and selling my information to more
| ads.
| pessimizer wrote:
| > Google has fallen victim to spam.
|
| Google is intentionally dropping five year old results from the
| index and prioritizing five hour old results. They have
| complete control over whether they're doing this. Part of SEO
| is making five year old results look like five hour old
| results, which is something that Google did to spammers, not
| something that spammers did to google.
|
| Google has decided that it is more profitable to make sure that
| somebody who types "chicken" into the search box gets either
| chicken restaurants nearby, or listicles and video covering the
| story on the news today about a chicken that scared away a
| bear. They've given up on depth.
| remoquete wrote:
| I'd love to agree with you, but are you sure the depth is
| there? Where is all the quality content about "chicken"?
| Where are the legions of chicken experts creating high
| quality content? We might be starting from the (slightly)
| false premise that the internet is full of quality content.
| pessimizer wrote:
| There's no quality content for "chicken," in fact I'd say
| that local chicken restaurants and funny animal news _are_
| the best content for "chicken." That's why I don't want
| every search to favor new material and drop old material.
| The problem that I have with Google is that they know that
| most searches will be simple and timely [edit: and badly
| phrased and nonspecific], and they've just ignored
| everything else.
| eitland wrote:
| > Where is all the quality content about "chicken"? Where
| are the legions of chicken experts creating high quality
| content?
|
| Try something like this (just imagine a word or two that
| would appear in quality content about chicken and put it
| into marginalia):
|
| https://search.marginalia.nu/search?query=poultry+farming&p
| r...
|
| > We might be starting from the (slightly) false premise
| that the internet is full of quality content.
|
| Well maybe it isn't but at least using Marginalia I get
| more of the results I want for these kinds of searches.
|
| (I've also had good luck with a query about git a few weeks
| ago and yesterday with one about kubernetes.)
| t-3 wrote:
| There's plenty of quality content about chickens on the
| internet. Permaculture forums especially love poultry. You
| can read about how to raise, breed, and slaughter chickens,
| different varieties of chicken, and how to incorporate
| chickens into your lifestyle. This type of quality content
| was _easy_ to find back in the day, now you have to know
| what you 're looking for, and where to look for it.
| suddenexample wrote:
| I feel like people on HN are really detached from reality
| sometimes. For 99% of people, typing "chicken" into
| Google search means they want chicken, or don't know what
| a chicken is. Does anyone here actually expect the
| average person to be looking for in-depth guides on how
| to raise a chicken? That's like saying the "hotel" query
| should return compelling information about the supply
| chain and inner workings of the hotel industry.
|
| Google's "problem" is that they need to cater to the most
| common intents per query (see: lowest common
| denominator), and believe it or not, those intents are
| usually not biased toward in-depth educational content -
| isn't this why HN is such a nice niche?
|
| Google could think about adding a different search result
| sorting option that attempts to prioritize high quality,
| thought provoking, or otherwise educational content above
| all else, but it makes sense to me why their primary
| search ranking algorithm works the way it does.
| svachalek wrote:
| Ah, chicken. The quintessential centerpiece of a
| weeknight meal. I fondly remember my childhood in
| Kentucky, rolling in a pile of leaves until the warm,
| scrumptious smell of roast chicken wafted out from the
| kitchen into my eager young nostrils. I can go on for
| hours about this, and I will, but I knew that someday
| billions of people would lovingly read this long,
| overcooked story before dinner because it was their inner
| heart's desire.
|
| Preheat oven, insert chicken.
| WA wrote:
| Spot on. I have an in-depth article about a niche topic
| and ranked on place 1-3 for many years. Everybody who
| typed the short keyword would want an in-depth
| explanation.
|
| These days, the search volume went way up and my article
| went down to 6-10. The first three spots merely give a
| rough explanation of my in-depth topic. Quite insulting
| actually.
|
| But upon further reflection I realized that most people
| these days only want a rough definition and no in-depth
| explanation. Google gives this to them.
|
| The people who used to search for my keyword now add 2-3
| more words to get to my in-depth article. The typical
| long tail.
|
| What I find worrisome is that sometimes, the long tail
| query I use to find quality content gives me the same
| results as the unspecific short query. Some stuff is
| close to impossible to find without knowing a very topic-
| specific thing.
| [deleted]
| 0cVlTeIATBs wrote:
| The second order effect is intense competition to create
| lowest common denominator content. You're right that it
| would be nice for Google to separate it from better
| content, but this leads to the yet deeper problem--there
| isn't enough money in that idea.
| nappy wrote:
| I honestly have no idea what the "best" results would be
| for chicken. Maybe the Wikipedia entry? Not sure what else.
| It's sort of just a lazy search.
| remoquete wrote:
| Well, if not all of humanity's knowledge is freely and
| openly available on the web, how can we expect a search
| engine--any search engine--to provide a meaningful
| answer? I remember when Google aimed at scanning and
| indexing entire libraries, but then they had to stop due
| to copyright laws.
| dylan604 wrote:
| >It's sort of just a lazy search.
|
| A bad search deserves a bad result. If you walked up to
| me and just said one word "chicken", I'd be insulted. If
| you said one word "chicken" while pointing at your mouth,
| I'd perhaps think you spoke little English and wanted a
| place to eat chicken. Providing a bit more info is useful
| to get decent results.
|
| As Jerry Maguire once said, "help me help you"
| dylan604 wrote:
| Is the 5 year old result actually still available though?
| Link rot is real, and there are lots of pages that don't make
| it 5 years.
| eitland wrote:
| I thought about this too.
|
| After testing with marginalia I found that much of it is
| still there - it is just suppressed by Google and Bing.
| dylan604 wrote:
| That is interesting. I would have imagined honest link
| rot being a much larger problem.
| marginalia_nu wrote:
| My feeling is that the Lindy effect largely holds: The
| expected lifetime of any given document is proportional
| to its age. Old websites for the most part seem extremely
| stable. Young websites change drastically and often.
| pessimizer wrote:
| These pages die from starvation. If people can't get to
| your page even if they specifically google the name of your
| page, eventually you'll shut it down.
| dylan604 wrote:
| I understand why pages disappear. I'm just saying the
| expecting a search engine to return a result from 5 years
| ago is kind of a bad metric to be using in whatever point
| was attempting to be made.
| pessimizer wrote:
| I don't want results to be dropped arbitrarily. It kills
| all of the good content. I don't need a book to change
| every week to remain relevant.
|
| edit: and to directly address what you said, excusing a
| search engine's loss of content because sites have
| disappeared because the search engine dropped them is
| circular.
| AlexAndScripts wrote:
| Google regularly crawls websites. They know if a site still
| exists. It's not a 5 year old _result_ , it's a website
| that has existed at least 5 years.
| medstrom wrote:
| Million Short is a solution. https://millionshort.com/ Good
| complement for certain popular topics when the default search
| engine just gives you big blobs of SEO.
| platz wrote:
| > This is about me as the customer, not about you and your
| monthly active user numbers.
|
| Businesses want to retain customers and have repeat customers,
| not necessarily just active user numbers. Do you think it is not
| in a businesses interest to do so?
|
| > We don't create content for the web and for longevity. We
| create content to show ads around it.
|
| Not just ads, but regarding social, what is more valuable to
| people, a library or a mechanism to get attention and influence
| from people?
|
| The broader "rat race" here is how people must earn a living in
| todays's society
|
| > I didn't have to wait for a certain time to learn about a new
| movie - I could read up on it any time I wanted.
|
| Who created that content and if it was from a professional
| source, did you benefit from it?
|
| "information wants to be free" sure sounds great if you're not
| the one supplying it.
|
| It doesnt sound like the author was a contributor to the free and
| open web. I'd be interested to hear a perspective from one of the
| bloggers he referenced who tirelessly produced content and who's
| blog died in 2010 with nothing to show for it.
| BizarroLand wrote:
| You're supplying information in the form of your opinion on
| this topic for free. Now imagine that hacker news starts
| displaying obvious ads here and someone needs the information
| you freely provided but is frustrated in finding it because of
| 3 pages of trash results placed above your post.
|
| You would have to agree that this scenario would at the very
| least be frustrating, not only for you but also for the people
| who want your free content, right?
| platz wrote:
| > You're supplying information in the form of your opinion on
| this topic for free.
|
| My "information" here is not "content" like How to fold a
| Shurgard moving crate or Movie Reviews i.e. produced with
| intent to inform/educate the general public about specialized
| topics. My post is simply part of the social web of personal
| opinions, and he doesn't seem to think
| twitter/instagram/tiktok are solving his problems.
|
| Forums do exist. Hacker news and Reddit does exist. But I
| think the OP is not satisfied with Reddit and would not be
| satisfied if we just had a bunch of additional forum sites.
| amelius wrote:
| I want better tools to isolate myself from the bad parts of the
| web.
| jjbinx007 wrote:
| The web is now a user hostile place to be. There are dark
| patterns, clickbait headlines, taboola churn, autoplaying never
| ending videos, ads that track you, cover content, distract you
| and occasionally try to force malware onto you.
|
| I pity anyone who's using accessibility tools to help us the web
| as sites often have a timer before they cover the content with a
| nag to sign up to their newsletter or they track your mouse and
| display something else because they don't want you to leave.
|
| I recently was inspired by a hacker news article to try using the
| web without an adblocker. Holy hell. It's almost unusable. I made
| a video where I recorded this on my PC, I'm going to do the same
| on my phone. I had no idea it was this bad.
|
| In contrast, the BBC website still seems pretty usable because
| they don't need to run ads (at least when you're accessing from
| the UK). They do, however, have the utterly ridiculous concept of
| having autoplay on by default so if you've clicked to watch a
| video about a current event, if you don't click 'cancel' in 5
| seconds they'll load you another video about something else
| (seemingly at random) when there is no reason to do so at all.
|
| The web reminds me of the state of movie and music piracy before
| Netflix etc. In those days you bought a DVD and were forced to
| sit through an unskippable FBI warning and in some cases
| unskippable trailers, whereas if you pirated the movie you got a
| superior product. You got a copy of the movie that let you watch
| it on any device, let you make backups and didn't punish you by
| forcing you to stare at unskippable content.
|
| If you were a music pirate then you didn't need to worry about
| Sony putting malware onto CDs that installed rootkits in your pc.
|
| Software pirates didn't need to worry about similar rootkits that
| made the game run slower than the pirated version or generally
| buggered up your computer.
|
| We've reached this state with the web. I am forced to use an ad
| blocker for my security and sanity. Most adverts are lies, scams
| and are too damn distracting.
|
| This isn't the vision that Tim Berners-Lee had.
|
| Look at this: http://lite.cnn.com/en
|
| See how fast it is? See how well it runs on any old device you
| may have? I'd rather have this than the current web. Surely
| there's an in between compromise somewhere.
| elefantastisch wrote:
| But the thing is... there's also a web that isn't like that,
| but no one has yet built a tool that helps you find it.
|
| Like, here's a site that (among other things of interest to
| fans) chronologically orders Korean historical dramas:
| https://thetalkingcupboard.com/resources/sageuk-timeline/
|
| No dark patterns, no clickbait, no videos, no ads, just a labor
| of love by someone with a lot of time on their hands.
|
| The problem for search engines is that it's trivially easy to
| copy this list and put it up some garbage blogspam domain, but
| even if the content is exactly the same, I want this list, not
| the copy, because if I find this list, I can explore the rest
| of the site and find more great stuff. Even a spammer copies
| the entire site, this is the one I want because this is the one
| with a real person behind it who will be updating it, engaging
| with readers, appreciating the traffic they get, etc.
|
| It starts to become clear that what I want my web discovery
| tool to do is less find individual pieces of good content but
| more find content from good creators.
|
| I don't see any way a search engine can ever do this kind of
| discovery as well as a human curator.
|
| The web has changed so much from when Google launched. Google
| is optimized for finding content about some keyword because
| there was actually a time where the was a legitimate problem.
| You searched "flowers" and Google helped you find the places to
| buy flowers online. You searched "guitar tabs" and Google
| helped you find where to get them. Google is still really good
| at this. Other search engines too. So good in fact that it's
| become almost invisible to us how easy this is compared to how
| it was in the past.
|
| But now instead of buying flowers, I might want to know...
| where are the communities where professional florists hang out
| online and talk about their craft? The Google results for that
| query are pretty much equivalent to a random listing of
| websites. But I can almost guarantee there is such a community.
| Is it a subreddit? A facebook group? Some old vbulletin? A
| mailing list?
|
| Or I might want to know... where are the blogs/channels of the
| top authorities on web accessibility? What are the best craft
| coffee roasters in Sweden? What are the essential reads on the
| history of Botswana? Who are the most consistently good travel
| vloggers in Spanish? Where can I get help with sourdough
| starter problems? I can 100% guarantee there are people out
| there that have great answers to all these questions, but they
| seem unlikely to be solved by search engines any time in the
| near future.
|
| If someone can crack the problem of leveraging genuine,
| interested-motivated human curation to deliver results without
| falling victim to abusive, quick-buck-motivated spamming...
| they could replace search engines.
| the_snooze wrote:
| >If someone can crack the problem of leveraging genuine,
| interested-motivated human curation to deliver results
| without falling victim to abusive, quick-buck-motivated
| spamming... they could replace search engines.
|
| That's the tension right there. The moment someone solves the
| first part is the moment someone will try to hijack it for
| their own gain. The Internet is dark and full of husslers.
| They want to exploit people's goodwill and trust---that stuff
| is costly and doesn't scale, which makes it valuable. If you
| want genuine interactions, you go to a quiet corner with a
| handful of folks and be very very careful about who you let
| in.
| BizarroLand wrote:
| For instance, I'm imagining a wiki-search engine.
|
| The builder would need to load the first few hundred
| thousand results and then add some sort of user moderation
| system, where search results get a reputation and site
| submitters get a reputation as well.
|
| Donation funded, with maybe one sidebar section for curated
| ads that are tied to search results and not with a tracking
| cookie or fingerprinting.
|
| With a few tweaks, that would be a really good start,
| right?
|
| Once it reached a certain point, it would be overrun by the
| same systems, using human and bot armies to bias results
| towards the results that would make them the most money.
|
| As long as there is a profit to be made somewhere, people
| will undermine any obstacle placed in front of them to make
| it, and I can't imagine any fix for it that isn't "run your
| own servers and pay for it out of your own pocket".
| NoGravitas wrote:
| People don't want to hear that the problem is capitalism,
| but the problem is capitalism.
| hbn wrote:
| Google results are shockingly bad now. For searching
| documentation or Stackoverflow it can be fine, but for anything
| else, good luck. I know that blogspam has floated to the top for
| years, but it seems like it's gotten even worse in the last
| couple years or so. Googling for random information, or trying to
| find a good product recommendation returns absolutely useless
| blogspam results where it seems to be strings of text copy-pasted
| into giant "articles" that are just lists of questions and
| answers that I assume was cobbled together by a bot.
|
| I dread if Reddit going public ruins the site (well, ruins it
| more than the redesign did), because currently, appending
| "reddit" to your query is the only way to get results that seem
| like they're actually written by a human.
|
| edit: oh, and in regards to his bit about web notifications -- I
| totally agree that they're one of the worst things to happen to
| the web, and it's the one web standard I'm actually happy Apple
| refuses to implement in Safari. It's only used maliciously, and
| it's a horrible UX. The amount of times I've looked at the
| notification shade of a non-tech-savvy Android user's phone and
| seen a bunch of ads from random websites, it's obviously not
| worth it. Users have been so trained to click "ok" and "accept"
| on the millions of popups that are shoved in their face as they
| try to navigate the web, it's no wonder they're enabling
| notifications on every website they enter. Get this stupid popup
| out of my face so I can see the content!
| fbanon wrote:
| >For searching documentation or Stackoverflow it can be fine
|
| I have to disagree on that one. If you search for some API or
| error message, 9 out of 10 results will be these malware-ridden
| autogenerated clones of Stackoverflow. I can't believe Google
| engineers can't do something about this. They must be using
| Google to search for this kind of stuff everyday...
| hbn wrote:
| Oh god I forgot about the SO scrapers. They seem somewhat
| recent, I don't remember seeing them not that long ago.
| They're usually completely broken. Or just made by someone
| with no sense of UI
| MarkusWandel wrote:
| Does the "Page 4" thing refer to the few paragraphs at the end of
| the article? Because here's the thing. The cool, electic web
| circa 1996 was maybe X in size. Chances are that kind of web
| content is still here, possibly even 10X in size. It's just
| drowned out by 990X more of junk. If the search engines can't
| filter the good stuff from the junk, you have to go back to the
| pre-search-engine days. Lists of links, web rings and so on. They
| never went away. They're as eclectic as ever.
|
| Only problem is we've been spoiled by the thought that ALL
| information is on the web. And a lot of it is buried in the
| junky, spammy 990X part. I don't like having to watch an ad-
| riddled Youtube video for a simple thing like where did they hide
| the last screw you need to remove. But at least the information
| is there if I need it badly enough.
|
| I also don't like to wade through the "sign up for Amazon Prime"
| dark patterns. But I do like being able to order a gadget for a
| good price and reasonably soon delivery.
| ozten wrote:
| I thought it referred to search results, page four. Very few
| people look at the fourth page of results and the first three
| pages are the types of pages the rest of the article is about.
| noselasd wrote:
| Is this related to the google default of showing 10 results ?
| I have had it show 100 results by default since .. forever..,
| , much of the stuff I'm actually interrested are often
| atleast beyond the top 10-20
| bwestergard wrote:
| I've been using the "small web" much more in the past few days
| and loving it. Strongly encourage everyone to install a quality
| Gemini browser like Amfora, Castor, or Lagrange and check it out!
|
| https://gemini.circumlunar.space/
| schwartzworld wrote:
| I think it's somewhat ironic that when I Google quote "how to
| fold a Shurgard moving crate" this article shows up on page 1 of
| the results.
|
| I agree with the author's conclusion, but the example is a poor
| one. I would expect the sort of content to come directly from the
| manufacturer. Is it surprising nobody has blogged about a
| specific moving crate?
| sharikous wrote:
| I find myself agreeing with the author. We are regressing towards
| curated bookmarks. I actually changed my settings to show the
| bookmarks bar (again) in Chrome and Safari. Search engines,
| especially Google, are not the panacea they were 10 years ago.
|
| My optimist side tells me we will have a revival of bookmarks in
| the mobile browsers too (now they are way too hidden). My
| pessimist side tells me Google will fight this trend to the
| user's detriment.
| frouge wrote:
| Let's go back to the old glory of RSS.
|
| I was so frustated to see Facebook/Twitter using the
| fundamentals of RSS to their advantage whereas everybody should
| have started to use RSS for the greater good.
| giantrobot wrote:
| RSS isn't some panacea to the problem. A site needing visits
| for money is not going to put full content in their feeds. At
| best you'll get elided content and at worst you'll get only
| titles and links. You'll also get the same SEO practices
| where some old content has the date changed to show up as
| "new".
|
| Most CMSes by default don't do a good job generating RSS
| either. Most of the time a feed is just a grab bag of posts
| on all topics. I don't know of any that understand inline
| hash tags for instance. A separate field for adding tags is
| just more work for an author. As a reader if I'm looking for
| blog posts on a topic I don't care about Grampa Moshe's
| goiter. Yet if I put a blog in a category in my reader
| software that's what I get.
|
| In very specific circles with specific topics RSS _can_ be
| really useful but outside that narrow range it 's no better
| than the shit show we currently have.
| pessimizer wrote:
| "Starts" is a important word here. I know it's mentioned in the
| tail of the article, but if you have a site that's not shit -
| please, please, please fill it to the brim with links to other
| sites that aren't shit. Gift me the ability to avoid going back
| to a search engine for as long as possible.
| godshatter wrote:
| Sounds like we need to bring back web rings.
| MarkusWandel wrote:
| The other thing is that the Wikipedia alone is more valuable
| content than probably the whole web of 25 years ago. And aside
| from their annual donation drive, junk free. And "X wikipedia"
| where X is the subject still works on Google, with the desired
| result at least in the first six or so.
| softwaredoug wrote:
| IMO the biggest issue with the web is the lack of a consistent
| "contract" between content and consumer.
|
| Compare a blog to a podcast. A podcast is long form content. You
| know clearly how a podcast is monetized, and accept the
| advertising or Patreon or whatever.
|
| A blog, OTOH, might literally be malicious to your computer,
| privacy, and attention. You dont know if it'll try to hijack your
| browser or what it might track about you. You don't know if
| you'll have a pleasant reading experience or get twenty prompts
| to signup for a newsletter.
|
| Intermittent reinforcement being the strongest kind, we begin to
| associate the web / blogs with malicious spam that slows down
| your computer, even if many aren't.
| marginalia_nu wrote:
| I don't think it's too late to fix this. We can build better
| search engines, or better yet, tools more suitable tools for
| discovery. It doesn't have to be big to be useful.
|
| Right now the big problem as I see it is that there is great
| content being created but its audience just isn't finding it.
| There's so much noise, the signal is almost completely drowned
| out.
|
| Out of largely the same frustration permeating the link, I built
| search.marginalia.nu alone in less than a single year in my spare
| time without prior knowledge of search, paying for the hardware
| out of my own pocket.
|
| I don't say that to promote how great I am. The point is
| specifically that I'm just some guy on the Internet. Just imagine
| what could be possible if actual resources were put toward
| finding solutions to this problem.
| indymike wrote:
| > I don't think it's too late to fix this. We can build better
| search engines, or better yet, tools more suitable tools for
| discovery. It doesn't have to be big to be useful.
|
| Over the next few years, things will change. When people don't
| like the product, it gives us an opportunity to make products
| people do like. Right now, a lot of the internet is just not
| very likable.
| marginalia_nu wrote:
| I'm not sure. This is a problem that affects not just
| websites, but physical products as well. It's really hard to
| find what you actually want. Producers are rewarded more for
| paying for reviews and search results, for reddit
| astroturfing, for influencer recommendations; than they are
| for actually making something worthwhile.
|
| It's not that good things aren't being made, it's just that
| it's incredibly hard to find them among all crap. There
| doesn't seem to be a good mechanism that lets the actually
| good products float to the top.
| lanstin wrote:
| I doubt this is a new phenomenon. I certainly risk buying
| things just by myself where pre-internet I would find
| someone that knew about the thing (cars, knitting, lamps,
| whatever) and tell them my issue and see what they said.
| now there is some expextation on my part that fifteen
| minutes of reading will somehow allow me to drop a lot of
| cash in some specialized area i have no edperience in and
| not be taken advantage of as a sucker in the market place?
|
| If you are spending money, possibly just having the worlds
| info at your fingertips doesn't make up for a lack of
| experience.
| marginalia_nu wrote:
| Back in the brick and mortar days, you could at least go
| look at the thing. Not that there weren't lemons, but the
| sort of extreme low quality alibaba crap that you find
| everywhere nowdays wouldn't sell at all because it feels
| so obviously low quality. Even having it on the shelves
| would stain the reputation of the store.
| svachalek wrote:
| Simple laissez faire competition leads to many solutions
| that are more optimal than naively creating a product
| people want at an attractive price. The game needs to be
| regulated to force the "right" kind of solutions to the top
| but that would be a difficult thing to do even if
| regulators weren't already part of the "wrong" way of
| competing.
|
| We can still "vote" with our wallets but just like in real
| elections sometimes it's really hard to even get some
| worthwhile candidates on the ballot.
| alexashka wrote:
| > Right now the big problem as I see it is that there is great
| content being created
|
| Is that so? Where?
|
| We'd have to define 'great'.
|
| If you mean Tik Tok dance videos and instagram photos/art, then
| yes. If you mean anything related to philosophy, sociology or
| explaining how the world works at large - no.
|
| You don't need any tools. You just need to pay people, who have
| a working brain they've accomplished something with.
|
| It's not an algorithm problem, it's a 'fuck you money' problem.
| Until people with a brain have fuck you money, they aren't
| going to waste their life fighting braindead Karens and
| corporate/political interests who don't want people with a
| brain to explain how the real world works.
|
| Look at the amount of shit Joe Rogan is getting for having
| accomplished scientists on to talk about their work. He has
| fuck you money. Do you know how many other people have fuck you
| money and don't say shit? A lot. You need to spread that fuck
| you money around thick, so that one in ten thousand will have
| the guts to put up with braindead Karens of the world.
| marginalia_nu wrote:
| > If you mean anything related to philosophy, sociology or
| explaining how the world works at large - no.
|
| I'm the wrong person to ask for sociological links, but
| here's a whole flock of actively maintained black swans
| pertaining to philosophy and other topics:
|
| https://lileks.com/
|
| https://stpeter.im/
|
| https://www.philosophizethis.org/
|
| https://antiqueradio.org/
|
| http://attalus.org/
| silent_cal wrote:
| Your search engine is awesome, I've been using it since I saw
| it elsewhere on HN a few months ago.
| fallat wrote:
| > We can build better search engines
|
| Yeah, they're called people.
|
| We can curate better results.
| dylan604 wrote:
| Sheds a tear for Yahoo like search. What would the web be
| today if Sergey and Larry hadn't met?
|
| I really enjoyed the Halt And Catch Fire take on curated vs
| algo search.
| [deleted]
| geuis wrote:
| Hey, edit your comment so your link is clickable.
| marginalia_nu wrote:
| It's past the event horizon and can't be edited anymore.
| kwerk wrote:
| Whoa. Searching a few random terms you're hitting your goal of
| "serendipity" results. Can you share more about the search
| basics? I'm learning search now
| marginalia_nu wrote:
| Don't really know what to say, a lot of the algorithms are
| snore-inducingly standard.
|
| TF-IDF, an approximation of BM-25. Only twist is that I do
| Personalized PageRank biased toward a secret segment of the
| internet to promote the right kinds of search results.
| bsedlm wrote:
| none of the real issues breaking the internet (which is not
| quite broken yet) has technical solutions. No better tool nor
| "more technology" will solve the problems at hand.
|
| The problems are social and economical, they require
| "political" solutions, not more technology.
| agumonkey wrote:
| Better search is not the issue, it distorts the spirit, google
| became the focus of attention, now you want to be listed and
| seen, to monetize too.. before that people spent less time
| formatting stuff to exist. The word of mouth levels is a
| different (maybe more fertile) soil.
| marginalia_nu wrote:
| Yeah I don't think search is actually the solution to the
| problem of discovery, it was just the first avenue I tried.
| Although the metadata from a search engine database does open
| up a lot of options.
| agumonkey wrote:
| Oh sorry btw, it was not an attack against you. And I
| actually enjoyed your engine and found a new lisp dialect I
| never heard of (even though I googled that a few hundred
| times).
| _fat_santa wrote:
| > Right now the big problem as I see it is that there is great
| content being created but its audience just isn't finding it.
| There's so much noise, the signal is almost completely drowned
| out.
|
| It's a curation problem. We have billions of pieces of content
| being created and only a handful of curators to bring that info
| to us. All the big search engine players want to be "the one"
| but it's a fools errand IMO.
|
| No one search engine will be able to become "the one" because
| there is simply too much information. Google with all of their
| cash in the bank and talented engineers can't even crack the
| problem. The problem though is even though each search engine
| offers something different, they all think they offer the same
| thing and compete to muscle out any smaller players.
|
| So you get a situation where you want a metal roof for your
| house, metal roofer gives you a quote. Big roofer guy in town
| hears about this and runs the metal roofer guy out of town,
| then tells you he cant offer you a metal roof anyways.
| Shacklz wrote:
| > Google with all of their cash in the bank and talented
| engineers can't even crack the problem.
|
| "Can't they" or "won't they" because it's simply not in their
| business interest?
| DannyBee wrote:
| Ah yes, the amazing hn cynicism - it's not that the problem
| is really hard, and there is a really complex system here
| with all sorts of incentives, variables, and issues on all
| sides. Instead, everything is easy, and the reason the
| "right" thing (as defined by the poster) doesn't happen can
| be reduced to some single cartoon-villain level bullet
| point like "not in business interest".
|
| Small problem: There are plenty of folks, foundations,
| companies who are not resource limited in attacking
| something like this, yet it still doesn't happen. So maybe
| it's not as simple as you think?
| dylan604 wrote:
| Please, the cynicism pointed in the Googs direction is
| well deserved. It is clear and obvious by their behaviour
| and changes to company ethos that serving ads is priority
| #1. Any thing that diminishes that ability will not be
| tolerated.
|
| Just look at the recent (as of yesterday) stories of the
| changes that Googs is pushing to re-enable tracking that
| has been previously manually/intentionally disabled by
| the users. Look at how Maps is forcing users to enable
| wifi in order to provide routing directions. This one
| happened to me personally as well.
| DannyBee wrote:
| So you don't at all address whether the problem is hard,
| and instead deflect completely.
|
| The wifi thing is just a silly example. The wifi is
| required to do fast start GPS. 99.99999999% of their
| users probably don't want slow start GPS. If you do,
| sure, it's no longer the app for you. Yes, they are
| optimizing for the customers they want and giving them a
| good experience . I'm not sure exactly how this is
| something abnormal. Like, you are basically complaining
| they won't add knobs for you. That's pretty standard in
| good products - but also means if the knobs they aren't
| what you want, it's not a good fit for you.
|
| I got the email in the latter, and that is a super weird
| take. They had one control for literally everything,
| which was owned by admins. They almost certainly got
| complaints that turning it off it made search suggestions
| not work in sheets/docs/etc. So they introduced a new
| separate control for that, and made it controllable by
| the user. Because it's controllable by the user, it also
| means the admin can't see the doc search history of the
| user, only the user can. Nor can they delete your history
| for you - only you can control it. Your auto-delete
| preferences, etc apply to it.
|
| None of this seems bad or horrible to me. The only thing
| even worth picking a bone about is whether the new
| setting should take it's default from the old setting or
| not. There are issues in there of course, because as
| mentioned, before admins could turn it on/off for
| everyone - and this led to lots of complaints. do you
| take the admin setting? Do you take the setting the user
| had if it hadn't been overridden by the admin? etc
|
| The claim, in that story, i that it is forced on by
| default even if you had it off. This claim is wrong,
| afaict. It was not worth wading into that clear firestorm
| of a thread.
|
| The support doc clearly says: "If you disabled Web & App
| Activity in the Admin console, it is turned off for
| Google Workspace users. Users can turn it on if they
| want."
|
| IE if the admin had it disabled, it will be turned off.
| It also says if you had it disabled yourself, it will
| default to off.
|
| It goes through this quite clearly if you click "what if
| i had it disabled" and "what happens if i don't do
| anything".
|
| Overall presenting this as "re-enable tracking that was
| manually/intentionally disabled by users" is a real
| stretch.
| pdonis wrote:
| _> The wifi is required to do fast start GPS_
|
| No, it isn't. A cell phone connection is sufficient for
| that.
| DannyBee wrote:
| This seems very pedantic, and doesn't change what i said
| at all.
|
| I'm happy to change it to "wifi helps with a bunch of
| features they have". AGPS is not even the only one. Wifi
| scanning is happening in the phone anyway to know when to
| switch networks, etc, so they are saving power when it is
| used instead of cell phone.
| dylan604 wrote:
| Not when I've turned off the WiFi to conserve battery
| while out and about not anywhere near wifi signals.
| Unfortunately, because I've decided to use Bluetooth
| earbuds, I now leave the bluetooth radio on as well.
| Until then, that was kept off specifically to avoid
| bluetooth tracking.
|
| GPS is just fine for Garmin, TomToms, etc. Why suddenly
| for a phone that has WiFi in them Maps suddenly
| "requires" wifi is just not convincing me of anything
| other than Googs wants all the data.
| pdonis wrote:
| _> doesn 't change what i said at all_
|
| Yes, it does. See below.
|
| _> I 'm happy to change it to "wifi helps with a bunch
| of features they have"._
|
| This _does_ change what you said, because "a bunch of
| features they have" is not at all the same as "GPS, a
| feature which pretty much everybody wants to use and
| wants to start fast".
|
| _> Wifi scanning is happening in the phone anyway to
| know when to switch networks, etc_
|
| Not if wifi is turned off. If I'm in my car, for example,
| I might well turn wifi off to prevent the phone from
| wasting power scanning for wifi networks that aren't
| there. But I'm still going to have my cell phone
| connection on.
|
| _> they are saving power when it is used instead of cell
| phone._
|
| Nonsense. See above. Plus, the cell phone antenna is
| always scanning too, but on a phone it is far less likely
| to be turned off to prevent that than wifi is.
|
| What I really can't understand is how any of this is
| connected to your (correct) claim that search is hard and
| content curation is hard and so we shouldn't expect
| Google, or anyone else, to just magically solve it.
| Google could easily serve the needs of users much better
| than it does, even if it can't do it perfectly. But it
| won't because it's not in the business of serving user
| needs, it's in the business of serving advertiser needs,
| and serving users is just a by-product.
|
| If Google really wants to solve the problems of users,
| instead of advertisers, it should have users _pay_ them
| instead of advertisers. But of course it won 't since it
| has spent more than two decades now getting users used to
| the idea that search and other "hard" services should
| magically appear for free, and hoping those users won't
| notice that they are actually the product, not the
| customer.
| bbarnett wrote:
| My wifi is never on. This attitude is what is broken at
| google.
|
| You do a thing (wifi alway on), so clearly everyone does,
| and therefore clearly we should force it!
| dylan604 wrote:
| >So you don't at all address whether the problem is hard,
| and instead deflect completely.
|
| That's right, because I wasn't attempting to address
| that. Instead, I was addressing that the cynicism towards
| Googs is not unjustified.
| DannyBee wrote:
| Except both the comments you reply to are talking about a
| specific problem and context. If you are saying that you
| are just claiming "in general, cynicism is warranted",
| that seems like a generalized opinion that doesn't really
| add anything interesting to anything.
|
| It'd be much more interesting if you would engage with
| the actual conversation being had.
| dylan604 wrote:
| I did. The conversation stated that the cynicism was not
| warranted. Just because you brought it up, but now don't
| want to talk about doesn't mean it wasn't part of the
| conversation. I did not just randomly reply to a comment
| with spambot level lack of context.
| bbarnett wrote:
| _The wifi is required to do fast start GPS._
|
| This is 100% factually untrue. AGPS data is downloaded
| via the net, giving a quick bootstrap.
|
| This statement of your is just used to deflect the truth
| ; Google wants more, moar, more, always more.
| zepto wrote:
| But that's just it - Google's business interest is
| _always_ about protecting revenue from search
| advertising, which is _never_ simply aligned with the
| search user or with search quality, but exactly as you
| describe it "a really complex system here with all sorts
| of incentives, variables, and issues on all sides".
|
| It's perfectly reasonable to speculate about whether
| search quality is sacrificed in the interest of some
| incentive Google is trying to balance in favor of its own
| revenue stream. The fact that it's complex is immaterial.
| marginalia_nu wrote:
| I don't think this is particularly cynical. Ads are how
| Google makes money. Show results with many ads, make
| money. Show results with no ads, make no money. I don't
| think it's an example of mustache twisting villainy, but
| rather their business model. I can't really blame them,
| either.
| skeeter2020 wrote:
| How does that reconcile with google results getting worse
| over time then, with worse defined as relevancy vs.
| profit motives? With UI changes that de-emphasize the
| results and promote the ads? With pulling in cursory
| summarizes to keep you on a google property and isntead
| of qucily & easily getting you to the definitive source?
|
| There is lots of support for assuming the worst of google
| in this case.
| notriddle wrote:
| Because it's not just Google. Every web search engine has
| been getting worse; it's why Google remains "the best" in
| every head-to-head comparison. The whole web has been
| getting harder to search.
| eitland wrote:
| I thought this too.
|
| Then I found Kagi last year who manages to exeed my
| expectations, proving that my original assumption is
| correct:
|
| It is still possible to provide good results today,
| Google just fails at it.
|
| I'm not saying it is easy. But it is possible.
|
| (Extra interesting: Kagi builds on Google and Bing, two
| engines that drive me crazy, yet Kagi manages to be
| great!)
| marginalia_nu wrote:
| With a few small exceptions, every search engine uses
| either Google or Bing-data.
| eitland wrote:
| Good points.
|
| But a large part of the problem is that Google can't be
| bothered to follow their own rules:
|
| Again and again I catch them ignoring my doublequotes and
| verbatim options.
|
| There aren't any conflicting incentives around that, are
| there?
|
| Either you respect user queries or you don't.
|
| Also, look at it another way:
|
| Kagi manages to do this _while building on Google_! It is
| in another league, just like Google used to be.
|
| Even nano scale Marginalia (1 guy, 1 tower pc, 4 drives)
| manages to respect my queries.
| Jasper_ wrote:
| Both things can be true. Perhaps the problem is really
| hard, and Google also isn't attempting to solve it
| anymore.
| skeeter2020 wrote:
| ...or they are different problems? Google is really good
| at solving their problems, maybe they only care about
| quality search results as related to financial
| incentives?
| dylan604 wrote:
| Moving the goal posts and declaring a victory aided by
| buying up/supressing other competitors. Become winner by
| default judgement.
| rthomas6 wrote:
| I would agree except Google used to do a good job.
| prox wrote:
| Same reason electrical cars took ages to take off before
| Tesla. The status quo companies (and most are, because
| nobody likes a disruptor) dragged their heels to no end
| before that.
| DannyBee wrote:
| This is a similarly over-simplified take.
|
| Things are simply never this binary.
| tharne wrote:
| > This is a similarly over-simplified take.
|
| Is it though? There are plenty of examples of businesses
| or even entire industries trying their level best to slow
| down changes and innovations that will hurt their
| profits. And in many cases the products may become worse,
| but more profitable, over time. In the 1970's, you could
| buy a washing machine in the United States that would
| last you 25 years. Try doing that now. I'm sure a lot of
| folks would like their washing machine to last two and
| half decades, but that's not that profitable if you're in
| the business of selling washing machines.
| eitland wrote:
| > Google with all of their cash in the bank and talented
| engineers can't even crack the problem.
|
| Don't forget that Linux became only possible because 20 years
| of OS research was carefully studied, analyzed, discussed and
| thrown away.
|
| Ingo Molnar
|
| From a message to the Linux Kernel mailing list in 1999.
| shepherdjerred wrote:
| Can you explain? Was there a competitor to Linux that never
| surfaced?
| eitland wrote:
| My point was that as a newcomer in either operating
| systems (Linux late last century) or a new search engine
| (Marginalia, Kagi) you cannot always win by repeating the
| same stuff incumbents do.
|
| Especially not when the incumbents are busy digging
| deeper holes.
| pdonis wrote:
| I wonder if it was a veiled reference to the debate
| between Linus and Andrew Tanenbaum, who wrote MINIX based
| on OS research that, according to him, showed that
| microkernels are better than monolithic kernels.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tanenbaum%E2%80%93Torvalds_
| deb...
| monetus wrote:
| _what is the ratio between dynamic and static content
| amongst say the top100 web sites on the web? Can we say
| 0% static pages? [yes, i accept Dean Gaudet 's point that
| webpages can be split up into dynamic and static parts,
| probably that will be the future.]_
|
| This is delightful
| sam_bristow wrote:
| In a funny twist of history MINIX is running at ring -3
| on most modern Intel CPUs. So it's probably running on
| more desktops than MacOS or Linux.
| fuzzer37 wrote:
| I assume they're talking about all the OS research done
| at places like XEROX and Bell Labs that never really came
| to fruition, but formed the basis for modern OS's.
| quotehelp9128 wrote:
| Here's the mailing list entry referenced: http://lkml.iu.
| edu/hypermail/linux/kernel/9906.0/0746.html
| ColinHayhurst wrote:
| A fools errand indeed. But we currently aren't far from "the
| one" in three world(view)s: China - Baidu and Sogou; Russia -
| Yandex; Elsewhere - Google and Bing/syndicates. Korea (Naver)
| and Czechia/Slovakia (Seznam) are not international but local
| exceptions.
|
| We choose not to offer the same thing based on our values;
| no-tracking and infrastructural independence, meaning we
| aren't captured like other search options:
| https://blog.mojeek.com/2021/03/to-track-or-not-to-
| track.htm...
| new_guy wrote:
| > Google with all of their cash in the bank and talented
| engineers can't even crack the problem.
|
| Search is a solved problem. But you're starting from the
| false premise that Google and your expectations are aligned,
| they're not. Google shows you what they want you to see,
| typically spam sites carrying their ads. That's not what
| you're looking for but from their perspective they've 'solved
| search'.
| dylan604 wrote:
| I see nothing wrong with this comment, and find my
| understanding of Google to be very same.
| megous wrote:
| For me it would be enough if RSS feeds could include
| <recommended-feed href="https://someone-elses/rss.xml"
| reason="Friend's travel blog" /> and RSS reader allowed to
| browse through the web of recomendations and add allowed to
| add selected ones to my feedreader list.
|
| A potentially standard way to find other related feeds,
| instead of just consuming the content of one author/website.
| Curated by real humans that produce useful content (that's
| why I have them subscribed).
|
| Simple thing that could have been very powerful for discovery
| if this was thought about early enough.
| johnny22 wrote:
| webrings for rss?
| hinkley wrote:
| PageRank worked when humans were creating content across a
| huge number of sites. Once you start consolidating the humans
| (Medium), then the organic content and the machine generated
| content start to blur together. And the machine sites can
| collude to make their content look more organic than organic.
| Today there's 10x as much of it so if only 20% of the organic
| content is high quality, that's practically in the noise
| floor for the sorts of graphs I stare at in any given week.
|
| Perhaps what's missing here is a garbage collection
| algorithm. Whatever they are using as 'roots' is not working,
| and they can no longer infer trust by association. They need
| to curate and review sites. Or maybe they already do, but the
| humans' focus is directed by heuristics and those heuristics
| have been gamed.
|
| Does anyone know if Google still has a functioning QA
| department? Perhaps this is the same disease we see
| everywhere of developers thinking they understand testing
| when really we know just enough to be dangerous.
| onion2k wrote:
| _PageRank worked when humans were creating content across a
| huge number of sites._
|
| PageRank worked when there was very little tangible value
| besides vanity in being number one for a particular search
| term, and when there was little competition between sites.
| Once SEO became a key strategy to growing a business
| PageRank had to shift from finding the most relevant
| results to removing the things that were pretending to be
| relevant results. That challenge is much harder.
|
| I contend that practically every update to Google Search
| over the past 15 years has been to try to defeat SEO spam.
| There doesn't appear to be anything else. And,
| unfortunately for all of us, it's a battle Google are not
| winning.
| rtpg wrote:
| Who even "gets content" through searching? I'm sure many
| people here are all basically using the internet through link
| aggregators (reddit, fb, HN etc).
|
| Has the web ever been much beyond that? Have people ever
| really been just hitting "give me a random web page about X"?
|
| Of course search engines are very useful, just that these
| conversations about content and "the web", I feel like
| there's not much focus on how so much traffic is guided
| through link aggregation.
| dgb23 wrote:
| I often search for articles/books about X, or reviews about
| Y. The top results for those things is a mix of SEO spam,
| Amazon links etc. which I all try to avoid.
|
| I use search for information, but I often have to dig quite
| deep to find something worth clicking on or reading. And
| that's true for Google and DDG (which I mostly use).
|
| When it's raw, basic knowledge, then I'm using !wiki or
| !mdn etc. in DDG to search those sites directly. Note:
| Wikipedia and Mozilla Developer Network are two of my
| favorite sites.
|
| But when it's something more subtle and specialized that
| I'm not very familiar with then often my only hope of
| finding something useful is to search via aggregators and
| forums like HN, Reddit etc. because then I can gauge the
| quality of the links via the discussion around it and the
| people who post them. Or in some cases I know about a
| specialist or journalist and can use their name to filter
| out spam.
|
| Discovering these kind of things via search is really hard,
| especially if their authors are not known. It's the
| spammers and low effort creators that get rewarded the
| most, partly because of search engines, partly because of
| visitors who are content with that kind of quality.
| godshatter wrote:
| Whenever I'm searching for something (using DDG, too) I
| usually scroll down the results page until I see a
| website that I don't recognize or one I remember as being
| small and targeted. The big company websites usually have
| shortest blurbs on the topic and the worst "NoScript
| minigames". Smaller websites usually have more
| information and less reliance on massive ad networks.
| This is especially true if you are looking for reviews on
| games.
| dgb23 wrote:
| I don't get to play video games anymore as often as a
| couple of years ago. Then I was naturally informed about
| interesting titles (typically indie). Now when I have a
| couple of hours to kill and would like to play something
| new/original I usually give up after 20min of searching
| and grab a book.
|
| I wish I knew some decent curators or magazines, but most
| of the stuff I come across is just too far from what I'm
| looking for. Search engines don't help much here either.
| marginalia_nu wrote:
| If you find yourself looking for a game in the future,
| just get "Vampire Survivors". Trust me. It's the pinnacle
| of casual gaming. $3 and as simple as it is plain fun.
| Can easily spend 10 hours on it if you want to, or 10
| minutes if you don't have any more time.
| marginalia_nu wrote:
| I can't tell you the number of times I've wished there was
| a subreddit or a facebook group for the types of content
| I'm interested in, only to find that there isn't. Not
| because the content doesn't exist, mind you.
|
| Link aggregators are also very much part of the problem.
| Besides the astroturfing, they tend to favor the lowest
| common denominator in content. Popular vote just doesn't
| seem to be a good way of surfacing quality content,
| especially not with the social incentive of winning
| internet acclaim for submitting a good result.
|
| HN does surface the odd gem, but why can't I pick one of
| those and say "Hey, this topic interests me, show me more
| like this"? I'm currently working on build something to
| that effect, and so far it seems at least reasonably
| possible.
|
| RSS was good in one way, but it also sort of turns
| everything it comes into contact with into a blog.
| fishtacos wrote:
| >> I can't tell you the number of times I've wished there
| was a subreddit or a facebook group for the types of
| content I'm interested in, only to find that there isn't.
| Not because the content doesn't exist, mind you.
|
| Why not start it? One of the beauties of reddit subgroups
| is that not only do you find random very specific ones,
| but if you don't, you can start your own.
| marginalia_nu wrote:
| I've started subreddits for niche topics. Only visitors I
| got were spambots.
| dylan604 wrote:
| What search engine were people using to find your niche
| topic's thread.
|
| Oh, wait
| wonderwonder wrote:
| I hate the new web, especially google news. Its seems to have
| gone downhill fast the last couple years. So much of what they
| feed me is based off some random article I clicked on years ago
| and now they decide that's all I am interested in. Worse all the
| articles are just clear click farm bait. "This guy clicked on a
| Marvel movie link, he must love comic books and nothing else..."
| ploppyploppy wrote:
| This has to be some of the worst writing I've ever read
| AlexandrB wrote:
| > And when it comes to demands from publishers of PWAs, there is
| not much about access to hardware or clever new web APIs. The
| biggest demand was about notifications and making sure people
| stay in the app or keep coming back to it.
|
| I think this is an interesting observation in the context of
| Apple adding PWA notification support to iOS. It's also the
| reason I won't be enabling _any_ notifications from Safari once
| that feature goes live.
| withinboredom wrote:
| It'd be nice if the feature included a way to disable
| notifications per site though. I never allow notifications from
| a website, ever (or any app on my phone), fwiw.
| butler14 wrote:
| There's a pattern with these threads (aside the rose tinted
| glasses).
|
| A complete lack of examples. And when there is examples, they're
| absurd.
|
| Of course the results are general for a super general search
| intent keyword. Of course the results are bad for super obscure 0
| search volume keywords.
|
| I don't think Google's perfect, far from it, but a lot of the
| criticism in these types of threads is limp and based on
| unrealistic expectations.
| nappy wrote:
| Agreed. I'm not sure if you meant rose tinted glasses regarding
| the internet or search, but it's definitely both. People forget
| that google results felt amazing because they were so much
| better than other search... But also forgot how often they
| weren't great.
| elefantastisch wrote:
| "Instant noodles"
|
| Consider the difference in results between Google and what you
| might expect if directories rather than search had remained the
| primary way of finding things on the web. A search for "instant
| noodles" assumes you either want to buy them, find recipes for
| them, or read about whether they are healthy. But a directory
| topic "instant noodles" would find sites _about_ instant
| noodles. And sure enough, if you hunt through search results,
| you can find things like https://www.theramenrater.com/ which
| definitely fits the bill, but it takes some hunting. It's a
| "page four" type of result (in reality, it was on page five).
|
| So, yes, this is a general topic and you get general results...
| but that's not how directories worked. A directory listing for
| "Instant noodles" would never have included Walmart and Amazon
| searches. It wouldn't have included random news articles on
| whether or not they're healthy. And in the days of blogrolls
| and web-rings and such, once you found one site, you usually
| had a way to get to more human-curated related sites without
| even returning to the directory.
|
| Not denying there's some rose tint here, but there's a big
| difference in how human-curated topical browsing differs from
| search.
| zozbot234 wrote:
| The most widely used directory DMOZ.org was closed in 2018 or
| so, simply because AOL were fed up with maintaining its
| content. Google didn't have much to do with that. In fact,
| the Google search bot benefits from having high-quality
| curated links available as much as anyone else does.
| dahdum wrote:
| > But a directory topic "instant noodles" would find sites
| about instant noodles. And sure enough, if you hunt through
| search results, you can find things like
| https://www.theramenrater.com/ which definitely fits the
| bill, but it takes some hunting. It's a "page four" type of
| result (in reality, it was on page five).
|
| Your example of Ramen Rater is the #1 result for the query
| [instant noodle reviews]. The more broad [instant noodles]
| has Wikipedia as the #1 result, which covers the "about"
| intent case you mentioned.
| elefantastisch wrote:
| I think there's still a distinction here.
|
| I didn't specifically want instant noodle reviews. I just
| wanted sites about instant noodles. If they happen to be
| reviews, cool. If they are photo galleries, that's cool
| too. Message boards, also cool. But I don't want articles
| or encyclopedia or dictionary entries about instant
| noodles. I want full sites, or at least large subsections
| of sites, where the primary topic is instant noodles. This
| is what directories list. Sites where you open the site and
| ask "what's this site about" and the answer is clearly
| "instant noodles". Not at the page level, but at the site
| level.
| kkjjkgjjgg wrote:
| Lately I have been wondering about that classic book listing web
| sites from the early days of the WWW, that everybody was making
| fun about. I also thought it was funny, but now I wish I had such
| a book. I don't even know how to discover interesting web sites
| anymore.
| rchaud wrote:
| > We don't create content for the web and for longevity. We
| create content to show ads around it.
|
| And that is the difference between the artisanal/hobbyist web of
| the pre-Facebook/Youtube/Blogging Gold Rush era, and what came
| after it. The web is dominated by businesses that consider
| content to be a means to an end. Kids' cartoons on TV in the 60s
| were designed to sell toys and merchandise after all.
|
| This isn't just limited to websites that 'review' things with a
| metric tons of Amazon affiliate links, or gate white papers
| behind an email signup. Youtube and Instagram went this route
| years ago. At least YT is still generally good quality. IG feels
| like a wasteland of influences shilling some product with a
| discount code that attributes sales to them.
| i_am_proteus wrote:
| Why should one expect there to be "good" free content on any
| platform that permits content for the purposes of advertising?
|
| Is it not the natural result that monetized content dominates
| free content on any platform that permits both? After all,
| monetized content, because it leads to some sort of revenue for
| the creator, has an advertising budget, and free content does
| not.
|
| The only way to to avoid such advertising is to not permit it on
| a given platform, or to require it to be explicitly financed
| (e.g., a subscription to a digital magazine). The internet, as a
| platform, has no such rules, and so it is dominated by
| advertising.
| hombre_fatal wrote:
| Though blatant, obvious advertising isn't the only form of
| advertising. And I'm not so sure that it's the worst. You're
| just pitching a platform that only launders ads through content
| because you only ban the detectable and perhaps even the most
| honest ads.
|
| It's just not that easy.
| benlumen wrote:
| Couldn't agree more. I'm particularly upset that it's turned our
| journalists into click-farmers who experience no consequences for
| the damage and division they're causing. That has been a huge,
| huge blow to our society in my opinion.
|
| At least it brought us the likes of Lex Fridman.
| newswasboring wrote:
| Is there any way to fight SEO? That seems like a big problem
| nobody seems to be working on. Or maybe working on but failing.
| If we can reduce the efficacy of SEO then we can fight spam
| right? I understand its a feedback loop where once they improve
| something, someone will figure out how to beat it. But maybe it
| can be adaptive in some way?
| butler14 wrote:
| You don't think Google is fighting SEO?
| newswasboring wrote:
| If it is, its failing miserably. Used to be that if I did a
| broad search about a concept it would take me to personal
| blogs and stuff. Now it just takes me to pintrest. It seems
| like every non technical search I do leads me to pintrest.
| foxfluff wrote:
| Yes, there are ways. Human curators, network effects,
| transparency.
|
| Anything that is at the mercy of an algorithm will be gamed
| once they figure the algorithm out.
| lonk11 wrote:
| At the end the author talks about curated link collections as a
| solution - create them using Pinboard.in and consume them via
| RSS.
|
| I think the part that is missing is how to discover the link
| collections to subscribe to.
|
| I'm building https://linklonk.com that merges the collection, the
| consumption and the discovery:
|
| - You add links to content you liked to your "channels".
|
| - LinkLonk connects you to RSS feeds and other user channels that
| posted the content you liked and shows you new content from them.
| The more content you have in common with a feed/channel - the
| more weight their new content gets in the "For you" list.
|
| You can also share your channel via a public link (example:
| https://linklonk.com/channels/programming-yUlhkwDXFb) or an RSS
| feed (example:
| https://linklonk.com/api/publicChannels/programming-yUlhkwDX...)
| .
| exaltation wrote:
| I really enjoy curated link newsletters like Thinking About
| Things [0] and Findka Essays [1].
|
| [0] https://www.thinking-about-things.com/ [1]
| https://essays.findka.com/
| randomsilence wrote:
| This looks very promising.
|
| The problem is see is that without an account, it is impossible
| to submit links. However, unlike reddit or hn, one needs to
| submit links to get useful content. Thus I would assume that by
| the 1% rule [1], it is very difficult to retain visitors.
|
| Could you offer options for those who don't want to make an
| account? Maybe you could create some ready-made selections to
| see good content? Or you could allow to post links in a hidden
| way to get the algorithm going and you and some moderators
| approve them later-on.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1%25_rule_(Internet_culture)
| quiet_cool wrote:
| pinboard, interesting, i guess bookmarking is a step in the right
| direction, but wouldn't it be better if browsers actually wrote
| functional bookmark systems and provided standard import/export
| methods?
| kaetemi wrote:
| The blogroll-style linking culture is still alive in Discord
| communities. With colorful about pages, and everything. Animated
| emojis are the new GIFs. Sadly they do not offer much in terms of
| persistent content.
| jdrc wrote:
| > Discord communities.
|
| You mean the "app" that has no search and requires you to sign
| up to see anything, then pass some obscure initiation ritual by
| the mods, then be pestered with various bots. And that app
| doesn't even make money yet, wait until they decide to become
| profitable.
| kaetemi wrote:
| No-search is the best part. You actually have to talk with
| people, and get to know them, to discover more communities!
|
| Sadly, it's a proprietary space, yes, but still.
|
| The difference with "social" networks (and now the bad state
| of search engines) is that you actually get to be part of a
| community. As opposed to shouting in a loud bar to compete
| for likes to get heard better maybe if some algorithm likes
| you.
| jagged-chisel wrote:
| > No-search is the best part. You actually have to talk
| with people...
|
| I tire of answering the same question hundreds of times
| Aurelius3 wrote:
| What do you mean by no search exactly? I think there is a
| disconnect between the person you replied to and the
| person that the person you replied to replied to. Discord
| has a pretty good search function for messages,
| attachments, and embeds in servers depending on date,
| author, etc. As for searching for servers to join they
| didin't have that before and you had to rely on third
| party aggregators, now they do, although I have never
| tried it out as I prefer joining servers who advertise
| themselves on their own websites individually.
| [deleted]
| pmlnr wrote:
| > Discord
|
| Discord communities are nearly as much readable as geocities
| pages were as well, but that is not a compliment.
| kaetemi wrote:
| I think it's charming. :)
| verisimi wrote:
| Google is not the victim in this. It is probably the prime tool
| in the presentation of reality. It fulfils the role that the
| legacy media used to do - ie newspapers.
|
| Google wants to intermediate reality for you. A perfect example
| of that is how it tried to kill rss - first by making a fantastic
| rss client so that most people used it, only to then to stop the
| service. This was not due to budgetary considerations, - it was
| by design! RSS is puts you directly in touch with the content you
| like - this is a threat to a company such as google and whoever
| runs them.
|
| If you dig deeper, you will see that google has long-standing
| associations with military intelligence.
|
| "Both Brin and Page were working on the Stanford Digital Library
| Project (SDLP). The SDLP's goal was "to develop the enabling
| technologies for a single, integrated and universal digital
| library" and it was funded through the National Science
| Foundation, among other federal agencies.[9][10][11][12] Brin and
| Page were also part of a computer science research team at
| Stanford University that received funding from Massive Digital
| Data Systems (MDDS), a program managed for the Central
| Intelligence Agency (CIA) and the National Security Agency (NSA)
| by large intelligence and military contractors."
|
| from: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Google
|
| If you look at the CIA's venture capital firm - In-Q-Tel, you
| will see that they funded google too:
|
| "In-Q-Tel sold 5,636 shares of Google, worth over $2.2 million,
| on November 15, 2005.[10] The shares were a result of Google's
| acquisition of Keyhole, Inc, the CIA-funded satellite mapping
| software now known as Google Earth"
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In-Q-Tel
|
| (Why In-Q-Tel require a funding arm at all, is another question
| you can ponder.)
|
| When the Edward Snowden fiasco was running, I also recollect
| reading about 3-letter agencies having offices in google's
| offices - no questions asked.
|
| TLDR
|
| If you think that the 3-letter agencies are about keeping you
| safe from the world, you have this the wrong way around. They are
| about managing the people - they cannot allow information to be
| unrestrained. Google is an essential part of the infrastructure.
| verisimi wrote:
| Its all very well downvoting me, but say why not take the time
| to say what is objectionable?
|
| Even if you don't like my assertions, I'm providing sources for
| them!
|
| I have to say downvoting without engaging with what info is
| provided is one of the worst elements of this site. Surely
| downvoting should be used sparingly. It shouldn't be that just
| because you are a power user (with 500+ upvotes) who feels
| discomfort with whatever is being raised, right? Perhaps its
| hard to justify working at a big tech company, but downvoting
| would be a rather self-serving ideology, don't you think?
| matt1982 wrote:
| Mentions that lots of links now from search engines take you to
| walled gardens. Take a peek around the rest of his site and click
| a link, low and behold its to skillshare, wanting me to sign up
| :S
| jspash wrote:
| Would you trust the word of a rancher who doesn't eat his own
| cattle? - Not Mark Twain
| togaen wrote:
| js8 wrote:
| It seems that mass media, in reaction to the Internet and facing
| the increased competition, went with the approach where they
| increased the frequency and churn of the news articles and
| content, at the expense of quality.
|
| However, this is a very print-centric approach, where you print
| something and cannot change it afterwards, and maybe throw the
| old newspaper away that day. I wonder why they cannot adopt a
| different journalistic paradigm, similar to for example Wikipedia
| or Wikivoyage, where instead of publishing hundreds of articles
| about a topic, one a day, they would instead create a sort of
| curated portals which would be fine-tuned and updated over the
| longer time periods, focusing on quality of information.
|
| The same goes for most online discussions; they are extremely
| ephemeral and stupid points are argued over and over. It would be
| nice to summarize the main points in a particular discussion from
| time to time and then continue.
|
| So I think there is plenty of space to innovate like this.
| Kye wrote:
| This was a big thing in the early days of the blogging boom. I
| forget who, but one major blogger made a point out of treating
| posts as living documents that changed as stories developed.
| lanstin wrote:
| You might enjoy the old wiki, they tgought a lot about this
| balance between debate and conclusions
| https://wiki.c2.com/?AllPanaceasBecomePoison
| bjornklose wrote:
| Being ephemeral is both a bug and a feature, though.
|
| Take a random Discord server, where we try to figure out some
| details of a DAO in the making. People from other timezones
| have to hop in and out and are welcomed by a wall of text when
| they come back.
|
| So did the issue from yesterday get resolved already since you
| were gone? Maybe, but if so, how did that agreement come to
| fruition? And which part of the above wall of text do we "mark
| as resolved"?
|
| What part to keep, what to formalize as a rule, etc. Those who
| were "in the room" when the discussion happened now have to
| find a way to re-tell the story in another ritual (meeting,
| weekly summary, task, whatnot). Sounds like the work of an
| editor or journalist to me.
|
| But most people would rather add onto, instead of editing or
| removing only [1]. Like with maintaining legacy software or
| editing existing wikipedia entries, most prefer to instead just
| "add some more".
|
| But even more important, some people tend to disregard even
| scientifically proven advice and prefer living through things
| themselves, no matter how redundant the experience.
|
| [1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2021/04/16/bias-
| prob... (which i found via HN back then)
| irrational wrote:
| > I challenge you right now to find a tutorial on how to fold a
| Shurgard moving crate.
|
| This whole post is a disguised attempt to get help with this,
| isn't it? (I say this after spending 15 minutes trying to find a
| tutorial ;-)
| nathan_compton wrote:
| Its called the Society of the Spectacle. Here on hackernews we
| literally call it "Commoditize Your Compliment." The startup
| ethos produced this web at the behest of capital. Its kind of
| nuts to see this post discuss all these problems without even
| mentioning that capitalism, for good or ill, has created them.
| SuoDuanDao wrote:
| How do you define capitalism? I assume it's not 'people having
| voluntary economic interactions with one another' because that
| would seem a little redundant.
| guerrilla wrote:
| "Capitalism is an economic system based on the private
| ownership and control of the means of production and their
| operation for profit."
| js8 wrote:
| And also based on free market for labor.
| SuoDuanDao wrote:
| so if I have a hammer and am using it to build houses when
| someone pays me, and I refuse to lend out my hammer to
| everyone who asks, that's capitalism?
| wbsss4412 wrote:
| > I refuse to lend out my hammer to everyone who asks,
| that's capitalism
|
| Capitalism in this analogy is your ownership of the
| hammer, not who you are or are not obligated to lend it
| to.
|
| Though it's not really a great example, a lot of things
| are missing from this example, such as how you came to
| have ownership of the hammer, what property rights you
| are entitled to with the hammer, and why you even need to
| have ownership of said hammer in the first place.
| Alternatively, there is some sort of public ownership (as
| opposed to private, not necessarily implying state
| ownership) of the supply of hammers, and you are able to
| obtain a hammer to fit your business needs as needed.
| SuoDuanDao wrote:
| Is there any situation in which Alice can refuse Bob
| access to a tool Bob's declared a need for _not_
| capitalism?
|
| I don't care about the word 'ownership' or what makes it
| valid, I care about limiting access to limited resources,
| be those resources hammers or the land my ancestors are
| buried on.
| wbsss4412 wrote:
| Well, ownership is the operative term here, so it's a big
| deal.
|
| Ownership is _who_ decides access (a more appropriate
| term would probably be who governs utilization), not
| where access can or cannot be limited.
|
| So to directly answer the question, yes, within certain
| definitions of "socialism" bobs access can be limited.
| SuoDuanDao wrote:
| Can a private citizen limit access of another private
| citizen's access without it being capitalism?
| wbsss4412 wrote:
| I think you're trying to ask if there's such a thing as
| private property/ownership outside of capitalism, and the
| answer is yes.
|
| An obvious example would be feudalism.
| SuoDuanDao wrote:
| Then what are people referring to when they say
| "Capitalism caused this"? If capitalism is private
| ownership of tools, and there are systems other than
| capitalism with private ownership of tools, what are
| people diagnosing when they say 'capitalism' in this
| context?
| wbsss4412 wrote:
| Well capitalism isn't just private ownership of tools,
| it's also division of labor, wage labor, and market
| exchange. Possibly some other things that are escaping me
| at the moment.
|
| The critique ultimately traces back to Marx, who asserted
| that social relations within a society are dictated by
| the "mode of production".
|
| I don't necessarily alway agree with people when they say
| "capitalism caused this" but this is by best attempt at
| relaying the reasoning.
|
| Ultimately the critique that socialists are making, to
| bring it back to your analogy, is that most people don't
| own their own hammer, capitalists do, they just do all
| the work with it to build houses while the capitalists
| take the lions share of the profits.
| wbsss4412 wrote:
| I mean yes, I could literally take the hammer from you
| and destroy it under any system, thus "limiting your
| access". The question is whether or not that is a crime,
| whether or not you or I have a right to the hammer or
| control over what's done with it.
|
| Again, ownership is the operative idea here.
| [deleted]
| dasneueprogram wrote:
| This led me to pinboard.in, thanks for that.
| jll29 wrote:
| I share the sentiments. And the first time I got upset about
| bloat was in 1993 when instead of a <HR> tag, people put a GIF
| with a line ;-).
|
| Some of it, though, is a natural consequence on the commercial
| potential of the Web being realized. "If you put up an abreuvoir,
| the pigs will come", to quote the German supreme court (out of
| context).
|
| Perhaps one could design another protocol that is designed so
| that it cannot be commercially useful. Because we live in an
| "attention society" (attention = power = money) this means in all
| likelihood that such a WWW successor would by definition not be
| able to get as big as the WWW (which is an upside and a downside
| at once). Decentralized ideas are very appealing, but
| centralization is used to make the existing Web fast and
| convenient - this is also something that will have to be
| addressed somehow (maybe there is a way to have physical
| centralization but logical distribution and a way so that the two
| levels - physical and logical - can't see each other).
| AlexAndScripts wrote:
| > Perhaps we could design another protocol that is designed so
| that it cannot be commercially useful
|
| Take a look at Gemini. It was designed to be lightweight,
| minimalist, human-readable, near useless commercially and, most
| importantly, difficult to extend.
| vmoore wrote:
| I'm not so sure about this article. Yeah the modern web is a
| commercialized hellscape now, but there are pockets of resistance
| if you know where to look, and alternative search engines we can
| leverage to unearth gems. Think Qwant, Mojeek, Marginalia, hell
| even Tor has plenty of programming blogs/chans & search engines
| that remind me of the early Internet. The web is still a
| rabbithole to get lost in. You have to make the web work for you,
| and try to escape your comfort zone or bubble.
| chriscodepo8 wrote:
| Author here: for sure, but that's not the point. My point is
| that the initial experience for non-technical people using the
| web is horrible, and they will never ever get to the places you
| mention. The promise of the web as a medium that isn't paid for
| (and I worked in Radio, TV and Newspapers) is not a mainstream
| thing.
| rthomas6 wrote:
| Does anybody else remember StumbleUpon? I want that again. It was
| great for finding new content, better than Reddit or anything
| else.
| baxtr wrote:
| _> I miss having the web as a resource. As a library of knowledge
| and a collection of weird and wonderful entertainment and
| subculture art._
|
| This is becoming a meme. Yes, I also think Google results are
| getting worse.
|
| But: The real underlying core reason for this is that the entire
| society has come online by now. You can't compare the old, elite
| web to the mainstream web of today.
|
| At the end of the day, Google is just a machine optimizing for
| the masses.
| aabajian wrote:
| I'm sure everyone is used to typing:
|
| 'VanVan motorcycle starting issue reddit'
|
| 'FJ Cruiser clutch chirp forum'
|
| Adding the "reddit" or "forum" tag makes the results way more
| useful. Is there a way to tell Google to only include forum-like
| results?
| Kye wrote:
| Google in a better era would have noticed this and used it to
| improve results. I don't think Google cares about good results
| anymore. Just profitable results.
| jdrc wrote:
| > I loathe that 90% of image results are pointing to walled
| gardens that ask me to sign up before seeing it. I really wished
| search engines would not show me Facebook or Pinterest results
| unless I am also logged in there.
|
| By search engines they mean google. Other search engines (yandex,
| bing) have pretty good image search.
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