[HN Gopher] Forbes Marketplace: The Parasite SEO Company Trying ...
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Forbes Marketplace: The Parasite SEO Company Trying to Devour Its
Host
Author : greg_V
Score : 549 points
Date : 2024-09-19 10:44 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (larslofgren.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (larslofgren.com)
| graeme wrote:
| Very good article. Not clear to me why Google has let parasite
| SEO become so successful. Possibly they are starved of human
| generated content kept to a certain quality level. But it's very
| strange to see sites leveraging a legacy brand to expand far
| beyond their expertise. Forbes is the most prominent example.
| thmsths wrote:
| Complacency? Google has such a dominance in search that their
| name is used as a verb. Combine that with their culture of
| automating everything to an extreme degree. And the end result
| seems to be: search that is just good enough that people keep
| using it and requires little human fine tuning/curation making
| it cheap at scale.
| fakedang wrote:
| Not to mention how flawed the current search tool really is.
| If you search for something, page 1 shows results from page 7
| to some infinite number. But click on that large number, and
| you find out that the last page was page 3.
| jajko wrote:
| That was there for many years
| thrance wrote:
| Since there is no competition and people will keep using Google
| whatever happens, might as well push the ad-filled garbage site
| than the ad-free handwritten blogpost. The former probably
| makes them more money, everything else humanity holds dear be
| damned.
| miohtama wrote:
| On why Google allows bad quality results nowadays:
|
| https://www.wheresyoured.at/the-men-who-killed-google/
|
| Also discussed on HN earlier
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40133976
| nick3443 wrote:
| One of the commenters on wheresyoured seemed insightful:
| "wonder if organic search results being worse generates more
| ad clicks, as the ads are more likely to be more useful than
| the actual search results".
| morkalork wrote:
| Someone once described the state of mobile gaming on
| Android like this. Games that are good make less money.
| Games that are just good enough to get you to open them but
| are also just shitty enough that when you hit an ad in-
| game, you click on it and leave, make more money.
| bee_rider wrote:
| It is astonishing to me that people click ads in general,
| but especially ads in a game. At least ads on websites,
| you were probably just mindlessly scrolling...
| mschuster91 wrote:
| Some mobile game ads are actually advertising for decent
| other games. Or a few weeks ago, some shipping company on
| Instagram closing down one of their locations and selling
| off stuff at a heavy discount, got about 1200EUR worth of
| stuff for barely 400EUR.
|
| The key thing is the luck to get shown such ads... about
| 95% IME are utter garbage, and Google should go and not
| just mandate that game ads show actual gameplay but also
| that what the ads show must be _the main_ part in the
| game, not just some irrelevant side quest.
| adamc wrote:
| In the short-term. But google is training a whole
| generation that everything they touch is shit. I know a
| lot of engineers who won't touch chrome if they aren't
| testing something. I have the same feeling about android
| games.
|
| They've toxified their own markets for short-term gains.
| robocat wrote:
| Conspiracy theory: one or more companies are background
| manufacturing Google hate.
|
| Chrome is amazingly well engineered and the Chromium team
| seems to have avoided the worst shittification. Having
| watched other products dive into the cesspit of
| advertising I'm not quite sure how the team does it.
| Somehow Chrome seems to add useful features (while being
| hated for that). Maybe I'm the fool in the room.
|
| And the code is open source. A gift to humanity yet so
| strongly hated. So open source that most of the
| competition uses it! There's some magic going on somehow.
|
| I just don't understand how anyone that calls themselves
| an engineer could hate Chrome that much. Firefox doesn't
| feel well engineered, and Mozilla has a strong taint of
| scuzzy executive vampires. Safari has its good points but
| when I was developing for it, it consistently had major
| flaws. Safari certainly has some amazing engineering. But
| Chromium mostly has better engineering from what I could
| tell as a JavaScript developer.
|
| Engineers are just as vulnerable to branding and anti-
| branding as everyone else.
|
| Microsoft, Google, Apple. Try to order them by evilness.
| alephnerd wrote:
| > Conspiracy theory: one or more companies are background
| manufacturing Google hate
|
| Personally, I believe that Google's issues are just a
| general issue of tech debt and creeping complexity that
| is common in all organizations.
|
| That said, Amazon was a victim of a strategy similar to
| your conspiracy theory
|
| In 2019, the WSJ [0] exposed how Walmart, Oracle and
| Simon Property Group were funding and astroturfing anti-
| Amazon groups.
|
| [0] - https://www.wsj.com/articles/a-grassroots-campaign-
| to-take-d...
| cynicalsecurity wrote:
| You are amazed by Chrome, but it's still not good for
| your privacy. Firefox is way better.
| visarga wrote:
| > They've toxified their own markets for short-term
| gains.
|
| Both Google and Apple. If you go to the App Store all
| games are ad ridden to the point where you can't play
| more than a minute without interruption or constant
| nagging to buy. Where are the apps where you pay a sum
| agreed from the start and use the damn app without
| restrictions? Some games will even trick people into
| buying $20/week subscriptions. I can only trust Apple
| Arcade for my kid. What a wasteland, probably no more
| than 1000 decent apps in millions. And they have the
| nerve to pretend App Store is some curated collection of
| software we can trust. It's no better than "shareware"
| before 2000's.
| ghaff wrote:
| Shareware at one point was really try before you buy
| without restrictions--even if mostly people never bought
| before software really didn't have trial periods etc.
|
| "Free to play" is really awful in general though. But I
| guess people won't in general pay up-front for a lot of
| things.
| fillskills wrote:
| Google team has long given up its user's needs for
| incremental revenue goals. See the 10 ads that come before
| any result
| miohtama wrote:
| The problem is lack of credible competition. There is no
| quality wise matching alternative for Google.
| ilrwbwrkhv wrote:
| Because Google makes money through all this. These move ads.
| That's all they care about at this stage. I had stated a few
| years back Google is dying. It will take a while and it's going
| to be painful but we will get over this soon. 20 years is a
| good run.
| paulpauper wrote:
| google search result can be shit and they will still make
| tons of money from 3rd party/publisher ads and youtube,
| cloud, gmail, atc.
| scottyah wrote:
| Nobody has come up with a scalable metric for determining
| quality that can't be appropriated by SEO. Pagerank was one of
| the best for awhile (number sites that link to your site,
| weighted by their rank). Whether it be clicks, time on page,
| percentage of people who clicked onto the page then ended the
| session, etc it all gets gamed.
|
| Like it or not, it's what the people want. The "trashy" movies,
| books, music, etc. all sell like wildfire, why do most people
| on hn think that the internet should be any different?
| visarga wrote:
| I think today we can use LLMs to decide what websites are
| shit. The wheel is turning. SEO artists will have to provide
| actually useful, non-spammy content. If Google doesn't do it,
| some uBlock like service will implement it on user side. Or
| we'll just use chatGPT with search and not see the cesspool
| at all. You can edit its system prompt to avoid shit in
| search results.
| disgruntledphd2 wrote:
| Your comment assumes both that current LLMs can scale to
| replace Google which seems unlikely from. both a business
| and compute perspective.
|
| And if they do, you'll get maybe a decade out of them
| before they succumb to the same problems as Google have.
| 10000truths wrote:
| > Nobody has come up with a scalable metric for determining
| quality that can't be appropriated by SEO
|
| Nor will it ever happen, at least as long as search is a
| Google monoculture. One effective player in the search space
| means that everyone sets their sight on the same target.
| Which naturally leads to SEO being an extremely one-sided
| arms race not in favor of Google - "good content" is hard to
| quantify, and whatever proxy (or combinations thereof) Google
| uses to estimate that quality will be ruthlessly uncovered,
| reverse engineered and exploited to its last inch by an
| unyielding, unending horde of "SEO optimizers".
|
| The only way that Google maintains search quality is if it
| properly accounts for the fact that websites will adopt the
| path of least resistance, i.e. put in the least amount of
| effort to optimize only specifically the things that Google
| measures. Which means that the heuristics and algorithms
| Google uses to determine search rankings _must_ always be a
| moving target whose criteria needs to be vigilantly updated
| and constantly curated by _people_. Any attempt to fully
| automate that curation will result in the cyber equivalent of
| natural selection - SEO-optimizing websites adapting by
| automating the production of content that hits _just_ the
| right buttons while still being royally useless to actual
| visitors.
| paulpauper wrote:
| It has to do with these old brands exploiting domain authority,
| plus buying tons of backlinks. Investopedia.com is another
| example of this. Google assigns too much weight to authority
| domains. Google doesn't actually penalize paid backlinks for
| old domains, I think.
| nickfromseattle wrote:
| > Not clear to me why Google has let parasite SEO become so
| successful
|
| This was in response to the millions of SEOs flooding the SERPs
| with ever increasing amounts of low quality / incorrect /
| harmful AI generated content. Google didn't know how to keep
| the SERPs clean except over index on authority. The highly
| authoritative websites abused that to shill CBD oil, air
| fryers, mattresses, etc.
| ramesh31 wrote:
| It's coming for all the old "legacy" web names with strong domain
| ranking and decades of backlinks. Private equity is snapping them
| up as fast as possible, loading them with ads, and bleeding the
| brand dry.
| Animats wrote:
| Right. I get offers for my decades-old domains every day or two
| now.
| paulpauper wrote:
| bingo. this is 100% the reason
| drcongo wrote:
| This man is surprised that his google results are terrible. I
| have to assume this is a frog boiling thing and he's only just
| noticed the water heating up. Having switched to Kagi years ago,
| I'm immediately horrified by the state of Google if I ever end up
| on it. It's appalling and has been for a few years now.
| toast0 wrote:
| Google does a lot of personalization of search results. But if
| you don't give it your searches, it won't know what you want.
| So when you come back after switching, it's much worse.
| charlie0 wrote:
| It's getting closer to the point where we will compare Google
| to Kagi like web-browsing without an ad-blocker. It's hell
| surfing the web with ad-blocking off.
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| Reading this comment just above your comment is funny:
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41594450
| charlie0 wrote:
| Lol, guess you can't really escape. One benefit of Kagi is
| you can block websites from appearing. Maybe website
| blocking lists will appear similar to ad blocking lists.
| Maybe Kagi already lets you do this.
| burkaman wrote:
| Try those same search terms in Kagi and you'll see Forbes at
| the top of the results. I use Kagi and like it a lot but you
| should be aware that most of their results come from Google.
| bloopernova wrote:
| You can block Forbes in Kagi search, but not in Google.
| xbar wrote:
| how to get rid of roaches -site:forbes.com -site:usnews.com
| -site:nredwallet.com -site:usatoday.com
| -site:businessinsider.com -site:marketwatch.com
| -site:bankrate.com -site:money.com -site:fool.com
| magic-michael wrote:
| What's the issue with all these websites? Is it simply
| that you have a distaste for affiliate sites in general?
|
| It's worth noting that Lars Lofgren's own affiliate site
| (the person that wrote this article), hradvice.com, was
| impacted by a Google update in August, so there might be
| some personal bias and motive here.
|
| But I'm curious--what exactly are the criticisms you have
| towards platforms like NerdWallet and Bankrate? Would
| love to better understand.
| drcongo wrote:
| Interesting! Presumably I've downranked Forbes at some point
| over the past few years, I get useful results in Kagi.
| itissid wrote:
| Actually googling some of the terms from his post and seeing
| Forbes up there is oddly surprising, even after reading it all.
| davidu wrote:
| This is such a big story and yet most of HN just doesn't care. It
| should make the WSJ though.
| charlie0 wrote:
| Yes, this is a big deal, but most of us have simply stopped
| using Google and moved on to other tools.
| happyopossum wrote:
| > most of us have simply stopped using Google
|
| Citation needed
| magic-michael wrote:
| Google has lost a small amount of market share, but nothing
| too significant to warrant "most of us have simply stopped
| using Google": https://searchengineland.com/googles-huge-
| search-market-shar....
| crote wrote:
| It isn't exactly _news_ , though. This isn't a Forbes issue, or
| a Google issue. Pretty much every single large company is
| actively being ruined by parasites. We're dealing with a
| generation of CEOs / CFOs who were taught to care about nothing
| except short-term shareholder value. Quality and reputation
| doesn't matter anymore, so you replace your products with cheap
| garbage and hope nobody notices. When that inevitably fails,
| every single part of the company including its name is being
| torn apart and sold piece by piece, until nothing is left but
| an empty shell with a lot of debt.
|
| We're intentionally ruining our economies and praising the
| people doing it. If the "Western" world gets economically
| steamrolled by Asia in the next couple of decades, we've got
| nobody to blame for it but ourselves.
| akira2501 wrote:
| > It isn't exactly news, though.
|
| It's exactly news. It spots the issue, dives into it, exposes
| the source of it, and details the structure of how it came
| into existence. That's what news is. That you're not
| surprised by it is not material.
|
| > we've got nobody to blame for it but ourselves.
|
| Ironically you are the one who characterized this article as
| "not news."
| Dalewyn wrote:
| >We're dealing with a generation of CEOs / CFOs who were
| taught to care about nothing except short-term shareholder
| value. Quality and reputation doesn't matter anymore, so you
| replace your products with cheap garbage and hope nobody
| notices.
|
| There is a line where you really do need to compromise on
| quality and even reputation to keep costs down, though. If
| you can't or refuse to do that, you end up stagnant and
| irrelevant like Japan.
|
| Customers ultimately don't care how much sincerity and effort
| was infused into a product as long as it's past a certain
| "good enough" threshold.
| ghaff wrote:
| Yes, there's a lot of crap out there but I also don't want
| to pay a huge premium for everything so that it lasts a
| lifetime (and will probably be outdated or out of fashion
| long before that).
| crote wrote:
| I agree, but the economy as a whole seems to have swung to
| the completely opposite side. Every product is either
| turning into disposable one-time-use items, or into a
| subscription. Even "luxury" items aren't providing quality
| anymore.
|
| I'm not calling for t-shirts that are guaranteed to last 20
| years, but it would be nice if clothing didn't fall apart
| after a wash or two just because they saved 5% on material
| cost.
| cruffle_duffle wrote:
| > If the "Western" world gets economically steamrolled by
| Asia in the next couple of decades, we've got nobody to blame
| for it but ourselves.
|
| Implicit in that statement is that only the "Western world"
| has that "short erm shareholder value" ethos. I'd say that is
| quite debatable.
| akudha wrote:
| While greed, short term vision etc are universal, Asia is
| not (yet) as bad. Take banks for example, say Singapore.
| How many Singaporean banks have failed vs American? Asian
| banks are way more conservative (relatively at least) and
| don't play aggressive with their customers' money.
|
| My fear is that it is only going to get worse (both in the
| west and in Asia).
| bsder wrote:
| > This isn't a Forbes issue, or a Google issue.
|
| That's wrong. This is very much a Google monopoly issue.
|
| Google has _zero_ incentive to improve search for users since
| there is no competition. Google has every incentive to
| maximize the amount of money that search makes them.
|
| Simply busting up companies with monopolies would fix 80%+ of
| the problems.
| stonogo wrote:
| > Google has zero incentive to improve search for users
| since there is no competition.
|
| Not sure I buy this. People will overwhemingly choose
| 'cheap' over all other qualities. Anyone providing the sort
| of competition to Google will have to 1) do it for free, 2)
| be better enough to displace users, and 3) stay in business
| long enough to matter. Even if you broke Google up, who
| would be in a position to compete with their search
| platform?
| bsder wrote:
| > Even if you broke Google up, who would be in a position
| to compete with their search platform?
|
| You break Google Search out of Google and break Google
| Search up into two (or more) companies. Now, they have an
| incentive to compete against one another.
|
| Before Google became a monopoly, SEO optimizations were
| somewhat restrained because something which was super-
| optimized for Google would generally hurt your search on
| Yahoo and vice versa. If the results got too shitty,
| people would start to switch.
|
| The fact that switching doesn't happen anymore is prima
| facie evidence that Google is a monopoly.
| carlosjobim wrote:
| Even if the majority prefer free or cheap, that doesn't
| mean there isn't a market for better and more expensive
| search. Those who don't want to pay can stick with Google
| and get what they pay for. Just like with any other
| product.
|
| Being a more expensive premium product can even be more
| lucrative than being the cheaper majority product. Look
| at Apple, the only company to even try making a high
| quality laptop i the last 10-15 years. I'd say the same
| about smart phones, but the latest Samsung phones are
| actually high quality.
| carlosjobim wrote:
| > We're dealing with a generation of CEOs / CFOs who were
| taught to care about nothing except short-term shareholder
| value.
|
| We're dealing globally and in every industry with almost all
| shareholders being either retirement funds, elderly
| individuals, or other organizations controlled by elderly
| individuals. And the current generation of elderlies want to
| benefit as much as they possible can from any wealth being
| created. They haven't much time left to live and they prefer
| to not leave much of value behind.
| magic-michael wrote:
| I'm not sure how this applies to the conversation. The
| challenges being discussed here are centred around managing
| compliance and long-term sustainability within specific
| platform ecosystems. It's about navigating policies,
| ensuring longevity, and minimising risk rather than short-
| term shareholder gains. The generational divide you're
| mentioning doesn't really seem relevant in this scenario.
| carlosjobim wrote:
| Big companies have been owned by shareholders for
| hundreds of years. Most companies being plundered right
| now were created by selling shares to initial investors.
| These shareholders held a sense of responsibility towards
| customers, towards employees and towards their community,
| which made the companies long term successful.
|
| Blaming shareholders has no relevance unless you look at
| what has changed about the shareholders. It's a new
| generation of elderly who never grew up and never learned
| to think long term.
| heisenbit wrote:
| It is a big story if one can make it part of the anti-trust
| actions. Google having a monopoly which it leaves laying around
| as a weapon to be picked up by the next most corrupted big
| player to damage real businesses. The impact on the market is
| measurable (with naked eye), is distorting the market (which
| anti-trust is dealing with) and is an instance of escalating
| (making it actionable) domain reputation abuse. Google failing
| to police such blatant abuse might also open them to class
| action lawsuits.
| CM30 wrote:
| Damn, didn't realise that Forbes Marketplace was run separately
| to Forbes itself. Knew it was always a parasite SEO operation,
| but the idea of it being a separate company entirely (and how
| much they tried to hide the fact) is really interesting here.
|
| But yeah, it's still crazy that this site is even allowed in
| Google, and that they've shown no signs of cracking down on these
| types of parasite SEO schemes.
| MitziMoto wrote:
| To be fair, Google HAS shown "signs" of cracking down on this;
| but they haven't actually done it in any useful capacity yet.
|
| They call it "Site reputation abuse".
| https://developers.google.com/search/docs/essentials/spam-po...
| MisterBastahrd wrote:
| I implemented something similar years ago for the publisher I
| worked for. Like 2006ish. It was after Katrina, I'd never had a
| full time dev job, and I created it as a POC to show to my
| employer that they could invest in me full time as a developer (I
| was helping put their magazines together when I wasn't working on
| their CRM).
|
| I created a marketplace with finely tuned SEO for my employer to
| advertise (and charge) companies in niche industries. My SEO was
| better than the SEO of the developers who worked on their sites,
| and our audience was obviously much larger than theirs, so we
| ranked higher. Any time you would search for the company name or
| the product type in a certain geographic area, you'd find links
| to our pages dominating the search results.
|
| One of the interesting things is the shenanigans some of these
| companies would pull to show up first in our local results. A
| whole lot of A1 and AAA names began to spring up as they decided
| that if the list was going to be alphabetical by default, then
| they needed to be the first in their category.
| JadeNB wrote:
| > One of the interesting things is the shenanigans some of
| these companies would pull to show up first in our local
| results. A whole lot of A1 and AAA names began to spring up as
| they decided that if the list was going to be alphabetical by
| default, then they needed to be the first in their category.
|
| This well predates Google, though; it was a common trick for
| placement in the (physical) phone book.
| cynicalsecurity wrote:
| So, Google can kill their whole business if they simply stop
| giving Forbes unfair prioritisation in the search results.
| erehweb wrote:
| Sure, and Google and FB have killed businesses before by
| changing algorithms. But what is fair prioritization? Non-
| trivial Q.
| coliveira wrote:
| And then get negative press from Forbes for the next few years!
| Is that something useful for Google? No, better let them keep
| part of the money.
| roughly wrote:
| > negative press from Forbes for the next few years
|
| Who the fuck reads Forbes anymore? You seen the garbage
| they're shilling on their website these days?
| coliveira wrote:
| This is not just Forbes, most mainstream media sites are
| using the same affiliate scheme.
| magic-michael wrote:
| Is it unfair though?
|
| While there's definitely optimization for search, it doesn't
| appear to be purely about that. A lot of the content,
| particularly on Forbes Advisor and Forbes Health, seems user-
| driven and genuinely helpful. If you spend some time exploring
| those areas, you'll notice well-researched, in-depth guides
| aimed at offering practical advice.
|
| Just some quick research and Google searching:
|
| https://www.forbes.com/advisor/banking/savings/financial-
| eme....
|
| https://www.forbes.com/health/nutrition/diet/healthy-life-
| ex....
|
| https://www.forbes.com/advisor/banking/digital-wallets-payme...
| miki123211 wrote:
| Is this an US thing? This has to be an US thing, right? How come
| I've literally never seen this in the EU?
|
| I usually search in English and find SEO spam somewhat often, but
| never from these brands.
| OvbiousError wrote:
| Just searched "best pet insurance", am inside Europe. Forbes is
| #1. I distinctly recall seeing this from time to time.
| Interestingly they're also the #1 for pet insurance on
| duckduckgo.
| sweezyjeezy wrote:
| About 10th in the UK with that search, so probably this isn't
| across every geography.
| phatfish wrote:
| For me in the UK "best pet insurance" is squatted by The
| Telegraph and "best cbd gummies" has Forbes top and The
| Independent second.
|
| I assume all media companies that have a "trusted domain" and
| are already involved in aggressive SEO are using this as a
| revenue generator.
|
| The sites that turned exclusively into link farms like
| about.com could be whacked by Google eventually and everyone
| was happy. But if they try that with well known media brands
| there will be cries of censorship--whether it is collateral
| damage to some genuine journalistic content, or Google
| "taking away" a revenue stream.
| slyall wrote:
| "best cbd gummies" is interesting for me. I get a mix of
| "health" and vendors with some old media brands.
|
| I get Forbes 4th and 5th
|
| Chicago Magazine is 9th
|
| The Independent, Kirkland Reporter and The Observer are
| 12th, 13th and 14th
| yas_hmaheshwari wrote:
| Happens in India as well. Forbes is #1 for "best pet insurance"
| jeffwask wrote:
| I miss the days of a searchable internet
| neves wrote:
| Cory Doctorow article nails it https://doctorow.medium.com/the-
| specific-process-by-which-go...
|
| It is Google "do no evil" to blame.
| tempfile wrote:
| he really never misses
| vgeek wrote:
| The same thing happens every 3-5 years. HowStuffWorks, About.com
| (now like 10 different domains), many IAC acquired properties,
| RedVenture sites, even random sites like LiveStrong.com will be
| wildly prominent when the domains historically aren't relevant or
| authoritative for a given niche.
|
| Even recently, sites like CNN were using subdomains with
| affiliate offers managed by third parties(1). These sites weren't
| being de-ranked algorithmically-- someone at Google would have to
| apply a manual action to remove them from the SERPs. What
| incentive would there be to do so if a prior agreement was in
| place?
|
| Google doesn't really care about discoverability for smaller
| domains that may have good content. They are either being risk
| averse (avoiding potential spammers, junk AI content) by favoring
| trusted domains, favoring brands who are likely to spend on
| display or search ads, or maybe a combination of these.
|
| 1) https://searchengineland.com/google-begins-enforcement-of-
| si...
| stackghost wrote:
| >The same thing happens every 3-5 years. [...] Google doesn't
| really care about discoverability for smaller domains that may
| have good content.
|
| What's galling is that (ostensibly) they used to care. So much
| for "organizing the world's information" and "don't be evil".
| Nevermark wrote:
| Well they are certainly organizing the world's information,
| and continue to be incentivized to do so. Deeply. For
| advertisers.
| Animats wrote:
| It's really frustrating. I currently want to buy a mattress and
| a refrigerator. The results for those are so awful as to be
| useless.
| supportengineer wrote:
| A lot of classic software essentially worked more like a
| database. In the last 10-15 years it's all moving to an
| algorithm.
|
| Here is what I mean. Photos apps used to let you search
| through your photos using filters.
|
| The same kinds of things are happening on the web which
| already happened to apps (desktop and mobile).
|
| In the modern world, some marketing company wants to tell YOU
| which of YOUR photos you wanted, so they can sell you some
| prints, harvest your data, or something.
|
| I would like any apps that have to do with collections of
| files, photos, music, etc to be more of a deterministic
| DATABASE and less of a nondeterministic algorithm.
| wolpoli wrote:
| > A lot of classic software essentially worked more like a
| database. In the last 10-15 years it's all moving to an
| algorithm.
|
| You just described what I missed about the older software.
| Older software gives users control over sorting and show
| data in a tabular format. Modern software sorts data with
| an algorithm, with ads mixed in, and shows data in a card
| format, making it a lot less usable.
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| Exactly. My related observation: half of the SaaS
| products I see would be more useful and ergonomic for the
| user if they were implemented as an Excel sheet.
|
| (I actually worked for one of such "better off as an .xls
| file" startup in the past, and its main competitor was an
| incumbent that sold the same stuff _as an Excel
| extension_. Trying to replace that with a React app is
| _not_ a worthwhile use of life.)
|
| Algorithms are fine. I'll happily apply the most advanced
| ones I can get. The problem is with who applies them to
| what - as you and GP said, it's about user control - or,
| currently, lack of.
| llm_trw wrote:
| Excel is great until it you need to do something that
| takes up more space than a single screen. Then it isn't.
|
| Sending sqlite databases to the users which they can
| interact with using both sql and a viewer is where it's
| at.
| jkaplowitz wrote:
| I wonder if being a more powerful backing data store for
| Excel is one of the remaining reasonable uses for
| Microsoft Access, at least for users of the Windows
| desktop version of Office? Access is still included in
| many editions of that (although not on Mac or web or
| mobile). Officially it's even still supported and not
| deprecated, although of course it's very much not
| emphasized by MS any more.
|
| Other options might be SQL Server Express or SQL Server
| Express LocalDB, the latter of which seems conceptually
| very much like SQLite within the MS ecosystem, and both
| of which are usable for production purposes at no cost
| within the technical limitations that differentiate them
| from paid editions.
| brookst wrote:
| > Older software gives users control over sorting and
| show data in a tabular format
|
| I'm old and tend to agree, but I suspect this is similar
| to "you used to have a knob on the TV that showed the
| channel it's on".
| watwut wrote:
| Not every change is for the better. You gotta admit that
| TVs used to be able to switch channels much faster then
| they do now. And analogue controls in cars are safer and
| better then touch screens for everything.
|
| A lot of change is for the better, but quite a lot is a
| regression.
| brookst wrote:
| "Better" and "regression" are purely subjective.
|
| I have access to around 1000 "channels", if you include
| live broadcasts and network-like apps. How exactly were
| old TVs better at helping navigate that?
| kedean wrote:
| Modern TV interfaces are way better at navigating 1000
| channels, but whether or not having 1000 channels
| available through one TV interface is highly debatable.
| It's also not a given that the current way most TVs use
| is anywhere close to the optimal one (especially when you
| have multiple devices that all have to work together
| because the cable provider insists on their own box, made
| even worse when a helpful family member installs a sound
| system with its own dedicated remote).
| PaulHoule wrote:
| For one thing, the clicker seems to work instantly for
| analog TV because it will sync up on the next frame,
| which is 0.03 sec which is less than the 0.2 sec it takes
| the human mind to perceive two events as two different
| events.
|
| With digital broadcast TV and cable whenever you switch
| to a different carrier there is a long delay (at least
| 0.5 sec) for the radio and the rest of the processing
| train to sync up. With streaming you have to do multiple
| network round trips to establish a stream. Either way you
| don't have the immediacy that old TVs had.
|
| The question of UI in modern TV is interesting. 15 years
| ago the 500 channel problem looked difficult, my
| impression was that Comcast Xfinity (2010) was the first
| really good STB interface for the digital age.
|
| I have a NVIDIA Shield which has an Android TV interface
| that convincingly makes FAST services like Pluto, Plex
| and Tubi look like linear TV on an STB. What you find
| though is that going "back" from one of those channels
| can put you, disorientingly, in the app for those
| channels, and also that you can usually navigate better
| if you start out with the FAST app (and have a more
| consistent experience watching FAST on a computer, tablet
| or XBOX) Except for those things which, for some reason,
| are easy to find in Android TV but hard in the app.
| robinsonb5 wrote:
| That immediately made me think of the digital TV
| switchover. The elderly father of a friend of mine would
| spend much of his time in front of the TV, and could
| operate it without assistance, thanks to the simple 1:1
| mapping between buttons and functions.
|
| After the digital switchover, there was now a set-top
| box, and electronic program guide and three-figure
| channel numbers thrown into the mix, as well as stateful
| aspect such as whether the TV was set to AV or still
| trying to use its now-obsolete tuner.
|
| For someone with poor eyesight, limited feeling in his
| fingers and limited ability (and admittedly willingness,
| too) to build a mental model of how the menus worked and
| how they can be navigated, it spelled the end of his
| unsupervised access to TV.
|
| The big difference for me between database-query-driven
| and algorithmically-driven is that the latter makes it
| very hard to know when you've completed an exhaustive
| search. Indeed for the likes of meta and tiktok that's a
| feature, not a bug, since their goal is to keep you
| engaged and plugged into "their" content forever.
| dehrmann wrote:
| The problem is with cataloging and discoverability. After
| a certain number of photos (or movies, songs, whatever),
| finding what's relevant is non-trivial.
| _DeadFred_ wrote:
| Or the problem is what's relevant, such as Spotify's
| 'what the user likes and is in our bargain bin for
| plays'. If the photo algo wants you to get multiple
| prints which mostly happen when you are sending them to
| others it's going to push group photos and baby pictures
| not that epic moonrise.
| grugagag wrote:
| Deterministic software puts the user in control of the
| product. Nondeterministic algos put the products in control
| of the user. Naturally companies want the latter and under
| guises of the 'now better' give the user worse and charge
| them more. A new generation isn't even aware they're being
| fleeced because they don't have anything to compare with.
| And the frog boils slowly...
| knowaveragejoe wrote:
| This entire thread reads like multiple people circling
| around product opportunities. There are users out there
| who want control and will pay for something no-frills.
| You might not get big VC money to build this, but you
| could build this.
| robocat wrote:
| Consumers want lots of things but they don't want to pay.
| They pay indirectly via advertising.
| underlipton wrote:
| Consumers can't pay. Part of the grift has been the
| concentration of capital in the hands of the highest
| wealth-holders, who all seem to have the same idea as to
| where to put their money (hence, uncomfortably, the
| bidding up of tech compensation to where it is now). So,
| no, you're not going to be able to Adobe/Autodesk-style
| price gouge. However, if you show customers the value
| proposition (generally some aspect of longevity or
| portability that prevents expensive upgrades or lock-in),
| they'll pay when they can. And until sanity returns to
| the economy, partnering with a credit facility of some
| sort might be wise (for you, not the customer).
| vgeek wrote:
| I think of your suggested idea of objective reviews and
| classifications quite often, but the problem ends up
| being discoverability. There have been a handful of sites
| that were highly useful by aggregating price and consumer
| sentiment/recommendations from Reddit. They get initial
| visibility and search traffic, then get penalized by
| Google. Froogle/Google shopping gets priority and is the
| only aggregator that Google really wants to include.
|
| Look at defunct sites like Nextag that were moderately
| useful in the space-- they had free and paid placements.
| They were steadily growing search visibility until Google
| started pushing their own product (Froogle, free product
| listings in 2014ish) and Nextag suddenly "violated
| Google's policies" and lost 90%+ of their traffic rather
| quickly (probably 1MM daily visits to under 10k basically
| overnight). Google shopping technically offers "free
| product listing placement", hidden well below the ads--
| likely as a defense to anti-trust on monopolization of
| that specific space.
|
| Brickseek and CamelCamelCamel are the two most
| successful/long lived tools in the space-- and they grew
| their visibility from the now defunct but once huge deal
| site FatWallet and SlickDeals. Walled garden subreddits
| frequently disallow posting of specific tools, so it
| makes organic growth super challenging-- given that
| pretty much all commercial queries start with Google or
| Amazon.
| Ekaros wrote:
| Reminds of Windows and search. I am not anymore even sure
| if there is some nice dialog where I could put some pattern
| and folder or list of folder and have it run through it for
| me...
| zeagle wrote:
| It's just enshitification. It's pretty funny when I
| search for putty and get the help doc, or my email client
| and get some windows setting option. I switched to
| powertoys search to get around it but wonder if anyone
| responsible for maintaining this feature actually uses
| it.
| ncpa-cpl wrote:
| > nice dialog where I could put some pattern and folder
| or list of folder and have it run through it for me
|
| Everything from Voidtools is a dialog window, accepts
| patterns and is really fast.
|
| https://www.voidtools.com/
| _DeadFred_ wrote:
| And Stardock's Start11 adds EveryThing's search to your
| start menu.
| ghaff wrote:
| Mattresses have been especially bad for a long time. For
| refrigerators, you can look at consumer reports and
| wirecutter--and you can reasonably do some evaluation at your
| local big box appliance store. I wouldn't buy based on a
| random web search though.
| groby_b wrote:
| Wirecutter's gone downhill after the NYT purchase as well.
| The Spruce seems somewhat better (but is also part of a
| huge web site family, so caveat emptor)
|
| Either you do deep research, or you find a trusted friend
| to advise you. The Internet is largely useless at this
| point.
| ghaff wrote:
| I think Wirecutter is still a decent source; they
| probably won't steer you too far wrong if you're not
| _too_ picky. But nothing, including your trusted friends,
| is an all-knowing oracle if only because their tastes and
| priorities are probably different from yours. Certainly
| pre-Internet there were few enough reliable sources of
| recommendations--maybe some specialist magazines but even
| those were far from perfect.
| eitally wrote:
| I think you hit the nail on the head. They won't steer
| you far wrong, but they also may neglect excellent
| options. For example, they recently published a "best
| water bottle of 2024" list. They chose to rate Hydroflask
| #1 and mentioned Yeti in a brief comment about "other
| bottles to consider" near the bottle. No mention of Kleen
| Kanteen at all. Yet they do cover the current trendy
| options of Owala & Stanley Quencher. I don't think it's
| really objective -- not in the same way that rtings.com
| is for the electronics categories they review.
|
| https://www.nytimes.com/wirecutter/reviews/best-water-
| bottle...
| Malidir wrote:
| No affiliate link = less likely to be a star pick?
| flir wrote:
| That's probably a testable hypothesis, with a little
| screen scraping and some time.
| ghaff wrote:
| Probably also hard to test. I was an analyst for many
| years and, if you generally hated on a company for
| reasons that you thought were valid, they were unlikely
| to hire you.
| ghaff wrote:
| That's almost certainly true. Depending on your
| preferences, there are just a ton of perfectly
| serviceable options out there, including what you're
| handed at trade shows. I have some Nalgenes that are sort
| of the standard for hiking (and fit my water bottle
| parkas) and otherwise mostly random stuff I've been
| given.
| sheepolog wrote:
| > or you find a trusted friend to advise you
|
| I think there's an opportunity here for a review platform
| that only shows you reviews from individuals that you
| personally trust. "Find a trusted friend" but for the
| internet.
| parpfish wrote:
| The problem with reviews from individuals (trusted
| friends or complete strangers), is that for major
| purposes they only get to deeply evaluate a single
| product. So they could tell you if they are happy with
| the fridge they bought, but they wouldn't be able to do a
| detailed comparison between multiple fridges.
|
| This will lead to you getting a product that's good
| enough, but there may be a superior quality/value option
| that you don't know about
| adamc wrote:
| Yeah, but it might be a satisficing approach. Most of us
| don't really need to optimize an appliance purchase, just
| not get screwed.
| bee_rider wrote:
| Could have been an interesting application for social
| networking. (Friend of a friend)^n. I'd probably trust
| most of my friends, and most of their friends, not to be
| bots. Probably want to see the links, past that.
| groby_b wrote:
| That review platform is called "the phone", "hanging in
| the pub", "having a get-together".
|
| Friendship requires regular contact anyway. We don't need
| somebody to intermediate that.
| frontiersummit wrote:
| It has always felt to me that Wirecutter focuses on only
| one end of the Pareto curve ("what is the very best XXXX
| that money can buy, within reason") and ignores the middle
| of the curve where most people are actually shopping ("what
| is the best XXXX that I can get for $XXX"). It also seems
| to reliably ignore brands from Mainland China (Hisense,
| Midea, etc). I guess It makes obvious sense to court rich
| (or at least price-insensitive) readers.
| ghaff wrote:
| Whether or not it started that way, yes, it makes sense
| to recommend brands that New York Times subscribers are
| familiar and comfortable with. I'll buy a GE Profile
| refrigerator or Bosch dishwasher. Not some Chinese brand
| I've never heard of and have no idea what the service
| situation will be with. Makes perfect sense to me and I'm
| in that demographic. Especially with major appliances and
| things I can buy at the local big box store seems to make
| perfect sense to not buy things you have to go to Alibaba
| to obtain.
|
| It's not about being price insensitive but recommending
| things that are relatively mainstream and that don't seem
| risky, especially for major purchases that have to be
| installed and potentially serviced.
|
| (Did have a service issue on my recent GE Profile
| refrigerator but it took one phone call and was a no-
| brainer.)
|
| But you're probably right in general. Wirecutter mostly
| doesn't recommend unknowns it thinks are potentially
| bargains. Which I probably wouldn't do in its position
| either.
| bobthepanda wrote:
| Their top pick for an air conditioner is a Midea:
| https://www.nytimes.com/wirecutter/reviews/best-air-
| conditio...
| brirec wrote:
| Oh, I had that very model and it very quickly got moldy
| in places that I couldn't easily clean. Absolutely
| wouldn't recommend it...
| dghlsakjg wrote:
| Check out Tech Gear Lab. (I have met the owner)
|
| They are a great review site, and normally do categories
| like "absolute best", "best value", and "best budget".
|
| They are very thorough, and always buy their own stuff,
| never take sponsorships or freebies.
| crazygringo wrote:
| That's not true at all.
|
| They usually have a midrange "top pick", followed by a
| "budget pick" and an "upgrade pick".
|
| It's not "the best money can buy" at all -- that's what
| they reserve their "upgrade pick" for. E.g. look at
| humidifiers:
|
| https://www.nytimes.com/wirecutter/reviews/the-best-
| humidifi...
|
| Also it's full of Chinese brands. The top two humidifiers
| are Levoit, from Shenzen. Or if I look at dehumidifiers,
| Midea is their #1 pick:
|
| https://www.nytimes.com/wirecutter/reviews/best-
| dehumidifier...
|
| So I don't think anything you said is true. Maybe for
| some individual products, but certainly not for the site
| as a whole.
| ghaff wrote:
| I think it's fair that they don't offer real off-brand
| budget recommendations. I do think they offer a generally
| reasonable array of choices.
| crazygringo wrote:
| Well, nor should they because those items tend to
| disappear from the market within months and not be widely
| available. So that's a feature not a bug.
|
| You don't want to research and recommend a product from a
| random seller on Amazon that won't be available six
| months from now.
|
| Their budget recommendations are, correctly, products
| that have proven to be reliable and available.
| ghaff wrote:
| Totally agree. The budget recommendations tend to be
| reliable budget and not a questionable "steal."
| Animats wrote:
| > Mattresses have been especially bad for a long time.
|
| Yes. Refrigerators, at least, are made by a relatively
| small number of companies with established brands. They
| have EnergyStar ratings, and there's some objective
| evaluation.
|
| For mattresses, the whole industry is a scam. Mattresses
| actually cost about US$50 to US$80 in bulk. Search Alibaba.
| Almost all consumer-facing companies are resellers. Markups
| are huge. Essentially all the mattress review sites are
| paid promotions.
| mschuster91 wrote:
| > For mattresses, the whole industry is a scam.
|
| Pillows as well. Mike Lindell (the My Pillows guy who
| sank himself with "election manipulation claims") didn't
| get his fortune from nothing. The markup is insane there
| as well... if you want decent pillows go to Ikea.
| ghaff wrote:
| Eh. I've bought some from a boutique quality down
| sleeping bag/comforter manufacturer. They've been great
| and have lasted decades.
| digging wrote:
| I'm sure it was marked up still, but the best and last
| pillow I've ever bought is buckwheat hulls. Basically a
| fancy sack of grain, but I'd guess procurement was more
| costly than filler plastic fabrics/foams. It was an
| immediate cure for neck pain from side sleeping and it's
| quite cool, too. For me, anything stuffed with fabric is
| going to be a waste of money anymore.
| dghlsakjg wrote:
| I imagine that the logistics of moving a bunch of
| stupidly large items is also part of the markup.
|
| Sure, I can buy a mattress from a factory in China, but
| getting it to my door is a whole other thing.
|
| Last time I bought a mattress, admittedly, an overpriced
| one. I got to test out a sample at the store, and then a
| truck with two guys showed up, put on special booties to
| keep my house clean, carted away the old mattress, placed
| the new one, etc. I even took advantage of their 90 day
| guarantee to swap to a slightly less firm mattress, and
| the whole process was repeated for no cost.
|
| Hiring a truck and two men to deliver a large item, and
| then haul another large item to the dump, and then pay
| the dump fee for a mattress (a lot more than standard
| dump fees), is something that would cost a few hundred
| dollars otherwise.
|
| I'm sure that they made a profit off of me, but I have my
| doubts that there are riches to be made in the mattress
| industry given that there seems to be VERY low barriers
| to entry.
| ghaff wrote:
| Yeah, even if there are often explicit
| delivery/disposal/installation charges, large deliveries
| are often not just a matter of shipping something to your
| door sight unseen and no reasonable recourse if you're
| not happy.
| murukesh_s wrote:
| if there is a trial period better get cheapest and highly
| reviewed mattress. Even if it's a scam you get to know it
| within x days and can return it.
|
| I try to buy natural materials like latex or cotton - which
| cannot and are not mass produced (difficult to roll and
| transport from across the world)
| Supermancho wrote:
| Saatva mattresses raised the bar. They are amazing.
| datavirtue wrote:
| It's easy, browse to GE on big box hardware website. Select
| the model you want. Avoid everything else.
| ghaff wrote:
| I might add a couple other brands but, yeah, you probably
| won't go too wrong.
| jameshart wrote:
| One problem with this kind of strategy is that brands
| often become enshrined when you aren't looking. While the
| last time I was looking for kitchen appliances GE was
| pretty good, how do I know that in the past few years
| they haven't been bought out by a private equity firm and
| started having their brand slapped on random low quality
| products?
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| The only signal I use is warranty. So I tend to go to Costco,
| and avoid Samsung.
| hansvm wrote:
| It's not a bad idea to pair that with lawsuits related to
| such warranties.
|
| Costco and Samsung are big enough that you can achieve
| reasonable signal.
|
| When your local car dealer offers you a full drivetrain
| warranty though (assuming it's a full warranty and not one
| of the other ways people are often fleeced), will they
| honor it when the lemon they sold you breaks the first
| time? the 2nd? the 3rd? Will they, instead, note that most
| people buying that car don't have much money (or, if you
| used any form of dealer financing, know for a fact you
| don't have much money) and require you to retain a lawyer
| and sue them to recover any damages?
| mdorazio wrote:
| Not sure if your car example was meant to be general or
| specific, but Lemon Laws are extremely common across the
| states and are very easy to take advantage of without
| needing to retain a lawyer. For example, in Texas you
| fill out a form, pay a $35 filing fee, then bring your
| evidence to mediation.
| hansvm wrote:
| It's a bit of both. Generally the idea holds. The example
| isn't that bad either. O(100k-1M) people have dealer-
| fraud related problems every year in the US, usually
| without happy outcomes. A few ways this might happen
| relating to my use of the word "lemon" include:
|
| 1. Colloquial use of "lemon" differs from the legal
| definition. In the given example, this might include a
| 15yr old vehicle (far outside any normal "manufacturer's"
| warranty) with numerous defects both known to the dealer
| and lied about to the consumer. The dealer would likely
| lose any civil complaint, but in Texas, and most states,
| this doesn't count as a "lemon." You're protected, if at
| all, by the fact that the salesperson warranted a thing,
| and perhaps any actual written "warranty" (really
| insurance, not that it necessarily matters) the dealer
| might have sold you. You usually waive the warrant of
| merchantability, so the fact that the car is a dud isn't
| enough by itself for you to have any damages (all state-
| specific, consult a lawyer in your jurisdiction).
|
| 2. Picking on Texas, since you brought it up, if you only
| bring the car in 3 times for a major defect covered under
| the lemon law, it's not a lemon yet. If the dealer
| refuses to deal with you on the 3rd instance then you'll
| have to sue with some other justification.
|
| 3. In the vast majority of states, you don't have an
| automated (minus filing fees) hearing process pertaining
| to lemons. Even in those which do, you're much more
| likely to succeed with the help of an attorney. In either
| case, in most states, attorney's fees are not part of the
| damages you can claim, and when squabbling about a $5k
| used car it can easily cost more in attorney fees (plus
| incidentals like renting a car and missing work for the
| actual hearings -- usually not covered even in states
| granting damages for incidentals (including rentals and
| missing work in other contexts) arising from the lemon),
| often making it not even worth pursuing.
|
| ...
|
| Usually, even with moderate legal protections, you don't
| want to enter into an agreement where you expect to have
| to rely on those protections. Your best-case scenario is
| that you waste a bunch of time and still have only as
| many resources as you started with. You'll usually do
| even worse. Why take a losing gamble?
| tacocataco wrote:
| Samsung appliances are awful. I'd rather do my own dishes
| or put my food in a cooler.
| perks_12 wrote:
| Try naplab.
| Krasnol wrote:
| How do we know you're not an ad?
| brendoelfrendo wrote:
| Having bought a mattress recently, it might be worth going to
| a mattress store. The sales process sucks, but if you want to
| find a mattress you like, it's hard to beat actually laying
| down on one.
| Loughla wrote:
| It also can help you identify the kind you like (coil,
| latex, etc) and composition you like (layer style and
| thickness).
|
| Then you just search for those two things online.
|
| That's how I found an amazing natural latex cooling
| mattress online.
|
| And the best part is that most online mattress retailers
| have 90 day try out periods. We didn't like our first one,
| and instead of having us ship it back they told us to
| donate it and sent us the next to try. So now we have a
| really nice spare bedroom mattress as well as the perfect
| mattress in our bedroom.
| jihadjihad wrote:
| I like how you donated it to the spare bedroom lol
| Loughla wrote:
| In my defense, we did call multiple agencies that work
| with low-income folks on finding housing and household
| goods. Due to the possibility of bedbugs, none of them
| are taking bedding or mattresses anymore.
| underlipton wrote:
| This is common. Most online retailers don't have the
| means to recover and remediate used mattresses (if it's
| even legal). Most are essentially just branded drop-
| shipping companies hocking products manufactured in Asia
| (often from the same factories, with minor differences
| between "models"). If you have the money to purchase the
| mattress initially, then you can just keep doing 90-day
| trials until you get one that the seller asks you to
| dispose of yourself when you try to return it. Bam, free
| mattress. Manufacturers and retailers can afford to do
| this because the markup on materials+labor+shipping is
| insane.
|
| I'm surprised that people haven't caught on yet. Maybe
| something to do with the nature of the purchase. In a
| better world, even a "luxury" mattress would cost a
| couple hundred bucks, at most, but then be _extremely_
| difficult to return.
| Hnrobert42 wrote:
| I got a mattress last year using Consumer Reports rec for
| most the mattress with the least synthetic chemicals. I am
| not going to say its name lest it look like I am shilling for
| them. I will say, it has been great.
| Larrikin wrote:
| If it's in a verifiable external source (Consumer Report
| for instance, not some lady's Amazon affiliate links blog),
| then I would say it's never shilling.
| heintmyer wrote:
| May I ask why you use search engine for buying something like
| a mattress or refrigerator? I dont mean to sound that as an
| insult. I'm genuinely curious. I or anyone I know of will
| just go to a nearby store and checkout these items to buy.
| For things like these one would already know who sells these
| items, even online. So why not directly checkout those
| stores, either online or physical?
| froglets wrote:
| If I want to buy something like that I set an alert on
| slickdeals.net Like everything else it used to be better
| years ago, but there are still some genuine great deals and
| lots of insight if you're willing to sift through the
| comments.
|
| When I was looking for a fridge a year or so ago I heard that
| Samsung was trying to fix their bad appliance rep and quality
| of parts had gone up, but I went with a different brand.
|
| There's been an issue the last few years of fiberglass
| escaping through the cover on memory foam mattresses. If I
| was mattress shopping I'd probably still get foam, but look
| for one without fiberglass or find some kind of allergy cover
| to at least contain it.
| infecto wrote:
| sleeplikethedead.com
| joenot443 wrote:
| Fantastic site. There's a Mattress Selector which seems
| just grand [1] Will definitely be using this next time I'm
| in the market.
|
| [1] https://www.sleeplikethedead.com/mattress-selector.html
| pembrook wrote:
| It's the same for pretty much any product category now.
| Affiliate marketing and Google using its monopoly to
| prioritize ads over search results has basically ruined
| search. It's in their best interest to lower the quality of
| results because the ads get more useful comparatively.
|
| Gmail is next I predict. They have a monopoly over consumer
| email, so it's revenue growth just waiting to be unlocked
| when times get tough. A higher percentage of your inbox is
| going to become paid Gmail ads and there's nothing you're
| going to do about it. Nobody wants to go to the hassle of
| changing their email address (the amount of boomers still on
| Yahoo mail is staggering).
| devjab wrote:
| I got so frustrated trying to find some shelves recently that
| I ended up building them myself. It used to be that I could
| use Google to find some furniture stores, but now they all
| require me to throughly vet them to make sure they aren't
| just reselling stuff from China or scam sites. Ikea still
| works, but that's about it unless I go to big designer brands
| where a shelf will cost me a gazillion DKR. Unfortunately
| Ikea didn't have any shelves that I liked, which is why I
| build them out of some wood I purchased in the local hardware
| store.
|
| It's so annoying that it's almost impossible to find a
| legitimate store. Well maybe that's not the correct way to
| word it. It's so frustrating that it's almost impossible to
| know whether or not the top shops you get in your search
| results are stores you want to use or not.
| PaulHoule wrote:
| It's bad enough that manufacturers in China might start
| complaining about it as the best manufacturers there have a
| reputation to protect.
|
| There is a mushroom grower in Shanghai, for instance, which
| grows very inexpensive but tasty beech mushrooms in a giant
| vertical farm where workers only touch the mushrooms with a
| forklift (see https://www.finc-
| sh.com/en/about.aspx#fincvideo)
|
| There are numerous photography equipment vendors in China
| that make innovative and value-conscious products (like
| this inexpensive manual focus lens which takes pictures
| like you've never seen:
| https://7artisans.store/products/50mm-f1-05) that excel in
| customer support. They post _real manuals_ to their web
| sites where you can easily find them, they correspond to
| you with email and not a ticket system behind a CAPTCHA,
| they don 't have a huge list of unauthorized vendors for
| whom they won't support your product if you bought from
| them, etc. I hear back from them in 24 hours most of the
| time compared to an Italian vendor that makes great tripods
| but takes more like four days to respond.
|
| If Chinese vendors are working that hard to get my business
| I very much want to support them.
| Kye wrote:
| I borrowed a Laowa 100mm macro lens (Venus Optics) for a
| little while. The only reason I didn't buy one is it
| disabled TTL since it lacked the required electronics.
|
| https://www.venuslens.net/product/laowa-100mm-f-2-8-2x-ma
| cro...
|
| There are also several Chinese graphics tablet companies
| that Wacom still doesn't realize it's in competition
| with.
| PaulHoule wrote:
| It depends what kind of shooting you are doing. I depend
| on autofocus for a lot of the work I do (sports) but I
| have more fun shooting with my manual 7Artisans lens with
| the aperture ring than I do with a Zeiss 55mm/1.4. The
| 7Artisans lens has weaknesses that show up when you try
| astrophotography with it (definitely some light goes the
| wrong way and bright stars turn into weird shapes) but it
| also takes great shots like
|
| https://mastodon.social/@UP8/111077882869934997
|
| (freakin' at night!) I bought this ring flash
|
| https://godox.com/product-d/MF-R76.html
|
| which requires manual metering to save more than $100 off
| one which has TTL metering as I am using it for studio
| work where I am going to set it up once and take 20
| shots.
| darth_avocado wrote:
| > they aren't just reselling stuff from China
|
| At this point everything you buy is from China in some way
| or the other. From iPhones to Nikes, from your electronic
| batteries to garlic. At this point stuff from China isn't
| exactly a bad thing, considering how poorly things made
| elsewhere are doing. I have had so many issues with
| American made things that I almost prefer items made
| elsewhere. From cars to refrigerators.
| sirsinsalot wrote:
| I was looking for a product recently. I wanted to buy from
| a UK business.
|
| I found countless Web stores pretending to be UK businesses
| complete with founder stories and convincing copy... All
| turning out to be Chinese fronts.
|
| They know the tide is against them and see starting to
| employ some shady tactics to get sales.
|
| At the same time the big money in China is buying
| westernised historic brands to trade through.
|
| I'm not anti-China for goods and services, but I am against
| the deceptive practices I've been seeing.
| boringg wrote:
| I want to add in case people think this is strictly a Google
| thing. DDG is equally terrible at finding this kind of thing.
| I didn't realize until I read this thread that I was
| suffering this same kind of issue. Its so painful trying to
| find on the internet.
| klyrs wrote:
| Is DDG not just a whitelabel Bing?
| Workaccount2 wrote:
| I get flashbacks to the exodus of Digg, when the admins
| basically said "Look, we get a lot of junk content and a lot of
| common source content so we are going to start fast tracking
| the common source content from trusted providers"
|
| We all know how that went over.
| underlipton wrote:
| And then the exodus ruined Reddit. Eternal September
| dominoes.
| paulpauper wrote:
| Investopedia is another one. Same for bankrate.com Other ones
| included wikihow and genius.com
| smcin wrote:
| ??? I've always found wikihow superbly curated, clear,
| direct, readable, with simple clear diagrams and almost no
| fluff. At least for how-to-do guides, not buying.
|
| Can you post a link to a low-quality wikihow article or two?
| vlexo1 wrote:
| They never can yet complain all the time based on the
| perception of the brand and people complaining - same thing
| as those on Twitter/x
| flp619 wrote:
| https://www.reddit.com/r/disneyvacation/
| smcin wrote:
| Sure, people can submit low-grade garbage or vandalize
| pages, but that doesn't mean the site doesn't also have
| useful content, like:
| https://www.wikihow.com/Category:Computers-and-
| Electronics
| cynicalsecurity wrote:
| Wikihow is crap.
| smcin wrote:
| No it isn't, not in the moderated sections with lots of
| viewers: https://www.wikihow.com/Category:Computers-and-
| Electronics
| vlexo1 wrote:
| Sorry but what are you talking about?
| EcommerceFlow wrote:
| BlackHat SEO's have insiders at many of these companies that'll
| publish your article for $X amount of money. Or edit existing
| articles and insert your URL.
| janesvilleseo wrote:
| You don't need an insider for you know where to just buy the
| link. They hang their shingle out on at least one link buying
| marketplace.
| kevin_thibedeau wrote:
| I suspect that's how geeksforgeeks got so dominant with their
| student written drivel.
| ericmcer wrote:
| "So we have $29M in annual revenue on an average of 3.4M searches
| per month in 2021." Is this real? That averages out to 40m
| searches, so .75 per. It seems insane to get close to $1 per
| search. I figured the return was closer to a penny or even a
| fraction of one.
| 55555 wrote:
| Many types of sites get ~$1 per visitor from search engines.
| Quite possible, yeah.
| cyost wrote:
| Seems likely that the articles in question include affiliate
| links to the products they're advertising
| rwmj wrote:
| When I did search (AdWords) for Thomas Cook, a now defunct but
| then major travel agency, we'd pay PS10 or more to Google for a
| single click sometimes. (Full story:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21046731)
| ren_engineer wrote:
| if they are doing affiliate marketing than it's realistic
| OptionOfT wrote:
| This is not that different from this guy who posted how he
| 'stole' CEO traffic from his competitor.
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38433856
|
| And it is not that different (albeit at a smaller scale) from
| what websites like mini partition wizard has been doing. Their
| sitemaps are full of articles that don't relate at all to their
| tool:
|
| https://www.partitionwizard.com/news_en_sitemap.xml
|
| https://www.partitionwizard.com/partitionmagic_en_sitemap.xm...
|
| All these 'articles' pollute search engines.
| EricE wrote:
| One of the best things about Kagi search (https://kagi.com) is
| you can ban domains from search results. Forbes was one of the
| first I entered!
| zeusk wrote:
| and pinterest; scourge of the web
| kstrauser wrote:
| I had honestly forgotten it existed until you mentioned it.
| Thanks, Kagi!
| insane_dreamer wrote:
| quora is even worse
| gman83 wrote:
| You can do a similar thing for Google with the uBlackList
| extension:
| https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/ublacklist/pncfbmia...
| ClassyJacket wrote:
| This should come preconfigured with pinterest and quora
| blacklisted.
| yas_hmaheshwari wrote:
| Haha :-)
|
| I always feel bad if I click on any of those sites.
| noisycarlos wrote:
| Indeed, but AFAIK you can't do the opposite (make results
| from certain sites show up higher in the results), which you
| can do with Kagi.
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| The second best feature is that you can specify rewrite rules
| for URLs in results, using regular expressions. The example one
| is the most important one for me: rewriting reddit.com to
| old.reddit.com.
| rafram wrote:
| You can disable New Reddit in reddit's preferences. That puts
| old reddit back on reddit.com. No need for a redirect.
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| If you have an account. Rewrite works always.
| maples37 wrote:
| Even without having Forbes explicitly blocked or downranked,
| their article shows up well below the fold on Kagi:
| https://kagi.com/search?q=best+pet+insurance&r=us&sh=ac3i1h1...
| (shared link, you don't need your own subscription for this
| preview)
|
| Their "collapse listicles" setting is probably one of the best
| features when trying to search for products, they squeeze all
| the listicles together in their own list (usually just below
| the fold). If you want them, they're there, and if you don't,
| they take up hardly any space.
| underlipton wrote:
| Kagi boosters:Google articles::SEO spam:Google searches
| ghaff wrote:
| Forbes as a whole basically sold its soul for clicks. It used to
| be one of the three top business magazines depending on your
| preferences. After the web became dominant, at some point after
| Malcolm Forbes died, you ended up with a ton of blog writers--
| with plenty of biases and axes to grind--and essentially
| advertorial content.
| paulpauper wrote:
| fortune.com too. same thing . these brands realized they can
| cash in on their domain authority to create content farms full
| of ads. scales really well too
| ghaff wrote:
| Fortune's case was mostly the whole Time-Life magazine empire
| going to the dogs partly by way of TWB. Forbes just kind of
| faded away post-Malcolm (and with a distracted Steven
| Forbes).
|
| But, in general, the magazine and journalism businesses
| aren't what they were so most of the relatively mass market
| magazines pretty much cashed in on their brands to the degree
| their owners decided to keep them around.
| roughly wrote:
| Bit of a microcosm of the entire business world nowadays.
| Forbes made something - a magazine that produced enough good
| content to gain a reputation. In the new school of business,
| that's an asset, and assets are things we turn into cash as
| quickly as possible, so now Forbes sells CBD, and now anyone
| who sees "forbes.com" in the URL knows it's useless crap, but
| hey, someone made some money, and now they can go find the next
| thing to flip for a couple bucks.
| marcus_holmes wrote:
| I was talking to a friend about this recently.
|
| I bought a pair of Doc Martens boots a while back. And
| they're shit. I remember them from the 80's and they were
| really solid, good leather, well made, etc. The modern ones
| are crappy leather and fell apart after only a few months.
| But they still cost a decent amount because they're Doc
| Martens.
|
| My friend pointed out that Doc Martens are primarily worn by
| teenage girls these days, and are almost "fast fashion". My
| expectations based on the brand are not matching with
| reality, because the brand has moved on from being the de
| rigeur footwear for the entire 80's alternative scene.
|
| From this, I have come up with the "reverse Vimes" theory of
| boots. That actually the most cash-efficient approach to
| footwear is to buy cheap K-mart shoes, expecting them to last
| for a year, instead of buying expensive branded shoes which
| are actually made just as badly as the cheap ones and still
| only last a year.
|
| The point being that Doc Martens, like Forbes, are trading in
| their reputation for quality. In ten years time they will be
| known as shitty boots that used to be worn by edgy teenage
| girls, and the brand will be worthless. But the shareholders
| will have made significant bank from the destruction of that
| brand. Late-stage capitalism win, I guess.
| senkora wrote:
| I think that the trick is to try to find new and upcoming
| brands that have a reputation for quality, and learn what
| high quality looks like so that you can confirm personally
| that the product is good.
|
| This is difficult and requires ongoing work. Fashionable
| young people tend to do it but I certainly don't blame
| anyone who decides that it isn't worth the effort.
| marcus_holmes wrote:
| This used to be what brand was all about - that you could
| trust the brand to produce high-quality stuff because it
| was a quality brand. All Doc Marten boots were well-made
| and solid, would last a decade at least, because it was a
| quality brand and the price tag came with that.
|
| I know what high quality looks like; I wore my first Doc
| Martens for a decade. I trusted the brand when revisiting
| my youth and buying a new pair.
|
| It seems someone figured out that the price tag goes with
| the brand, not the quality. So you can charge high prices
| for cheap boots if you put the DM tag on them. And make
| bank.
|
| I think this will accelerate, and the "new and upcoming"
| brands will get shit at exactly the point where people
| like me discover them. Because, as you say, it's not
| worth the effort to keep up with this rapid churn.
|
| Hence the Inverse Vimes solution: stop trying to buy
| quality and instead accept that everything is shit and
| deal with that reality; buy cheap and often.
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| I prefer the Costco solution 90% of the time. If and when
| the Costco solution does not work, then I do the research
| to figure out what might be better.
|
| For example, I like to wear $30 Costco shoes. I can
| usually get at least a year out of them, but even if not,
| they're only $30. I can buy 3 in a year and come out
| ahead. And I don't waste time researching shoes.
| ZephyrBlu wrote:
| This is only a problem with really big and popular
| brands, where they leverage their brand at scale to
| generate more revenue.
|
| You can find smaller brands that have been doing high
| quality stuff for a while, and they're unlikely to blow
| up in popularity or to reduce quality.
|
| Docs are not my style so I don't know a good small brand
| that does boots like that, but I like Buttero, Crown
| Northhampton and John Elliott for boots/shoes. Beckett
| Simonon is a good brand for more formal shoes. Morjas is
| another brand for more formal shoes that looks really
| good, though I haven't bought anything from them yet.
| citizenpaul wrote:
| Its not late state capitalism. Its hidden inflation. The
| market for actual high quality boots is much smaller than
| you are thinking. Including your own desire. The reality is
| doc martins are selling for <$180 max, basically mid-high
| sneaker (non collectable) territory. Actual quality boots
| like the doc martins of the 80's probably cost over $1000
| dollars now. Are you willing to pay over $1000 for boots?
| Because that is what quality boots cost now.
|
| Doc martin didn't sacrifice the brand. They realized that
| people would never pay $1000 for doc martins so they just
| jettisoned the company name by rebranding into fast fashion
| before they totally disappear. It was probably the only
| choice by the time it was decided. There were probably some
| missteps along the way where they may have been able to
| keep their prices up enough to keep the quality but they
| missed it.
| marcus_holmes wrote:
| I think I paid $300AUD for mine. I was very poor in the
| 80's, I would not have been able to afford the equivalent
| of $1000USD. I have vague memories of them costing around
| 80 GBP, which would be ~350 GBP now, so about half that
| $1K (but definitely more than I paid for them now, so
| your point is at least partially true).
|
| And yes, I would be willing to pay that kind of money now
| for a pair of boots that would last me a decade again.
|
| It was also kinda the point back in the 80's; your Docs
| were an investment. They cost decent money, but they'd
| last a decade and became part of your identity.
| Practically a physical extension of your body; I had a
| flatmate who regularly fell asleep in his and eventually
| developed trenchfoot from doing that. The boots were
| fine, his feet weren't. Most of my friends back in the
| day had one pair of shoes; their Docs. It was worthwhile
| investing in them because that was all you needed.
|
| I think you're also right that the brand itself has
| changed and moved down-market, so they're charging less
| than they used to for a lower-quality product. But this
| is kinda my point; the brand is now being cannibalised
| and turned into a low-quality fast-fashion product
| marketed with a high-quality brand. This is obviously not
| going to work long-term, as people realise that Docs are
| now shite. As I said, in ten year's time the brand won't
| be worth anything.
| chris_armstrong wrote:
| Although Docs have almost given up making in Northampton,
| you'll still find a number of shoemakers producing good
| quality boots that should last a decade or more. You'll
| be paying PS250-PS500 as you guessed.
| eitally wrote:
| High quality boots definitely don't cost >$1000, and
| definitely not boots that are on par with the quality of
| DM from the 80s. DM from the 80s were "fine", but they
| still weren't really high quality and their soles were
| definitely not very durable.
|
| Even today you can find excellent quality, resoleable
| boots, for $200-300. Just look at Redwing, Thursday,
| Wolverine and many, many others.
| citizenpaul wrote:
| You can get boots that function as boots for $300. The
| thing is everyone has forgotten what high quality
| actually is. High quality boots are north of $700
| starting price and can last 20 years.
|
| This is of course a massively opinionated subject about
| price/quality so no one will ever agree but there are
| plenty brands north of $1000 now that probably are around
| as big market as doc martin was in the 80s. I'd consider
| that to be the more accurate comparison.
| ghaff wrote:
| I have a pair of custom-made boots I bought a few decades
| ago for $500 and which have been repaired once. Don't
| wear them much now because they're so heavy. So, yeah,
| they're not really for me today but that's what high
| quality is.
| roughly wrote:
| It's also late stage capitalism.
|
| https://www.epi.org/productivity-pay-gap/
|
| Since the late 70s, policy changes and the modern
| management movement have caused worker pay to drop in
| real terms. Cut forward another decade or so and the
| entire retail landscape discovers people can no longer
| afford their products.
| AnthonyMouse wrote:
| > Since the late 70s, policy changes and the modern
| management movement have caused worker pay to drop in
| real terms.
|
| This isn't well established as the cause and there is
| reason to expect that it isn't. To start with, the
| Housing Theory of Everything fits better.
|
| If this was about management practices then in
| competitive markets things would still be fine, you would
| only need one company to not do that and everybody would
| buy from them. But things still kind of suck even there,
| so what's that about? Housing costs would explain it.
| People spend more money on rent so they have less money
| to spend on other things, meanwhile companies have to pay
| higher rents too, so their customers have less money and
| simultaneously their business has higher costs. Somehow
| they have to lower prices while covering higher costs and
| the somehow is by enshitifying their products, i.e. that
| is the symptom rather than the cause.
|
| But the Housing Theory of Everything is slightly off,
| because the real problem is a generalization of the
| theory. Housing is expensive because supply is
| artificially constrained, and it's artificial supply
| constraints -- insufficiently competitive markets -- that
| are the general underlying cause. Housing is a major
| example of this, probably the largest and most important,
| both because it's such a large proportion of personal
| expenses and because the restrictive zoning that imposes
| the constraint is so widespread.
|
| But it's the same problem when you need a medical imaging
| scan and there are Certificate of Need laws that
| expressly prohibit new competitors from providing the
| service when the incumbents are charging inflated prices,
| and then those high costs get incorporated into health
| insurance premiums and Medicare taxes and reduce real
| wages by increasing the cost of living.
|
| Regulatory capture has to be undone or it will be our
| undoing.
| smcin wrote:
| Sure but that seems to have been predictable from:
|
| - 2003: DM came close to bankruptcy, moved all production
| from UK to China and Thailand, laid off UK workers
|
| - 10/2013: private equity company Permira acquired R.
| Griggs Group Limited (owner of DM brand), for PS300m. Hired
| former brand president of Vans as CEO.
|
| - 2019: declining quality reported for previous years
|
| - 1/2021: floated on London Stock Exchange for PS3.7
| billion.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dr._Martens#History
| marcus_holmes wrote:
| Thanks, useful detail :)
| smcin wrote:
| 9/20/2024: the stock is currently worth PS51.65, market
| cap is PS617m. That's 80% down from the IPO. Downward
| trend for last 3 years.
|
| https://www.londonstockexchange.com/stock/DOCS/dr-
| martens-pl... https://www.barrons.com/market-
| data/stocks/docmf
| mschuster91 wrote:
| > From this, I have come up with the "reverse Vimes" theory
| of boots. That actually the most cash-efficient approach to
| footwear is to buy cheap K-mart shoes, expecting them to
| last for a year, instead of buying expensive branded shoes
| which are actually made just as badly as the cheap ones and
| still only last a year.
|
| The problem is, it may be cash efficient in theory for an
| individual, but for society at large it's a significant
| cost - animal lives (for the leather), fossil fuel
| consumption (for the plastic parts and synthetic leather,
| also transport), human time lost in production and sales...
| malfist wrote:
| Project Farm on youtube does a lot of comparison videos
| between a bunch of brands of the same type of tool. He's
| sometimes able to snag an antique craftsman (before Sears
| sold it to china) and includes it in his tests. It's always
| amazing how much better US made craftsman tools are
| compared to anything currently made in china (including the
| current version of craftsman).
| bongodongobob wrote:
| Well what did you expect them to do? Magazine subscriptions
| fell off a cliff as the Internet matured and no one wants to
| pay for online content.
| ghaff wrote:
| Some magazines have been able to maintain quality better than
| others. Especially if there was outside funding from someone
| who had a real connection/passion. I'm not sure there was
| anyone at the helm of Forbes who cared at that point.
| smcin wrote:
| Consumer reports that you pay for, or at least websites that
| have a policy of avoiding or declaring conflicts-of-interest,
| seem to be the reasonable middle-ground.
| cynicalsecurity wrote:
| Not to become villains and scammers, obviously. That's the
| bare minimum of what you should not become no matter how bad
| your business is going.
| somethoughts wrote:
| It's a really good example of why one should not name your
| company after your surname. At some point if you sell your
| company, you are putting the surname of all your descendants in
| the hands of some other entity outside of your/their direct
| control.
| BobaFloutist wrote:
| If they really care about it they can just change their name
| though.
| ackbar03 wrote:
| The Forbes family tree or the publication?
| jm20 wrote:
| I'm pretty sure in the grand scheme of things the Forbes
| family is still perfectly OK with the association
| FatalLogic wrote:
| >I'm pretty sure in the grand scheme of things the Forbes
| family is still perfectly OK with the association
|
| The writers, editors and other business partners who built
| their reputation by contributing to Forbes previous good
| reputation are probably very not OK with it
| Dylan16807 wrote:
| The question was whether to name it after a person or
| not. Those people would be equally upset if it was named
| Bisclock, so them being upset at the current site is not
| relevant to the naming discussion.
| Loughla wrote:
| For the amount of money involved, and all joking aside, you
| can have my first and last name. You can name a horrible
| flesh eating disease after me. It doesn't matter.
|
| I get the feeling the family doesn't care while they lounge
| around on their stacks of cash?
| FatalLogic wrote:
| >It's a really good example of why one should not name your
| company after your surname.
|
| That relationship can work in the opposite way sometimes.
| John McAfee seemed to be getting a gleeful kick out of
| embarrassing the security company that had invested in the
| right to use his name.
|
| Usually because he was doing zany and sketchy and potentially
| criminal, while expertly courting media attention. But he
| also used that power for good sometimes by criticizing their
| bad products.
| specproc wrote:
| For anyone in the thread that's not seen "How To Uninstall
| McAfee Antivirus" by John McAfee, you are very, very
| welcome [0].
|
| Content warning: it was made in his Alpha-PHP era, and
| contains a lot of sex and drug references. It's mostly sex
| and drugs IIRC.
|
| [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bKgf5PaBzyg
| cynicalsecurity wrote:
| It's crazy how in our modern world people still might get
| offended because of something as common and natural as
| sex.
| refulgentis wrote:
| I don't think OP is offended, just, there's a lot of us
| who are in locations where we can't be watching someone
| yap about sex and drugs
| smcin wrote:
| Jardine is still a name in trading, at least in the west, not
| China, where they are not fondly remembered for their 19th-
| century "import activities".
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Jardine_Matheson_%2.
| ... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jardines_(company)
| rgovostes wrote:
| One of the Forbes "contributors", Gordon Kelly, used to
| generate an enormous volume of posts for every single minor
| Apple software release, in addition to regurgitating every
| rumor published by Mark Gurman and other journalists.
|
| Apparently he passed away last year, after "authoring 2,511
| articles in sum and accumulating over 174 million page views in
| just one year, 33 million of which were gained within a single
| month."
|
| https://www.forbes.com/sites/paulmonckton/2023/10/05/tribute...
| underlipton wrote:
| Apple-focused journalists have historically been especially
| egregious. Nilay Patel and Josh Topolsky took their maddening
| approach of covering the Engadget homepage in inane, separate
| articles for every minute detail of a product announcement
| (starting with the iPad) to The Verge, and its "success"
| caused the strategy to propagate onward. No more concise
| write-ups; it's all about keeping you in a deathloop on the
| platform. Gotta milk those cult clicks, you know.
| ghaff wrote:
| Certain topics, and Apple is certainly one of them, can be
| essentially guaranteed to generate a ton of traffic. HN is
| by no means immune. And some writers have made a career of
| taking advantage of that fact.
|
| Meanwhile, a founder of one of the major 80s-era
| minicomputer companies that even had a book written about
| them passed away a few weeks ago and I would have not even
| known except for my Facebook groups.
| bartekpacia wrote:
| What person do you have in mind?
| ghaff wrote:
| Edson de Castro (Data General as in Soul of a New
| Machine). But you could name just about any luminary from
| important commercial computer companies from that era and
| it would be the same story. The computer industry just
| wasn't in the public spotlight at that time.
| coliveira wrote:
| It's not just Forbes that is using this strategy. Many
| traditional media sites, including CNN and USA Today are running
| the same type of content. And of course they'll not report on
| this issue, which might just well be why Google is doing this, a
| kind of kickback for traditional media.
| seo-throwaway wrote:
| The dirty secret is those are also run by Marketplace, it's the
| same team under the hood once you get past the handful of
| people dedicated to each brand.
|
| The model has proven very successful and these brands are happy
| to lease their reputation for a cut of the profit and none of
| the work.
| plewd wrote:
| Is there a source for this?
| seo-throwaway wrote:
| I work here.
| vlexo1 wrote:
| What do you do there? And how would you know all this? I
| find it hard to believe this to be the case
| seo-throwaway wrote:
| As you can see this is a throwaway since I don't want to
| identify myself, but a wrote a lengthy comment elsewhere
| in the tree describing how the company has changed here:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41590466#41598797
|
| The aforementioned companies in the parent comment have
| partnerships with Marketplace to replicate the Forbes
| model. I didn't mean to imply everyone who does this
| thing is using Marketplace.
| vlexo1 wrote:
| Ok understood and read that now.
|
| > I wanted to share some insight into our world and get
| stuff off my chest as it's been disappointing to watch go
| down, if not all that unique or surprising.
|
| I guess what benefit do you get out of ratting out the
| company you work for?
|
| Is it that you don't feel you have enough of a voice to
| change anything or to help improve things?
| seo-throwaway wrote:
| Nothing specifically. Just maybe give some context to the
| post here, since this article is rightly pretty harsh and
| I used to be somewhat proud the work I did with the
| company.
|
| I wouldn't say I'm ratting them out because these
| partnerships aren't literally a secret, just that they
| aren't widely known and are similarly obfuscated like the
| relationship with Forbes. Ultimately like I said
| leadership does everything in a silo and unless you're
| high up in the ladder you're not really getting a say. So
| probably yeah just felt a bit powerless
| magic-michael wrote:
| sounds like things have changed a lot over the years
| you've been there? Interesting hearing how editorial and
| business teams have interacted--always feels like a tough
| balance when growth kicks in.
|
| do you think the culture shift was just bound to happen
| as the company got bigger, or were there some key moments
| where things really started to shift?
|
| I'm on the Editorial team at RV - so know the finance and
| insurance space well, and we deal with similar dynamics
| with the sales side, so I get where you're coming from.
| I've seen stuff like this play out before, but curious to
| hear how it unfolded on your end.
| seo-throwaway wrote:
| I don't think it was bound to happen. The company did a
| pretty good job maintaining the culture as we grew.
| Obviously as more layers of bureaucracy are added and
| things settle into more standardized procedures, you're
| going to lose some of that scrappy feeling. Up until the
| end of last year, at least the energy really hadn't
| changed too much.
|
| I think the algorithm change mentioned in the article
| precipitated a lot of the culture shift. I think it was a
| failure of leadership to not have planned for something
| like this, and two rounds of layoff really shattered a
| lot of the energy that had been cultivated over the
| years. There isn't much discussion these days about brand
| integrity or responsibility, especially from the top
| down. It's very clearly coming from leadership to pursue
| growth and SEO is steering the ship with everyone else on
| the sidelines, subject to their whims. I hear from my
| colleagues in edit and data about some truly wild pieces
| they're told to write/research. It doesn't help with
| leadership being, as mentioned before, basically
| invisible outside of quarterly town halls (which are
| hilariously lacking in transparency, they refuse to even
| show revenue numbers to the employees).
|
| There's been other aspects too that contributed. They've
| built up a massive operation in India which offshored a
| lot of company functions. I had colleagues who had their
| growth paths with the company essentially halted because
| they decided to hire new people in India to build out
| teams rather than advance them and have to pay them more.
| There were a lot of issues last year with hiring where
| management basically refused to do US hires because the
| UK had lower labor costs, even though a significant
| portion of the existing company was US based. This caused
| some of the cross-functional breakdown because it made it
| more difficult for teams to collaborate across the major
| timezone gaps. The India buildout exacerbated this too so
| stuff generally began to take longer.
|
| It all ultimately stems from what is Leadership's stated
| "growth above all" mindset. I can't say they're wrong
| from a business perspective. Obviously they're doing
| extremely well and taking in a ton of revenue (little of
| which makes it into our paychecks based on our raises
| last year lol). It definitely wrung whatever joy or spark
| people had to try and put together something good. It's
| an SEO machine at this point.
| aaa_aaa wrote:
| In Turkey, all searches hits to newspaper sites. Its like a sad
| joke. Related page is full of repetitive garbage where
| information is hidden somewhere.
| throwawayl3ll wrote:
| Just start browsing search results from the second page.
| skeeter2020 wrote:
| I need the author to tell me again who runs Forbes Marketplace. I
| assume it's Forbes. It's not?
| scarface_74 wrote:
| I just did the "best pet insurance" search and once reputable
| sites came up.
|
| - US News and World Reports
|
| - CBS News
|
| - Forbes
|
| - Motley Fool
|
| The entire web is a shit show.
| smusamashah wrote:
| There are 2-3 very detailed articles on how only a few media
| companies that own top few hundred domains have spammed SEO and
| hijacked top spots in search results. I made a list of block-able
| domains (dot dash meredith sites only). I have roughly explained
| how I searched these domains.
| https://gist.github.com/SMUsamaShah/6573b27441d99a0a0c792431...
|
| Just copy paste this list to UBlacklist (or other tool). Need to
| sit down and search and add more sites including forbes someday.
| darby_nine wrote:
| Google basically destroyed itself when it decided to become an ad
| network rather than a dumb pipe you pay to access. You have to
| pick a base to sell to. Selling to two different bases at once
| (advertisers/seo and actual users) means both resent you and
| neither respect you.
|
| When google gets split up the whole world will cheer.
| thfuran wrote:
| >Google basically destroyed itself when it decided to become an
| ad network rather than a dumb pipe you pay to access.
|
| It didn't destroy itself, it became one of the largest and most
| profitable companies ever.
| darby_nine wrote:
| Right! Imagine how big they'd be if they hadn't given up on
| microtransactions in the 90s. I'd guess not trying to be
| broken up by the DOJ.
| thfuran wrote:
| Probably they'd have closed shop long ago, because someone
| else would've done ad-funded search, and it's nearly
| impossible to compete with free.
| seo-throwaway wrote:
| I've worked here a while. He's a bit aggressive about it but a
| lot of what he says is on point.
|
| The relationship with Forbes has always been a weird one. The
| understanding I've had was the company was spun off from an
| effort that kind of started in Forbes but they didn't really want
| to deal with themselves.
|
| It was always an SEO driven content strategy but for a while we
| had a pretty sizable content apparatus. Really big editorial
| teams for each vertical, a bigger cultural emphasis on the
| quality of the content and more collaboration across teams. The
| editorial teams had a lot of voice in what got published and
| tried to respect that we were using the Forbes brand and what
| that meant when we made recommendations or wrote about something.
| The only thing I'll say to our (meagre) defense is there are
| panels of experts that are consulted for recommendations on a lot
| of products, and the teams that do research for the actual
| written content (not the affiliate/partner garbage that often
| takes up sponsored slots) do try and work hard to provide data to
| meet the demands of the SEO and BD teams.
|
| A lot of that has changed over the years. The company has grown
| explosively in the time that I have been here. The company
| something like tripled its size last year alone. I went from
| being a newbie on a team of less than ten to a senior member on a
| team in the mid double digits in the space of a year. The culture
| has become increasingly bureaucratic and disconnected. We've
| always been a fully remote team but it used to be much more
| collaborative and cross-functional.
|
| We don't hear much at all from leadership. It's always been a
| fairly insulated operation from one vertical layer to the other.
| There have been two pretty big layoffs this year which came out
| of the blue. Editorial teams have been gutted across every
| vertical and the strategy has pivoted more and more towards
| shovelware content and partner posts. The latter being especially
| frustrating because they are handled by a completely separate
| team from the editorial team but are formatted to look like our
| written content even though they're actually sponsored posts. At
| a team meeting after the last layoffs the CEO answered a question
| about the company's plans and said something to the effect of "if
| we're not growing we are dead" which I think is obviously seen in
| how the company is re-shaping itself.
|
| It's been disappointing to say the least. I don't think any of us
| ever operated under the illusion we were doing important
| journalism or anything, but we all seemed to strive to make
| something good of the system we were working in. I've seen and
| heard of a lot of things I find commendable of my co-workers.
| Editorial and mid-level leadership have worked for a long time to
| ensure a separation of biz dev and edit so that they don't have
| influence over the written content. I heard of times when BD
| really tried to push, however indirectly, for partners to get
| higher rankings in content. As edit gets increasingly sidelined
| in the business by the SEO content teams I'm not sure how much
| this is being maintained but I don't work in that side of the
| business so I can't speak specifically.
|
| All of this is to say. He's right, we are just ultimately doing
| our jobs. Unfortunately, I've outlasted a lot of people who were
| hired after me, and up til the layoffs it was very rare for
| someone to quit. Now more and more of the people who have been
| here since the early days (even before me) are peeling away.
| Those of us who stay are seeking more and more checked out.
| Honestly the benefits are excellent and I think that's what keeps
| most of us around but no one is passionate these days.
|
| That was a super rambling post, but I don't ever see anyone
| talking about this place I've been at for a while. I wanted to
| share some insight into our world and get stuff off my chest as
| it's been disappointing to watch go down, if not all that unique
| or surprising.
| stickfigure wrote:
| Thank you for the inside view.
|
| It is interesting that there's a huge rush to grow; the bigger
| and lower quality you get, the more incentive Google has to
| change the algorithm. The business could completely evaporate
| overnight.
| krick wrote:
| > As for oversight, Forbes only has 2 board seats. And really it
| only has one.
|
| It doesn't matter though. They have permission to use the name
| and domain, Forbes clearly knows what they are doing and why. If
| it wouldn't be ok with them, they'd revoke the permission (I'm
| not sure, but I assume they can, right?) So, yes, you can claim
| there is an oversight. If anything, Google's definition is a bit
| clunky, since it doesn't grasp the essence of the problem. But it
| also shouldn't matter, since it should be pretty obvious there is
| a problem indeed.
|
| Now, why Google is ok with that (or didn't notice that) is
| another and very valid question. I mean, great, Forbes can host
| whatever bullshit they see fit, but then it would be appropriate
| for the whole domain to never appear on the first page of Google.
| Or second. Or tenth.
|
| But then again, it doesn't seem like Google really tries to
| battle other, lesser doorways and LLM-generated content. And it's
| easy to see why.
| LarsDu88 wrote:
| Damn this opened my eyes to a whole 'nother world of online
| marketing
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| Meta comment: I consider myself pretty adept at finding things
| people don't want to be found in securities filings, registration
| records, _et cetera_. The author is uniquely competent at this as
| well.
| not_math wrote:
| Do you happen to have a blog? This type of investigative
| journalism is really interesting and would love to read more.
| lo0dot0 wrote:
| Why would they not want what to be found?
| visarga wrote:
| When I am using Chrome on the phone to read the Google Discover
| news feed I am often horrified how shitty the experience is.
| Popups, cookie warnings, almost no article is visible initially,
| and some of them actively make it hard to scroll to the text. It
| looks like there is no use friendly news site left in Google's
| feed. I prefer LLM slop, thank you very much. The only attractive
| proposition is the fresh and targeted feed. Probably Google is
| not allowed to offer a reading mode that hides the cruft.
| yas_hmaheshwari wrote:
| Try Brave on iOS. It is a much better experience than Chrome (
| Maybe because Brave comes with Ad blocker installed, but not
| 100% sure )
| talkingtab wrote:
| In the past I have wondered why Hacker News had so many articles
| from Forbes. Now I know.
|
| And this from 2016: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10871410
|
| [Edit, add link to article about Forbes and Hacker News]
| fredgrott wrote:
| People, Google is not in the Tech business....
|
| Its tech powering an search and ad monopoly....
|
| Things only change when ctr of ads and amount of ads displayed go
| down.
| thfuran wrote:
| To zero, I hope.
| chiefalchemist wrote:
| To your point, my theory is that all their other tech efforts -
| that are very often sunset'ed in a couple+ years - are merely a
| smokescreen of the ad monopoly. Worst case, if they have to:
| "Tech is hard and competitive. Look at how many other
| businesses we started and were unable to be successful at.
| Search + ads is one click away from slipping away from us.
| We're not a monopoly. We're alone and very scared for our
| future..."
| arn3n wrote:
| An aside about Forbes: I used to be subscribed to a few of their
| newsletters. About two years ago, I would notice that nearly all
| the newletter content would say something along the lines of "as
| reported by The Information" and I realized that a huge portion
| (>60%) of the newsletter content was just summarizations or
| rephrasing of articles from The Information. Which, I mean, great
| that you're citing your sources, but are you really providing a
| service here?
|
| I just read The Information, now.
| joshdavham wrote:
| Is there a way I can blacklist Forbes from my google search
| results?
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