[HN Gopher] Google is dead. Where do we go now?
___________________________________________________________________
Google is dead. Where do we go now?
Author : tomjuggler
Score : 1006 points
Date : 2025-12-29 20:29 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.circusscientist.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.circusscientist.com)
| tomjuggler wrote:
| A blog post lamenting the demise of Google Adwords.
| agentifysh wrote:
| good riddance seriously i used to pay like $1~2 a click back in
| 2010s and remember feeling like a total scam. no way of knowing
| if those clicks were bots and any campaigns would always have
| inflation somehow even long tail words that shouldn't.
|
| AI should equal the playing field and promote businesses based
| on merit and capacity not how much they can spend.
| eterm wrote:
| For now.
|
| I give it maybe 12-18 months before AI results are polluted
| by advertising.
| djmips wrote:
| exactly, enjoy the Golden age people, like the Internet had
| once...
| nospice wrote:
| I don't even think this golden age actually exists today.
| Aask Google AI mode for the best product in some category -
| say, the best kitchen range - and it cites... a bunch of
| spammy "review" websites and a YouTube video.
|
| If you're shopping around, an LLM you control can work for
| stuff like summarizing customer reviews or compiling a list
| of products with specific features (if you don't mind them
| being randomly wrong). But for general shopping advice /
| "plan my vacation" kind of queries, it's already firmly in
| the land of SEO-garbage-in-SEO-garbage-out.
| nacozarina wrote:
| they won't be in a separate panel you can ignore, either
|
| the product promotion text will be integrated into the
| responses
|
| 'your prompt is insightful and refreshing. reminds me of
| the refreshing taste of organic coconut-cinnamon water.
| here's a QR code coupon for $1 off a 48-ct pack you can use
| at your local HoleFoods.'
| ndriscoll wrote:
| More like
|
| "Fantastic! It's great that you care about what you
| should feed your children. A bowl of Cinnamon Toast
| Crunch is a great way to start your kids' day with the
| energy they need, and it's something they're sure to
| love! It's also fortified with vitamins to give them the
| nutrition they need! If you don't have any, I can start a
| DoorDash order right now."
|
| Or "It's great that you want to find a way to earn some
| extra money for holiday presents for your family when you
| don't have anything left over after paying your bills.
| You're so thoughtful. You're an avid sports fan, so
| you've got the knowledge to have an edge in sports
| betting. DraftKings has a $10 credit when you bet your
| first $15 on tomorrow's game. You're automatically a
| winner!"
|
| One mustn't forget that propagandists are frequently just
| straight malicious.
| lelanthran wrote:
| They _want_ to get there (embedded ads that look like
| content), but right now it 's not so easy - how can they
| confirm to the advertiser that the ad was seen? What are
| they gonna do? Put in a 700-character long link in the
| conversation?
|
| I'm pretty certain that the ChatAI providers _want_ to
| show ads, but until they can bill for it, they aren 't
| going to.
|
| At some point the billing will work, and then they will.
| hylaride wrote:
| > I give it maybe 12-18 months before AI results are
| polluted by advertising.
|
| Have you been on amazon lately? We're already there. :-/
| Banditoz wrote:
| I will say I have no experience in the ad space, but surely
| the SEO/ad companies will figure out how to game LLMs to make
| their sites more likely to be picked up by it, no? Or OpenAI
| would just directly sell ads themselves.
| trey-jones wrote:
| Yes - we're in what I like to call the Socialist Phase of
| AI (user acquisition). We were once in this phase with
| Google. Eventually we'll move into the as-yet-unnamed-by-me
| phase that Google (and search in General, also the
| internet) have been in for quite some time, where they try
| and squeeze out all the money that they put in during the
| Socialist Phase.
| cheschire wrote:
| Capitalist?
| trey-jones wrote:
| I prefer not, because technically this socialist phase is
| part of capitalism currently.
| simpsond wrote:
| Value creation phase vs extraction phase.
| jaggederest wrote:
| The classic pairing is explore/exploit - where you
| allocate resources towards serendipity in the former, and
| lock down into only doing the profitable thing in the
| second.
| delfinom wrote:
| I like to call this the candyvan phase.
| mtoner23 wrote:
| I would be that Openai and Google will find a way to boost
| the embedded ad in the llm result to you based on an auction
| on how valuable you and your query are
| mrweasel wrote:
| > AI should equal the playing field and promote businesses
| based on merit and capacity not how much they can spend.
|
| Wasn't that pretty much also the promise of Google as a
| search engine originally? For the longest time Google
| actively fought SEO, while running a minimal set of ads, then
| they bought DoubleClick and everything went to to shit.
|
| AI should equal the playing field, but it won't. The current
| generation have our bias built in and it's not in a good
| place financially. It's only a matter of time because it
| becomes infested with ads. You think OpenAI aren't going to
| promote shitty products or companies, because the algorithm
| says they shouldn't? No, they might charge that customer
| more, but they aren't saying no.
|
| This is a multi facet problem. There's a generation of
| advertisers who believe that advertising is clicking around
| in the AdWords interface, maybe sprinkle in a little ad spend
| on Meta and boom, you're done. The reality is that they can't
| advertising anything, they don't have the skills required to
| sell a product.
|
| If they can't rely on Google, where can they go? Social
| media, AI? Nope, because many of us have been burnt by the
| major online platforms and won't trust any of them. I'm never
| signing up for another social media platform, hell, I'm
| reluctant to sign up for ANYTHING. The current generation of
| marketing has sacrificed the future for a quick profit now.
| Many aren't on social media, we use adblockers, we pay for
| services to ensure no ads, we don't watch TV, newspapers are
| dead, we don't go out much, so where are you going to
| advertise exactly? Even if you find a venue, many see so few
| ads that your attempt at marketing is going to feel like an
| assault, because you're so desperate that you don't dare tone
| it down enough.
|
| Advertisement needs to reinvent itself, and it needs to stop
| funding the entire online services industry, because it
| can't, not without cannibalizing its own future.
| mapontosevenths wrote:
| AI is built with content from the open web, but it has also
| killed the open web. The death of Adwords is only one symptom
| of that.
|
| I don't know what comes next, I just know it will be worse.
| shadowgovt wrote:
| It wasn't really AI. Fundamentally, building a website the
| "traditional" way (hosting agreement, apache install, your
| favorite way to convert data formats that don't hate you into
| HTML, CSS, and JavaScript) was always a learned and quite
| technical skill; most people weren't doing it for fun, they
| were doing it because it was the only way to be on the web.
|
| What killed the open web was Facebook, Twitter, and their ilk
| replacing that whole mess with social media profiles,
| networking connections, and templated, pre-fabricated
| organization home pages. When social networks became dominant
| enough that businesses could use it to get their info out
| there without having to author a webpage, the balance tipped
| (at least for business-motivated web content).
| nottorp wrote:
| No, google search has stopped being useful years before "AI".
| mapontosevenths wrote:
| It was still useful to advertisers and publishers.
| LunaSea wrote:
| Is that why it kept it's market share and usage numbers?
| pixl97 wrote:
| Business momentum goes a long way, especially with Google
| being near monopoly status in their advertising. If
| you're flying at 50,000 feet and the engines fall off the
| plane it may be a long time before you the customer feel
| the impact. We can only guess Google is in a panic trying
| to figure out how they'll make their numbers next quarter
| and looking for something else to enshittify to increase
| profits in the meantime.
| nottorp wrote:
| They're paying right and left to be the default search
| option, aren't they?
|
| Plus to be honest alternatives aren't much better. I use
| duckduckgo but the results are still a deluge of spam
| (content mills).
| sixtyj wrote:
| - Build FAQ section (LLM can help write a lot of it, if you let
| it load the content of your site) - Write news on your site
| (LLM can help you to find ideas what to write about)
|
| There are other networks as well: X, Meta, YouTube, LinkedIn,
| Amazon ads. It depends what's your target group. But all
| networks have targeting tools so you can test them with minimum
| budget just to see what works and what doesn't.
|
| For sure, you have some personalized landing pages with CTA
| (Posthog script included so you can see what works).
| AuthAuth wrote:
| Please go anywhere but the platforms I use. Go fill Tiktok up
| with ads. Any of the "mainstream" platforms inbuilt ad posts are
| a good bet. Or a marketing agency that will disguse it as organic
| content.
| tomjuggler wrote:
| Lol wish I could afford to "fill up Tiktok with ads"! Seriously
| though, I always felt like Google AdWords (we only used the
| search network) are the most honest way. Someone searches for
| what you offer and they see your ad. With these other platforms
| it's more about relying on the algorithm.
| hawtads wrote:
| Google ads are the cheapest yes, but depending on your
| audience they may not be looking on Google now.
|
| For ChatGPT (and similar) you need to have a strong FAQ page
| and lots of content marketing to increase the likelihood of
| being the suggested answer when a user asks ChatGPT a
| relevant question (it's a highly probabilistic system, look
| up AEO/GEO).
|
| CloudFlare for example offers an option to block AI scraping
| bots by default. If you are in the services business, this is
| the _opposite_ of what you want because having AI crawlers
| scrape your site would drive traffic down the road when users
| ask a related question.
|
| I would also suggest having accounts with major chatbot
| companies and enabling the "allow training on my
| conversations" option and then talk to it about your
| services. Ultimately you just want to get your brand into the
| training data corpus, and the rest is just basic machine
| learning statistics.
| dataviz1000 wrote:
| Facebook ads were the cheapest for me ten years ago.
|
| We were marketing a product that many people were happy to
| know existed. The dashboard gave us tools to really delve
| into demographics. Of all the ridiculous personal data
| Facebook collected, the best demographic filter was
| allowing me to narrow in on pages someone liked or
| interacted with. We were selling things related to cruising
| sailboats, and we could target an audience within 30 miles
| of Fort Lauderdale who also liked _Sailing Magazine_.
| Moreover, we could use a pixel so that only people who had
| also visited our website saw the ads.
|
| Facebook had a policy of rewarding high-quality ad content.
| If people clicked the ad, or better yet left positive
| comments and discussion or shared, the price drastically
| decreased to fractions of a cent per impression and click-
| through. We were able to get ads shared a lot with people
| tagging other people about the product suggesting they
| might be interested in it. That was the holy grail for copy
| that we always strived for.
|
| Of course, they got rid of all that. But at the time, it
| was a great way to target an audience based on third-party
| pages they liked, giving them ad content about products
| they were generally interested in--and products they were
| happy to know they could purchase because they had value.
|
| Ads configuration is like gambling in Las Vegas, in that
| the easier the game, the worse the odds--like slot machines
| --and the more the player has to interact, like Blackjack,
| the better the payout. When done well with good
| configuration, we were getting 1000s of click-throughs for
| dollars. It was amazing.
|
| The point is that Facebook rewarded ads that people
| positively interacted with, as it meant the quality of the
| news feed wasn't hurt by the ad.
|
| There was a time when ads benefitted everyone, the buyer,
| the seller, and Facebook.
| pixl97 wrote:
| >when ads benefitted everyone, the buyer, the seller, and
| Facebook
|
| As others have stated in this thread, it's called the
| acquisition phase. Get people hooked, build the network,
| make it be the place that people have to be at.
|
| After that comes the exploit phase where said network
| effects make it hard to leave. You can rake in billions
| (trillion?) of dollars this way. Who cares if it
| eventually kills the company, you've made more money than
| god at this point.
| samtp wrote:
| Google Search Ads are usually the most expensive on a CPC
| basis out of the big platforms, but usually the CPA is much
| lower (even though Bing Ads can often be better value).
| This is usually because of 2 reasons:
|
| 1. You can target a specific part of the funnel
| (informational -> purchase intent) in search ads. Targeting
| on social networks is more about overall user profiles
| rather than their immediate state of mind.
|
| 2. People going to a search engine expect to leave that
| search engine to go to another website. Whereas people on a
| social network expect to stay in that portal. So clicking
| on an ad then doing something after is a more natural flow
| (and better value for advertisers).
| lukan wrote:
| Your product are programmable LED pois?
|
| That does seem like a very good fit for a good video that can
| spread on TikTok etc on its own if some performers upload
| videos.
| tomjuggler wrote:
| NO that's a side project - my product is my juggling/magic
| shows here in Durban (also good for video though). I made
| the poi for myself and open sourced it, now people are
| selling them in Brazil, and Australia. Sometimes I get a
| bit of cash from it but not a lot.
| lukan wrote:
| I see. Not sure if TikTok is the best plattform then as
| you want a very local audience (but I never used TikTok,
| just watched family members do).
|
| I rather would try to get an entry on google maps.
| Meaning when people browse the area, they see your thing.
| I certainly like to discover new stuff like this in new
| areas and some things I find are clearly there because of
| ads, but other got there by other ways. Making a entry by
| hand, publishing a picture there with further info ..
| tomjuggler wrote:
| We are on Google Maps. Many 5* ratings (apart from that
| one psycho neighbour who objected to me asking him to
| turn his base down - they left one night without paying
| their rent and a week later my business has 1* review.
| urrgh 10 years and I'm still annoyed)
|
| Instagram has apparently got hyper specific location
| targeting, so we are doing an ad on there now.
| h33t-l4x0r wrote:
| Maybe you just need to update your act. Eat some tide
| pods or something.
| tomjuggler wrote:
| I think the Magician equivalent is David Blaine, making
| people pass out from shock because you smuggled a fake
| spider into their ear or something.
|
| Mostly we do kids entertainment though, so that's not
| really going to convice moms to hire my magic show for
| Bobby's birthday
| rw_panic0_0 wrote:
| pls don't go to TikTok, I use it
| DaSHacka wrote:
| TikTok's already full of ads and barely hidden sponsored
| posts though
| talentedcoin wrote:
| Why hate on the guy with the kids' entertainment business for
| placing ads? I don't get it.
| mattmaroon wrote:
| I think they're really hating on ads in general, not this
| specific person.
| tomjuggler wrote:
| I hate ads too, I understand. Currently running pi-hole and
| ublock simultaneously. Have to use a burner phone to see my
| own ads
| AuthAuth wrote:
| Its not specific on him Ads just drive me insane. I haven't
| really formed enough strong reasoning(to me) to say they
| shouldn't exist. So I'm at a halfway point of "advertise
| somewhere that isnt in front of me".
|
| The platforms I use are very NOT local so it'd be pointless.
| Mainstream platforms are invasive with their data collection
| that would allow his ads to be specifically targeted and do
| well there, getting put in front of people who might actual
| use his service.
| 1970-01-01 wrote:
| GOOG +65% YTD. Opposite of dead.
| mikert89 wrote:
| unfortunately, google is better than ever
| allknowingfrog wrote:
| The article is specifically about the decline of Adwords, not
| the company as a whole.
| shadowgovt wrote:
| Both of these things can be true:
|
| - Google, the company, is doing pretty well in the stock
| market.
|
| - Google, the advertising company, isn't generating good ROI
| for its advertising customers.
|
| From Google's point of view, they've been very gunshy about
| having ads be their only revenue stream for years; I wouldn't
| be surprised that the consequence is the value there is drying
| up.
| 1970-01-01 wrote:
| Let's answer the question. Hard trending data on ads says
| everything is normal.
|
| https://www.statista.com/statistics/266249/advertising-
| reven...
| InsideOutSanta wrote:
| Advertising revenue being up is also consistent with the
| linked article, since the writer had to increase ad spend
| to get any results before giving up entirely.
| emodendroket wrote:
| It's also not broken out -- for instance, if people move
| to advertising on YouTube instead of AdWords that's still
| revenue for Google.
| tyingq wrote:
| Though, that doesn't really conflict with the story. He
| increased his ad spend before he figured out it wasn't working.
| Which would be more $$ for Google.
| larodi wrote:
| is super ineffective, indeed. if you need to pay 20$ to get
| s.o. to pay you 50$ for a service/product, well in all
| honesty calling people one by one and giving them 10$ is more
| likely to result in sale.
| po1nt wrote:
| AI Bubble
| bdangubic wrote:
| whats that?
| mikelitoris wrote:
| Kagi
| mapontosevenths wrote:
| Kagi depends on their being an open web to crawl. The incentive
| to publish on the open web is gone though.
| carlosjobim wrote:
| Search engines can usually search the closed web as well.
|
| Also, incentives are super high for businesses to create
| quality content for the open web to drive business. For
| example a car tire manufacturer could publish reliable
| restaurant reviews in order to encourage driving.
| piskov wrote:
| Kagi will be dead if google and alike are dead.
|
| Buying access to web search indices is not the same as having
| one.
|
| (I love them but this is the hard truth)
| tensor wrote:
| Kagi is building their own index. There are also other open
| indexes. Over time these can replace the big corporate
| indexes. The hard truth is that the big players in search are
| dead. They are now the yahoo of search, with landing pages
| full of ads and results that are primarily ads.
| piskov wrote:
| See their revenue (number of paid users is not a secret):
| something around $7M annually? It was half of that not so
| long ago (glad, that the userbase is growing).
|
| With their current pricing they are out of their league of
| having any full-blown index, crawlers, people, what have
| you.
|
| I would say year ago I was amazed how they are alive at all
| (unless I am missing something in their funding).
| wahern wrote:
| A little over 15 years ago you could index the web with a
| small cluster. I remember people doing doing it with
| Cassandra or Elasticsearch. I'm sure you'd need a much
| bigger cluster, but outside video and images I imagine
| it's still doable even for a small organization,
| especially if you're filtering out content farms. Plus,
| there are many organizations interested in having access
| to an index, and I'm pretty more than a few currently
| running their own index and selling to analytics firms.
| piskov wrote:
| Index is one thing, great search over it is another.
|
| A competitive, general-purpose web search engine with its
| own full index is _brutally_ hard and expensive.
|
| This is the reason there are only a few world-class like
| russian yandex, chinese baidu (to not state the obvious
| names like google).
| tensor wrote:
| They already have world class search technology. In terms
| of indexing they only need to index the most important
| content. There is so much slop now and it doesn't matter
| at all if that is indexed. IMO their strategy of focusing
| on smaller sites with human curated content is correct.
| They can make some deals to index some of the big walled
| gardens and that's pretty much world class right now.
|
| What do you think a site like Google is giving you these
| days? They are explicitly bad at indexing the small web.
| Their search technology is not better than Kagi, and made
| worse by ads and LLM ad bias. So what is this big "world
| class" thing they do that can't be replicated?
|
| The web is not the same place it was years ago. Indexing
| all the slop and scams and ads is not useful to me as a
| consumer.
| yunwal wrote:
| In case you didn't read the article, it's about Google Adsense
| no longer being an effective way to advertise.
| efilife wrote:
| Please read the article before commenting. It's not about what
| you think it is
| thornjm wrote:
| Anecdotally, this article seems to match with what I am
| witnessing regarding browsing habits. I am planning a big trip
| with others and everything is being found via social media apps;
| destination ideas, experiences, cafes, accommodation, etc.
| hyperhello wrote:
| Look, the 90's Internet isn't cool anymore. Sorry. Things are
| cool for a while and then they're not.
|
| Franchises die. It's still cool to say "The originals were really
| cool", and always will be, but now we're talking about now. Star
| Wars is uncool. There are people who sort of automatically praise
| it and subtly put down those who don't like they're aligned with
| a magnetic field, sure, but they're in their own world. Indiana
| Jones and Ghostbusters are uncool now. Star Trek is almost there.
| AI is not cool and never will be. Tiktok is cool, but soon
| everything that is uncool will descend upon it.
|
| Sorry. Bananas blacken and apples get spots. Time moves on.
|
| Downvoting isn't cool. Reply instead.
| lokar wrote:
| Did you read the page? The context is very clear: a small
| business that had for years gotten a lot of its leads/customers
| from Adwords is seeing that Adwords ("Google" in context) is
| not working. They are then asking (other small businesses in
| the same situation, "where do we go now?").
|
| There nothing about nostalgia, no real concern for Google as a
| company, or how the web used to work, etc. Just a small
| business trying to stay afloat.
| hyperhello wrote:
| Yes, Google is no longer producing good results for them.
| That is what I'm addressing.
| antonvs wrote:
| "Cool" is precisely the problem. Cool is completely irrelevant
| to whether something is useful or valuable.
| hyperhello wrote:
| God no! Useful and valuable is incredibly cool! How could you
| write this?
| wiseowise wrote:
| You're joking, but they're _really_ trying hard to make cool
| things uncool.
| hyperhello wrote:
| I think it's not directly in their interest to make anything
| uncool. They're there to suck away some of it for themselves,
| that's all.
| d-lisp wrote:
| It seems you didn't read the article, which doesn't tell
| anything about google being cool or uncool.
| hyperhello wrote:
| The title is "Google is dead".
| d-lisp wrote:
| To be fair, I find the title to be misleading.
| tomjuggler wrote:
| That is fair. It's dead to me though.
| crystal_revenge wrote:
| I don't know why people are so aggressively downvoting this.
| It's the honest truth.
|
| I grew up _before_ Google, I remember when it was just a useful
| search tool. Then an industry grew up around exploiting it in
| various ways and ads became a major revenue source for Google,
| completely changing the platform. I witnessed this entire
| online marketing /ad industry come into existence.
|
| I have friends who worked in SEO for years. Very talented,
| smart people. But that industry is _gone_ now. Likewise Google
| ads is clearly not long for this world as Google will probably
| get a lot more money leveraging their AI for product
| recommendations /sales etc.
|
| People used creative thinking to _create_ this industry, so the
| answer to "where do we go now?" is find the next one. It won't
| just be the same thing repeated, just like SEO and ad
| optimization where fairly major departures from the previous
| world of advertising and marketing they came from.
| hyperhello wrote:
| >I don't know why people are so aggressively downvoting this.
| It's the honest truth.
|
| There you go.
| rolph wrote:
| -to explore strange new worlds, to seek out new life and new
| civilizations, to boldly go where no man has gone before.
| dana321 wrote:
| Haha no wonder, check out the website its dodgy as f.
| https://bigtop.co.za/
| andy99 wrote:
| This is actually the most legit thing I can think of that could
| be behind an ad. It looks like an actual small business that is
| using ads as a replacement for the yellow pages, presumably
| when people are searching for party entertainment. I had
| assumed that basically all online ads were just straight up
| scams.
|
| That said, I don't ever want to see ads for it either. If I
| lived in Durban and wanted a juggling act, I'd like to be able
| to find it, as I'm sure all their clients would. I wonder if
| the market is just very competitive, or if they don't show up
| on regulular searches for some reason.
| tkin1980 wrote:
| Well, it's harshly put... bu not entirely untrue. The website
| would probably need to be refreshed.
| fourneau wrote:
| Serious question: why do you find it dodgy?
| wiseowise wrote:
| Not enough layers of SPA and Tailwind for your taste?
| xandrius wrote:
| Funny how a simpler and self-made website is seen as "dodgy af"
| but geocity 90s mash of stuff is "nostalgic".
|
| It's not the neatest but it feels real, like these guys are
| into entertainment for parties, not web design.
| relaxing wrote:
| I'm not handing over money to 90s geocities.
| relaxing wrote:
| I agree, that site looks like the owners lack basic self-
| awareness. Surely they must use the modern internet and
| recognize the difference?
|
| And if they're unable to invest in their site or they're simply
| shut out of the modern world, I'd assume the same applies to
| other aspects of their business as well.
| nirui wrote:
| Checked out as instructed, it somehow made me empathetic
| towards the OP. Not only the business completely harmless, it's
| the opposite: their job is trying to make people happy, and
| it's lovely.
|
| Off-topic reply but I don't want to start another comment:
|
| The problem about Google and AI has deeper layers: AI answers
| has trained users to not look into the source information
| (a.k.a websites), and websites are combating it by making
| themselves harder to crawl (for example, by enabling Cloudflare
| protection/verification), which in turn makes creating new
| search engine harder.
|
| This down circle is currently unbreakable, which is a hellish
| situation for new comers, but great for established players
| such as Reddit, Facebook etc since they have internal search
| engine as well as mountains amount of content to provide.
|
| If one day the big platforms (there are only handful of them)
| completely blocked Google from crawling them, that will be the
| true death of Google.
| reconnecting wrote:
| Perhaps, click fraud?
|
| Is there any new powerful platform/aggregator in your market?
| austinpena wrote:
| unlikely but they should check their invalid click rate to be
| sure
| reconnecting wrote:
| Invalid click rate is not always a reliable metric.
|
| I've been dealing a lot with click fraud on Google Ads, and
| it's usually hard to detect it without special tools.
| austinpena wrote:
| What's your experience?
|
| Off the shelf click fraud software (for search) has never
| been ROI-positive for me when I run in A/B tests.
|
| Fou analytics is a fun tool though for social/native etc
| reconnecting wrote:
| Click farms that we had been dealing with for our clients
| did not render images on webpages during visits,
| therefore we put tirreno on the backend of the platform,
| plus added a 1px image that sends the same request to
| tirreno to spot the difference.
|
| Page loading + no image loading = blacklist API.
| tomjuggler wrote:
| I don't know what click fraud is but it's a very small
| entertainment agency market in Durban, South Africa's 3rd
| largest city. We only advertised locally (specified in AdWords)
| reconnecting wrote:
| Click fraud is malicious activity where someone runs bots
| that click on ads for specific category keywords. For
| example, if this is a villa rental website, someone like
| competitors or a _large platform_ , might use ad agencies
| that perform click fraud against the villa rental website to
| exhaust their budget and therefore get more traffic
| themselves. In the case of an entertainment agency, it might
| be other competitors interested in your traffic.
|
| The first step you might take is to check that you are not
| advertising with AdWords _partner networks_ , as they might
| be the reason for the clicks on your ads.
|
| Second, you can check your server logs and verify clicks from
| Google Ads, especially the geolocation of those clicks. If
| they are not from your region and the visitors perform no
| action after viewing the first page, this is most probably
| click fraud.
|
| I use our own open-source security platform (I'm a co-
| founder) for this purpose (1), as it's server-side and works
| even if bots aren't running JS. However, your website
| analytics might also be useful if they can collect events
| without JS.
|
| 1. https://github.com/tirrenotechnologies/tirreno
| tomjuggler wrote:
| Shockingly, I did not consider malicious intent as a
| possible reason. I will look into it. Never did trust the
| partner networks though, it's not that anyway, just used
| plain old search network
| reconnecting wrote:
| I tried to visit your website to get a better idea, but
| found `Connection timed out Error code 522` by
| Cloudflare.
| tomjuggler wrote:
| It's fine now, somehow got to #1 on Hacker News and
| 1000's of visitors did that. Learned something new about
| Cloudflare Cache Settings, it won't happen again
| ndarray wrote:
| Is this being on top of HN part of the writer's new non-google
| marketing strategy?
| tomjuggler wrote:
| Please not that again, my server was down for 2 days last time!
| (I did join CloudFlare CDN after that)
| tomjuggler wrote:
| Cloudflare seems to be sorting it out (mostly).
| BirAdam wrote:
| CF is exposes my own hypocrisy more than any other company.
| I am always the first person to say that humans shouldn't
| be centralizing so much into so few hands, but then... I
| use CloudFlare, I recommend it to others, and the company
| has a fairly decent track record.
| NooneAtAll3 wrote:
| > CloudFlare CDN
|
| lol
| phoronixrly wrote:
| Thankfully there are a bunch of comments here summarising the
| post.
| wiesbadener wrote:
| Not sure how much HN is read in SA though. Could even be a
| small GEO/SEO bonus if search engines/LLMs pick up the thread +
| his webpage.
| manoDev wrote:
| The web is dead, we replaced with portable cable TV where you
| scroll up to change channel.
| bdangubic wrote:
| whats a cable tv?
| bigbuppo wrote:
| It's how we got our internet before the internet.
| mcphage wrote:
| It's like TikTok but you hit buttons instead of swiping.
| bdangubic wrote:
| that sounds like a lot of work
| pndy wrote:
| Nearly same thing but instead of smacking the screen
| you'd actually press the physical button on remote
| control and run in circles with channel's list to find
| anything remotely interesting.
| mcphage wrote:
| The trick is you hold the controller in your limp hands,
| with your fingertip resting on one of the channel
| buttons. Usually the plus. So when you want to swipe you
| just extend your index finger just a fraction of an inch.
| And the screen changes. They dialed in the interface over
| years, and have gotten it to a process with almost no
| work involved.
| apublicfrog wrote:
| It's what Americans call non free to air television. You're
| probably being downvoted because it's intrensic there and
| they assume you must know about it.
| noumenon1111 wrote:
| It is indeed intrinsic here in America. Pretty much all
| houses that have been occupied in the last 50 years have at
| least one coax cable coming out of a wall jack or a corner
| of the floor. MoCA adapters allow for a nice home
| networking backbone in a house like that.
| agumonkey wrote:
| a cable TV where anybody can poison your brain with whatever
| benefit them
| tartoran wrote:
| Any state sponsored actor can pay to play.
| agumonkey wrote:
| I'd be curious to know how much cable tv content was direct
| propaganda or hype
|
| on youtube most of what i see is hyped hyperbolic content,
| polarized podcasts, shorts.. the way and reason why
| "content" is produced has changed
| BirAdam wrote:
| Direct propaganda? Not too much. However, the amount of
| content in the 1980s and 1990s that was in some way
| funded by the DOD was a bit crazy. Likewise, stuff like
| NED funded content. If one considers corporations part of
| the state, then the percentage of content that was
| propaganda would likely be more than 40%.
|
| Today, this would be harder to figure. Because anyone can
| use a VPN and pose as a person in any country, any
| country's intelligence people could be carrying out
| misinformation/disinformation campaigns at any time. How
| much of the left or right content on FB that mom is
| reading is from genuine actors vs intelligence actors?
| How many calls for violent action on the left and right
| are just FBI entrapment or Russian attempts to
| destabilize the USA?
|
| When all of this was being built, this angle never
| occurred to me. It should have, but it didn't. I naively
| thought, as so many did, that the ability of people to
| connect across national boundaries, across racial and
| gender lines, and across socio-economic divides would
| lead to a better, safer, and happier world. Sadly, I was
| completely mistaken. The internet became worse than life
| AFK on those fronts, people joined echo chambers, and
| radicalism increased.
| xtracto wrote:
| Glad to see I'm not the one that sees the similarity in
| "zapping" or channel surfing to what people do nowadays with
| those shorts...
|
| I remember my brother loving to do channel surfing in the 80s
| when we were young. I've always hated it! maybe that's why I
| cannot stand the current Tiktok media format (so sad that
| Youtube is pushing more and more the same format).
|
| Also, remember when telephones started and people who took
| vertical video where seen as sinners? How times change!
| ruszki wrote:
| I still consider them as inconsiderate. You can watch a
| horizontal video on every screen with more, or equal detail.
| That's not true for vertical videos.
|
| But at least, we could experience first hand that laziness
| beats thoughtfulness, when people are allowed to.
| taikahessu wrote:
| Reminds me of a quote I once read of "marketing being a game of
| diminishing returns".
|
| When you find a working marketing solution, it's just a matter of
| time when it dries out, because of competitors and overall
| saturation.
| tomjuggler wrote:
| I can't rule out competition here, definitely part of it - cost
| per click has gone up a lot over the years
| giorgioz wrote:
| Yes but it's possible that the marketing channel is very
| profitable before drying out. Also the less a channel is known
| the more it will take to reach saturation. So there might be
| channels that are very profitable and well hidden, the problem
| is that by definition it might be too hard/expensive to find
| them.
| pigpop wrote:
| Your business seems well suited to advertising through short form
| content so I wish you lots of success with transitioning away
| from Adwords.
| tomjuggler wrote:
| Thanks, yeah I see lots of video editing in my future
| cjbgkagh wrote:
| Perhaps catering towards TikTok experiences, help them make
| the videos that they then share with their friends.
|
| 'Pic or it didn't happen' has now been replaced by 'TikTok or
| it didn't happen.' Is it possible to enjoy something without
| there being video evidence of it? According to my gf and her
| female friends the answer appears to be no.
| tomjuggler wrote:
| Tell me about it - my mother was a librarian, I prefer text
| content, but have to face facts now I guess
| eagsalazar2 wrote:
| Is this really about Tiktok or about AI and how people are
| consuming the web? Used to be all web, then web+Tiktok,etc, now
| only AI+Tiktok, etc? I think I go to normal websites way less
| than I used to. Maybe everyone is doing that?
| senthil_rajasek wrote:
| I think the author intended the title to be,
|
| "Google Ads is dead, Where do I promote my business now?"
|
| When I hear "Google" I assume search, oof (sigh of relief).
|
| They mention running ads on tiktok or instagram but no mention of
| youtube ads...
|
| Also, In my own experience for my business ( also entertainment)
| I have found reddit ads to be useful.
|
| So my next steps would be, Reddit Ads
| Youtube Ads Instagram Ads Increase AI Visiblity
|
| [Edit: Added Instagram Ads, from a different comment]
| bdangubic wrote:
| > When I hear "Google" I assume search, oof (sigh of relief).
|
| If Google Ads is dead/dying the search is soon to follow...
| hgomersall wrote:
| Search died ages ago [1]. Ads dying is a direct consequence
| of that.
|
| [1] https://www.wheresyoured.at/the-men-who-killed-google/
| crazygringo wrote:
| > _Search died ages ago_
|
| You might want to let Google know that, because the number
| of searches on Google appears to continue to be growing
| massively:
|
| https://searchengineland.com/google-5-trillion-searches-
| per-...
|
| Those numbers look like the exact opposite of dead or dying
| to me. As does Google's growing stock price over the same
| time period.
| imron wrote:
| 'Numbers go up' is the exact type of thinking that caused
| the death of search.
|
| From a user perspective, google search results are awful
| and almost always a complete waste of time.
| crazygringo wrote:
| Again, this "death of search" I hear so much about, but
| doesn't exist in the numbers.
|
| If search results are such a waste of time, why do people
| keep using Google? In ever-increasing numbers? What's the
| explanation there?
| imron wrote:
| Dead internet theory explains this perfectly well.
|
| Google search results are a wasteland of ads and content
| farms, with vanishingly small value for humans
| crazygringo wrote:
| Again, then why are people using Google _more than ever?_
|
| I don't really see how "dead internet theory" explains
| _that_. If it were as bad as you claim, surely usage
| would be plummeting? But it 's just the opposite.
| imron wrote:
| Are you sure it's _people_ driving this increase?
|
| Dead internet theory means real users are declining while
| bot users are skyrocketing.
|
| For example google search is such a terrible experience
| these days that I'll often ask an LLM instead.
|
| That LLM may do multiple google and other searches on my
| behalf, combine, collate and present me with just the
| information I am looking for, bypassing the search
| experience entirely.
|
| This is a fundamentally different use case from human
| traffic.
| weatherlite wrote:
| > Are you sure it's _people_ driving this increase?
|
| Most likely - yes. If Google has been dead for years
| people wouldn't pour hundreds of billions of dollars into
| ads there. The Search revenue keeps increasing, even
| since ChatGPT showed up. It might stagnate soon or even
| decrease a bit - but "death" ? The numbers don't back
| this up. One blog saying he stops paying for Google ads
| conflicts with the reality of around 200 billion yearly
| revenue from Search.
| crazygringo wrote:
| Exactly this. Businesses decide whether to pay for ads
| based on clickthru rates and conversions. Bots don't
| click through. They don't convert. If these rates fall,
| advertisers will pay proportionally less as their max
| bid, and Search ads revenue will fall substantially.
|
| That hasn't happened. Google continues to grow with real
| users.
| wood_spirit wrote:
| You get what you measure.
|
| It does not follow that people making more searches means
| people are having more successful searches. If google
| found the exact thing you were looking for and put it top
| centre in the results, would the number of human
| searchers stay the same but the number of human searches
| drop?
| rightbyte wrote:
| The design of Chrome is such that people use Google
| search instead of entering the tld.
| hgomersall wrote:
| The policy described in my link is literally about making
| each user search more to get the results they want in
| order to drive more ad revenue. That would create more
| searches and a less good user experience.
| duped wrote:
| That is good evidence that Google is dying because it
| takes more than one search query to find what you want.
| kakapo5672 wrote:
| You should let Google know, given their business is really
| humming nowadays. Along with their stock price.
| esseph wrote:
| Gemini is the new search.
| reddalo wrote:
| But Gemini doesn't bring much visitors to your website.
| Also, optimizing for AI is even more "black magic" than
| normal SEO.
| nicce wrote:
| Instead sites adds Gemini integrations, which are
| targeted based on prompts. When you pay enough, Gemini
| recommends your shop and AI buys the stuff for the target
| audience.
| brainwad wrote:
| Google considers the consumer's side, not just the
| publishers. Users often don't want to visit someone's
| website (and then dodge ads and
| cookie/newsletter/notification popups). If the query can
| be answered without veer visiting a website, so much the
| better.
| frmersdog wrote:
| AI is not and cannot be search. Search is dead and has been
| for a few years now. Search has seemingly been subsumed
| into the LLM monster, considering how "fuzzy" queries have
| become (probably because they're not hitting the search
| algorithm without being massaged by "something else").
| Significant portions of the web have been purged from
| Google's index, which means that neither Gemini nor Search
| can present those pages to users.
|
| It's over. Sorry.
| esseph wrote:
| When people say "search is dead", I feel like you and I
| live on different planets.
|
| If I have an idea of what I want, Google search works
| great. On the rare occasion I don't know the specific
| thing I'm looking for, Gemini points the way.
|
| It had never ever been easier for me to find what I'm
| looking for on the internet, since 1993-1994.
|
| I do wonder how much browser, location, and language
| plays into this.
| discordance wrote:
| Search -> click on website -> read website to find the
| information you wanted; is dead/dying.
|
| I agree that paradigm is over and using Google search
| feels antiquated. It's not a good outcome for website
| owners, but I want info retrieval.
| frmersdog wrote:
| I believed these sorts of statements a few years ago, but
| not anymore. Results were hit-and-miss enough to give the
| benefit-of-the-doubt. They're now so bad that I assume
| bad faith, either on the part of the speaker or Google.
| b3ing wrote:
| Yep, I use it when I run out of free usage on ChatGPT or
| DeepSeek, or for simple queries, once ads show up I'll
| block them or use something else
| imron wrote:
| Google search died years ago already.
| ravenstine wrote:
| It's been some years since I've had to put ads on the web, but
| I found Reddit ads insanely effective. Really, Google ads have
| been dead for a long time. I found them hardly effective at all
| since maybe 2011.
| manmal wrote:
| A surgeon in our family got basically all his (private)
| clients from Google. Spend was multiple k per month. If you
| consider that one surgery brings in 7k in revenue, then those
| numbers actually make sense. He's retired now but did this up
| to 2y ago.
| tsunamifury wrote:
| This is a Kshaped example that's solid. Some SMBs can
| afford per keyword large spend in focused high reward
| arenas. The rest can't do anything.
| theshackleford wrote:
| > Really, Google ads have been dead for a long time.
|
| For you perhaps. I work with a huge amount of businesses
| whose profits are still driven almost entirely by them, who
| have seen not even a blip and make money hand over fist.
| benjaminwootton wrote:
| I wish I knew the difference. I've ran or been close to
| tens of businesses over the last 20 years and we've always
| paid the Google tax, but I'm not sure it's ever had a
| positive ROI.
| tomjuggler wrote:
| I forgot YouTube has ads, thanks.
|
| I do occasionally post (free) on Reddit, it's not that big here
| though
| senthil_rajasek wrote:
| By "here" I think you mean SA. Reddit is big in the U.S.
| lovich wrote:
| Reddits been building up its user base in India the past
| few years.[1]
|
| I'm permabanned on Reddit so I only consume via the default
| not logged in feed and I run into some comments in what I
| assume is Hindi(might be marathi or one of the multiple
| other languages on the continent) or posts from subreddits
| explicitly about some aspect of india
|
| [1] https://www.thehindubusinessline.com/catalyst/inside-
| reddits...
| grugagag wrote:
| How are permabanned? Can you just change the handle or
| create a new account?
| lovich wrote:
| I had a few alt accounts, they were all banned and I
| wasn't able to make a new account with existing emails.
|
| I assume, with no evidence, that they just used the same
| data tracking for ads, to enforce the ban. I think Meta
| turned on the real banning tech during a panic in Covid
| iirc
| grugagag wrote:
| I noticed I was shadow banned on youtube (for comments).
| I have no idea what was the reason because I rarely
| comment and am very civil when I do. It doesn't bother me
| much though, I was just curious how it happened.
| lovich wrote:
| I got a few strikes. They were in one of two main
| categories
|
| 1: my true beliefs 2: directly quoting the president
|
| I laugh at any current supporters of this admin who
| complain about censorship while this is happening and
| we're doing shit like having multiple media companies
| being sued by the king left and right.
| grugagag wrote:
| Yes, I agree with you. It's become quite ridiculous. I
| expect things will turn for the worse and comments would
| be used against people in various ways if it's not
| already happening, eg. being scanned on social media upon
| entering the US. Dark times...
| qingcharles wrote:
| Their ban system is really hard to get around. They use a
| massive amount of different signals to try to detect
| anyone trying to get around a ban.
|
| (Reddit has two forms of bans, shadowbans and permabans,
| both have essentially the same effect)
| yanslookup wrote:
| Occasionally post reddit content or occasionally post reddit
| ads?
| tomjuggler wrote:
| content, in r/Durban - gets a few views
|
| for personal, I'm on lemmy now
| JohnnyMarcone wrote:
| How are you finding lemmy community compared to reddit?
| tomjuggler wrote:
| what community? There's almost nobody there! (it's nice)
| Imustaskforhelp wrote:
| Hm good point but if one were to try to reach visibility via
| let's say contacting the creators themselves or making reddit
| showcases themselves?
|
| I am not sure what might work better, sponsorships or Ads. Of
| course some are definitely icky sponsorships but if one were to
| align with small youtubers who develop their own things and you
| enjoy their content and there might be an overlap etc.
|
| I personally have an ad blocker so I don't really know what
| might work for. I guess organic marketing? But how does one
| achieve it?
|
| Any good books / ideas on more sustainable forms of marketing
| aside from paying the large corporations a sort of land tax
| basically?
| mingus88 wrote:
| Google ads is dead precisely because their search product is
| dead.
|
| Ever since Google bought double click, their ads business has
| been their search business. They are the same product.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _their search product is dead_
|
| Do we have any evidence search volume is down?
|
| Don't get me wrong, I'm an avid Kagi user. But I'm sceptical
| anyone outside tech is using anything other than Google.
| timnetworks wrote:
| I watch people search for PlatformName Login every single
| day because they don't know how URLs work.
|
| Google isn't search. It's a crutch for people with too much
| time and money.
|
| p.s. not google labs, not tpu's, but specifically search.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _Google isn 't search. It's a crutch for people with
| too much time and money_
|
| ...wouldn't this make it an advertiser's dream?
| TacticalCoder wrote:
| Google search ain't dead at all: it became so good something
| silly like 99% of all the queries have to be answered by the
| Google AI before the very first "result". And for those who
| want more, there's the "continue this discussion with
| Gemini".
|
| Now this may not be great for Google Ads (dunno about that)
| but Google search now works better than it ever did.
| skeptic_ai wrote:
| Try to double check the AI inline response. Got it wrong
| way too many times to trust it now.
| retsibsi wrote:
| The AI summary is good enough often enough that it's
| tempting to rely on it. But, at least as of a week or two
| ago when I finally decided to block it, it still gets
| things badly wrong. (Sometimes seemingly inexplicably, but
| often because the results don't obviously contain an answer
| and yet the LLM is desperate to provide one.)
| Aurornis wrote:
| > Also, In my own experience for my business ( also
| entertainment) I have found reddit ads to be useful.
|
| Reddit is very hit or miss depending on your target audience.
|
| Depending on your Reddit target audience, a lot of people could
| have adblock installed. They might be loyal to communities that
| have approved vendor lists where everyone parrots the same
| vendor recommendations back and forth in every thread, so not
| being part of that game means you're left out. In some niches,
| the subreddit moderators have a financial relationship with
| vendors and they'll put their weight into swaying every
| conversation away from competitors.
|
| For other niches, none of this applies and Reddit can be a good
| ad destination. It really depends
| uyzstvqs wrote:
| Let's be honest, most "Reddit marketing" isn't about on-site
| ads, it's about posting UGC that promotes your product in
| some way.
| vineyardmike wrote:
| 100%. My business is in the smart home space. I peruse
| various smart home subreddit communities, and they all have a
| few brands that are aggressively celebrated on Reddit. Market
| research, financial disclosures, and other public data
| largely indicates that these brands are not all that popular,
| especially in the biggest-spend markets.
|
| We don't find Reddit ads valuable.
| silexia wrote:
| I run a large marketing agency and Reddit is terrible for
| advertising across most verticals.
| hermitcrab wrote:
| Based on personal experience, I would be wary on spending much
| on Reddit ads without carefully measuring the results. Some
| real world data:
|
| https://successfulsoftware.net/2025/08/11/what-i-learned-spe...
| jonas21 wrote:
| I'd suggest that the title should be, "Competition for Google
| AdWords is so strong that unsophisticated advertisers can no
| longer get a good return. Where do I promote my business now?"
| tonyedgecombe wrote:
| I have a feeling that it is mostly unsophisticated
| advertisers bidding up the price of AdWords.
| tsunamifury wrote:
| As someone who leads large parts of ad tech for TikTok and
| worked at Google for 10 years, it's the K shaped economy
| that is pressing SMBs out. Pure and simple
|
| Everyone can make up some complex theories but I see it in
| the numbers every day. Spend distribution is now k shaped
| and SMBs simply can't compete at top end performance
| levels.
| lifeisstillgood wrote:
| This seems one of the more important comments here - a K
| shaped economy (Rich get richer up the rising arm of the
| K and the rest of us are on the down arm) dominates
| everything (ie asset price inflation means if you had
| assets in 2020 you probably still do else good luck) and
| this just is one of many ways the playing field has
| tilted towards the richest.
|
| And it is always a choice - we choose platforms and
| regulations and spending priorities. If "we" choose a
| different set of tech regulations the K shaped economy
| can be put back in its box.
|
| For me the problem was most clearly outlined by Cory
| Doctorow "developers did not unionise or rebel in time
| because they thought of themselves as temporarily
| embarrassed entrepreneurs".
| dewarrn1 wrote:
| Presumably with apologies to Steinbeck: "Everyone was a
| temporarily embarrassed capitalist."
| LunaSea wrote:
| Wouldn't the K shape only affect targeting of affluent
| users that are desirable to luxury brands?
| tsunamifury wrote:
| Think through the net margins of the bottom of the K left
| to them. And then the spend against their own K economy
| on the business side.
| LunaSea wrote:
| Makes sense, thanks
| thayne wrote:
| Not all companies that have massive budgets only sell to
| affluent consumers. For example, walmart, amazon, most
| streaming services, coca-cola, pepsi, mcdonalds, etc.
| collaborative wrote:
| It affects everyone. It's always been the case, also in
| traditional advertising. As soon as a company gets rich
| it defaults to massive marketing (at a loss) to stay on
| top and drown the underdogs. That's why I think marketing
| spend should be capped by revenue by law. The current
| system stiffles competition
| baobun wrote:
| I lke it. It would be wonderful if the cap was gradually
| reduced to 0.
| collaborative wrote:
| That would make it easy to implement: a simple payment
| receipt to a journalist who visited a "demo" would be
| enough to start fining them. Imagine the honesty of the
| press when it can't get bribed by the oligarchs anymore.
| Or imagine charities needing to court local producers
| instead of poison-cola for endorsements. It would be a
| different world!
| bix6 wrote:
| Can you share any numbers ie roughly how different the
| spend is? SMB spends $1k on ads but grandes spend $1M or
| something? Idk how it works.
| tsunamifury wrote:
| SMBs broadly spend 200-400 dollars a month on ads and see
| marginal to negative returns against 10 million in spend
| for large clients. Even 1000-5000 see marginal returns at
| best unless the target small demo high return (local
| premium services). They lack the budgets for learning and
| optimization let alone optimal price per placement.
|
| This combined with SMBs targeting everyday joes with
| increasing less demand availability for anything it
| leaves them crushed on both sides.
| bix6 wrote:
| Wow so 10,000-100,000x spend difference. That is a wide
| K.
|
| Do you think there's any hope for SMB? Eg I've seen some
| companies tout AI advertising optimization for SMB but
| when I looked into one for investment the numbers weren't
| very compelling.
| tuesdaynight wrote:
| What is the proportion of spend of SMBs vs large clients?
| Would you say that large clients are responsible for most
| of the advertising revenue? I always assumed that would
| be something like a 50/50 split, but these numbers made
| me question that assumption.
| x0x0 wrote:
| I have a colleague who runs growth for a big consumer
| company driving value through their apps. They spend over
| $100m/year on install ads.
|
| And the fact they price smbs out should be unsurprising:
| they're better at making money from a user; users are
| worth more to them; so they pay more.
| tonyedgecombe wrote:
| There is probably an element of truth in that however
| when I looked at the people who outbid me on keywords
| half were selling high value products where they had
| enough margin to make it viable. The other half seemed to
| be spaffing their money up the wall.
| tyingq wrote:
| He had presumably used it for 10 years successfully. Surely
| he gained some expertise over that time period.
| paxys wrote:
| He probably just got a new competitor in the space. Easy to
| see good returns on online ad spend when all traffic just
| goes to you by default.
| grugagag wrote:
| Or returns gradually went down until it stopped working
| altogether.
| theptip wrote:
| Ad noob here; how would you test this hypothesis?
| blinding-streak wrote:
| Nobody goes there any more. It's too crowded.
|
| -- Yogi Berra
| NooneAtAll3 wrote:
| it's not "competition"
|
| it's bots creating too high noise-to-ratio for feedback loop
| ChuckMcM wrote:
| Without search ad revenue Google _is_ dead.
| tcfhgj wrote:
| for my life, I haven't found ads useful at all, so I block them
| jwrallie wrote:
| Any suggestions for local business? Things that operate only
| within a specified area. Google worked well for those.
| stackedinserter wrote:
| How did you run campaigns on reddit? Reddit ads had the worst
| performance among all platforms I tried, literally zero
| conversion.
| Art9681 wrote:
| Thank you. This is a perfect example of clickbait. I trusted
| the HN crowd, clicked the link, and immediately realized the
| trap. I'm upset at how effective it is. And also commend the
| author for publishing an article specifically engineered to
| waste the viewers time.
| cornholio wrote:
| In truth, I have never seen a company doing such an insane
| 180 against it's traditional suppliers as Google is doing
| against the websites populating its search pages which now
| Google milks as mere training data. Google Search is dead,
| from the perspective of the websites, and there is less and
| less incentive to spend effort and money to appear on the
| first pages.
|
| Google better have a good strategy because this is bound to
| have 2nd order effects down the road, like, why would I pay
| money for advertising on a dead internet search engine? If AI
| is killing organic results, then AI better make money itself,
| because dead websites don't buy ads.
| safety1st wrote:
| I think he's aimed in the right direction with the observation
| about short videos.
|
| I tried to load his website. It took a full minute to come up.
| Maybe that's the HN hug of death or something, but this is
| surely issue #1 to resolve.
|
| Beyond that I would ask whether targeting the "young'uns"
| directly is the correct strategy. His business is party
| entertainment, kids' birthday parties could be the biggest
| slice of that, but the kid isn't the purchasing decisionmaker,
| and there are all these other opportunities (like corporate
| events) too.
|
| And then I would consider whether paying for ads in shorts is
| the right or only way to approach the world of video. The thing
| about video is it's huge, lucrative, and eating up more of
| people's time every year. People are moving from the text
| Internet, to watching videos. I would think given the nature of
| the business this guy has raw footage which can be turned into
| entertaining videos, or can produce it pretty quickly. I'm
| increasingly surprised by how much some people can earn on
| Youtube, by creating videos that also function as marketing
| collateral for their business. He will ultimately need to
| geotarget to get customers, so yeah that's probably paid ads,
| but a good YouTube channel would build authority, making sales
| easier to close, and might also make him more money than you'd
| expect via ad revenue.
| rendaw wrote:
| It loaded in far less than a second for me, almost immediate.
| safety1st wrote:
| Hmm, the URL appears to have changed since I commented. It
| was originally a .co.za. Now it's fast.
|
| Perhaps there was a CDN issue (I am in a country that is
| definitely not material to his business)
| tomjuggler wrote:
| I updated CloudFlare settings, yes. Seems to have worked?
| safety1st wrote:
| Looks like it, site loads within 1 second now!
| tomjuggler wrote:
| My entertainment website typically gets 10-100 visitors per
| day, yesterday it was more like 1000 per hour. The only
| reason it's still online is because of CloudFlare CDN!
|
| My content is best live and in person but you are right, will
| be concentrating more on video content for yt and others
| going forward
| miguelbemartin wrote:
| I see paid ads as a short-term goal; the business seems to be
| local, so people should find this when looking for this
| specific service in their city.
| bgro wrote:
| Remember when people wrote things online because they had
| something useful to say and share and that was enough?
|
| Now it's slop factory of people having a writing quota to get
| enough ads because they don't want to work. Particularly true
| for tech writers who praise things like leetcode then can't get
| a real job.
|
| Now it's supercharged by ai and they're upset how accessible
| their slop job is. I just find that funny I suppose.
| xthe wrote:
| Google isn't dead, but it's no longer the single answer. Even
| Mark Zuckerberg recently acknowledged how fast Google is
| improving, which explains why Meta is pushing AI harder. Still,
| competing shouldn't mean replacing what already works.
| JKCalhoun wrote:
| > Even Mark Zuckerberg recently acknowledged how fast Google is
| improving
|
| AI. I thought he was referring to how fast Google is improving
| their AI.
|
| Search though?
| margorczynski wrote:
| But what's the endgame? What if Google has the "best" AI
| offering if most of their revenue that comes from ads is gone?
| emodendroket wrote:
| They'll presumably monetize their AI (more) on both ends:
| getting you to pay for more access and getting advertisers to
| pay to be mentioned more often in the outputs. I mean that
| isn't really a bad position for them if you "using the
| Internet" degrades into you just sitting there typing queries
| in their Web app and never going anywhere else.
| newman8r wrote:
| They recently changed the max results per page from 100 to 10 and
| they're suing serpapi. They've basically killed their google
| newspaper archive.
|
| Not happy with google.
|
| And it's become clear to me how little of the open web, and top
| 100k sites they've fully indexed, I used to have a lot more faith
| in them.
| SunshineTheCat wrote:
| I recently took someone to go and watch a hockey game. Been a
| little while but I personally played as a goalie myself.
|
| The person kept making the comment that she couldn't see/find the
| puck and it made it frustrating to watch.
|
| As a goalie, not being able to see the puck is pretty normal
| (especially with big bodies trying to screen you).
|
| What I told her was that what matters a lot more than where the
| puck is, is where it's going to be in about two seconds. But the
| next best thing is to know where the puck is now.
|
| If you can't see the puck then look at the players and as a last
| resort, look at the ref. 99% of the time they will be looking at
| the puck. Look where they're looking and soon enough it will
| appear.
|
| I think this applies very much to this whole Google question.
|
| The puck is gone (or on the way to the other side of the rink)
| and everyone is confused where it is or where it's going.
|
| Look where everyone is looking and you'll find your answer there.
| It may not be in the same form as Google adwords, but the game is
| the same. Leveraging attention.
|
| The tactics were different during the phonebook days (it was
| having your business start with the letter "A") as opposed to
| Google and will be different for the next thing as well.
|
| From what I can tell, everyone seems to be looking at chatbots
| and vertical, shortform video. Not sure how that plays out in
| terms of advertising, but in terms of the answer to this
| article's question, that seems like a good place to start.
| philco wrote:
| Skate to where the puck is going
| kevin_thibedeau wrote:
| Better to stop playing the game.
|
| --WOPR
| AndrewKemendo wrote:
| "The game" is an emergent property of the human species at
| scale
|
| Human society cannot exist at this scale without this
| nested social complexity structure given the biological
| constraints
|
| So something has to give
| willturman wrote:
| Revenue generation via advertising is an emergent
| property of humanity?
| pixl97 wrote:
| 100%, but it's not a direct 1:1 relationship.
|
| First you need agriculture so people tend to settle in
| one place. After ag comes more specialization, farmers
| need houses, graineries, and as society grows social
| specialists in which we'd call government.
|
| These things in an area typically cause the area to grow
| because of their stability. As they grow you get more
| than one person/business doing the same line of work
| _and_ you get more people than fit in ones monkeysphere.
| At that size you may not know a person that knows what
| you need to know and start looking further. This is why
| as cities grow advertising itself becomes an emergent
| property. Just go to a Roman city and look for dick
| pavers for example. Then someone will think "Hey, I can
| give some poor kids a board with a message on it and have
| them cry out to go to the place that people pay me to
| advertise" and suddenly you have an emergent property of
| humanity.
| willturman wrote:
| I (mis)attributed an element of pre-destination to the
| word emergent that apparently doesn't map to the word
| properly used.
|
| That said, there's a petroglyph (circa 1150-1600 CE) of a
| macaw (among other sign-like petroglyphs)[1] on the walls
| above the pueblo ruins in Frijoles Canyon in Bandelier
| National Monument in New Mexico that came to mind when
| reading your explanation. The pueblo ruins themselves are
| immediately above an agriculturally developed riverbed
| floodplain with structures previously used for food
| storage.
|
| It doesn't seem too far fetched to analogize a macaw
| above a pueblo in a canyon to, say, a flamingo on a neon
| sign (Circa 20th century)[2] above a bar along a highway,
| or an ad on a phone in 2025. Perhaps advertising is
| emergent (and, dare I say, with an element of pre-
| destination).
|
| [1] https://www.nps.gov/places/petroglyphs-pueblo-loop-
| trail-sto...
|
| [2]
| https://www.flickr.com/photos/25229906@N00/4056975591/
| Root_Denied wrote:
| An emergent property of scaling civilization then, not
| just humanity specifically. It does make me wonder how
| alien advertising might differ.
| tomjuggler wrote:
| Whoever said that lived with their parents and didn't pay
| rent
| tomjuggler wrote:
| It's short form video for sure. My wife just got 4 WhatsApp
| messages from our new Instagram campaign in 1 hour. Spent $1.50
| so far.
|
| So Zuckerberg is the ref now?
| AznHisoka wrote:
| AI SEO is where the attention is going, with
| ChatGPT/Claude/Gemini/Google AI Overviews replacing the need
| for people to visit websites
| echelon wrote:
| It's unnatural to search an LLM for a product. It's why Alexa
| never became a shopping portal.
|
| Best way to get the word out about a product now is through
| an influencer in the space.
|
| -- Edit:
|
| Show of hands for anyone using ChatGPT to shop. Be honest.
|
| People don't even use Google to shop. They try to find
| something either (1) by brand name, eg. "iphone" or (2)
| generically by category, eg. "best cold weather tent".
|
| In the former case, Google used their enormous, antitrust
| flaunting power and 90% browser marketshare to turn the URL
| bar into a competitive trademark bidding dragnet. Apple pays
| out the nose for the iPhone spot. For every click. And every
| other major corporation selling to business or consumer does
| the same. This is the source of Google's enormous wealth.
| Google is a middle man. You cannot conceivably get to a brand
| or product without paying the Google tax.
|
| In the latter case, when people try to look up blogs and
| reviews and Reddit posts to compare products, Google gets in
| the way and inserts themselves into the flow. If LLMs make
| this experience even shittier, there won't be upstream
| content to source as no reward will reach the people
| providing the value. It will naturally atrophy over time.
|
| As a new sales channel, young people are buying content off
| of TikTok and Instagram directly now. When they see
| influencers using products they like, it leads to massive
| sales volume. New unicorn consumer businesses are being
| minted regularly from this.
| ben_w wrote:
| Alexa never became a good shopping portal because voice
| interfaces regularly mishear you, so there was always a lot
| of doubt about what it might be ordering, and also has
| anyone except the obscenely rich ever gone "yes, the first
| result, that's always fine, no I will not bother looking at
| any of the prices on any of the results"? Hence the joke
| about the reason why Amazon bought Whole Foods being that
| Bezos said one day "Alexa, buy me something from Whole
| Foods" and Alexa mishearing it as "Buy Whole Foods".
|
| LLMs are not limited to voice interfaces. You absolutely
| can use ChatGPT as a search engine if you want to: it does
| give you results you can compare, telling you about pros
| and cons of various options, and you can discuss with it
| what your end-goals are and have it turn a vague idea into
| a shopping list (that may or may not be complete for your
| project).
|
| I don't have any reason to think these are the best,
| ChatGPT is not a storefront and OpenAI does not have a long
| history as a search engine, but it absolutely can be used
| this way.
| heliumtera wrote:
| Searching with llms is the single best use case for it. It
| is some form of natural language apropos. Ask it what is
| the best way to have a beautiful and modern website, Vercel
| will make money and tailwind will receive a visit and gain
| one more consuming application. Ask it how to be safe, rust
| will gain more power and influence no matter what
| originally was your intent. It doesn't need to be
| justified. Chatgpt said so therefore true (the audience
| vulnerable to this has established that generative
| technology==chatgpt)
| sdoering wrote:
| Wow - than at least my behavior - and that of quite an
| impressive amount of non tech people in my circle of
| acquaintances - are "unnatural".
|
| I know people who took a photo of their car's driver side
| mirror cap (the thing that is on the opposite of the
| drivers side mirror and often colored like the rest of the
| car) - and asked chatGPT to search for the part. Because
| they were not able to navigate the respective auto parts
| portals.
|
| I myself had perplexity generate a comparison report for
| different electric cars in a specific price range to get a
| first rough understanding of the used eCar market.
| Including links to respective models in used car sites.
|
| Using Kagi for the few regular searches I need to do
| nowadays, Claude Code on the commandline for any other
| extended research/searches, I actually only use Google
| nowadays when I use the Google song detection function.
| Like Shazam - I just find this thing to be on my phone, so
| no need for an additional app.
|
| I could give you a lot of additional examples from
| acquaintances and family - esp. from the not so tech
| people. Google is catching up, though. So - I think, with
| habits being hard to break, most people find Google good
| enough for quite a long time to come.
| spwa4 wrote:
| > and asked chatGPT to search for the part. Because they
| were not able to navigate the respective auto parts
| portals.
|
| I do that, 10 years already, using Google, on a specific
| website. Website owners are just so very, very bad at
| making search working. Haven't even tried using ChatGPT
| for it.
| esseph wrote:
| I have used LLMs to find dozens and dozens of products when
| I didn't know the proper name for the solution or what to
| look for.
| JKCalhoun wrote:
| I might be unusual, I only use LLMs to shop these days.
|
| "What is still considered a highly regarded 35mm film
| camera for under $400 (used)?"
|
| Of course then I go to eBay...
| supern0va wrote:
| LLMs are honestly rather amazing for product search and
| comparison.
|
| Here's a use case for me last week: I'm re-organizing my
| bathroom sink/vanity, and I want a few counter top
| organizers to keep things neat and tidy. I have a low
| mirror, low medicine cabinets, and generally tight spaces
| to work with and want to maximize storage.
|
| So, I have a 10" wide space and I can't have anything over
| 16". I want to find a drawer organizer as close to 16" tall
| without going over, and as close to 10" without going over.
| Given a choice between the two, I want to bias for more
| height.
|
| Go to Google or Amazon and try finding that. You're going
| to be trying permutations of 10x16 and 9x16 and so on, and
| digging through pages looking for something approximate.
|
| In theory maybe there's some filter options on Amazon that
| might work, but they're usually incomplete, wrong, or
| absent. It's a terrible experience even when it's
| supported.
|
| ChatGPT (or even Amazon's kind of janky Rufus) immediately
| finds top near-perfect matches for me to choose from. 15-20
| minutes of aggravating digging turned into 90s of letting
| ChatGPT think and search while I was off grabbing a coffee.
| majgr wrote:
| > LLMs are honestly rather amazing for product search and
| comparison.
|
| True, LLMs are quite good in things where I have limited
| knowledge. It shortens exploration phase considerably.
| Before, I would need to go to web pages, compare
| parameters (somewhere), think out why this, not that.
| drnick1 wrote:
| > It's unnatural to search an LLM for a product. It's why
| Alexa never became a shopping portal.
|
| There is plenty of evidence that people are increasingly
| turning to AI chatbots for that too. And it's entirely
| possible that ChatGPT and others are already being trained
| to mention some products first or to present them in a more
| positive light.
| Diederich wrote:
| "Show of hands for anyone using ChatGPT to shop. Be
| honest."
|
| I use Gemini to help with shopping decisions pretty
| frequently. It's been very effective and useful for that.
| tartoran wrote:
| I used Chatgpt to compare product specs. Pretty good to get
| a rough idea but obviously not reliable.
| nikole9696 wrote:
| I used ChatGPT to find a bike for me. It asked good
| questions, recommended good results, linked me to options
| and the websites I needed to further research things. I
| don't do a lot of shopping though so this is one tiny
| example. If I was looking to actually shop again though I'd
| use it again. Most of my shopping these days is the grocery
| store. I don't have a lot of needs.
| DANmode wrote:
| > Show of hands for anyone using ChatGPT to shop. Be
| honest.
|
| Show of hands for anyone still compiling 500 Amazon reviews
| by hand...
|
| This won't necessarily work well in a year (month?),
|
| but up through now?
|
| _Absolutely_ I've been using assistants for some shopping
| purposes.
| charcircuit wrote:
| >Show of hands for anyone using ChatGPT to shop. Be honest.
|
| I used it for evaluating air filters. I used to for making
| shopping lists for food I want to cook.
| supriyo-biswas wrote:
| > Show of hands for anyone using ChatGPT to shop. Be
| honest.
|
| I recently used ChatGPT to compare headphones before buying
| them, although the workflow there was a bit manual; I took
| some headphones that I had in mind off a cursory search off
| Amazon, had ChatGPT produce a summary of the differences
| and then picked the "best" one.
|
| I'd assume this happens a lot more, I can easily someone
| doing, produce a list of [product category X] under < $Y,
| then use follow-up queries, etc.
|
| > As a new sales channel, young people are buying content
| off of TikTok and Instagram directly now.
|
| I assume this would only work for the things that
| influencers can directly sell, e.g. selling makeup to women
| that way is apparently a thing; for other products that are
| not impulse-buys, ChatGPT is a perfectly reasonable way to
| shop.
| Touche wrote:
| I don't know why people are down-voting it. You might not
| like it, you may not think it's good. But this is absolutely
| happening and there's a lot of data out there about it.
| peab wrote:
| how is AI seo different from regular SEO? Behind the LLM is
| a search function, naturally the same queries and keywords
| would work for both search and LLMs, no?
| bluedino wrote:
| > The person kept making the comment that she couldn't see/find
| the puck and it made it frustrating to watch.
|
| Lifelong hockey fan, I never understood this complaint. I
| believe it was FOX that did the 'highlight the puck' thing for
| a few years in the 1990's.
|
| You can't see the ball in American football, either.
|
| But you don't need to. The guy that's running and everyone is
| trying to tackle? He has the ball. Just like the guy skating
| across the ice with his stick on the ground? He's got the puck.
|
| When you CAN see the puck/ball, either someone lost control of
| it, or they're shooting/throwing/passing it.
| pedalpete wrote:
| I'd go a step further and say the ball/puck is not the
| interesting thing to watch.
|
| Imagine if you couldn't see the players, and just saw the
| puck. Would that be interesting at all?
|
| Think about tennis. There is the trope of people's eyes going
| back and forth following the ball, but I don't think they are
| following the ball directly. They are going back and forth
| looking at the person who is going to hit the ball.
| tshaddox wrote:
| I think you might be conflating _knowing where the puck is_
| with _being able to fix your eyes on the puck at all
| times_. The complaint is usually about the former. People
| are complaining that they don 't know where the puck is.
| basch wrote:
| you dont know what you dont know. walking into hockey for
| the first time, you may think you should be looking for
| the puck.
|
| but really, what you want to look for is how the players
| are moving. it's sort of a "which one is different from
| all the others." one person will clearly be moving in a
| completely unique way, as the others chase them or vie to
| get open or get in somebodys way. to acomplish this
| identification, youre looking at their legs, shoulders,
| hands, feet, and heads.
| autoexec wrote:
| > Imagine if you couldn't see the players, and just saw the
| puck. Would that be interesting at all?
|
| Honestly, I don't know. Is it really the players people
| care most about? More than the score? The players come in
| and out of teams so often that caring about any specific
| player seems strange. Teams seem more important. I suspect
| that just seeing colored sticks (with colors signifying the
| team) and the puck would probably work just as well but
| then I don't get the appeal of watching sports in the first
| place.
| tshaddox wrote:
| > You can't see the ball in American football, either.
|
| The average play must be what, like 5 seconds? So if you lose
| where the ball is you're not going to be confused for long.
| ISL wrote:
| In far fewer than five seconds, one team can suddenly have
| the upper hand.
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9O34BnFu8Kk
| joenot443 wrote:
| You're right - it was called FoxTrax, it's a fairly
| interesting piece of engineering.
|
| It's pretty wild they were able to convince the NHL to use a
| modified puck with a battery and PCB inside, all so American
| viewers could better follow the action.
|
| It was not well received in Canada :)
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FoxTrax
| tempest_ wrote:
| As someone with low vision I loved when they added that and
| missed it when it was gone.
|
| I can't see the puck at all at a game and have to be very
| close to a television to see whats going on.
|
| As a result most sports are boring.
| SoftTalker wrote:
| It was not well received anywhere. However, in a bit of
| defense of the idea, TV at that time was still NTSC (~480p
| resolution at 24 frames/s) and it was pretty hard to see
| the puck even if you knew where it was.
| Mixtape wrote:
| Just a nitpick: analog NTSC was roughly 480 _i_ at (just
| under) _30_ FPS. The latter is significant, as 3:2
| pulldown (as would have been necessary if the station 's
| cameras were scanning at 24 FPS) would have introduced
| judder and made tracking even harder. To its credit,
| interlacing also improved motion clarity at the expense
| of loss of detail, but whether that's a net benefit
| ultimately amounts to a matter of preference.
| lesuorac wrote:
| Well, the current puck still has emitters inside of it.
|
| > [1] Puck and Player Tracking became fully operational in
| 2021-22, with up to 20 cameras in each arena and infrared
| emitters in each puck and sweater.
|
| The player tracking is fairly easy to see; there's often an
| airtag sized bump on a player's jersey.
|
| The puck tracking can be a bit more difficult but sometimes
| the puck looks like it's melting the ice behind it. That's
| just them giving it a grey shadow instead of the neon
| shadow.
|
| [1]: https://www.nhl.com/news/nhl-edge-launches-website-
| for-puck-...
| baxtr wrote:
| What I've always found fascinating is that I could always
| clearly see the puck in any stadium, no matter how high up I
| sat. It was impossible to miss.
|
| However, when watching hockey on TV, it's incredibly
| difficult to see the damn thing.
| apercu wrote:
| I find this interesting - before we switched from 5/4
| aspect ratio, it was hard to find the puck because the
| camera was always chasing - but if you know hockey (e.g.,
| watch enough of it) there are a lot of cues about where the
| puck is or will be, now that we have a wider aspect ratio.
| magicalhippo wrote:
| As a gamer this seems obvious to me. It's long been clear
| to me that our eyes are very adept at processing high-speed
| motion. Even the first 120Hz LCD gaming monitor, as sucky
| as it was, was miles bette than the 60 Hz on the market.
|
| So while technically our eyes might not discern individual
| frames higher than 25 FPS or so, our brain can absolutely
| process data from a much higher effeice framerate. The
| motion blur fast thing naturally produce for example,
| provides critical context clues.
|
| In gaming, sure 240 Hz won't help you see more as such, but
| it allows your eyes to do what they naturally do and give a
| much improved experience of fluidity and superior motion
| prediction.
| ISL wrote:
| The effect is so powerful, it fools professionals and the
| camera-operator: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8fioVbt7eF8
|
| Even when the technique is known, everyone remains
| susceptible (the victim team in the above video is the
| trickster here): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uSNTfFg4XW0
| boogieknite wrote:
| pretty common with my crowd of fans to even get a little
| giddy when the play is so deceptive that it fakes out the
| camera man and they dont realize theyre focused on the wrong
| player until a second or two passes
| mexicocitinluez wrote:
| That's the exception. not the rule.
|
| So yes, in "trick" plays you can't see the ball. But
| neither can the defense.
|
| Having watched hockey AND US football my entire life, you
| can't compare the two. Totally different styles of sports
| and thus comparing your ability to see the 2 doesn't make
| sense.
|
| to add: There has never been a football in history that had
| the ball going from one end of the field to the other and
| back. And yet, this happpens in hockey regularly and within
| seconds.
| NooneAtAll3 wrote:
| > American football
|
| handegg*
| owisd wrote:
| The leading theory for the etymology of the "foot" in
| "football" is because it's played _on foot_ unlike, say,
| jousting or polo.
| WorldMaker wrote:
| It gets the name from "rugby football" from the time
| where both rugby and international football ("soccer")
| were considered related sports and often shared rules and
| associations (such as the London Football Association,
| from which Princeton imported rules to the US, and which
| eventually started to split as the sports split further).
|
| The change in shape from a round ball to the "handegg"
| eventually derived from the first American innovation in
| "rugby football" of the forward pass. Even with the
| forward pass, the game required kicks into goals for a
| long while with the "touchdown" a further later
| innovation (though also influenced by reimporting rugby
| rules, as it relates to the rugby "try"). Kick offs,
| punts, field goals, and extra point attempts all still
| vestigially remain from the rugby origins even as most of
| the play in between them changed drastically.
|
| American Football is called "football" because it evolved
| from the "football family". It's like using the term
| "romance language": Spanish and Italian sound very
| different today, but they both share roots in Latin.
| They've also both changed a lot since the days when Latin
| was a living language.
| drstewart wrote:
| Also:
|
| basketball -> handball
|
| hockey -> stickball
|
| volleyball -> handball
|
| rugby -> handegg
|
| baseball -> stickball
|
| cricket -> stickball
|
| golf -> stickball
|
| Hopefully this will finally appease the football
| literalists and make things simpler for you all to
| understand :)
| Vegenoid wrote:
| I like the basketball, volleyball, and baseball way where
| the noun before ball has some leeway but should be
| clearly identified with an aspect of the sport.
|
| football -> tackleball rugby -> tossball cricket ->
| paddleball golf -> clubball hockey -> icepuck
| mananaysiempre wrote:
| Handball's already taken though.
| h2zizzle wrote:
| I find it werid that you keep calling soccer football.
| mexicocitinluez wrote:
| > You can't see the ball in American football, either.
|
| Tell me you're not from the US without telling me. This is
| apples and oranges.
|
| Unless it's a trick play, you 100% know where the ball is.
|
| How many times in football does the ball go from one end to
| the other and back? Never. In hockey that happens regularly,
| and in seconds. That's why comparing them in this context
| isn't correct.
| imiric wrote:
| "AI" is the next advertising frontier, no question.
|
| People are throwing themselves to feed you personal data. You
| no longer have to come up with sneaky ways to collect it, or
| build out their profile from inferred metadata. Less work for
| you, more accurate profiling, and less risk getting fined by
| pesky regulation.
|
| Ad campaigns can be much more personal and targeted. You can
| push them at just the right moment to optimize the chances of
| conversion. They can be much more persuasive, since chatbots
| and assistants are deeply trusted. You can dial the sensitivity
| knob to make them very subtle, or completely blatant, depending
| on your urgency and client.
|
| If I as someone outside of this hostile industry can think up
| these scenarios, the world is not ready for what advertising
| geniuses are cooking up as we speak.
| mcphage wrote:
| > the world is not ready for what advertising geniuses are
| cooking up as we speak.
|
| Advertising directed towards AI models, at the very least. If
| you can get into ChatGPT's weights that McDonalds is the
| cheapest and tastiest hamburger, how many millions of people
| would ChatGPT tell that to?
| criddell wrote:
| If ChatGPT told you to go to McDonald's, would you?
| smileson2 wrote:
| yeah, it's always a good time for a egg mcmuffin
| mcphage wrote:
| Personally, if ChatGPT told me the sky was blue, I'd go
| out and check. But if you're someone who takes advice
| from ChatGPT, maybe? It's not like I don't ever go to
| McDonalds.
| beloch wrote:
| Bang on. It's advertising, so literally looking at where people
| are getting their info from is the way to go.
|
| Google searches don't produce good results these days. The
| enshittification has become too extreme. Google openly admits
| as much (and further intensifies the enshittification) by
| placing a huge AI summary above those results.
|
| The answer is self evident. If, before, you were relying on
| clicks resulting from google searches, today you need to be
| what an AI recommends when somebody uses an AI like they _used_
| to use google. (Users will eventually become more sophisticated
| though!) Lots of people are using AI like a search engine and
| getting better results than google gives simply because massive
| resources are _currently_ being put into training AI, while
| mere neglect is insufficient to explain how fast Google search
| results are getting worse.
|
| Is this how AI companies plan to cash in? Accept money from
| advertisers to promote their products in interactions with
| their LLM's? Were I an advertiser, I'd be trying to get
| Anthropic to take my money instead of giving it to Google. AI
| might be what finally makes it impossible to tell content and
| ads apart. That's great for advertisers... I guess. Not so
| great for the rest of us.
| PaulDavisThe1st wrote:
| > Google searches don't produce good results these days. The
| enshittification has become too extreme. Google openly admits
| as much (and further intensifies the enshittification) by
| placing a huge AI summary above those results.
|
| I haven't asked Google a question it has failed to provide a
| more than adequate answer to in ... months? years?
|
| And on all my devices, I run google search with &udm=14, so I
| am not talking about AI summaries. I also have search
| personalization disabled.
|
| I see a lot of people complaining about this on HN. It simply
| doesn't match my experience at all, in any way.
| JKCalhoun wrote:
| I don't want a list of links that I have to then click
| through in a kind of Russian roulette--hoping I don't get
| some kind of SEO crap.
| PaulDavisThe1st wrote:
| Google seems relatively good at never giving me SEO crap
| near the top of most of my search results.
|
| And a list of links to original sources or close to it is
| _precisely_ what I do want.
|
| If you want an LLM to generate an answer from its
| training data, that's fine, but go use a different search
| engine instead of demanding that the one many of us have
| relied on for decades has to do that.
| MostlyStable wrote:
| My experience was quite the opposite, and the reason why
| I switched to Kagi: any search that was anywhere adjacent
| to a product would be almost nothing _but_ SEO garbage.
| Non-product related searches were better, but I also
| think they had noticeably degraded over the past several
| years to a decade.
|
| And I actually agree with the last point. While there are
| entire categories of questions that I now prefer an LLM
| to to _any_ search engine, when I _want_ a search engine,
| I specifically _do not_ want LLM summaries, which is
| another thing I like about Kagi: they allow me to choose
| when I want to see an LLM summary and to turn off
| summaries altogether.
|
| (this is really not meant to be an ad for Kagi, I presume
| that most HN users are familiar with it already and don't
| need yet another random endorsement, but I honestly don't
| know how to talk about my experiences with search over
| the past several years and my dissatisfaction with google
| without talking about it)
| PaulDavisThe1st wrote:
| > which is another thing I like about Kagi: they allow me
| to choose when I want to see an LLM summary and to turn
| off summaries altogether.
|
| firefox: keyword "g" configured as google search plus
| &udm=14
|
| firefox: keyword "a" configured as google search without
| &udm=14
|
| works for me!
| JKCalhoun wrote:
| I don't believe I was demanding anything of the sort. If
| you're happy with Google, enjoy. I am adding my own
| anecdotal experiences to other's (who appear also to have
| found search _lacking_ for some time now).
| PaulDavisThe1st wrote:
| You stated that you did _not_ want a list of links. I am
| not sure what other alternatives there are, but AFAIK,
| they will all involve LLMs in some way and be a quite
| different way to present the results of a "search" than
| traditional search engines.
|
| So, if not that, then what?
| mancerayder wrote:
| Maybe because you have the personalization disabled. My
| complaint isn't the SEO stuff; that hits me when I search
| on a tech item I want to learn (I get slammed with crappy
| vendor blogs), or food recipes (long story about a Sicilian
| Grandma before the recipe at the end). My complaint with
| Google is it fights me on keywords, and I have to
| constantly add quotes, add minuses, and it seems to
| silently override it.
|
| It's easier to add Reddit at the end to get a more accurate
| question repeated, and skip the sponsored SEO crap.
| PaulDavisThe1st wrote:
| So why have personalization enabled?
| lelanthran wrote:
| > Google openly admits as much (and further intensifies the
| enshittification) by placing a huge AI summary above those
| results.
|
| The AI summary is not the problem; you could take it away and
| the experience would be just as poor.
|
| In fact, the AI summary slightly improves the experience for
| faster readers.
| nostrademons wrote:
| In my anecdotal experience, it's moved to private, trust-based
| channels: iMessage, WhatsApp, email, face-to-face interactions.
| Our 30-year bender of putting our lives online and blurring the
| public and the private has finally ended: people don't _want_
| to be online, don 't trust social media, don't really trust any
| media, and are living simple local lives with a small circle of
| friends that they get together with regularly in person.
|
| But then, my anecdotal experience may not be representative of
| most of the world. Most of my friends have money, houses, kids,
| friends - all of which are, by the numbers, rarities these
| days.
|
| It's an interesting thought experiment to explore what it means
| if that actually _is_ the new normal, and people are not
| consuming media or much of anything, or even if the people who
| are still addicted to social media are now tapped out and don
| 't have any more disposable income left to spend. Probably
| economic depression. If everybody bought only what they needed
| and ignored all the advertisements, our present level of
| economic activity would plunge.
| mikepurvis wrote:
| Absolutely this. I recently got a nice photo taken with my
| kids and for the first time I... didn't post it on Facebook.
| I sent it to my family group chat. Yesterday I posted on
| Facebook for the first time in months and it was about the
| power being out for an hour in the ice storm. I haven't
| posted travel photos to FB in years.
|
| I'm mostly still on FB at all for the acquaintance-level
| connections to things like neighbourhood, church, and hobby
| communities. All the people I actually care about are in
| private group chats.
|
| I was reflecting recently that Google Plus actually had the
| right idea back in 2011 with "circles", but at the time we
| all said it was _too hard_ figuring out which circles we
| wanted to share a particular message or thought with. Hmm,
| maybe they were ahead of the game all along?
| hinkley wrote:
| One of the things I hope will come from the Trough of
| Disillusionment in cloud computing will be families running
| redundant file servers hosting the family photos instead of
| doing everything on IG.
|
| Your three tech savvy family members should all have
| redundant copies of the photos of memaw's wedding and Uncle
| Jim when he was 2 and looked exactly like your cousin's
| second kid. I don't need to see those. Your stalker ex
| boyfriend definitely doesn't need to see those. It's none
| of our goddamned business.
|
| Someone, I think WD? Already made a play at this but I
| think it fell on deaf ears and will have to be tried again
| after the hype cycle calms tf down.
| Eisenstein wrote:
| Too bad all of the RAM and NAND flash are going to be
| unaffordable for the next few years at least.
| hinkley wrote:
| Once you include internet latency hard drive latency
| isn't that much worse. It won't help but it won't stop
| it.
| kalleboo wrote:
| Hard disk drive prices are also soaring. Looking up a
| random WD drive: up 70% since July, a Seagate drive, up
| 50%
| Dylan16807 wrote:
| For $125, which is also about the price of one year of
| cloud storage, you can get a hard drive big enough to
| store half a million photos and also back up a million
| photos. It probably won't ever go over $200.
|
| And the hardware to serve that hard drive is somewhere
| between free and another hundred.
| glitchcrab wrote:
| Sure, but then you're putting all your eggs in one basket
| (hard drive). If you really want to divest yourself of
| the cloud then you need to set things up in a redundant
| and fault-tolerant fashion. And at that point the outlay
| is much more than 'just a hard drive'.
| raddan wrote:
| Yes, you need two hard drives. If you're really paranoid,
| use three.
| hinkley wrote:
| That was already covered in my top level comment though.
| Geographic redundancy not local mirroring.
| Dylan16807 wrote:
| Did you skip the "back a million photos" part? That's at
| least 3 copies of every file, spread across your group.
| If you want maximum safety you can add a local backup
| too, which isn't much more money. You don't need to spend
| anything on fault tolerance. Your files should already be
| on multiple servers, but also if it goes down for a few
| days that isn't a big deal.
| DrewADesign wrote:
| My very vibes-based take is that setting up home servers
| is the dad jeans of tech hobbies. It's kind of arresting
| how bewildered many young people are when confronted with
| anything below the UI layer. I think peak tech savviness
| happened a bit younger than me: maybe mid-late
| millennial. After that you start getting into the iPad-
| from-birth generation for whom tech was rarely a
| challenge. Tech savviness among young folks feels more
| like it was in the mid-90s. They're infinity more online-
| savvy, no doubt, but when it comes to knowing anything
| about how that works, they're cooked.
|
| I do know some non-developer Gen Z folks that would set
| up minecraft servers on DO droplets, but I don't know of
| any that actually made their own and hosted it on their
| own network.
|
| Aside from more exposure to raw tech, the technology
| making the internet happen was a lot simpler back then,
| where servers were actually physical servers,and such. I
| was able to adopt the complexity progressively as it came
| into existence which is a lot easier with the base
| knowledge of how the building blocks worked.
| AtlasBarfed wrote:
| We still need a lot of plug and Play with home servers.
|
| In theory, AI should be good at helping building
| interfaces between cloud backups and home server apps.
| Because AI should be good at apis.
|
| In theory
| hinkley wrote:
| I'd like a turnkey k3s and a 10" rack designed for
| consumers. Set up to host your Minecraft server, store
| your media, and be incrementally upgradeable.
| BrenBarn wrote:
| This is my impression as well. From what I've seen, many
| Gen Z people only loosely even think in terms of things
| like "files". They are used to integrations where
| everything just lives on some website or in a Google app
| and the way you locate things is by searching.
| raddan wrote:
| I am a professor of CS and we found, post-pandemic, that
| very few students had any exposure to real computers. It
| was all smartphones and tablets. So the things you
| mention--not knowing what a file is--really is the state
| of things. We now explicitly talk about files in our
| intro programming courses, first as a general idea in
| CS1, and then we dig into (some of) the representations
| in CS2.
|
| Although there has also been a softening of math skills
| among the weakest students, the best students are still
| quite capable, so the erosion is mostly in tech skills,
| not analytical skills.
| antod wrote:
| I'm also noticing another trend with my 16yr old daughter
| and her friends. They are craving old school offline
| experiences. They have all dragged out the parents and
| relatives old music collections, cruising second hand
| shops for old CDs etc. when they visit others houses they
| are checking out each other's household book and music
| collections.
|
| She recently got a cheap digital camera with no screen
| and just a shutter button and and plain old viewfinder.
| The idea is that like the old days you don't know what
| you took a photo of until (a bit like getting the film
| developed) you plug the SD card into a computer and have
| a look.
|
| I think she'd get a kick out of ripping CDs and ditching
| Spotify. I can teach her all about files and filesystems
| then haha.
|
| My 19yr old son doesn't follow the same old school stuff,
| but he kinda shunned social media from the beginning.
| hinkley wrote:
| Gamers are the ones building PCs by hand. They have the
| skills, it's a matter of motivation.
| lII1lIlI11ll wrote:
| Building PCs by hand nowadays is quite trivial. You don't
| need to set bunch of jumpers on the motherboard
| correctly, manually assign IRQs, etc. The peak
| "complexity" modern gamers deal with is correctly
| overclocking their gear without frying it or making the
| system unstable (which is mostly done in some nice GUI
| according to a youtube tutorial anyway).
| mikepurvis wrote:
| I just set up a little cube server with a Mini-ITX board
| I had lying around. Overall I'm very happy with it, but
| right now it's basically just Unraid with the built-in
| containers running for Deluge, Jellyfin, and the Crafty
| minecraft server.
|
| I'd love for it to also be a backup of my whole Google
| Photos account (eg https://github.com/JakeWharton/docker-
| gphotos-sync) but honestly I can't imagine trying to
| maintain an app on there that would actually be the first
| class storage/sync/presentation layer for my family.
| cyberax wrote:
| > I can't imagine trying to maintain an app on there that
| would actually be the first class
| storage/sync/presentation layer for my family.
|
| Immich exists. It really is missing only some editing
| functionality and some nice-to-have features from GPhotos
| like automatic panoramas. Other than that, it's superior
| to Google.
| vachina wrote:
| Immich feels too heavy for my needs, so I wrote a single
| executable server that turns my photo directories into a
| photo gallery (https://github.com/yhling/go-web-image-
| gallery)
|
| Photo ingestion is via regular samba uploads from my
| phone.
| esseph wrote:
| You might be shocked. Immich is amazing.
| ExtraRoulette wrote:
| I'm working on it! I have a little NUC that I'm learning
| Linux (Is that the proper term?) on. I plan to self host
| a few services for myself and host family photos on it
| someday.
|
| I'm going through a "Deep, Vast, Trough of Learning" at
| the moment :>
| egypturnash wrote:
| Everyone who was on Livejournal before G+ "invented"
| "Circles" had _absolutely no problem_ with locking posts to
| "friends" (people they followed) or various "friends
| groups" that were subsets of their friends. It was fucking
| hilarious to see everyone say it was too hard on G+. Just
| two dropdowns right there on the new post page next to the
| main text field. Super simple. Creating and editing the
| groups was a pretty simple task with its own page.
|
| Now that I look back at that I wonder what kind of theories
| suggest that abilities like that will result in reduced ad
| impressions, since I feel like every decision made by
| social sites makes much more sense when viewed through that
| lens.
| alex1138 wrote:
| + also got a bad rap due to what happened to Youtube -
| merged accounts - and yeah Google acted in some awful
| ways in more than one way but they were also trying to
| solve a problem of Zuck's shifting views on privacy (or
| rather the same view, that it shouldn't exist)
| mikepurvis wrote:
| It probably wasn't the worst thing ever to try to
| leverage some of the existing social networking going on
| on YouTube, but combining it with a real name policy and
| making the actual posts/comments into first class global
| content for the G+ feed? Idiotic, and completely
| undermined the whole premise of safely walling off your
| content to its intended audience.
|
| (See also: nice how reddit now makes it possible to
| curate the list of which subs you participate in whose
| comments and posts appear on your global profile page)
| alex1138 wrote:
| Reddit is fucking miserable. I don't want to claim they
| profited solely off the work of Swarz, because his
| involvement wasn't... total, I mean he left, but it feels
| like one of these things where mediocre people get
| control over something which was initially made by people
| who actually know what they're doing
| esseph wrote:
| > Reddit is fucking miserable
|
| Reddit is the town bar, the popular one.
|
| Some people love the town bar! :)
|
| Some people hate the town bar! :(
| somenameforme wrote:
| Things like this can often be assessed on a macro level.
| When you start to get the number of users sites like
| Facebook have and sites like Reddit claim they have, you
| end up with content that's reflective of a broad sample
| of society. You do have that on Facebook, you do not have
| that on Reddit.
|
| I suspect Reddit is intentionally overcounting by doing
| things like counting multiple devices as different users,
| multiple accounts as different users, making minimal
| efforts to remove bots, counting dynamic IPs as distinct
| users, and so on. You could even count API callers as
| users, but that is stretching the limits of plausible
| deniability. The thing is - their content isn't
| reflective of the popular town bar, it's representative
| of an insular clubhouse with some small rooms in the
| backyard for 'normies.'
| esseph wrote:
| If you look at their "all accounts" it's over
| 650,000,000.
|
| Around 250,000,000 is monthly user usage, which would be
| for one or more accounts.
|
| And if course, like every site, a percentage that keep
| the thing going (around 35,000,000 daily logins).
|
| It's one of the top sites on the internet and has been
| for a very long time.
| user205738 wrote:
| I tried to start using Reddit. None of my friends had
| ever heard of it or wanted to use it, and I soon lost
| interest in it.
|
| From my little experience of using it, it seems that its
| main audience is the mentally retarded or just children
| under 11 years old.
|
| The same questions are asked all the time. It wasn't
| difficult for me to find a search on the site for why
| they don't use it?
|
| There is a lot of nonsense in the comments/answers, which
| they state with full confidence.
|
| And there was also a feeling that there are rarely
| disagreements in discussions, even if there are minor
| differences, everyone adheres to a single line, often
| related to the topic/name of the subreddit.
|
| I found several people creating content that I was
| interested in, but some of the posts on the page were
| hidden and it was easier to follow them on YouTube or
| blogs.
|
| In general, searching for valuable posts or comments is
| like digging through manure to find gold.
|
| And even if you find a clever idea or a good technical
| hint, it was often easier to find it just by reading the
| documentation. It's the same with interesting posts. If
| it's something worthwhile, then it will be on twitter,
| blog, YouTube, social networks or in some forums.
|
| I'm not talking about advertising every second post, or
| even among the comments. Disabling ad blocking was a
| mistake.
|
| > it's representative of an insular clubhouse with some
| small rooms in the backyard for 'normies.'
|
| A very appropriate definition. It's not even interesting
| to discuss something on Reddit. If your opinion or
| thought coincides with the ideology of the subreddit,
| then you will have a lot of likes. If it don't match, you
| get dislikes, insults, or worse, no response.
|
| In general, I did not find any benefit for myself on
| Reddit and I am unlikely to return there, it is a waste
| of energy and effort.
| alex1138 wrote:
| No. I'm very specifically saying (contrary to your
| implication) that it's the management of the bar which is
| the problem
|
| HN loves to do this. "Platforms are mirrors held up to
| society". No, not always. Sometimes there really is
| unnecessary executive top-down control
| wishfish wrote:
| Reddit is a bunch of bar districts in a large city. You
| can find any sort of bar you want. Some of the bars
| you'll love. Some of them you'll hate. Some of them will
| make you say "what the hell is any of this?"
|
| It's an almost infinite variety. Fractal even with how
| many subreddits are the results of splits from an older
| subreddit.
| autoexec wrote:
| You can find any sort of bar you want, but all of them
| are owned by the same shady company which waters down the
| drinks, are involved in secret backroom deals which
| sometimes results in things like selling your personal
| info or in bars being closed without notice. They also
| refuse to give the bouncers the training and resources
| they need which leaves many bars full of jerks who
| shouldn't have made it inside in the first place, while
| in other bars you can find yourself thrown out for no
| reason at all.
|
| It's kind of like an American grocery store where you
| have shelf after shelf filled with different brand names
| and products in all kinds of colors and flavors, but
| they're all owned by one of three corporations so it
| really doesn't matter which product you buy, you're still
| supporting the same assholes who will gladly poison you
| if it'll increase their profits by a fraction of a cent,
| so naturally most of your choice comes down to the flavor
| of the poison.
| CobrastanJorji wrote:
| I still mourn G+. It was clearly put together by somebody
| who thought first and foremost about privacy. It made
| deciding who to share what with the central, most visible
| part of how it worked. And that's probably part of why it
| failed. Was it hard to choose? Nope. But I guarantee you
| that if Facebook added a little "hey, are you sure you
| want to share this post publicly with the whole world
| under your real name? Yes/No" popup, organic content
| would drop 50% overnight, and not because of the
| difficulty of clicking "Yes." G+ died in part because it
| looked like a ghost town to a visitor, and it looked like
| a ghost town because everything was being done in
| private. And that was a great thing!
|
| Mind you, G+ also made some insane and boneheaded
| decisions. I think at one point they tried to make all
| Youtube comments also be G+ posts under your real name,
| or something like that? That was fucking stupid.
| falcor84 wrote:
| The biggest boneheaded decision from my perspective was
| their taking over the + prefix in Google search (to
| filter for results that have this term verbatim). That
| just positioned G+ as my enemy and I had a strong desire
| for it to die. Unfortunately, they didn't bring back the
| prefix even after it died. Quotes around a term do
| something similar, but I am still angry.
| SR2Z wrote:
| I think that change happened well after G+ was dead
| falcor84 wrote:
| I just found this October 2011 post reporting about this
| change as it happened (4 months after G+'s launch in June
| 2011):
|
| https://waxy.org/2011/10/google_kills_its_other_plus/
|
| According to Wikipedia, G+ usage kept growing from about
| 40M that October to 90M by the end of 2011 and then to
| hundreds of millions over the next few years, but the
| reporting methodology seems very inconsistent.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google%2B
| twelvedogs wrote:
| yeah they made a lot of mistakes, the biggest one was not
| iterating on making it a good product. they just dumped
| it into the world, mostly formed and did nothing with it.
|
| it had a lot of good ideas like you said it just needed
| to make it simpler to use, maybe even make the circles
| stuff not default though i didn't have much trouble with
| it
|
| forcing everyone to use something that still had teething
| issues was the biggest screw up, if they wanted to
| integrate youtube they should have started with making G+
| popular so people would actually _want_ that, and yeah
| real names so dumb.
|
| blizzard tried that as well lol. then some guy rang up
| blizzard hq and told one of the higher ups where his kids
| went to school and they suddenly realised full name is
| actually too much information
| imoverclocked wrote:
| > It was clearly put together by somebody who thought
| first and foremost about privacy.
|
| Except that they worked for a company that clearly wants
| all of your data. Privacy and Google are often at odds
| with each other... and for the folks that understood
| privacy at the time, it was a hard sell unless they
| worked at Google.
|
| Privacy to me means that even Google doesn't get to peek
| in whenever they feel like it.
| MaoSYJ wrote:
| The migration of YT accounts to G+ is how most of the
| critical mass learned there was G+. It took years to
| recover nicknames.
| notreallyauser wrote:
| People will make frequent mistakes if you put the privacy
| decision at a per post level. (And not just average
| users: see stevey's Google Platforms rant)
|
| Having different apps, chats (Discord servers), accounts
| (at-a-push) for each privacy circle is much clearer to
| average users. Migrating a whole group of any size to
| another platform is hard, hence many of us are stuck with
| Facebookk in case we get invited to something we don't
| want to miss on it, but new platforms will continue to
| emerge and some will succeed.
| youainti wrote:
| G+ copied some features and design work the open source
| federated social media, particularly Diaspora. So yeah, a
| lot of the features were developed in context of privacy
| protections.
| acjohnson55 wrote:
| IMO, their biggest problem was that they made a product
| that was terminally uncool.
| fuzztester wrote:
| Even worse was Google Wave. Totally unusable from the
| start, which is when I tried it, due to all the hype (by
| them) about it. Probably too JavaScript-heavy, was the
| reason, I think, back then. I remember reading reports
| confirming my guess, at the time. I was on an average
| machine. I bet the Google devs had quite more powerful
| ones, and in their infinite wisdom (not!), did not
| trouble to test, or even think of testing on average
| machines that most of the world would have.
| jwrallie wrote:
| Another mistake is that they had a significant presence
| in Brazil through Orkut, but they didn't bother to
| integrate and migrate the users in.
|
| Orkut's user base was already degraded through Facebook
| but it was not inexistent, as some features of Orkut were
| unique. One was that it allowed people to use alt
| accounts to participate on anonymous discussion, not much
| different from Reddit, I'm sure with some creativeness G+
| could have benefited from extra users.
| aftbit wrote:
| I was an Orkut user from the USA for a few years. The
| vibe was way nicer than Facebook. I think I was with them
| from 2007 to 2011 or so.
|
| killedbygoogle.com says 2004 to 2014 so a decent chunk of
| the service's run.
| jll29 wrote:
| Orkut Buyukkokten's orkut.com might have been a semi-
| private project (Google, like any company, doesn't
| normally name its products after first names of its
| coders).
|
| Also, as you say, it was populated by many Brazilians, an
| imbalance like that may discourage non-Brazilians from
| joining, so not sure if integrating them would have
| helped or hurt.
| jnaina wrote:
| "It was clearly put together by somebody who thought
| first and foremost about privacy."
|
| The legendary Andy Hertzfeld played a role in shaping the
| design of Google Plus.
|
| https://techcrunch.com/2011/06/28/google-plus-design-
| andy-he...
| Seanambers wrote:
| Discovery was bad.
|
| I was the one to push G+ and Gwave on my friends and it
| did not take at all.
| FireBeyond wrote:
| I remember that the (initial) invite-only aspect played
| out in the worst way. Some FOMO angle works, but it ended
| up just ... not working, and who joins a social media
| wastleland?
| Kye wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nymwars
| pndy wrote:
| Beside my friend who was gifted with invitation, there
| was nobody else from my circles (sic) and when asked they
| were replying with _standard_ "why I should make yet
| another account". So for me it was a ghost town right
| from the start.
|
| And frankly it was actually the first place where I truly
| noticed how big companies are extracting data from us;
| back then I felt really unpleasant when I tried to fill
| up profile.
|
| I've got this old screenshot [1] and profile included:
| about me, "I know this stuff", current occupation,
| employment history, education path, place of residence
| with map, home and work addresses, relationship status
| and what kind of partner you are looking for, gender,
| other names - maiden name, alternative spelling,
| nickname, visibility in search results and a section for
| links to other websites. This may be seen as not much
| today but back then even facebook wasn't that "curious" -
| that was about to change.
|
| I also tried to utilize Google Wave for our university
| group to keep us informed etc., but people wanted just
| "plain old" emails with attachments.
|
| [1] - https://ibb.co/SDDGG3PJ
| crucialfelix wrote:
| G+ died because it was clown colored google product, not
| a communal space for people. It was technology without
| any aesthetic that made you want to be there.
|
| Myspace was hilarious because it was such a mess. The
| people owned it, hacked the css. Every profile page was a
| messy real person.
| iseanstevens wrote:
| Yeah LiveJournal (my username there is lightfixer) really
| came close to replicating how we actually social.
| Deciding who is able to see what I posted on an
| individual level was great. Could create groups etc.
| BrenBarn wrote:
| In retrospect LiveJournal was pretty great as a social
| network of its time. It's too bad it got turned into some
| kind of Russian spam site.
| NooneAtAll3 wrote:
| it was russian twitter
|
| and twitter is a spam site, so you're somewhat right
| m3kw9 wrote:
| Apple has photo sharing where you can share photos
| privately.
| willparks wrote:
| Agreed, Apple shared albums seems to be the default. It's
| not amazing, but your photos and contacts are already
| there, no new network required.
| naravara wrote:
| I've been thinking about setting up a family domain and
| just hosting my family's pictures to it as a way to share
| internally. But the risk exposure of running anything
| online is just so bad now, it feels risky and a pain in the
| ass to both give family access to see and post but also
| seal it off from spammers and scammers.
|
| The way in which any open text box on the internet is
| guaranteed to turn into a malware vector is new now, and
| makes casual and marginally technical users trying their
| own thing much higher stakes and annoying.
| esseph wrote:
| If you setup a server at home, you can expose it via a
| cloudflare tunnel, meanwhile it's behind your firewall +
| NAT. This will obfuscate the server IP a bit. It allows
| allows you to use very simple cloudflare Zero Trust rules
| to only allow people to access your server/website from
| people with a user account on that domain. (Or
| geographical restrictions, etc, etc)
| Bombthecat wrote:
| I was thinking about something similar. ( Family photo
| sharing) The problem is: family is so used to Instagram
| and co, that they won't use it.
| vachina wrote:
| Yeah why put anything on social media. Your content is just
| a means to put ads alongside, and then trained to death by
| their AI.
| spoaceman7777 wrote:
| None of the numbers I've seen on web usage, platform usage,
| etc. indicate people are significantly pulling away from
| online lives. Though, there has been a slight dip in daily
| social media browsing time in the last couple of years (of
| course, it also follows the end of the pandemic, and it
| hasn't ceded back to where it was prior).
|
| That does sound like a rather charmed life though. Could also
| be a sign that people are reverting to using the social
| internet apart from their irl acquaintances as well.
|
| Linking up with all of our irl acquaintances through the
| public web was a terrible mistake imo. Seeking privacy can
| mean many different things.
| nostrademons wrote:
| Would it show up in the numbers on web usage, platform
| usage, etc? People who do this _drop out of the sample_ -
| they don 't show up in the numbers. As far as your stat
| gathering is concerned, they don't exist.
|
| If you're actually doing a _census_ of people and asking
| about their web usage and social habits, it 'd show up. So
| maybe Google or Facebook has the data if they were to do
| say cohort analysis on Google Analytics or Chrome History
| or Facebook beacon logs, counting specifically the number
| of total unique Internet users that used to visit social
| media but no longer do. But such an analysis would require
| SVP-level privacy approval (because it joins together
| personal, non-anonymized data across multiple products),
| and why would an executive commission a study that
| potentially tells them that their job is in danger and
| their employer is making a mistake by employing them? And
| if they did, why would they ever publicize the results?
|
| AFAIK, most of the major public-facing analytics platforms
| work by sampling their users. If their users are
| voluntarily choosing not to engage with the platform that
| their sampling runs on, they by definition cannot measure
| that change. They just become a biased sample that excludes
| specifically the population they're trying to measure.
| gcbirzan wrote:
| But they still READ. So, if you 'interact' (and by that I
| mean do any write-like action, like commenting, posting,
| liking, whatever) less, that's gonna show up.
| nostrademons wrote:
| They _don 't_, at least not necessarily. I look at my HN
| history and it's 13 hours ago, 6 days ago, 8 days ago, 13
| days ago. Fifteen years ago I was #2 on the leaderboard
| (itself now gone, it listed users by total comment karma)
| and would post about 4-5 times a day. Now when I'm not
| posting, I'm actually _not on the site_ and not reading
| replies. I just don 't have time.
|
| I think a decent-sized subset of Millennials have
| basically aged out of the time-surplus years of the early
| 20s and are now busy with kids and careers and families.
| And they aren't being replaced by the new 20-somethings,
| at least not on social media of the same form. The kids
| are still on text messages and Whatsapp and Discord and
| Roblox and Google Docs (!!), but they aren't interested
| in getting on the public Internet, and if they are, their
| parents won't let them.
| timeon wrote:
| Are bots included in those numbers?
| bawolff wrote:
| I think the platforms have changed. FB used to be 100%
| posts by people you know. I opened it today, and maybe 1
| out of 50 posts were by someone i know, the rest was
| "trending" content.
|
| Its essentially an entirely different website now.
| lolive wrote:
| For what it is worth, here is my experience with
| Facebook, [a platform that I have learnt to love after my
| Twitter ban]: I go to the main page, I immediately click
| the magnifying lens, so I get the list of unread posts of
| the 10to20 groups I follow. I read them quickly. Then
| leave. I do that, on a daily basis. Time spent: usually
| 20 minutes.
|
| Reddit is 99% search only. I go there only on a purpose.
| [might be replaced by Gemini, eventually]
|
| HN and Alterslash are probably the only source of random
| info that I still consume.
|
| May be that information containment is a reaction to my
| 15+ years of addiction to [the good old] Twitter. Or
| because I have reached age 50.
|
| But the consequence is that I get the news late, and
| usually because of a search I did. Not because of a
| proactive algorithm.
|
| Additional thought: in the end I suppose my information
| un-deluge is the proof that algorithms eventually failed
| to deliver [i.e point me at things meaningful to me]. The
| biggest example is Spotify proposals. That is 1% of my
| music discovery, whereas traditional non-commercial
| radios and dedicated podcasts are [human curated and]
| much more diverse.
| flir wrote:
| I knocked up a browser plugin that, whenever I land on /
| redirects me to /?filter=all&sk=h_chr
|
| It's a much less sticky place, now.
| DANmode wrote:
| Nice!
|
| Why does that look familiar?
|
| Some web wrappers forFB on Android must use that or
| similar.
| majormajor wrote:
| How about distinct public posts per day per user?
|
| My experience is that consumption is as high as ever, but
| the median person's non-private sharing is down.
| wolttam wrote:
| It's the people _with_ money, houses, and kids that departed
| the 'simple local' lifestyle when the Internet and social
| media become large. It's them that are re-discovering the
| joys of the simple local lifestyle.
|
| The simple local lifestyle is that which was lived by all of
| humanity for all of history up until the last ~75 years (give
| or take).
| goatlover wrote:
| > The simple local lifestyle is that which was lived by all
| of humanity for all of history up until the last ~75 years
| (give or take).
|
| A percentage of people still traveled, communicated, traded
| and migrated to other places in the past. Cities were a mix
| of lots of people, commerce, news. It was just slower and a
| smaller percentage. Look at the letters of Paul in the
| bible. He was writing to different communities around the
| Roman Empire, and traveled to them when he could.
|
| Looking at the big picture, trade, communication and
| migration are the norm over human history. We colonized the
| world before the Industrial Revolution, some humans did it
| thousands of years prior.
| dleslie wrote:
| Meta appears to believe this, and so is pushing chatbot
| integration into private chats on Messenger and WhatsApp;
| presumably that will be the vector by which they push product
| advertisements.
| bsimpson wrote:
| It's interesting to see how much of a behemoth Discord has
| become. Seems like there's a Discord for everything - from
| open source projects to hobbies and games to individual
| groups of friends/family.
|
| It's occupying the segment that subreddits historically have.
| However, it's perhaps-intentionally search-opaque. You can't
| Google to find a message/link/download that's gated by
| Discord. And it also gives a sense of community, where
| someone who had more attention and time on a computer than a
| sense of what to do with those things can go have casual
| conversation with... someone.
| __turbobrew__ wrote:
| Discord is really where it is at these days. Discord
| servers with 50-100 people form the new social fabric of
| the internet where real community lies. In theory Reddit
| was supposed to be this but
|
| 1. Reddit communities tend to get too large
|
| 2. Subreddits overflow into each other too much through
| cross posting and brigading
|
| 3. Post history being public meant that you could get
| banned/brigaded for your comments on a totally different
| subreddit (i.e. bots autobanning you on one subreddit for
| posting on another subreddit).
|
| The magic of discord is that everyone in the server I
| frequent I either know personally or they are known by
| someone I know personally. It creates a nice fabric of
| community and trust. Literally zero moderation over the
| past 10 years as everyone knows each other and behaves like
| normal adults and we also don't get all up in arms when
| someone says something controversial.
| bookofjoe wrote:
| 99% of the population hasn't a clue what Discord is/does
| barishnamazov wrote:
| You probably mean, 99% of anyone older than 25.
| bookofjoe wrote:
| I am 77.
| barishnamazov wrote:
| That's amazing. Wishing you well, and thank you for all
| your contributions!
| bookofjoe wrote:
| Very kind of you.
| poszlem wrote:
| Which is likely why it's so good still. The usenet before
| the eternal September.
| bawolff wrote:
| The majority of the population has no idea what the
| trendsetters are doing before it becomes mainstream.
|
| But if you include other group msg platforms as the same
| thing (whatsapp, fb messenger, etc) i imagine most people
| know.
| justinhj wrote:
| I think there's a much higher barrier to entry to Discord
| than Facebook. It won't become mainstream unless it
| significantly changes.
| majormajor wrote:
| In the US this is likely a wildly high overestimate
| because a huge percentage of the population plays video
| games at least casually and it has a very large mindshare
| (if not necessarily daily use for everyone) in that
| domain.
|
| Moving into things like sports and what we would've
| called the "general blogosphere" in 2010 quite rapidly
| too.
|
| I kinda hate it since it's hard to discover, but at least
| Google can't direct a million bots to it either that
| easily yet...
| izzylan wrote:
| Given that I recently joined a leatherworking Discord
| comprised of individuals pretty much the exact opposite
| of my demographic, I believe this is just plain wrong.
|
| My guess would be near half, probably a 60/40 split.
| AngryData wrote:
| I think the only people who don't know what discord
| anymore is the 50+ crowd. Atleast 50% of the randos I
| talk with online have discord as their preferred method
| for texting and voice communication and immediately want
| to switch to it if possible. And if older people actually
| cared about doxxing themselves with every conversation
| they would probably have a higher percentage too.
| bsimpson wrote:
| I don't know what the right way to handle intersecting
| identities is.
|
| Most of my online identities were started when I was in
| college and was happy to have them tied to my real name.
| (This is also when Facebook was popular, still good, and
| college-kids-only.) Since then, cancel culture et. al.
| has made me more wary of having my identity-adjacent
| usernames show up in hobbies like gaming.
|
| If I want to be myname in some Discord servers and
| anonoguy in others, is there a safe way to enforce that
| boundary? What about if I want to work on gaming-related
| open source projects or 3D prints?
|
| As the internet moves to logged-in-and-social-by-default,
| it's hard to know which identity to use for which
| service. Moreover, when things are constantly
| leaking/being hacked, I don't know that I want any
| service to know that anonoguy and myname are personas of
| the same individual.
|
| And as LLMs become the standard, I'm not sure any of this
| is defensible. I imagine in a decade's time, it will be
| trivial for an LLM to go "this account and that account
| have similar interests/references/ways of typing - they
| must be the same person."
| csomar wrote:
| He is not wrong though a bit off. Discord has 200MAU. So
| 97% of the global population probably have no idea what
| Discord is.
|
| People massively underestimate the scale of
| whatsapp/facebook/tiktok (billions of MAU)
| badc0ffee wrote:
| I'm (barely) under 50, but I kind of hate it. I have no
| idea how to handle the un-threaded flood of messages, and
| much prefer something like Reddit, message boards, or
| even FB groups. I felt the same way about IRC back in the
| day and never got into it.
|
| I use Slack at work, but at least there I have a workable
| plan: no notifications for most channels, read or at
| least skim all messages in every channel by EOD, don't
| read it outside of business hours unless I get a DM.
| Also, absolutely never join the chatty #random type
| channels.
| rootusrootus wrote:
| As someone with two teenage kids, I would wager that this
| is highly age-dependent, and that it is exactly reversed
| the younger you go. My guess is 99% of the under-25
| population uses Discord daily and has never had a
| Facebook account.
| pbhjpbhj wrote:
| In which country? The young adults in my UK family aren't
| using Discord. They don't use Facebook (except to keep up
| with older family/associates) either though.
| rootusrootus wrote:
| US. What are they using in UK? WhatsApp? That kinda
| counts as Facebook, I suppose. But then again, is
| WhatsApp really a direct competitor with Discord?
|
| By the numbers, Discord is definitely more popular in the
| US, though it is pretty popular in the UK too.
| qwertywert_ wrote:
| Are you sure they don't? How would you know? Every intern
| I've worked with uses discord
| glitchcrab wrote:
| Your experience (as a single data point) doesn't mean
| that everyone the age of the interns you work with uses
| Discord.
| qwertywert_ wrote:
| I'm responding to his personal datapoint with my own. I
| agree with you though..
| mjevans wrote:
| Discord is the 'AOL (1990s)' of the 2020s. (clearly
| aspects where that fails, but as a social media?)
| hinkley wrote:
| I wonder if the act of switching between discord servers
| works better with our _homo erectus_ brains. You visit
| your sister who moved to the next village over, and you
| hang out in that context until it's time to go home. You
| go hang out with the stone shapers because you're a
| Neolithic nerd and you think rocks are cool but you have
| the find motor skills of a dying walrus.
|
| Having all of your social circle mashed together on the
| internet is like a family reunion at a convention in the
| same room as your high school reunion. It's... a lot.
| kulahan wrote:
| I think this is almost certainly true. People aren't
| built to be acceptable to an audience the size of a
| football stadium, they're built to be acceptable to a
| hundred or so people at a time. If you can comfortably
| context-switch, it's probably a much easier lifestyle.
|
| I know that for me, at least, I like having one server
| where the comedy is not PC, one server where people seem
| to be a little more philosophical, one server for my real
| life friends, one server full of leftoids and one server
| full of rightards, etc.
| bsimpson wrote:
| It's funny to see how communities shard.
|
| In the plastic instrument games genre, there are some
| Discords where any wisp of using commercial music will be
| met with a stern reaction and potential ban. There are
| others that will link you to Drives full of thousands of
| songs from old games. The same people are in both groups.
| throwaway713 wrote:
| Sort of like the people who work in big tech and the
| people who post on Hacker News. You'd think the
| intersection is an empty set, but it's probably pretty
| large.
| Muromec wrote:
| Whatsapp, viber, line and tg groups are very much a thing
| too. Everybody is a chat of their apartment complex and
| district it seems
| _alternator_ wrote:
| Why doesn't Signal have the same mindspace that these
| (imo) marginal apps have? It's actually private. I wonder
| if people find it hard to use or something...
| __turbobrew__ wrote:
| Signal doesn't have channels (text, voice) which I think
| is a big one.
| bsimpson wrote:
| Does Signal scale?
|
| Until recently, I think the only way to join a Signal was
| to be explicitly added by a member. It doesn't have all
| the channels etc. of something like Discord.
|
| It doesn't have enough mindshare by normies either. In
| San Francisco, my entire social graph was on Signal. In
| NYC, I'm the weirdo that uses Signal for everything. Most
| locals seem to only use it for things that they
| explicitly want to be private. Among Euro friends, only
| the ones with ties to the US/tech industry use it.
| ethersteeds wrote:
| Won't disagree about channels and mindshare, but will
| note that Signal got public group links in 2020, not that
| recent.
|
| https://signal.org/blog/group-links/
| lukeschlather wrote:
| Signal by design doesn't have moderation and server-side
| conversations, it's not suitable for large groups.
| mbgerring wrote:
| It does in the Bay Area
| emodendroket wrote:
| > 3. Post history being public meant that you could get
| banned/brigaded for your comments on a totally different
| subreddit (i.e. bots autobanning you on one subreddit for
| posting on another subreddit).
|
| You can make it private now. Personally I think this is a
| bit of a misfeature since it ends up helping all the low-
| activity users showing up to post political agitprop in
| local subreddits, thinly-veiled advertisers, etc., but
| they changed it.
| esseph wrote:
| It's not really, you can just Google search and find all
| their posts and comments.
| emodendroket wrote:
| Sure, you can do that. It's harder and not collated in
| the same way though.
| Seattle3503 wrote:
| There is also Project Arctic Shift.
| yunwal wrote:
| The culture on discords tend to be way better than
| anywhere else on the internet, but discord really sucks
| to use. Somehow still doesn't have a usable search,
| really underpowered notifications control, they have the
| worst pop ups imaginable that seem to just float on top
| of the whole interface and make it impossible to use.
|
| I really wish something better would come along.
| esseph wrote:
| It can do per channel and per server notifications for
| all messages, @mentions, or none.
|
| What else would you want?
| antiframe wrote:
| Arbitrary regex matching. Something I use in IRC often.
| ravikapoor101 wrote:
| I also want levels of notifications. Especially emergency
| one - Some channels are super critical and I want to be
| notified immediately, give me a popup, ring my phone,
| override if my phone is on mute, then call me. Kind of
| like pagerduty.
| Seattle3503 wrote:
| I wish Discord had a betrer account switcher on mobile. I
| have a realname account for friends ana family, and
| another I use with randos.
| nkapias wrote:
| I use discord PTB and Canary to run multiple instances
| with different accounts on a single device.
|
| It also allows running multiple instances with a single
| account (to be on multiple vocals at once for example).
|
| The only drawback is the release cycle is more frequent
| and I need to update every time I boot.
| NooneAtAll3 wrote:
| > Somehow still doesn't have a usable search
|
| worst part is that it used to :/
| Cipater wrote:
| The problem with Discord is that I have to know exactly
| where stuff is for me to access it.
|
| There is absolutely zero chance I find something
| interesting on Discord just by "browsing" Discord. I have
| to be in a community that already exists elsewhere to get
| the Discord server link or just accidentally stumble upon
| the server link somewhere other than Discord.
|
| And If I do find an interesting Discord that is active,
| forget about seeing what people were talking about
| before.
|
| All the interesting and or useful stuff posted on Discord
| is completely walled off and hidden away and might as
| well not exist after it was posted. I'm never going to
| find a Discord thread when browsing for something on the
| internet.
|
| I genuinely think Discord is one of the more terrible
| things that has happened to the internet and the fact
| that it is replacing forums is a damn shame.
| Vegenoid wrote:
| Everything you just said is, through another lens, the
| boons of Discord. Lack of discoverability and permanence
| are a big part of why communities are moving and forming
| there.
| scrollop wrote:
| Though there may be some very good information locked
| behind unsearchable discord servers, and that won't be
| publicly archived for the greater good (not that most of
| reddit isn't forgettable).
|
| The good and bad, I guess.
| louistsi wrote:
| The problem about this, for me, is discoverability. I
| have loads of hobbies that I'd love to engage with the
| communities of, but how do you engage with servers of
| that size without actively being invited to them?
| oblio wrote:
| Discord is IRC, just with modern features.
|
| I wonder if there are any old school protocols out there to
| create a huge business around by just centralizing them and
| offering features people have been asking for decades.
|
| Probably not.
| Y_Y wrote:
| finger comes to mind, LinkedIn is almost a shit version
| of this
| bsimpson wrote:
| Slack had the ability to be Discord, but they explicitly
| decided they wanted to be business-only.
|
| React was the first open-source community I knew of that
| outgrew/got kicked off of Slack and moved to Discord.
| Now, it seems Slack is only used by companies, and
| occasionally by smaller groups (apartment buildings,
| school parents, etc) where someone in the group knows
| Slack from work and doesn't know it's hostile to non-
| businesses.
|
| Discord was the opposite. I was working on an open source
| initiative at Google at the time, and the Discord folks
| openly welcomed us. They even gave us someone's contact
| info, in case we had needs they weren't addressing. This
| was when it was still targeted just for gaming, but they
| were very welcoming of OSS projects using it too!
|
| As I write this, I realize that Discord is what "Google
| Apps for your Domain" was and Slack is the "Google
| Workspace" it became.
| Sharlin wrote:
| If only Discord weren't so incredibly bloated and full of
| stupid features aimed at 14-year-old gamers.
| perardi wrote:
| Ugh. Sigh.
|
| My rugby team uses Discord for chat and announcements.
|
| It feels...gross...inappropriate...it feels weird to use
| a UI covered in green gamer UI slime.
|
| https://imgur.com/a/eoa8arH
| Flere-Imsaho wrote:
| "Content Not Available Content not available in your
| region.
|
| Learn more about Imgur access in the United Kingdom"
|
| God I hate the modern internet.
| kulahan wrote:
| Or just not a buggy piece of crap. It's more stable than
| it used to be, but I still run into random problems here
| and there. Much more often than with any other piece of
| software I use regularly, but I suppose most are becoming
| web apps anyways...
| throwaway94275 wrote:
| I keep Discord running in a Firefox tab. It typically
| only goes down when I have to restart the browser and I
| often have it up for weeks.
| firecall wrote:
| I'd actually flip that and suggest that people stop
| trying to use Discord for things that aren't aligned with
| Discord's product UI/UX priorities!
|
| Discord is what it is, and my teenage kids love it.
| However I'm constantly baffled by it LOL.
| evandena wrote:
| I'm amazed Discord hasn't launched a corporate version of
| thier software yet, or that Slack hasn't seen the
| potential of static voice channels.
| m3kw9 wrote:
| everytime discord ask me to claim this account i just
| quit the app. they operate in some bs tech realm that no
| other service does.
| hinkley wrote:
| Subreddits ultimately took over when Usenet moderation
| failed to keep up. I had chat groups before the Web was
| really even a thing and they lived on until things like
| Slashdot and Digg took the reins.
| mgaunard wrote:
| It's more of a bad IRC replacement than a reddit one.
| sidereal1 wrote:
| One thing that's having a little comeback is the email
| newsletter (see Beehiiv). There's something nice about
| being able to get exactly what you signed up for and
| nothing more. No ads, no recommended content, no infinite
| scroll.
| Flere-Imsaho wrote:
| Yeah ever since email spam filters have been effective,
| email can now work as a social network. I genuinely think
| it's an untapped opportunity for the next "great thing".
| corford wrote:
| It's funny how things change but stay the same. I cut my
| teeth online in the mid nineties with usenet and IRC. When
| reddit got big, subreddits always reminded me of usenet
| groups. Now Discord is big and reminds me of IRC. Substack
| reminds me of personal blogs. Twitter/X sort of reminds me
| of ICQ/AIM.
| orthoxerox wrote:
| I'd say it was much shorter than 30 years. Facebook opened to
| the public in 2006, and I was surprised to learn Myspace (the
| first "normie" space on the Web) isn't much older. And before
| that your digital persona was separate from your offline
| persona, unless you were one of the grognards with a faculty
| .edu address.
| hinkley wrote:
| I've known a lot of neurodivergent and LGBT people, and I was
| in my late teens when The Internet happened and a young adult
| when the Web happened.
|
| If you're not within a couple standard deviations of boring,
| local living is isolating. Al Gore gave a mea culpa speech at
| one point because he thought, as a Senator, that legislating
| to give everyone the Internet would halt the rural brain
| drain but it had the opposite effect. People learned that
| they weren't alone, they were just surrounded by (my words,
| not his) idiots and so they moved to where their people were.
| They voted with their feet in droves.
|
| Ultimately, the Internet is good for support. It lets you
| find people who have the same obscure cancer your child has.
| Who are dealing with the same sort of neuroses your mom has.
| Who are being defrauded by a corporation in the same way. Who
| have the same feelings that the people around you ridicule
| you for even the hint of having. It lets these people find
| the patterns, see other people are feeling the same things
| they do, stop being gaslit.
|
| Everything else has become about dopamine and money. And for
| those parts we should definitely unplug. But without forums
| or chat threads that same feeling of being The Other comes
| back.
| emodendroket wrote:
| Yeah that's absolutely true that it was a lifeline for
| people who were isolated and that's less true with how
| ephemeral everything is now.
| lostlogin wrote:
| > Our 30-year bender of putting our lives online and blurring
| the public and the private has finally ended
|
| I wish you were right. We took our kid to a stage show she
| really wanted to see. People round us kept checking their
| phones. They weren't even really checking them. They held
| them and would turn the screen on and off, lighting the place
| up.
|
| They couldn't be without them for more than 5 minutes. This,
| after 30 mins of painful selfies before the show. It's awful.
| pesus wrote:
| I don't think the vibe shift they're describing has fully
| taken place yet, but I think the foundations have been laid
| and it's started. It's probably going to be a while and
| take further societal changes to fully come into fruition,
| though.
| zuminator wrote:
| AR glasses coupled with a sophisticated input device
| (fingertap? tounguetap?) will eventually be able to fully
| replace a touchscreen interface. And from then on it'll
| eventually become dated and rude to resort to pulling out
| touch screens during a social event.
|
| Mind you, inconsiderate people will be as distracted as
| ever, and will continue to halfheartedly pretend they're
| listening to those around them. They'll just need to find
| a new method to achieve maximal obnoxiousness.
| germinalphrase wrote:
| ..."a sophisticated input device (fingertap?
| tounguetap?)"
|
| My money is on subvocalization.
| majormajor wrote:
| Many people are simultaneously sharing to the broader
| internet less (the claim you're responding to) AND more
| addicted to media shared by the ones who DO share stuff
| then ever (the claim you're making).
| Spooky23 wrote:
| The alert checking is a thing.
|
| But I've noticed with my 14 year old son and his friends
| that they are all about Snap and iMessage. Instagram and
| TikTok are their public fora.
| barishnamazov wrote:
| I am a gen-z and most of my peers look at me weird when I
| express the same. It was once cool to have social media and
| presence -- I was only 8 when I made a facebook account. But
| now, things are different. I actively avoid social media and
| don't like to show myself online anywhere other than my
| personal website.
| poszlem wrote:
| What's really interesting to me is how this coincides with a
| larger push to break up more and more ties that kept our
| society going for the last 30-50 years. Look at what's
| happening to globalization and the push to near-shore. Look
| at the fragmentation of media into private channels and
| closed groups, the erosion of shared narratives, and the
| growing skepticism toward institutions that used to act as
| connective tissue.
|
| Individually, many of these shifts make sense: resilience
| over efficiency, trust over reach, local over global. But
| collectively they point to a world that is becoming more
| segmented, less interoperable, and harder to coordinate at
| scale. If fewer people participate in shared public spaces,
| economic, cultural, or informational, it's not just
| advertising models that break, but the assumptions
| underpinning growth, politics, and even social cohesion.
|
| That doesn't necessarily mean collapse, but it does suggest a
| lower energy equilibrium: slower growth, fewer mass
| phenomena, more parallel realities. The open question is
| whether we can rebuild new forms of shared infrastructure and
| trust at smaller scales--or whether we simply learn to live
| with a more fragmented, quieter, and less synchronized
| society.
| Eisenstein wrote:
| That doesn't really sound bad to me. I think we expanded
| our social reach too far and need to scale back to where we
| can feel like we have an impact and our voice matters.
| kace91 wrote:
| People didn't leave social media, social media left them.
| Instagram used to show your friends, not it shows algorithmic
| content. Same for the other networks. People are still there
| but it's now the new tv.
| nobodywillobsrv wrote:
| Everyone should be simply posting algorithmic content to
| Facebook. Screenshots, etc not giving them your own life
| stuff imo. We need to push back on personalized feeds.
| Share a high percentage of what you see so that there is a
| digital commons and not just some island for each person.
|
| Social media platform used to be less about passive
| consumption.
| cookiengineer wrote:
| I had a very interesting discussion with a friend today,
| where I was talking to her about the /r/golang thread about
| Rob Pike's comments to OpenAI and how the thread was full of
| bots talking with other bots. No idea why the density of bots
| was so high in that thread, it was kind of absurd to see.
|
| Then she said: "I know nobody that comments on online forums.
| Nobody would ever comment to strangers on the internet. It's
| too dangerous."
|
| Took me a while to grasp what she meant with that, but I
| think she's right. Trust has eroded so much over the last two
| decades that most forums are either full of bots or full of
| annoyed and toxic people. It's very rare to find welcoming
| communities to newbies, and most of the ones I have
| discovered were offline connections.
|
| She also mentioned that all of her friends use private
| profiles only, because having public profiles is too
| dangerous because of stalkers.
|
| To me this sounded a bit absurd at first, but maybe that's a
| different perception on "how to use" the internet from a
| different younger generation that grew up post-socialmedia?
| My first contact with the internet was MIT opencourseware,
| her first contact was receiving dick pics at the age of 10
| from assholes on the other side of the planet.
|
| I miss the old phpbb forum days when the most toxic comment
| was someone being snarky and derailing the discussion into
| "did you use the search function?"
|
| No idea how to fix the internet, maybe it's time to move to
| gopher or another protocol :-/
| mgaunard wrote:
| They don't write on forums but they like or share a story.
| It's just more passive/consumer-minded.
| chrchr wrote:
| But your friend is wrong. She does know at least one person
| who comments on online forums. I bet she knows more too.
| misiti3780 wrote:
| exactly!
| baobun wrote:
| Don't ask don't tell.
| schuylerlarson wrote:
| Completely agree. Look at some videos on YouTube. 20,000
| comments on brand new videos sometimes. A lot of good
| people are commenting on the internet. The problem is
| that the trust in public institutions is at an all time
| low, and that is leading to much more doom and gloom and
| those of us who are from the 2000s can feel the
| difference in the comment sections.
| hluska wrote:
| People use analogies constantly. That was an analogy - it
| wasn't meant to be taken literally.
| ptero wrote:
| > No idea how to fix the internet, maybe it's time to move
| to gopher or another protocol :-/
|
| Fido and Usenet are still around. Kind-of. IMO google
| virtually killed that, too, when they started peddling
| google groups and did the classic embrace-extend-extinguish
| on the Usenet.
| jll29 wrote:
| Perhaps time for a revival - text mode only, please, to
| keep out those that I don't want on there (the platform
| appearing too unattractive might be the way forward to
| avoid the TikTokers).
| Khaine wrote:
| Thats just what the internet of the mid to late 90s was
| like. People rarely used their real name, there were
| hundreds of forums, some private. You could have different
| nicks on them.
|
| Nobody knew you were a dog on the internet[1] until the
| rise of Facebook and linking your real identity with an
| online identity.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_the_Internet,_nobody_k
| nows_...
| mjevans wrote:
| The idea that everyone has only one identity, one whole,
| is harmful.
|
| People change over time. People change even a little
| based on who's around them. Even memories change as
| people see things in new lights.
|
| The Internet of the late 90s and early 2000s was
| spectacular in that everyone could be as authentic and
| deep as they wanted to be, and as shallow and invisible
| as they wanted to be depending on context.
|
| Firefox? Want to know how to really sell yourself. Be
| 'For the User', like TRON (but avoid that for copyright
| reasons and because normal people don't understand). The
| user should be able to TRUST that Firefox isn't selling
| them out, spying on them, or doing anything strange. That
| when Firefox creates identity sandboxes they're
| firewalled from each other to the maximum extent;
| including resisting device fingerprinting (just look
| generic and boring).
| hyperadvanced wrote:
| You could argue (it certainly has been argued) that the
| ability for technology to dissolve the usually more
| coherent identities that we take on daily by granting
| unlimited role play, trolling, and exploration is simply
| too much for a lot of people, and makes it hard to
| maintain a coherent sense of self. This is especially
| true of people who are "internet addicts" - not that the
| designation means a whole lot as I'm here at the gym
| talking to you on the phone.
|
| Don't get me wrong, I mostly agree with your comment. I
| think even more dastardly is the tendency for the
| internet to market new personalities to you, based on
| what's profitable
| ethbr1 wrote:
| There's also the inconvenient truth that a very
| _specific_ part of the world was online in the 1990s.
|
| Primarily more educated, more liberal, more wealthy.
|
| Turns out, when you hook the rest of the planet online,
| you get mass persuasion campaigns, fake genocide
| "reporting", and enough of an increase in ambient noise
| that coherent anonymous discourse becomes impossible.
|
| I mean, look at the comments on Fox News or political
| YouTube videos. _That 's_ the real average level of
| discussion.
| brabel wrote:
| The 1990s internet was definitely not more liberal! 4chan
| style forums were probably the rule. I can't believe
| someone would say that, clearly you didn't use the same
| internet that I did.
| Eisenstein wrote:
| He didn't say the internet was more liberal, he said the
| people on it were.
|
| Before you start forming your reply, think about the
| actual culture back then. If you take slashdot as
| somewhat representative of the 90s internet culture, it
| was basically anti-corporate, meritocratic, non-
| judgmental, irreligious, educated, non-discriminatory,
| and once 2000 came around tended to be highly critical of
| the Bush agenda.
|
| 4chan at that time and places like it represented more of
| an edgelord culture, where showing vulnerability or
| sensitivity was shunned, everything revered by the larger
| populace was ruthlessly mocked, and distrust of society
| and government in general was taken as natural. Calling
| them conservative would have been non-sensical.
| ethbr1 wrote:
| Exactly. If I had to characterize the general internet
| (read: what would and wouldn't raise an eyebrow in an
| average forum) in terms of political alignment, it'd
| probably be: - anarchist 60s/70s
| - libertarian-meritocracy 80s/90s - capitalist-
| meritocracy-liberal 00s - polarized liberal-
| globalist vs conservative-reactionary 10s -
| polarized liberal-individualist vs conservative-statist
| 20s
|
| That SA / 4chan (both of which were really post-90s)
| existed were in no way proof of an anti-liberal bent.
| Their very edgelordness was an implicit reveling in
| absolute freedom of expression (even if their later
| liberal-pro-censoring and alt-right splinter movements
| subsequently forgot that).
| pessimizer wrote:
| 4chan was very much left-wing to liberal until Stormfront
| invaded them back. After Caturday came Soviet Sunday.
| dkarbayev wrote:
| Most of the internet users are passive content consumers,
| and it's been the case since a long time ago. There's a
| post about it from 2019:
|
| https://bewilderbeast.org/2019/08/16/most-of-what-you-
| read-o...
| golem14 wrote:
| And yet, here you are, posting ...
|
| BTW, I don't explicitly disagree with what you're saying,
| but it would be good to look at actual data instead of
| anecdata to know for sure, and the people who have the data
| are not telling ...
| cookiengineer wrote:
| > And yet, here you are, posting ...
|
| Correction, I am posting while pooping. I don't care much
| about social media these days and I draw the line at the
| toilet door.
| shermantanktop wrote:
| Given the word count of your original post, I can tell
| you that daily psyllium husk is a miracle.
| cookiengineer wrote:
| Actually, thanks for the reminder.
| drob518 wrote:
| I know I self-censor a LOT.
| mikestorrent wrote:
| To be fair, back in those "good old phpbb days", people
| trolled just as hard as anyone does now, and maybe worse,
| since the consequences of it were not as visible, and
| getting in trouble for things you said online was virtually
| nonexistent. Everyone used a fake name, and while it might
| be possible to dox someone, it wasn't an operational
| concern for anyone who just wanted to be a jerk...
| Majromax wrote:
| > people trolled just as hard as anyone does now,
|
| Trolling had (has) a different character in smaller, more
| private forums: it tends towards more effort. A low-
| effort troll just gets banned and loses their platform,
| so the troll needs to at least ride the line of
| legitimacy. Drawing the line back to Usenet, the sheer
| effort that went into some trolling garnered respect if
| not necessarily acceptance.
|
| Drive-by interactions reward volume since the 'game'
| isn't repeated. Curated social media feeds like Twitter
| are even worse; the troll has their own audience
| predisposed towards acceptance and the victim is just
| set-dressing.
|
| I analogize this to in-person interactions: ostracization
| is mutually costly. A small group loses a member who was
| at least making a 'warm body' contribution, but the
| ostracized person loses a whole set of social benefits.
| Flere-Imsaho wrote:
| The trolling that happened on IRC would put modern day
| trolling to shame. Imagine posting a link to an exe
| claiming to be one thing but would actually contain Back
| Orifice (a Trojan that gave you remote access to the
| victim's pc). People would blindly download exes and run
| them on completely unprotected Windows 98.
|
| To be fair I do miss the "old Internet". Less corporate,
| money grabbing, more freedom.
| mapontosevenths wrote:
| It's not the internet that changed, it's the people.
|
| I'm an old timer, and I've been there since the
| beginning. I remember the beginning of the eternal
| summer, and the gradual decline that came after.
|
| One of my first jobs was actually 3rd shift help desk for
| a regional dial-up ISP. The people that called were
| mostly drunk southerner's who, at the time, seemed
| hopelessly non-technical.
|
| Looking back I now see that any one of them knew much,
| much more about how the internet actually worked than a
| the average modern user, and were probably more worldly
| in general than todays average user.... and there are
| billions more of them now.
|
| We thought that global access to information would
| democratize everything and expose people to a higher
| level of rhetoric and thinking. We just KNEW that the
| best ideas would rise to the top of discourse naturally
| and the world would magically become a better place. We
| were so very wrong. It's turns out that more than cream
| floats.
| fragmede wrote:
| All my real HN friends are on
| https://news.ysimulator.run/news
| lolive wrote:
| The forum where Skynet becomes self-conscious :)
| campital wrote:
| I don't see any obvious evidence of bot activity on that
| thread (and all of my spot checks strongly leaned human).
| Were some comments removed or something?
| brigandish wrote:
| I noticed a few people on HN have started complaining
| that anyone arguing with them is a bot. I think it's a
| coping mechanism at finding people who challenge them,
| but maybe they've been on too many bot-infested forums
| lately, or are just young (that might overlap with both
| users of bot-infested forums and those who haven't had
| their ideas challenged much).
| xbmcuser wrote:
| Most of her friends are probably women. Try making an
| account with an obvious female name and you will see a
| marked difference on most social platforms I am saying this
| as a guy we really don't understand the world women live in
| online or offline.
| fennecbutt wrote:
| I think some of us have a fair idea. And I think both
| sexes have problems that we could solve but continue to
| ignore.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-Made_Man_(book)
|
| Still a very valid experiment. I know the source of both
| sex' strife though: competition. I don't think we'll ever
| solve that, not while we're still monkeys.
| sph wrote:
| I like her take-away from this experiment:
|
| _Vincent stated that, after the experiment, she gained
| more sympathy for the male condition: "Men are suffering.
| They have different problems than women have, but they
| don't have it better. They need our sympathy, they need
| our love, and they need each other more than anything
| else. They need to be together."_
|
| I respect that, compared to the arguments that sex A is
| having a better time than B, or that one needs more
| support and focus than the other. We're all in the same,
| but different, shit.
| jpster wrote:
| > They have different problems than women have, but they
| don't have it better.
|
| How can I agree with this? Material conditions matter:
| whatever problem you have, being poorer will make it
| worse. Women have been earning less than men for decades,
| and most highly paid execs are men, not women.
| https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2023/03/01/the-
| end...
| jrflowers wrote:
| > We're all in the same, but different, shit.
|
| Can you elaborate on other cases where the words
| "different" and "same" are interchangeable?
| MonkeyClub wrote:
| "Same difference" /s
| sethammons wrote:
| It means that if you zoom out, things look more similar.
| Similar patterns, similar problems and solutions, but
| different components.
|
| All the various shades of red are all red. All news is
| engagement bate (if it bleeds, it leads), but every piece
| of news is different. You are in a forest in region X and
| I am in a desert in region Y, both could be dealing with
| the same problem of keeping warm at night. It's all
| different, and yet still the same.
| saaaaaam wrote:
| I want a sandwich to eat. You want sushi. We are both
| hungry.
| pessimizer wrote:
| It's the stupid law of averages.
|
| You may be the victim right now, and I may be the
| perpetrator, but over time you'll sometimes be the
| perpetrator (what, do you think you're _perfect_?) and I
| 'll sometimes be the victim (you don't think I suffer?),
| and _over time it all averages out._
|
| But just because you're the victim this time, you're
| getting all the sympathy. Is that fair?
| philipallstar wrote:
| I agree with that, although a giant amount of support and
| attention is one way, the sexes are going through
| different stuff into terms of the meta-problem of "how
| our problems are viewed".
| pessimizer wrote:
| > We're all in the same, but different, shit.
|
| We are not. This is the law of averages and is absolute
| poison. Sexism is not symmetrical. Men do not suffer from
| women like women suffer from men.
|
| Norah Vincent killed herself.
| sph wrote:
| She died by assisted suicide, for private reasons. No
| need to exaggerate to make a point. There's Twitter if
| you want to engage in that type of culture war.
| darubedarob wrote:
| Social creditscore based cloning and ai creche raising?
| deaux wrote:
| Over the whole population, I bet the difference between
| sexes is very small when it comes to what % posts online
| comment. You're saying "most social platforms" - what's
| the biggest one in the world? Probably still Facebook.
| Yet I'm fairly sure it has a higher female than male DAU,
| at least in the West.
|
| r/kpop has _3 million subscribers_. Take a look at the
| most followed accounts on Instagram. How many of them
| have female-dominated comment sections?
|
| > I am saying this as a guy we really don't understand
| the world women live in online or offline.
|
| You're saying this as a guy who doesn't understand the
| world the general population lives in, outside your
| highly-educated male-dominated tech bubble. You're
| considering only the spaces _you_ have been visiting for
| most of your life.
| ethbr1 wrote:
| Parent was saying that most men don't understand the
| amount of casual sexual harassment women are subjected to
| in unmoderated online spaces -- much more so than men
| receive.
|
| Which makes me sad.
|
| Apparently Y chromosome + enculturation = prerogative to
| send unsolicited photos of ones genitalia to random
| internet strangers.
| lazide wrote:
| No, rather both are on opposite sides of an equation, and
| being buried in competition from folks trying to solve
| their part of it in isolation.
|
| Women == get too much attention, often of the wrong type.
| How to get the right kind of attention?
|
| Men == not getting any attention, of any type. How to get
| some attention?
|
| So women either get 'the wrong kind' of attention, but
| plenty of it - or somehow figure out the magic of getting
| the right kind of attention? Not easy.
|
| And men work hard to get any attention, often overdoing
| it on the only way they can figure out - which usually
| has poor (but not zero!) results. Folks good at playing
| the game get _excellent_ results, however.
|
| Meanwhile, everyone is getting played by the folks in the
| middle.
|
| Notably, there are plenty of women taking advantage of
| the attention they get on Tinder. They just have no
| problem solving for what it works for, which is getting
| laid with near zero effort.
|
| The way this previously got figured out was a 'managed
| market' - arranged marriages. Religious/social rules,
| etc.
| ethbr1 wrote:
| I think we might come from different cultural
| expectations?
|
| In my book, it's reductive to sweep unsolicited sexual
| harassment under "attention", unwanted or otherwise.
|
| It's not rocket science: everyone deserves to be treated
| in a way that makes them feel comfortable and safe.
| lazide wrote:
| Sexual harassment (having been a target of it), is pretty
| much the definition of 'unwanted attention'. Targets
| typically just want to be left alone.
|
| It's also a crime in some places, not (!!!) in others, or
| called different things in other places depending on the
| details.
|
| For example, is sending an unsolicited dick pic on a
| dating app sexual harassment? Is getting felt up at work,
| with the implication 'or else'? Is being stalked by
| members of the opposite gender? Or having career
| advancements blocked by a lack of 'playing the game'?
|
| I can give you concrete examples from a number of
| cultures that each culture will write off as 'he/she/they
| were asking for it', or 'she/they/he deserved it', or
| 'it's just boys/girls being girls/boys.'.
|
| I've seen it up close and personal, and have lived it.
|
| The underlying 'attention economy' dynamic is still the
| same.
|
| Edit: meant to add - plenty of 80/20 also applies here of
| course (though more extreme). Top 1-2% men (esp. from
| earning or traditional looks perspective) deal with the
| same issues that top 50%-80% of women deal with, bottom
| 20% of women (from traditional looks perspective) deal
| with issues that 80-90% of men deal with, etc.
| ethbr1 wrote:
| Sure, there are misogynistic cultures out there, but that
| doesn't justify it from a categorical imperative
| perspective.
|
| If it's okay, then it's okay for all sexes. And I'm hard-
| pressed to name a world culture that's equally accepting
| and promoting of men-sexually-harassing-women and women-
| sexually-harassing-men.
|
| Can you?
|
| It feels like you're trying to make this an argument
| about statistics, when it's an argument about ethics and
| morality.
| lazide wrote:
| I never said it's okay at all. Where are you getting that
| from?
|
| Reality doesn't particularly care about one persons idea
| of right or wrong. And if you look at the planet, good
| luck coming up with a consistent definition either.
|
| I'm also 100% sure some random persons idea on the
| internet or what is moral or right has zero to do with
| the dynamics of dating or social interactions either.
|
| What sort of discussion do you want this to be about?
| deaux wrote:
| I know. Parent, along with the reply, also said that
| women as a result are much less active online, but that's
| a belief caused by a lack of grass touching.
|
| > "I know nobody that comments on online forums. Nobody
| would ever comment to strangers on the internet. It's too
| dangerous."
|
| > Most of her friends are probably women
|
| -> "Women don't comment on the internet (especially
| compared to men) because it's a hostile place".
| ethbr1 wrote:
| I think the implied difference from upthread was that
| women are less active online _in public, unmoderated
| spaces_ for the aforementioned reasons.
|
| It's no surprise they often use private and/or moderated
| spaces instead.
| stinkbeetle wrote:
| That old trope is pretty tired ("you can't possibly
| understand or talk about anything that you have not
| personally exactly experienced for yourself").
|
| Of course men don't know exactly what it's like to be a
| woman, just like one person does not know exactly what it
| is like to be any other person. You can still have an
| understanding and talk meaningfully about things, in many
| cases.
|
| The internet is not "dangerous for a woman", like you
| might say it is for a child. It can be much less
| dangerous because there is a very low risk of unwanted
| physical contact. I have never in my life "made an
| account" with identifiable names that are public on the
| internet. I don't post my sex, address, age, photos, bank
| account details, or mother's maiden name on internet
| forums either. So I have had exactly the same experience
| as a woman who had done the same thing in anonymous
| forums. I might even be a woman.
|
| An identifiable woman will obviously attract unsolicited
| disgusting and horrible comments and content of course,
| not just sexual but threats of violence too probably more
| than men do. This is not some high mystery or something
| so complicated that we're befuddled trying to understand
| it. Offline is a completely different story, but online?
| I can see messages people I know get.
|
| Online is about the safest a woman (or man) can be, and
| still talk and interact and collaborate and share with
| people. And I have been "stalked" (in an online anonymous
| account way), sent horrible graphic sexual and violent
| threatening things, for having differences of opinion.
| It's not nice, but it's not "dangerous" for me. I got
| ambushed and beat up walking in public one day -- offline
| -- _that_ was dangerous.
| AlecSchueler wrote:
| They didn't suggest men couldn't understand, they
| actually offered a way to help foster understanding by
| creating the false profile. The ones who won't understand
| are those who make no effort to understand, and that's
| quite reasonable to say.
|
| A woman's online safety relative to other spaces also
| misses the point about their online spaces being less
| safe than those of men; the suggestion wasn't that online
| spaces are the absolute most dangerous spaces for them.
|
| That said I would raise the point of how easy it is to
| dehumanise people online and how easy it is to quickly
| gather various data like work addresses etc.
| stinkbeetle wrote:
| No you're wrong, poster I replied to explicitly asserted
| that "men really don't understand" it. And I that doesn't
| miss the point, you claim it does but you aren't actually
| addressing any of what I wrote.
| TuringTest wrote:
| You're missing the point, and that's because you changed
| the goalposts from "men really don't understand" to
| "can't possibly understand"; a difference that in this
| context is significant.
|
| The OP was saying that men generally don't have the
| awareness of how women have it in the online world. The
| lack of understanding is because of not knowing about it,
| not because of a lack of capacity or empathy.
|
| In fact the post suggest that doing an experiment to get
| such awareness _would_ help in getting the understanding.
| stinkbeetle wrote:
| No no, read the full conversation. The context was about
| women being safe posting on internet forums, and the post
| I replied to _did_ say exactly this, "we really don't
| understand the world women live in online".
| xbmcuser wrote:
| Most men don't understand what women have to go through
| in everyday interactions and most women don't understand
| the same for men. And I think your analytical reaction to
| an emotional problem proves my point I feel.
| stinkbeetle wrote:
| > Most men don't understand what women have to go through
| in everyday interactions and most women don't understand
| the same for men.
|
| Probably true. This is entirely different from the
| previous assertion you made though.
|
| > And I think your analytical reaction to an emotional
| problem proves my point I feel.
|
| It doesn't, and you have not addressed anything I said
| which might make your point.
| laszlojamf wrote:
| funny story: I got the wife of a friend to install
| tinder, a couple of years back when I was dating. I was
| having a hard time getting matches, so I figured I'd see
| how the other side lives. She created an empty profile,
| with a blurry hippopotamus as a profile picture, and a
| single letter as name. Just "H". For hippopotamus. No
| bio. Within five minutes she was matching with every
| other guy she swiped right on. Which wasn't all of them,
| mind you. Within another five minutes, half of the guys
| she had matched with had messaged her. Regular looking
| guys. A lot of them had same opening line. "Did you know
| hippos are the most dangerous animal in the world?" After
| that, I got why I wasn't getting any replies >.<
| bambax wrote:
| You can try creating a profile as a woman. I did, five
| years ago, on a site that advertised itself as being
| dedicated to "affairs" between married people.
|
| All I said was I was 20, was red haired, and open minded.
| Nothing more, and no photo.
|
| Indeed, within a couple of minutes there were guys asking
| me if I liked to be whipped while handcuffed to a
| radiator, and offered to send me dick picks if I sent
| naked photos first. One of them added later "maybe I'm
| too direct for you, is that why you're silent?"
|
| I didn't respond to any message, but the offers kept
| coming. It's insane.
| tuesdaynight wrote:
| It's really telling how most replies to your message are
| about "sexual market" or online dating. That's all some
| men can think of when talking about women online.
| aj_hackman wrote:
| It's almost as if we desire each other.
| tuesdaynight wrote:
| If I summarized men online as watching pornography and
| following hot women on social media, people would
| (correctly) point out that it does not encapsulate what
| men do online as a whole. A lot of people do these
| things, but that is only part of their online experience.
| However, these replies are talking about OLD apps and
| sexual market as if women only do that online, which
| relates to the point of the original comment.
| throwaway173738 wrote:
| When other men post about that, all I hear is a desperate
| cry for help.
| tuesdaynight wrote:
| I understand their struggles because I lived through
| them. However, after I got better at OLD, I understand
| how it gets tiring hearing about it after a while,
| specially from people who are clearly on a bad path. For
| example, treating like a market (which I don't consider a
| good approach) but not accepting their current value is
| not enough for creating any demand. And nowadays, with
| the gym culture being mainstream, it's getting even
| harder if you don't even try to be more "valuable".
| ethagknight wrote:
| I never tell people I comment online. No one I know knows
| my Reddit username (as far as I know...). Few of my friends
| even know what HN is.
| ravikapoor101 wrote:
| I know. In fact, millions of us know your reddit username
| hluska wrote:
| What a weird comment.
| KPGv2 wrote:
| > Trust has eroded so much over the last two decades that
| most forums are either full of bots or full of annoyed and
| toxic people. It's very rare to find welcoming communities
| to newbies, and most of the ones I have discovered were
| offline connections.
|
| Tumblr is still doing pretty well on that front. I'm there
| for a fandom, and it's a super positive atmosphere where
| everyone just wants to make and talk about cool art.
| enos_feedler wrote:
| I think the idea that nobody would talk to strangers online
| is a bit too general. We are all mostly doing it here. I do
| it on reddit all the time in the same recurring subreddits
| that I've grown to trust. IRC was also pretty hostile back
| in the 90s. But again it depended on the communities. Just
| think you can't generalize the internet this way.
| mahirsaid wrote:
| True I would also add that this an exception to most
| social media platforms. I feel as there is a roundtable
| Everytime somone posts a something. I'm some how invited
| and listening, whether I comment or say something is
| entirely up to what I have to share. Argument or debate
| isnt so aggressiveas it's factual based for the most
| part.
| spoaceman7777 wrote:
| most people just don't tell other people about what they do
| online. it's very private.
|
| like, it's a running on joke on most social media websites
| that "i hope no one i know irl finds this account..."
|
| i think your friend is just overestimating her knowledge of
| her friends' lives
| stpedgwdgfhgdd wrote:
| This thread is working pretty decently. No bots so far
| pzo wrote:
| > she said: "I know nobody that comments on online forums.
|
| Yet she knows you and you and me are strangers talking to
| each other on this forum. I think we don't know even close
| friends what online communities people hang out - the
| reason she didn't know about you being on HN.
| omnifischer wrote:
| Niche forums still exist with real humans like for
| example, LTT or openZFS forums. But main stream ones like
| XDA, reddit or YouTube etc are totally ruined by AI.
| lazide wrote:
| I'm a man who had to do this because of stalkers. Literally
| serious, life damaging stalkers.
| midnitewarrior wrote:
| Reputation management is what it will take to bring trust
| back to all forms of media. It means creating a trusted
| identity that can be verified, and that the identity is
| known to be a real human with a reputation to lose if
| exposed as being a bot or otherwise untrustworthy.
|
| Unfortunately, for common people whose aim is not
| celebrity, this means handing over your privacy in order to
| have a voice.
|
| We can do this in our IRL circles of trust, people know you
| because they have met or interacted with you personally.
|
| Online, this means someone like Zuck creating a digital
| identity for us after we entrust them with our privacy, or
| some kind of open source complicated technology identifier
| like a cryptographically verified signature that is techno
| bro-free that will only be adopted or understood by tech
| literate.
|
| It's a dark day for genuine human interaction and trust.
| raducu wrote:
| > Reputation management is what it will take to bring
| trust back to all forms of media.
|
| Does that really work, though? I think it doesn't --
| think all the anti-vaccine type influencers -- their
| identities are known and they're ok with it.
|
| > It means creating a trusted identity that can be
| verified, and that the identity is known to be a real
| human with a reputation to lose if exposed as being a bot
| or otherwise untrustworthy.
|
| Surely this won't be used for nefarious reasons or to
| silence individuals like it's done in the UK or in the
| cancel culture actions. /s
| atombender wrote:
| Which Reddit thread was that, out of curiosity? And how do
| you know which commenters were bots?
| hopelite wrote:
| > how the thread was full of bots talking with other bots
|
| I am sure there are some dead giveaways, but how can you be
| sure about that?
|
| What I have experienced is both going into
| forums/discussions someone said was bots talking to bots,
| with no real clear indication by any of the many markers I
| am aware of that it was in fact bots; and also comments
| calling responses bots seemingly as a manipulative
| dismissal in response to something that was not the
| consensus or commonly approved position.
|
| I say that because my impression is that what is happening
| is a full on breakdown of civic discussion and conversation
| as a whole. The internet destroyed IRL public forums
| (pubs/bars, clubs, etc) and the draconian COVID policies
| took the death knell to many more, and now bots and the
| seemingly bigger issue of immediate distrust of everything,
| seems to also be destroying online conversations of all
| sorts.
|
| Yes, you'll be able to have small group meetings and maybe
| even voice/video only conversations, but that brings a
| whole host of other systems changes with it, especially as
| mass surveillance long surpassed anything the worst tyrants
| of history could have ever even dreamed of implementing. It
| all seems a shift into unhealthy territory as a
| civilization in general, including since essentially all
| western governments cannot be trusted by their own people
| anymore.
| spacecadet wrote:
| For what its worth. I recently joined "Carpokes" which is a
| free members only Porsche forum being run by a man hell
| bent on keeping it a friendly, bot-free, community. Its
| been great engaging in a forum again where I look at it
| maybe once a week.
| ileonichwiesz wrote:
| I think some of this is caused by the non-obvious
| mechanisms of how interactions on these platforms work.
|
| When you replied to a thread on a phpbb forum (or when you
| reply to this HN thread), your reply ,,lived" in that
| thread, on that forum, and that was that. The algorithm
| wouldn't show that reply to your dad.
|
| I remember liking a comment on Facebook years ago, and
| being horrified when some of my friends and family got a
| ,,John liked this comment, join the discussion!"
| notification served straight onto their timelines,
| completely out of context. I felt spied on. I thought I was
| interacting with a funny stranger, but it turned out that
| that tiny interaction would be recorded and rebroadcast to
| whomever, without my knowledge.
|
| Similarly, commenting on a youtube video was a much
| different experience when your youtube account wasn't
| linked to all your personal information.
|
| If you comment on a social media post, what's going to
| happen? How sure are you that that comment, however
| innocuous it may seem now, won't be dredged up 8 years by a
| prospective employer? Even if not, your like or comment
| it's still a valuable data point that you're giving to
| Zuckerberg or similar. Every smallest interaction enriches
| some of the worst people in the industry, if not in the
| world.
|
| The way I speak, the tone I use, the mannerisms I employ,
| they all change depending on the room I'm in and on the
| people I'm speaking to - but on modern social media, you
| can never be sure who your audience _is_. It's safer to
| stay quiet and passive.
| pants2 wrote:
| This is very well said! Probably also why social media
| has become so "fake" - back in the early days of
| Facebook, friends would talk to each other like friends.
| But after my religious aunt started seeing the comments I
| was leaving on a friend's pics, let's just say that
| stopped pretty quick.
|
| Now the only thing I would ever consider posting on
| Facebook is "What a beautiful day! Went for a great hike
| with my family and enjoyed nature."
| hiq wrote:
| > WhatsApp
|
| This one is on its way to becoming part of the social media
| ecosystem. That's what the "Updates" feature is.
|
| To get an idea of what it will look like, check out Instagram
| users who use it for both 1:1 messaging and social media
| (1:many) features. Which (again anecdotally) is widely used
| in younger generations.
|
| Few of my friends use Instagram or TikTok, but I think we're
| just outliers. I see many (young) users, all the time,
| whenever I'm on the train.
| emodendroket wrote:
| The brief period where I could check Facebook and reliably
| find someone's name I forgot or figure out how to contact
| people or invite them to a gathering was pretty nice. Now
| everyone's on fifty apps I don't use, or installed but never
| remember to check. Oh well. Sorry, too stimulating for me to
| join your Discord and get hundreds of notifications, most of
| which don't concern me at all.
| wslh wrote:
| 100% this. I remember when I took advantage of being online
| and not really competing in SEO, it was simply a matter of
| being real. At the time, I didn't realize it was just
| arbitrage: I was naturally in a space with fewer participants
| and most organizations didn't even know the rules yet.
|
| Now that advantage is completely gone, and I have to build
| business the way it's always been done in history: walking
| the streets while the online "broadcasted" world is a massive
| distraction.
| chasd00 wrote:
| My two kids absolutely do not trust open social media
| (thankfully). My 16 year old has a IMessage group with his
| friends as well as a discord and that's it. My 13 year old
| just uses iMessage with his friend group. My wife and I have
| taught them the risks of social media but never to the degree
| of their current distrust. They seem to have picked it ip on
| their own and want no part of X, insta, TikTok or anything
| else. They just want to talk to the friends they know.
| rootsudo wrote:
| This is 100% what I see too.
| xnx wrote:
| > If everybody bought only what they needed and ignored all
| the advertisements, our present level of economic activity
| would plunge.
|
| Shh! One must never question the ponzi scheme.
| Morromist wrote:
| I think you're correct to a degree. Instututions like social
| media and google ads were given a very generous chance, we
| gave them our money and attention, they gave us scams
| (especially facebook) and enshittification.
|
| The loss of faith in institutions takes quite a long time to
| occur but I think it will be quite a bit of effort to
| reverse.
| chistev wrote:
| > people don't want to be online, don't trust social media,
| don't really trust any media, and are living simple local
| lives with a small circle of friends that they get together
| with regularly in person.
|
| Not true. People post their entire lives (OK not entire, but
| the positive parts) on social media every day for the public
| to see.
| bdangubic wrote:
| > people don't want to be online, don't trust social media,
| don't really trust any media, and are living simple local
| lives with a small circle of friends that they get together
| with regularly in person.
|
| maaaaybe 2% of the people...
| vishnugupta wrote:
| > my anecdotal experience, it's moved to private, trust-based
| channels: iMessage, WhatsApp, email, face-to-face
| interactions
|
| I can attest to this based on my circle of friends and
| acquaintances. Email not so much but yeah WA etc. I think
| people are done putting content that matters to them on
| public platforms. So all we see now on FB/Insta is memes,
| influencers or ads.
| geysersam wrote:
| > If everybody bought only what they needed and ignored all
| the advertisements, our present level of economic activity
| would plunge.
|
| Why would it plunge instead of re-focusing on things that are
| intrinsically important?
| acka wrote:
| > Why would it plunge instead of re-focusing on things that
| are intrinsically important?
|
| Because a lot of the economy is focused on creating and
| maintaining a surplus[1]: make people buy things that they
| don't really need, make them discard and replace things
| that they've been convinced are no longer worth it.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Surplus%3A_Terrorized_int
| o_Bei...
| geysersam wrote:
| That's the current state yes. But that doesn't mean it's
| the only possible state. If that wasteful consumption
| disappear, would anyone be worse off? Hardly. But it
| would free up capacity to do more actually useful and
| valuable things. Sounds like a win to me.
| eru wrote:
| > Our 30-year bender of putting our lives online and blurring
| the public and the private has finally ended: people don't
| want to be online, don't trust social media, don't really
| trust any media, and are living simple local lives with a
| small circle of friends that they get together with regularly
| in person.
|
| That's a nice narrative, but its simplicity clashes with
| reality.
| itissid wrote:
| From my own experience as one grows over their 30's, or
| probably much older, to get to what you mentioned "money,
| houses, kids, friends", these ads pretty much don't target u
| very effectively any ways because one's priorities are
| shifted and you care more about other things than what the
| attention economy is all about. IOW these ads all about the
| people who have attention to spare.
| kiba wrote:
| I regularly do improv every week, which is essentially
| improvised live theater. So some time is spent not watching
| youtube or some sort of electronic intermediaries.
|
| Which is actually pretty odd, because improvisational comedy
| as we know it today is younger than the film industry.
| euroderf wrote:
| > In my anecdotal experience, it's moved to private, trust-
| based channels
|
| The Return of Content Curation. Peer-to-peer: research,
| retrieval, review.
| lelanthran wrote:
| > It's an interesting thought experiment to explore what it
| means if that actually is the new normal, and people are not
| consuming media or much of anything, or even if the people
| who are still addicted to social media are now tapped out and
| don't have any more disposable income left to spend.
|
| Even if they do have disposable income to spend, the lack of
| working ads means that they're getting their vendors in a
| different way.
|
| Some speculation follows: If advertisements as the main
| driver of sales went away, wouldn't that help smaller players
| gain a foothold against incumbents? Because, while incumbents
| can use their war chest to push all newcomers to page 2 of
| the results. If the awareness is coming from somewhere else,
| being on page 2 of the results _doesn 't matter anymore_,
| because _no one is even seeing page 1 of the results anyway!_
| mbrochh wrote:
| 100% this. I used to be a "digital native". I guess I have
| migrated away from my native lands and now I am a boring old
| local again.
| glenngillen wrote:
| You just reminded me that a few years ago I was doing some
| product research and one of the questions I'd ask people was
| what technical communities they turned to regularly. To keep
| up with news, if they had a question to ask they needed an
| answer to (this was pre-LLM hype days). HN, Reddit,
| StackOverflow, and various Slack communities dominated the
| results for people I spoke to in the USA. I was shocked by
| how much private WhatsApp groups dominated amongst the
| respondents from Africa (Nigeria representing the
| overwhelming majority of people who I spoke to).
|
| At the time it felt to me they were missing out on so many
| other useful resources. Maybe I was wrong. It's interesting
| to see things trending in a similar direction now.
| bayarearefugee wrote:
| > Most of my friends have money, houses
|
| Yeah, these are genuinely the only people worth advertising
| to anymore in a practical sense, if you are selling something
| non-essential.
|
| Because of the K shaped economy a lot of people in the US are
| spending whatever they make on bare essentials like rent,
| food and paying off debt like student loans and consumer
| debt.
|
| Advertise to those masses all you want, on whatever platforms
| you want, cant get water from a stone.
| baxtr wrote:
| This is a great analogy and approach!
|
| One rough heuristic I use is people-watching on the subway.
| Just a quick glance from a distance at their phones. What are
| they actually looking at? (Yeah I know it's a bit nosy...)
|
| I see: short-form video, WhatsApp/Messaging, YouTube long-
| format - in that order.
| GuB-42 wrote:
| > ...vertical, shortform video. Not sure how that plays out in
| terms of advertising...
|
| I have seen a comment about them being terrible for
| advertising, it looks like a "good" idea but it is not.
|
| The problem is that the attention of people watching these
| videos drop to almost zero, too much is happening in a too
| short amount of time, and as a result nothing is remembered,
| including the ads. It is a very good deal for whoever is
| monetizing this content, they show a lot of ads, plenty of
| revenue, but not for those who are paying for the ads. It is
| like subliminal messages, "good" idea, but not very effective.
| For ads to work, people need to pay attention.
|
| I don't know how ads in chatbots will turn out and what form it
| will take, but I think it is inevitable.
| SunshineTheCat wrote:
| For sure, I've been hesitantly awaiting ChatGPT's first
| "sponsored" reply, or at least, one that features a
| "sponsored" product or link.
| actionfromafar wrote:
| How would you know?
| GuB-42 wrote:
| They are probably going to make them obvious at first,
| like with Google search.
|
| But they can also make it more pernicious. For example by
| having companies pay them so that they can train their AI
| on their products, with regular updates. Not technically
| an ad, but the AI will be more aware of their products so
| that they are more likely to be recommended to the user.
| In other words, that's paying for the right to advertise
| to the AI rather than to advertise to consumers directly.
| jabwd wrote:
| probably, probably and more probably.
|
| Why would they ever make it obvious? It makes no sense.
| google just had the luck of political inaction, and
| eventually enshitified it further to the point where you
| might not know it was an ad.
| GuB-42 wrote:
| For the same reasons why Google did it in the first
| place.
|
| To not undermine trust into their product and because ads
| are lower quality than organic results, and by making
| them indistinguishable, it will make their product worse.
|
| The chatbot market is still competitive, and while users
| may tolerate ads alongside their answers, they may not
| tolerate lower quality answers (that is ads disguised as
| answers). With Google search, they can get away with it
| because they are still the best even with the
| enshitification.
|
| There is another reason why it is in their best interest
| to make it really obvious there are ads. Chatbots want
| you to pay directly, sometimes hundreds of dollars a
| month, they are not getting that kind of money with ads,
| so obnoxious ads are also a way to say "hey look, if you
| pay, you won't get ads". It doesn't mean ads won't make a
| comeback in paid tiers later, but not initially.
|
| So, yes, lots of "probably", but my guess would go
| towards the first ads being obvious and flashy rather
| than subtle.
| basch wrote:
| but google did erode trust in their product, and the
| american government went after them, so they "made it
| more obvious" which still really didnt change that most
| people dont care if something is sponsored and just look
| at the first result.
|
| it's something that continually needs to be reenforced
| again and again. somebody will be made example of.
| MonkeyClub wrote:
| Viber already does something similar, by catching on a
| keyword in your reply and splashing an ad.
|
| E.g., around here, "happy holidays" would splash an ad for
| Jacobs coffee.
| abustamam wrote:
| It's kinda interesting to see how advertising is evolving.
| I'll mindlessly scroll Instagram reels once in a while and
| every other reel is an ad with the sponsored tag, with an
| obvious thing being sold and advertised. A fair amount of
| non-"ads" are influencers or celebrities promoting a product
| on their personal IGs with the #ad.
|
| It's like advertising and social media are slowly merging
| together.
|
| I couldn't say how effective it is. Who knows how much they
| paid that influencer and how much revenue it drives. But it
| sure is common.
| Moto7451 wrote:
| > The tactics were different during the phonebook days (it was
| having your business start with the letter "A") as opposed to
| Google and will be different for the next thing as well.
|
| And to add to this, the dark pattern of the time was to
| register in the Phone Book as "AAA Your Real Business Name"
| which was exactly what my first job did.
| moralestapia wrote:
| Nice, I really enjoyed this interpretation of Jobs famous
| quote. Even getting into the character "I used to be a goalie"
| was pretty cool as well!
| underlipton wrote:
| >Look where everyone is looking and you'll find your answer
| there. It may not be in the same form as Google adwords, but
| the game is the same. Leveraging attention.
|
| The chill that ran down my spine when I realized that you and
| TFA think that the part people care about is Google as an _ad
| platform_ , and not as a way to access websites.
|
| Jesus fucking Christ, things are bleak.
| PantaloonFlames wrote:
| Do you know how Google makes money?
| underlipton wrote:
| I actually don't care. Most people don't. We care about the
| quality of service. Aside from Google employees and
| shareholders, I assume that most users would prefer a
| useful service that barely makes the company any money,
| versus a money-printer that's useless and a PITA to use.
| blueboo wrote:
| The recent Acquired ep on "Alphabet Inc" put it aptly: social
| media moved into Google's space, video (reels, "pivot to
| video"), and social media for socialising moved to message
| groups, iMessage/Whatsapp/Discord.
|
| Revenue-wise, video ads have always been the sun to print ads
| peanut m&m.
|
| Look where the pucks going then:
|
| Implication: ChatGPT as a realtime video avatar will hit the
| jackpot with ads, but not before. Count on the ChatGPT device
| having a screen for that reason
| neilv wrote:
| > _what matters a lot more than where the puck is, is where it
| 's going to be in about two seconds. But the next best thing is
| to know where the puck is now. If you can't see the puck then
| look at the players and as a last resort, look at the ref. 99%
| of the time they will be looking at the puck. Look where
| they're looking and soon enough it will appear._
|
| You could've gotten an entire management bestseller book deal
| out of that.
|
| But you gave away the useful part on an HN comment.
| sharinsights wrote:
| Interesting way to put it!
| cryptica wrote:
| It's moved to AI training sets. If you can't get your product
| into the training set of a popular model, it's game over.
| giardini wrote:
| So maybe the puck is on TV?
|
| Reason I say this is that _this guy_ (Bob Hoffman)
|
| https://www.bing.com/videos/riverview/relatedvideo?q=Ad+Cont...
|
| says people watch ads on TV not the Internet.
| noisy_boy wrote:
| Maybe magnifying the puck could be a good use case for AR
| glasses
| KellyCriterion wrote:
| > The tactics were different during the phonebook days (it was
| having your business start with the letter "A") as opposed to
| Google and will be different for the next thing as well. <
|
| Interesting! I thought, they did it because of the stock-item-
| list order :-D
| makeitdouble wrote:
| This is an analogy that is very appealing, which is precisely
| why I feel it sends the fundamentally wrong message.
|
| There is not one single puck in the web search field, and we
| actively don't want that situation in the first place (want no
| monopoly or cartel). There should be at least 2 if not a ton
| more. Everyone focusing their attention and resource on a
| single thing is the absolute worst case scenario.
|
| I also hope the future of search is not where every existing
| player is looking at. That means there is no disruption
| happening, money straight dictates the winner and nothing truly
| innovative is expected.
|
| Even "skating where the puck will be" is essentially following
| someone else's play. It can be fine, but I'd prefer to focus on
| the person actually acting on the puck, where they're trying to
| lead the game.
| goosebumps wrote:
| So, The King is dead long live the King!
| instagraham wrote:
| I know this might seem reductive but when you say "look where
| everyone is looking", the answer hasn't really changed since
| the 2010s -- it's our phones.
|
| (and to some extent, monitors if you account for the amount of
| time 9-5 people spend on their work laptops or screens. desktop
| is not dead but that's another matter)
|
| The hot apps are for now, chatbots and vertical shortform
| platforms. We know advertisers get much better bang for their
| buck marketing where the influencers are.
|
| Google is "dead" because search advertising is much worse at
| figuring you out and showing you stuff when you're not
| necessarily looking for it. But Google can easily advertise
| where the eyeballs are - your phones.
|
| We must remember that enshittification is an ongoing process
| and Google has the power to reach billions of people, one
| shitty update at a time.
|
| From their POV, it definitely feels like a miss that they don't
| own a successful and dedicated social media platform. Maybe
| they will make another foray into it.
| lelanthran wrote:
| As someone who is completely disinterested in sports[1], I
| _like_ this analogy.
|
| -----------------------------
|
| [1] Watching them, anyway. I like playing, but I get almost
| sleepy-coma-like boredom by watching it. Probably a personality
| deficiency, but meh.
| ruslan wrote:
| Ice hockey player also here. Defence. Pretty neat analogy with
| Google. :)
| pankajdoharey wrote:
| Google is far from dead we need grounding of truth, and from
| what i hear they already have perplexity like answer engine in
| testing internally.
| darubedarob wrote:
| Shortfirm video generated based upon ai search?
| raincole wrote:
| > Look where everyone is looking
|
| In other words, Google. Google search grows every year despite
| people are dead sure it's "dead."
|
| [0]: https://sparktoro.com/blog/new-research-google-search-
| grew-2...
| autoexec wrote:
| Google search sucks and it's sucking worse all the time.
| Nobody knows what else to use though so people keep using it.
| The results are mostly spam and AI slop. If a searcher has to
| search several times to get information they used to get with
| a single query suddenly the average number of searches per
| searcher spikes and it looks like growth I guess. Worse, lots
| of people are trusting the AI results which is bound to lead
| them astray with lies and eventually be corrupted with
| ads/paid manipulation. For now though, the results Google
| returns are also mostly AI generated crap so at least people
| save themselves a click.
| microtherion wrote:
| > From what I can tell, everyone seems to be looking at
| chatbots
|
| A friend recently explained to me that this trend is awful for
| newer businesses trying to get into a niche:
|
| * Chatbots give a lot of weight to Wikipedia in their training
| data.
|
| * Wikipedia demands "notability" for pages being created.
|
| * So non-incumbent businesses have a hard time getting on
| Wikipedia, and chatbots keep recommending incumbents.
| autoexec wrote:
| Eventually the solution for this will be you paying the AI
| company to promote your products or suppress your
| competitors. Even now, chatbots are a terrible way to get
| product recommendations. They're trained on way too much ad
| copy and too many bullshit reviews. As ever, the best thing a
| company can do to advertise is simply to be excellent at what
| they do and be very affordable.
| alexpotato wrote:
| It wouldn't surprise me if physical advertising, as mentioned in
| the post, makes a comeback. Especially coupled with magazines etc
| apparently making a comeback too.
|
| Also, a lot of ads now have QR codes so you can tell which
| physical ads are driving versus traffic versus those that aren't.
|
| e.g. the "half of my advertising is a waste but I don't know
| which half" is not true anymore if you are using specific QR
| codes per location/advertisement.
| hyperman1 wrote:
| I assume physical still works. LIDL closed their shop in our
| neighborhood, so we stopped going unless their paper ads were
| interesting. Then they decided with a lot of fanfare to go all-
| in on digital, and as they decided we should want their ads we
| should install their app. Well, naughty us, we didn't. We
| simply stopped shopping there completely. A few months later,
| the paper ads are back (with a lot less fanfare), and no other
| shop followed their lead, so I assume LIDL was hurting hard.
| observationist wrote:
| Oh no, adtech is dying. I guess we'll all have to compete through
| quality of products and services and not gaming a rigged system
| designed to reward anything that maximizes the profit of the
| global surveillance adtech machine.
|
| This gives me warm fuzzy feelings. It's nowhere near good, but
| this is better than it was.
| btbuildem wrote:
| I wish that were true, but I don't think it's dying, I think
| it's metastasizing.
|
| Ads will ingress deeper into what were trusted layers --
| embedded in text and video in a seemingly organic way. GenAI
| tools make this possible -- to splice a 20 second mention of
| something into a stream, or rewrite a paragraph injecting a
| subtle product placement.
|
| We will develop new mental antibodies for this, we always do.
| Silver lining of sorts -- while short-form video content is
| making people illiterate, perhaps literacy will become a calm
| refuge once again.
| observationist wrote:
| The biggest problem is platform scale, imo - platforms grow
| so big as to make the network effects confer an
| invulnerability to regulation or moderation, and then get
| exploited to squash competition, either through legal action,
| acquisition, suppression, or sometimes simple inertia.
| Ubiquitous reach and total control over the platform made it
| irresistible to bad faith operators, politicians, activists,
| and rent-seekers. AI has a good shot at completely
| fragmenting those technologies at a fundamental level.
|
| We should be resisting any ad injection into ChatGPT, Claude,
| etc maintaining a firewall between what's acceptable in a
| paid product and what's not, and as long as open source
| Chinese models roughly keep parity, the big US labs can't
| pivot hard into exploiting users for ad revenues. Private
| hosting and bots are almost as good as ChatGPT with UI and
| UX, within a few percentage points as good in capabilities,
| and the pressure to go elsewhere is minimal. If they drive
| off a whole lot of independence minded users, they risk
| creating a community of people who'll create a very slick,
| workable alternative, while paying only a tenth or less what
| the frontier labs charge. As long as that dynamic cripples
| the efforts of big labs to enshittify, there's a good shot
| that the entire ecosystem fundamentally evolves to something
| better. I hope, anyway - it could just explode into a
| grotesque mess of user exploitation and yet more of the same.
|
| I think at some point you'll be able to have good-enough AI
| on your phone to carry everywhere you go, and it'll do all
| the ad filtering and opsec and digital hygiene for you -
| everyone will have a high quality competent tech nerd in
| their pocket looking out for their best interests, and it
| won't just be a niche rebel nerd thing anymore.
| pixl97 wrote:
| >good-enough AI on your phone to carry everywhere you go
|
| Eh, if Google/Apple allows you to put it on your phone,
| which is highly doubtful at this point. Google would
| outright directly ban that kind of competition in the name
| of security. Apple would just ban an AI like that in the
| name of security even though it doesn't actually compete
| with them.
| bsder wrote:
| > to splice a 20 second mention of something into a stream
|
| I'm seeing the start of this already, AFAICT. There have been
| a couple of YouTube videos with embedded ads that YouTube
| flipped over to a YouTube ad at _exactly_ the point the
| sponsor part started.
|
| Google is almost certainly getting ready to use AI to splice
| out in stream ads and replace them with Google ads.
| elbci wrote:
| I love your vibe but unfortunately I don't share your optimism.
| The interregnum between monopolies gets exponentially shorter
| as the money printing gets exponentially faster. What was maybe
| 20 years of "OK-ish" after say WW2 got down to a few years in
| the 90s when internet was worth browsing, from Google to AI
| could be just months..
| fidotron wrote:
| I love knocking on Google, and have been doing so for longer than
| it was cool, but this sounds more like the business is no longer
| attractive than Google having become suddenly wildly ineffective.
|
| My anecdotal evidence is the smarter normies are increasingly
| allergic to screens. They only use them to watch stuff they hear
| about by some other means, but parents, for example, look for any
| excuse to keep their kids off the Internet, and largely they're
| better for it.
| tsunamifury wrote:
| It's googles fault no one wants my product! It certainly can't
| be the basics of demand!
|
| - most SMBs I ever work with.
| pixl97 wrote:
| > the basics of demand
|
| If you've been around longer than internet advertising you
| realize the basics of demand have changed pretty
| considerably.
|
| Let's go back to 1980 and say that you have widget X that
| person A would absolutely buy if they saw/heard it
| advertised. They live in Podunk Minnesota that had coverage
| by 3 radio stations, 3 TV stations, and 2 newspapers. But you
| have no idea what media they actually consumed to target the
| right one.
|
| Right now you're at the point you would have to contact at
| least 8 different media companies for ad spend if you wanted
| coverage. Most likely you'd cut it down to one of each, and
| maybe a billboard. This said, the cost for just this little
| area is going to be wildly expensive! Ads were huge money,
| and this is just for one little town.
|
| These costs were slightly lower for large corporate buyers,
| but not that much because as you go back farther and farther
| you were typically dealing with more companies before
| consolidation. Being an SMB was great in this market in a
| local area because you weren't competing with the world.
|
| Fast forward to now and you compete with the entire world at
| any given moment. In the West we've forgotten about
| competition and allowed a huge portion of our economic
| product to consolidate to a small number of companies. This
| is very apparent in advertising as the old media entities are
| dead or far more expensive than you'll ever recoup with the
| competition out there. Instead you're looking at
| Google/Reddit/Facebook style ads, but with that kind of ad
| you again, complete with the entire world. If your ad
| actually does good and drive business, then Google metrics
| will feedback to players watching the market and they will
| advertise products in the same space driving up competition
| and the base costs for ads. The supply from your competitors
| is practically unlimited which will drive your profits to
| almost zero unless you happen to have something very special.
|
| Welcome to the K shaped economy, where the big get bigger and
| the small die.
| jrjeksjd8d wrote:
| One anecdote, but I have a brick and mortar business and Adwords
| leads have fallen off a cliff year over year. Since AI stuff
| started getting pushed harder we've gotten fewer impressions and
| fewer conversions. Some of it is economic headwinds but also
| Google is just a black box we throw money into and pray it will
| send us business.
| tomjuggler wrote:
| Trying something different myself. Enough is enough, I have
| said goodbye to AdWords for good now I think
| tensor wrote:
| I think it's time for a new way of discovering products. My ideal
| would be some sort of site that I can go to, to find services and
| products in my local area. There could also be national and
| international sections, with user ranked news of new interesting
| products in given categories.
|
| For example, with video games I can go to sites like
| www.rockpapershotgun.com or others, or forums related to games,
| to see what the new products coming out. That's perfect in my
| world. No ads in my search, no ads in my email, no ads in youtube
| or whatever. But when I'm interested in seeing what's new, I can,
| on my terms, go and check out the new products.
| austinpena wrote:
| A few things to determine if what you're experiencing is actually
| Google "being dead"
|
| 1. Check your search volume. Use Google Trends or the method I
| will share below. 2. Check how you spent in December vs how you
| spent during a previously great time. Understand if it's a volume
| issue or a conversion issue 3. See if anyone new entered your
| auction. If they did, find out what they're saying
|
| -- 1a) Search Volume
|
| Checking search volume: In the era of broad match, this is one of
| the most underrated approaches to diagnosing issues. Take a look
| at your `search exact match impression share` relative to your
| impressions on a few of your top keywords. Then measure out if
| search volume for your business is actually decreasing. Then, use
| the following rubric to diagnose futher:
|
| 1. Not decreasing. Move on to the next item 2. 5-10% decrease and
| competitive auction. If you have a decrease AND a competitive
| auction, a 20% drop in efficiency could be explained. 3. 5-10%
| decrease and a not-so-competitive auction. If this is the case,
| the drop in volume may not be what's causing your issues.
|
| -- 1b) Click volume
|
| Check your exact match impression > click rate. Similar to the
| last approach, this helps diagnose if there are SERP feature
| changes which could decrease the amount of clicks you're
| receiving despite demand remaining flat.
|
| If this is the case, take a look at the SERP and find the new
| winners.
|
| -- 2) Segment comparison
|
| Compare December YOY and see what changed. Are you serving to a
| different age range? Different search term mix? Increased spend
| to search partners? Are the headline combinations which are
| serving different?
|
| -- 3) Auction changes
|
| Have you checked your auction insights? Are new competitors being
| more or less aggressive? If so, what are their headlines? Are
| they offering an easier booking experience than you are?
|
| And... if Google is actually dead, you might try:
|
| 1. Meta ads. Turn off audience network, make sure you've got the
| conversions API set up, and see what happens. Expect leads to be
| lower intent. Make your creative dead simple. "If you're looking
| for kid party entertainment in Northdene..." Start with $20/day
| optimizing for leads.
|
| 2. Improve your form. I see typeform-style-forms do better than
| the long one you have.
|
| 3. (Maybe) If you don't already track `closed (won)` conversions
| into your google ads account, that could help. I find when I
| start tracking which searches turn into deals, I can restructure
| my account to de-prioritize the junk leads.
|
| 4. (Maybe) Add a soft form to each of your service pages.
| Basically an embedded form which starts by asking people softball
| questions like "How Old Are The Kids At Your Party." Once people
| start a form they're much more likely to complete it, even if the
| questions are very basic.
|
| 5. (Maybe) Add a way to give a phone call. Phone call leads
| convert 30-50% better in my experience. But, this isn't an option
| for every
| tomjuggler wrote:
| Thanks for the info. Will definitely be doing a post mortem
| after I finish scrambling for new work opportunities
| mattmaroon wrote:
| I work in private events and the answer is definitely Facebook.
| Facebook ads have been better for quite some time. Targeting is a
| harder but also the CPCs are a lot lower so you can spray and
| pray a bit more.
| tomjuggler wrote:
| Thanks, we tried them before but many years have passed and
| things have changed. Our new Instagram campaign just bore fruit
| in the first hour (4 WhatsApp enquiries with $1.50 spent!),
| will be looking at FB also
| wiesbadener wrote:
| I was intrigued to see this trending, because it seems to
| contradict what Google has been saying on earnings calls.
|
| It also made me wonder if this reflects conditions for
| individuals / SMEs rather than large corporate accounts. And
| I didn't expect the story to come out of Durban - I would've
| guessed the US.
|
| I haven't been to Durban lately, but my understanding is that
| the broader SA economy has been under pressure (high
| unemployment, etc.), and that can hit smaller/local
| businesses first. So it could simply be a rough patch for
| your market right now.
|
| That said, if you're seeing campaigns picking up on other
| platforms, you might be onto something, at least for your
| niche.
|
| Looking at your website/content: you're selling an
| experience, and this seems like a product that really
| benefits from strong visual marketing. Make it easy for
| someone new to "get it" in the first 10 seconds.
|
| Three ideas: 1) Ride local trends: build demos around what's
| currently hot in SA/Durban and showcase that with the
| Magicpods in short, punchy videos. 2) Consider adjacent use
| cases: beyond magic shows, this could be compelling for
| advertising, especially at conventions (e.g., ICC). That
| might be a natural expansion path if event bookings are
| slowing. 3) Try Airbnb Experiences, or local platforms, like
| daddysdeals.co.za :-)
| crystal_revenge wrote:
| > I am AI assisted, very fast!
|
| I sometimes think people really don't understand the value-add of
| AI (and I say this as someone on the less hyperbolic end of the
| "AI-hype" spectrum). If your service to me can be accomplished by
| AI "very fast"... I don't need _you_ anymore. AI provides a
| generic problem solving interface where non-experts can leverage
| the power of the AI to solve a task they previously couldn 't
| have so long as they can describe it well.
|
| I've had multiple cases at work or other places where I've been
| presented with something as the stakeholder and been told "I used
| AI to make this!" Great! Next time _I 'll_ use AI to make it and
| save myself the overhead/cost of having work with someone else. I
| don't see a lot of value in explaining a problem _to you_ so that
| you can then re-explain it to an LLM.
|
| When people show me they've used AI to complete a task I used to
| have to do I'm delighted, and, more often then not, proven my
| value when they come back weeks later asking for help untangling
| the mess they've made. But, I'm equally delighted in the cases
| where they are successful using AI to replace things I used to be
| tasked with. Despite the AI hype, I find myself busier than ever.
| dnw wrote:
| The author should try Google Local Services Ads instead of Google
| Ads. I think Google cannibalizes Google Ads with LSA.
| tomjuggler wrote:
| Thank you I will look it up, never heard of those
| butler14 wrote:
| Google and Google Ads are not one and the same.
|
| The jump from the op's "i screwed up my google ads campaigns" to
| "Research shows that many young people are getting their
| information from short video platforms like TikTok"....
|
| i mean, c'mon
| JKCalhoun wrote:
| If Google Ads was cut off from Google, would they still be
| profitable?
| handfuloflight wrote:
| Your campaign on Google is dead.
| travisgriggs wrote:
| > I am AI assisted, very fast!
|
| This feels like one of the most surreal things I have read in a
| while, believing that the blog is authentically written by a real
| person. I can't put my finger on why.
|
| I do feel like it's maybe time to rewatch BSG.
| tomjuggler wrote:
| lol I meant coding, can't stand AI slop web content myself. I
| wrote all the words - what's BSG?
| travisgriggs wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battlestar_Galactica_(2004_TV_.
| ..
| pixl97 wrote:
| We fought the toasters, and the toasters won.
| verdverm wrote:
| my vote is for ATProto
|
| let's take back the interwebs and have a single account where all
| apps store their data about you, which you can move around and
| also swap out clients for any data without companies blocking you
| kachurovskiy wrote:
| Try contacting YouTube creators in your area. Much more cost
| efficient than any other kinds of ads especially if you pick
| channels with your target audience IF you can actually get
| creators to promote you (most won't reply).
| mmmBacon wrote:
| I think Google's search and ad business are at risk. Search has
| become such a mess that it's become harder and harder to use to
| find quality results. It reminds me of Yahoo before Google in a
| way.
|
| I'm using ChatCPT or equivalent for 60% of my searches. The
| remaining 40% is just muscle memory. Of that 40% about half the
| time I regret using Google search due to the difficulty of
| finding the relevant result.
|
| I can see search users moving to ChatGPT or such and Googles Ad
| business suffering as a result and a general downward spiral of
| Google search.
| akoboldfrying wrote:
| You don't think putting ads in Gemini output has crossed
| Google's mind?
|
| I've never understood the "AI is eating search! Google is
| dead!" theory. The specific mechanism (whether that be keyword
| search, LLM conversation or something else) by which users
| describe their needs to a company _doesn 't matter_, all that
| matters is that (a) the company makes that mechanism available
| for free, (b) it does a good job of satisfying the user's need
| and (c) ads can be smuggled into it.
| lelanthran wrote:
| > You don't think putting ads in Gemini output has crossed
| Google's mind?
|
| What do you think the mandatory youtube link in every
| conversation is, if not a link to an ad?
|
| They have successfully monetised chatbot AI, while no one
| else has.
| mmmBacon wrote:
| Why do you assume I don't think that? Of course it will
| happen at some stage. But my comment wasn't addressing the
| future, but now. Effectively ChatGPT is buying market share
| by not having ads; that's clear. What's not clear is whether
| there's a more innovative model than inserting low-quality,
| mostly irrelevant ads into the body of the chat they way
| Google and YouTube do it today. In a Chat agent, advertising
| also will be an issue for credibility of results. So I think
| the ad model as we know it will need to change.
| theli0nheart wrote:
| This is a temporary situation. Think of it like how Napster let
| you download any song for free for a few years. For a while,
| all you heard was how the Internet was going to put all
| musicians out of business. Obviously that didn't happen.
|
| The same will happen here. It's not like OpenAI has built a
| search engine; every time they need a live search they hit Bing
| (please correct me if I'm wrong) and get the results from
| there. No matter how you slice it, search companies who
| actually supply the data are going to get reimbursed, and since
| most users don't pay $20 / month, that likely means ads
| everywhere.
|
| Also, Google's AI overviews are getting very good. Initially it
| was pretty inaccurate, but now it's basically 95% as good as
| ChatGPT, and faster. Most normies I talk to think it's good
| enough.
| cronelius wrote:
| psa, "is comprised of" is almost never correct. "comprises" means
| "is composed of". so when people say X is comprised of Y they
| really mean "X comprises Y" or "X is composed of Y"
| rickcarlino wrote:
| The way people get information online is changing rapidly.
|
| I run a local makerspace. It is not quite the same thing as a
| local entertainment business, but there are certainly some
| similarities. We are local, and we are very event-based.
|
| For the last 10 years, the way we would get new members was to
| host Meetups. Meetups are slowly bringing in fewer members. When
| I ask tour guests how they found out about us, they recently
| started saying that they found us on ChatGPT. They did not know
| what a makerspace was but they explained their problem and
| ChatGPT presented our space as a local solution. This has been
| good for us because we offer something useful to the community
| but struggle to explain it. In the old days of search, this was a
| problem because many people were not using the correct phrase to
| describe what we are. That doesn't matter anymore.
|
| How does a local business optimize for this though? I am not
| sure.
| layer8 wrote:
| The question is how LLMs will get that kind of information in
| the future, if not from the web. By scraping TikTok and
| Discords?
| rickcarlino wrote:
| I anticipate a cottage industry of "AI optimization" types
| similar to the current SEO crowd. I have not seen too much of
| it yet, though.
| pixl97 wrote:
| >By scraping TikTok and Discords?
|
| One of two ways. Yes, by scraping, even it it requires users
| to 'sell' their own browsing data to the AI companies because
| places like Discord lock them out.
|
| Or, the other way is for particular event organizers to pay
| directly for their services to be advertised/incorporated
| into the LLM itself. Those that don't pay get more and more
| of their data erased from the LLM maybe?
| slfnflctd wrote:
| Oof, that second one is _ugly_. Like Yelp style.
| arccy wrote:
| instead of hosting a website you host... SERVICE.md,
| BUSINESS.md, .... or maybe a MCP server describing what you
| provide /s
| hadlock wrote:
| Business directory for most of the telephone era was simply
| known as "the yellow pages". About once a quarter we get a
| color mailer with all the local plumbers, fencing companies,
| electricians etc. for homeowners who want a company that is
| actually licensed and insured.
| socalgal2 wrote:
| Are you using "Meetups" to mean Meetup.com or just events in
| general? Meetup.com has completely gone to shit. Trying to find
| an event is super frustrating. They show the same events over
| and over. They don't enforce categorization. People mark online
| only events as in person and the platform doesn't care. They
| also started trying to charge users (people looking to attend
| events) instead of only planners (people hosting events) so it
| drives people away.
|
| Sadly I don't know any better platform but it seems ripe for a
| new entry.
| rickcarlino wrote:
| I meant both, and you are correct 100% that meet up has
| entirely gone to shit.
| daedrdev wrote:
| Yeah that is my experience entirely with meetup these days
| Timwi wrote:
| There is a meetup-like platform called Spontacts here in
| Germany. I suspect that for the moment it is only available
| for meetups in Germany, but who knows, maybe it'll expand
| internationally if it's successful.
| alex_suzuki wrote:
| What's super depressing about Meetup.com are those Modal
| popups that want you to sign up for Pro. You can't dismiss
| them. It's like they're intentionally destroying their
| product to squeeze the last remaining dollars from their
| users, which I assume are becoming fewer and fewer.
| rishikeshs wrote:
| Have a look at llms.txt
| fairity wrote:
| Surprised to see this upvoted because the takeaway is completely
| incorrect, and based on the anecdotal evidence of one advertiser.
|
| As someone who spends seven figures every month on Google ads,
| what's much more likely to be happening here is that the
| individual advertiser is either getting outcompeted or they're
| executing ads poorly.
|
| Google ads revenue in the US continues to grow every quarter.
| And, since advertisers will generally invest in ads until the
| last dollar is break even, it's likely that the total value
| advertisers unlock through Google ads is growing as well. Whether
| that's true or not, the notion that value generated for
| advertisers is "dead" is absurd.
| JKCalhoun wrote:
| > and based on the anecdotal evidence of one advertiser
|
| The author admits as much.
| crazygringo wrote:
| The question is, why has this post been massively upvoted?
|
| It contains zero useful information. Just somebody struggling
| with AdWords and they don't know why. Not helpful.
|
| I have to assume the vast majority of upvotes are based on
| the title alone, assuming it's about Search? A large
| proportion of top level comments are about Search too.
| Depressing.
| nrhrjrjrjtntbt wrote:
| The "Google is dead" title in the AI age, probably.
| Scarblac wrote:
| Things are upvoted because people feel like discussing the
| subject. The actual article is usually just a conversation
| starter, if it's read at all.
| consumer451 wrote:
| I am fairly confident that the answer is that most people
| vote based on the title/headline without ever clicking
| through. I am likely guilty of this as well sometimes. It
| takes discipline to avoid this behaviour.
|
| > We find that most users do not read the article that they
| vote on, and that, in total, 73% of posts were rated (i.e.,
| upvoted or downvoted) without first viewing the content.
| [0]
|
| In this case, my guess is that people are noticing less and
| less utility from Google search, and that was why they
| voted like they did.
|
| This same phenomenon is what gives newspaper editors far
| more power than the journalists, as it is the editors who
| not only decide the stories to be covered, but even more
| importantly, they decide the headline. Most people just
| scan the headlines while subconsciously looking for
| confirmation of their own biases.
|
| [0] https://arxiv.org/pdf/1703.05267
| consumer451 wrote:
| _meta comment separated for its own discussion_
|
| I tried to find that paper via google search first, and I
| failed after 3 different searches. I then opened my not-
| important-stuff LLM, chatgpt.com, and found it in 3
| interactions, where in the 3rd I made it use search.
| Chatbots with search are just so good at "on the tip of
| my tongue" type things.
|
| Google is in such a weird position because of their bread
| and butter legacy UX * scale. This has to be the biggest
| case of innovators dilemma of all time?
| arccy wrote:
| then you have people complaining that search is no longer
| a keyword match when people claim to know exactly what
| they want...
| consumer451 wrote:
| Totally! Hence the dilemma.
|
| Google.com has "AI mode," and it tries to intelligently
| decide when to suggest that based on a search query. I
| could have likely clicke AI Mode on google.com once it
| gave me a crap SERP response, and used that to find the
| same thing. But, I instinctively just went to chatgpt.com
| instead. I am not a total moron, I use gemini, claude,
| and gpt APIs in the 2 LLM enabled products that I am
| working on...
|
| However, just last week I noticed that the AI mode
| default reply for some queries was giving me just
| horrible AI mode replies. Like gpt-3.5 quality wrong
| assumptions. For the first time I saw google.com as the
| worst option. I cannot be the only one.
|
| I think that I might understand the problem. Google has
| the tech, but as a public company they cannot start to
| lose money on every search query, right? The quarterly
| would look bad, bonuses would go down. Same reason ULA
| can't build Starship, even if they could and wanted to.
| However, OpenAI can lose money on every query. SOTA
| inference is not cheap.
| JKCalhoun wrote:
| Massively? I can't know. I read the article and upvoted 1)
| because it suggests a rocky road ahead for Google and 2)
| because, as you may have guessed, I dislike ads, dislike
| Google's complicity in ads, and so am happy to discuss.
|
| I happen to in fact think we have reached an inflection
| point. Whether "Google is dead" depends probably a good
| deal on where _they_ go now.
| zrn900 wrote:
| Because if you go to /r/ppc or /r/googleads, you will see
| that the experience of the majority is exactly the same.
| paxys wrote:
| Posting "Google is bad" will pretty much always get you to
| the top 5 spots on this site.
| hermitcrab wrote:
| I run a small software business and I know various other people
| who run small software businesses. We are all pretty much
| agreed that that Google Ads have been less and less profitable,
| year or year. Most of us have now given up on PPC ads.
| aucisson_masque wrote:
| Agree, ran a business for years and I've seen the slow but
| steady decline of Google ads.
|
| Ultimately I relied more on returning customer and mouth to
| mouth recommendations, kept lowering the Google ads budget.
| theshackleford wrote:
| And equally I know many people running non software
| businesses whose experience is the complete opposite of yours
| and Google ads has and continues to drive the majority of
| their revenue.
|
| I expected them to start seeing a hit or significant decline
| by now, and even told them as such but in what I honestly
| find surprising, it's not come to pass.
| qingcharles wrote:
| I've run Google PPC on-and-off for 20+ years. It's definitely
| way harder to make money with them now, and the complexity is
| now through the roof, which makes it way harder for a novice
| to optimize their campaign. I steer small businesses away
| because it's too easy to screw up and lose your shirt on PPC
| without professional help.
| busyant wrote:
| > seven figures every month on Google ads
|
| What are you advertising?
| doyouevensunbro wrote:
| Either Claude or OpenAI, going by all the ads I see.
| Culonavirus wrote:
| Basically any online shop with decent volume / revenue is
| going to be spending 100s of thousands if not millions of
| dollars a month on Google ads. (Not just Google Ads, also
| Facebook ads etc.)
|
| It used to be possible to get by with "organic" search
| traffic and some SEO... but google search looked completely
| different back then. Now when you look for something it's an
| AI box, products (google merchant) ad box, ad (promoted
| results) box, ... then there's a couple of (like two) results
| that are "organic" (whatever that means these days) and
| that's it. And we all know that when you want to hide
| something, you put it on the second page of google search
| results. So the space for doing online business "ad free" has
| been squeezed out over time.
|
| And the K shaped economy is totally true in this ecomm space.
| These days say 15% of your revenue gets eaten by ads, but you
| also have say 50% higher revenue overall. At some point it
| becomes a margin game and the bigger players will start
| squeezing out the smaller ones because the biggers ones can
| operate on tighter margins (making up the difference with
| volume) which the smaller ones simply can't afford. The
| difference in operating costs of an eshop that sells 10000
| items a month is not that different than that of an eshop
| selling 100000 items a month (i.e. not 10x, more like 2-3x).
| But selling 10x items gives you the volume you need to be
| able to lower your margins and put the difference into ads.
|
| BTW all of this is handled by professional online marketing
| people with increasingly widespread use of AI so there's no
| room for the small players to make it big while not being
| optimized to the gills. This is why most small advertisers
| are seeing small or negative returns while Google and Meta
| are making tens if not hundreds of billions in ad revenue...
| The ads work, but the amounts you need to spend and the
| optimization level you need to have is in a completely
| different galaxy than it was 10 years ago.
| levocardia wrote:
| Your experience is 100% compatible with the linked article: the
| seven-figure spender is presumably running a much higher margin
| business and can scale narrowly profitable ads much more
| effectively. The natural equilibrium for a perfect ad market is
| for the ad spend to be exactly equal to increase in revenue: a
| perfectly efficient market with no profit for the advertiser.
| Google (and Meta et al) are so good that for many SMBs they are
| completely cornered at the zero-point: spend as much as you can
| just to stay in the same place financially.
| ninthcat wrote:
| > The natural equilibrium for a perfect ad market is for the
| ad spend to be exactly equal to increase in revenue
|
| Not quite, the equilibrium is when marginal ad spend results
| in no change to profit. The ad spend at equilibrium should
| result in increased profit compared to no ad spend.
| akoboldfrying wrote:
| He's been using AdWords for 10 years, so I wouldn't assume
| incompetence there.
|
| It's just as likely that people are simply spending less on
| entertainment due to high cost of living.
| 0xbadcafebee wrote:
| > Surprised to see this upvoted because the takeaway is
| completely incorrect
|
| It's the standard actually. Hot takes get more votes and hot
| takes are usually wrong. Experts have non-controversial
| opinions, which are boring (so no impulse to upvote), and there
| are 1000x more non-experts with blogs. Add to that HN culture
| which values contrarian-ness. So HN front page blog posts are
| almost entirely incorrect, but spicy
| sgustard wrote:
| I just Googled "kids magic show in Durban" and his ad showed up
| in the top slot (sorry if this post has swamped your ad bill);
| and as a bonus, the Gemini AI blurb also touted him: "For kids'
| magic shows in Durban, look for local entertainers like Big Top
| Entertainment..."
|
| Doesn't seem like the issue is he's being outbid by
| international conglomerates with million dollar budgets. Maybe
| the kids magic show market has cooled in South Africa? Or users
| have left Google? Curious what we are to conclude here.
| wouldbecouldbe wrote:
| Google ads are very time & location dependent, the fact that
| it's showing to you might be a bad sign since you are most
| likely not close to Durban and this seems like an ad you only
| want to run locally.
| tomjuggler wrote:
| Yes our ads were geo-fenced when I had them on. We have
| always had a good web presence, I think the conclusion is
| that nobody looks for services on Google, and our reliance
| on it above other channels is now no longer viable
| wouldbecouldbe wrote:
| Everybody looks on Google for services; or ChatGPT
| googles/bings it for them. Still the same.
|
| We had a 10x jump just last month for my own company.
|
| For bigger company I consult with we had stable revenue
| last 2 years even though search traffic declined by 50%,
| our Google ads still perform the same. In general buying
| intent still seem to come through Google, only 10% via
| GPT.
|
| It will become more and more, but a full drop in 3 months
| means something else is wrong.
| dloy wrote:
| If I google for kids show in Durban, even if not from
| Durban, I want to see Durban related results.
| tomjuggler wrote:
| There is no ad - that's organic. Money ran out day before
| yesterday
| lelanthran wrote:
| > As someone who spends seven figures every month on Google
| ads, what's much more likely to be happening here is that the
| individual advertiser is either getting outcompeted or they're
| executing ads poorly.
|
| Outcompeted by who??? He's a performer offering local
| entertainment. I highly doubt that people searching for
| "entertainer in durban" are getting ads for Cirque du Soleile.
|
| His ad is probably on the first page for that search term; the
| problem is more likely that no one is looking at that first
| page anymore.
| delichon wrote:
| Push advertising sucks, but we can make pull much better by
| giving the user more control.
|
| Imagine a protocol to publish commercial offers for any given
| fragment of content addressable by URI. It would describe the
| details of some product or service and a set of proposed terms.
| We could surf the web looking for relevant content and publishing
| related offers. Various repositories would subscribe or not.
|
| A browser (extension or native) would optionally pull offers from
| selected repositories and have UI for the user to solicit/pull
| offers for any given piece of content styled to signal their
| existence, and to filter and sort them. To make it sustainable
| there needs to be revenue sharing with the content source(s).
|
| Are there existing projects like this?
|
| The same protocol could be used for independent commentary and
| other annotation.
| __MatrixMan__ wrote:
| The Brave/BAT experiment was similar to what you're describing.
| I think it failed to live up to its dreams of revolutionizing
| advertising because for the most part there are two kinds of
| people.
|
| - I try not to think about ads
|
| - I think about ads because I aggressively block them
|
| I'm sure somebody out there represents a middle ground, but I
| think it's a pretty small demographic.
| socalgal2 wrote:
| The problem is curation. People will mis-categorize in every
| way possible just to try to get eyeballs. I see this all over
| the web.
| pixl97 wrote:
| >user more control
|
| As others said, most users don't care or don't want to see
| them.
|
| This leaves the people that care being the ones who are
| providing the ads, and they will game the system with bots and
| other methods of bad acting that will make the system useless.
| yowayb wrote:
| I hate ads until I need them, then I complain that the
| algorithms still suck. My wife recently reminded me I have to
| give Shopee time to surface good options when I don't have the
| exact words. I expect this to improve as their models improve.
| eertami wrote:
| Why would I, as a user, ever opt in to this instead of just
| using adblock and never seeing adverts at all.
| tedk-42 wrote:
| As it should be with all things.
|
| I pivoted away from google search (duckduckgo instead primarily)
| but even then, the majority of "information" I'm looking for goes
| instead to chatgpt.
| wouldbecouldbe wrote:
| An instant drop in 50% means something else is off. The shift to
| llm's has been happening already for the last years.
|
| Its more likely their your ranking dropped. Or a competitor got
| ahead of you. Google is still main source of leads for service
| businesses.
|
| If you are old & previously ranked well the LLM's will also
| mention you similar to how Google did.
| weinzierl wrote:
| I don't know if Google is dead, but what I know is this:
|
| For the first time since 1995 my default method to research
| information on the web does not involve any traditional search
| engine anymore.
| kuon wrote:
| I consider ads to be a cancer I hope it will die in every
| possible way.
| efilife wrote:
| Same. This blog post is actually good news
| gavmor wrote:
| OK, but the poster is a party clown. How is he supposed to
| get business? He can't just show up to kids' birthdays when
| he hears them down the street.
| muppetman wrote:
| Might this not also be the fact that given the cost of living the
| world over, being able to afford a fancy party with entertainment
| like the poster provides is a luxury few can afford now? We used
| to eat out a lot more (Saturday lunch at a cafe I mean) and also
| used to get HelloFresh and other such services, but as the cost
| of them has gone up way faster than our salaries, we've had to
| reign them all back. I agree with the "Google is dying" sentiment
| for sure, but I also wonder how much is just being unable to
| afford nice things anymore.
| jackofspades wrote:
| If you believe markets to be a future discounting mechanism, then
| they're sure as hell saying Google "figured something out" in the
| last year, even vs OpenAI [1]
|
| [1]
| https://x.com/firstadopter/status/1993464859376468102/photo/...
| nonameiguess wrote:
| I'm glad as hell not to run a business and never plan to, but
| it's interesting to think as a consumer where I would try to get
| information like this. Guy's running a service that provides in-
| person entertainment for events and parties, seemingly things
| like clowns and magicians, maybe small-time bands or what-not.
|
| Seemingly you don't want to target children directly. If they ask
| their parents for specific entertainment at a party, they're
| going to ask for entertainers they know, not companies acting as
| brokers and middlemen. They might want a particular clown (but
| probably not) but will never want a particular local vendor of
| clowns. You need to target the parents for that. If it were me
| doing the buying, I'd probably prioritize word of mouth
| recommendations if anyone had such, and otherwise for a large
| enough event like a wedding or graduation party, I'd look to
| professional planners. Assuming that's any kind of widespread
| pattern, you'd want to target strong relationships with planners
| rather than trying to advertise directly to consumers.
|
| Did people really ever search Google to find party entertainment,
| and then ignore the search results and use the ads instead? Let
| alone Tik Tok videos? I guess I'm out of touch enough that the
| answer can be yes and I'm just that clueless about how small
| businesses work, but all the comments talking about LLM chatbot
| services are tripping me out. Y'all would ask ChatGPT who to hire
| for your kid's party?
| tomjuggler wrote:
| Google Adwords just shows your ad at the top of search results.
| Someone searches for a clown and I'm on top - worth paying for!
| (when it worked)
| deadbabe wrote:
| Here's the business model in a nutshell: If you want AI to
| recommend your business for some purpose, you must pay to have it
| included in the training corpus. And you will pay fees every time
| those vectors get used for outputs. And if you don't pay, you
| don't get mentioned.
| elorant wrote:
| Contextual ads is the answer. You sell shoes, go and advertise on
| fashion related sites. I don't want to see a shoe ad while I'm
| browsing a gaming site just because I did some relative search a
| week ago. It's so fucking annoying and I never understood why
| Google never bothered to try some alternative too. I don't mean
| completely replace behavioral targeting but at the very least try
| some contextual one too.
| amelius wrote:
| If google is dead, I sure hope they won't sell my gmail and
| google drive data to the highest bidder.
| rc_mob wrote:
| this post is title-gore. Gmail and drive aint going anywhere.
| kccqzy wrote:
| Google never sells your data to anyone. Why would they sell the
| primary data that they themselves use to determine how to show
| you ads? Doing so means a deep-pocketed new advertising
| platform can just buy data from Google and get started with
| competing against Google on their primary revenue source. It's
| like having a goose that lays golden eggs and selling the
| goose. It's corporate suicide. I'm surprised anyone on HN even
| believes Google will sell your data. It takes five seconds of
| thinking to dispel that notion.
| tonyedgecombe wrote:
| Google shares your data with ad-tech companies via its real
| time bidding.
|
| https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2020/03/google-says-it-
| doesnt-...
| nephihaha wrote:
| Google gets given significant tax breaks in many countries.
| Maybe it is selling it to agencies who could not obtain that
| info legally
| LightBug1 wrote:
| Already did.
| SirMaster wrote:
| Apparently you should be getting ready to buy ad campaigns from
| LLM companies because they are going to inject ads into the
| responses soon. Young people are using LLMs like crazy in my
| experience.
| layer8 wrote:
| The mainstream leaving Google search and the general web would be
| a chance for both getting better again. A new equilibrium will
| establish itself one way or the other.
| paganholiday wrote:
| It's a chance.. But which for-profit environments are not going
| to do whatever is necessary to try to win that role and how
| will the worst of them not have the most profitable model?
| tomjuggler wrote:
| Great, now my server is crashing again. I thought Cloudflare was
| supposed to take care of this stuff
| austinpena wrote:
| are you caching the HTML response or just the assets?
| tomjuggler wrote:
| I can't remember I think it's just the assets though - seems
| to be surviving so far. How do you get it to cache
| everything, is that a paid thing?
| austinpena wrote:
| Page rules should do it
| tomjuggler wrote:
| Page rules did it!! thank you
| riazrizvi wrote:
| Googles Search Ad revenue is dead, but the business is
| diversified and positioned for change. As of 2024:
|
| Search Ads and Partner Revenue = 230bn Youtube = 36bn Cloud =
| 40bn
|
| Say they drop 100bn on search revenue. How well are they
| positioned to convert their user platform and search crawling
| infrastructure onto Gemini, and introduce an advertising platform
| into LLMs to replace what they had? I imagine they are as well
| positioned as OpenAI.
|
| I would lose a lot of sleep if I paid out for puts on them.
| phillipseamore wrote:
| That site loosing revenue mentioned in the post
| (https://bigtop.co.za/) doesn't even load for me.
| efilife wrote:
| If it's loose then you might want to screw it on.
|
| Sorry, couldn't resist! The correct word here is lose, when
| something is loose it means that it's not fastened or
| constrained, like a loose knot
| neomantra wrote:
| I know very little about online marketing, but my Googler
| marketing friend told me that just 6 months ago everybody would
| Google search three word terms: "best Chinatown dumpling"
|
| But now people Google search: "my boyfriend is coming to town for
| the holidays and we are going to Chinatown and I want to have
| delicious dumplings with him because it was what we had on our
| first date, where should we go?"
|
| So he now works to sell AdWords properly in that environment. I
| am wondering how or if OP took that into account with their new
| spend. What are other people doing?
|
| I've also heard (probably via post+comments here on HN) that the
| new SEO is making tons of AI slop info pages on the site, not for
| humans but for AI crawlers to slurp, and then refer from prompts.
| czottmann wrote:
| Hugged to death right now, therefore:
| https://web.archive.org/web/20251229204141/https://www.circu...
| catlikesshrimp wrote:
| His _actual_ entertaiment bussiness is down,
|
| https://bigtop.co.za/
|
| They are a circus for hire (events)
| https://web.archive.org/web/20250424004511/https://bigtop.co...
|
| Located in Durban, South Africa.
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Durban
|
| He got too much exposure by stating Adworks no longer works?
| DinakarS wrote:
| the site is loading forever now. hn crashed it hehe
| why-o-why wrote:
| Reminds me of the whale oil business being replaced by petroleum.
| Except the ad-based economy was effectively a google monopsony.
| I'm surprised the OP managed to make ad revenue for a decade, but
| to me at always seemed about casino-ish and snake-oily. A decade
| is impressive but I think we all knew where this was going. I
| think the question is: will another monopsony for ads arise or
| will it be content based only? It seems YouTUbe is poised to be
| the next google since more people watch YouTube than cable, so
| the audience is captive since there's no alternative (yes I
| realize Google owns YouTube). But that's still a parasitic
| economy sucking from google. "Where to go now?" depends on if
| another ad server can gain dominance, otherwise the answer is
| "nowhere".
| Liron wrote:
| Wait I know Google search to content sites is largely dead, but I
| thought Google ads still worked fine.
| blauditore wrote:
| Now I wonder how long until AI chat tool are riddled with ads,
| and with shitty content because of people trying to game them
| just like they've been gaming search engines.
| ramon156 wrote:
| Can we also talk about how dogshit YouTube Search has been the
| last 2 years? Some videos have turned to shorts, but they're not
| searchable through their search API, making the feature pretty
| useless.
| semiinfinitely wrote:
| maybe the issue is that you site bigtop.co.za literally does not
| load
| mgaunard wrote:
| The old decentralized Internet is dying out and being replaced by
| a few apps under the total control of a few companies.
|
| I'm not sure much can be done about this. At least the physical
| world is still the same.
| pixl97 wrote:
| > At least the physical world is still the same
|
| You mean the physical world where businesses are signing up
| with companies to put AI enabled cameras all over their
| properties and sell your data? Why not some nice dynamic
| pricing on their digital price bars next (oops, we are already
| there).
| mgaunard wrote:
| I only go to small local specialty shops within walking
| distance of my house, none of which has such sophisticated
| equipment.
|
| Where I live, the trend has been to make spaces more walkable
| and with more nature and green spaces.
| cat_plus_plus wrote:
| You become a trusted source of data for AI chatbots (hopefully in
| somewhat ethical way for end users). Look into generative
| language optimization.
| mmaunder wrote:
| Just trying to find out what this guy actually does is hard. It's
| a page of links linking to another page of links, repeat. Where
| is the thing? The content? The product? It just feels a bit
| disconnected from patterns users expect and delivery mechanisms
| users are comfortable with in 2025. It's almost a 1995 style
| pastiche of intent with no payoff.
| eddythompson80 wrote:
| ?? There is one link that takes you to his business. It's kids
| parties (birthdays, etc) entertainment (Or corporate events).
| Think performers doing magic acts, juggling, comedy, balloons,
| etc. it really wasn't that difficult to find out.
| tomjuggler wrote:
| You must be referring to my personal Blog and Tutorial Site.
| It's messy, and serves no purpose other than to talk about
| whatever I am interested in at the time. Sometimes other people
| are also interested. And it's 14 years old now, so yeah.
|
| If you need a payoff, click the Patreon link banner on top and
| go support development of my Open Source LED Poi!
| mgaunard wrote:
| Is there such a thing as a good ad? I've always blocked them on
| all platforms.
|
| Looking at instagram where I don't block anything, most of what
| it suggests to me are soft porn or soft scams (generic chinese
| dropships marketed as a unique innovation).
| pixl97 wrote:
| I mean, you mean "I've always tried to block 'obvious' ads in
| the places I expect obvious ads to be".
|
| The thing is the world of ads is far larger and more
| complicated than that. Just think of product placement in
| movies? That is an ad, have you stopped watching most movies?
|
| What about content that is a thinly veiled ad? What about a set
| of bots that follows everything you post on line, and when it's
| little AI core figures out you are looking for something makes
| a suggestion under a post where you're asking questions?
| runamuck wrote:
| I get really good recommendations from Insta. Leather jackets,
| motorcycle gear, Swiss microbrand watches.
| akoboldfrying wrote:
| Another explanation is that when the cost of living is high,
| people reduce their spending on entertainment. If that's the
| case, no amount of advertising will materially shift your bottom
| line.
| kunley wrote:
| Where do you go know - maybe realize that ads make everyone
| around miserable and with this bitter understanding go through
| painful but necessary process of finding other means of earning
| money.
|
| PS. Seriously.
| bix6 wrote:
| How long have you lived in Durban? Nice surfing pics.
| tomjuggler wrote:
| 20 Years now. I'm from Cape Town, but the weather here is
| better. And no need for a wetsuit!
| bix6 wrote:
| Dreamy, I hope to make it out there one day. Heard good
| things about Mozambique as well.
| hollowturtle wrote:
| Genuine question: how is Google not losing a tons of money yet?
| alexpadula wrote:
| "Research shows" Lool!! Ask anyone in their teens or 20s even
| 30s. They'll all answer what you did in the article. Short
| attention spans are ruling and so are those social media
| applications you mentioned.
| cube00 wrote:
| Google Ads started charging me $5 _per click_ on low traffic
| search keywords this week, meanwhile YouTube ads are still 20
| cents a click (presumably to keep up with Meta)
|
| They're having a laugh if they think we'll keep paying that for
| no actual leads.
| emodendroket wrote:
| I think this article title misled me a bit... Google seems to be
| fine but it's no longer driving traffic through Ad Words. I think
| that in particular is really getting messed up by AI since people
| often don't go to any Web site once an AI agent answers their
| question.
| saltysalt wrote:
| There is always chaos when a central authority fails, and the
| "main home page for the Internet" model has definitely failed. AI
| killed it.
|
| How long before we see sponsored ads placed alongside prompt
| answers?
| jondiggsit wrote:
| Isn't it just AIs that have an agenda? That lie to you? That use
| a directive to persuade you to do / purchase something under the
| guise of authority?
|
| ChatGPT, etc. right now is the early web where everything was
| free and everyone wondered how it would make money.
|
| Soak it up because it won't last long.
| macinjosh wrote:
| Judging by the post this guy advertises his kids entertainment
| business to young people. With recent crackdowns on age
| verification etc. it could be his ads are no longer reaching the
| audience they used to.
| verelo wrote:
| It' not Google that's dead. It's the economy in North American
| markets. I am finding conversion way down, clicks and impressions
| I'm still getting. People are just being way more fussy before
| handing over cash.
|
| Everyone i talk to is quoting the same time line, this started in
| September and it hasn't returned to normal.
|
| Winter is coming.
| starik36 wrote:
| The blog in question is in South Africa.
| drstewart wrote:
| Everyone I talk to says the opposite.
|
| Spring has sprung.
| sans_souse wrote:
| Sorry in advance if this comes off as hostile, that's not my
| intent. I am genuinely wondering: You're in the business of
| advertising? And you're upset that Google isn't your golden goose
| anymore?
| paxys wrote:
| Maybe someone should tell Google.
| m3kw9 wrote:
| Because everyone asking AI to do websearch for them
| brandon272 wrote:
| Watching other people use Google, the predominant method of
| searching for information involves a query followed by getting
| their answer from the AI summary that appears above any search
| results.
|
| I'm not sure what impact this would be having on Adwords, but
| another commenter mentions that Google isn't hurting in the ad
| revenue department.
| throwaway5465 wrote:
| While TFA is anecdote, the author mentions maintaining their
| spend, being gifted adword budget, and getting lower returns so
| increasing spend.
|
| This suggests adword revenue is up, conversion to adword
| 'dollar' balances is inflating those balances, so both return
| per dollar in is down and even more down is return per adword
| balance dollar.
|
| It's a leading indicator that quarterly-return focused Google
| must be scrambling to fix right now - they inflated themselves
| out of Q4 2025 but 2026 is a question mark, or to parle some
| Boxton Matrix, is the cash cow dying and if so is the extension
| strategy ad injection in AI responses, product placement in
| your AI videos, background changes in your family snaps, etc.
| 6thbit wrote:
| Such thick tension in the air waiting for the first courageous
| company to place ads on their LLM chats and tools.
|
| They can spare their ad income falling for a while, but making
| the first move is always risky. Should they let openAI go first
| and fail?
|
| Where do you go now? You go make sure LLMs know about your site,
| you welcome the herds of bot crawlers and pray someone breaks the
| standstill before your business falters.
| devhouse wrote:
| The real story isn't that Google Ads stopped working, it's that
| attention moved somewhere ads can't follow. You can't buy
| placement in a Discord server or an iMessage group chat. If this
| is the new normal, the entire ad-supported internet is running on
| borrowed time.
| thesquib wrote:
| Anecdotally it seems like a lot of people go to whatever LLM they
| have access to and ask it what to do. Surely the next frontier of
| advertising products is directly injecting recommendations into
| the response from the LLM. Or at least make the answer
| incorporate products and services somehow, similar to how
| influencers do paid content in a seamless way alongside their
| main content.
| axelthegerman wrote:
| It never really worked. Most businesses just paid for customers
| that were going to or already found them anyways.
|
| Not saying ads don't work at all, they definitely increase
| awareness.
| CosmicShadow wrote:
| Yet if I turn off my ads my sales drop to nearly nothing, but
| when I turn them on again I get a steady flow of new customers
| as well as some repeaters who either forgot about us or needed
| a reminder to buy again, sometimes literally years later.
|
| It all depends on how big you are, what you sell, and how
| people can or will find you. I sell something that some people
| REALLY want, but they will never think to Google if it exists,
| they just think it's not available anymore/end of story, and I
| rank #1 unpaid, it's frustrating.
|
| Now I only have one ad platform I can get to work at this point
| and I've wasted so much money on others, trying again every few
| months, but they all seem to suck or I don't have the patience
| and pockets to try and figure them out compared to how I've
| figured out the one that works enough to make a living off of.
| austinbaggio wrote:
| I can't find it, but there's a good graph that shows Google
| search decline in share to GPT, but it excludes Gemini. With
| Gemini, it stays relatively on par. That's pretty much the answer
| with where one goes. LLMs are higher intent than search could
| ever be, and they are closer to you selling to yourself than a
| store selling to you since they have all of your user context
| charlie0 wrote:
| It's only going to get worse from here. Everything is trending
| towards zero for any kind of online service as it gets easier to
| make software with LLMs. There just simply won't any moat left.
| sam0x17 wrote:
| I would say Kagi but they need to start doing their own indexing
| for that to be a real future
| hirpslop wrote:
| Logged on to say Kagi[1]
|
| [1]not an employee, sponsor, or autonomous agent of the above
| company
| freediver wrote:
| The article is about using Google for advertising, and that
| would be a far stretch for Kagi. Thank you for your support
| anyway ;)
| giancarlostoro wrote:
| Well, there used to be altavista but it seems Yahoo bought them
| out. So I guess Yahoo?
| surfacenexus wrote:
| "Google is dead" feels overstated. What is actually breaking is
| the click based retrieval and attribution model once answers
| start getting synthesized upstream.
|
| When discovery is mediated by LLMs, ranking a page is no longer
| sufficient because the system is not choosing a single best
| document. It is assembling an answer from spans that fit its
| internal representation of the problem, which quietly invalidates
| many of the assumptions SEO and ads were built on.
|
| You can see this shift in the kinds of services being offered
| now. Instead of focusing on links, keywords, or bid optimization,
| teams are spending time on structured content that breaks cleanly
| into answerable fragments, on entity relationships and schema
| that make concepts legible to models, and on persona driven
| content that anticipates how questions will be interpreted rather
| than how pages will rank.
|
| Measurement is shifting as well. Instead of impressions and
| clicks, people are running prompt level tests, checking whether
| their content shows up across different models, and tracking
| inclusion and citation patterns rather than traffic. In many
| cases, strong traditional pages disappear entirely from answers
| while smaller, better structured sources surface.
|
| From the outside this looks like traffic declining. Internally it
| feels more like a loss of observability, where you cannot tell
| whether you were excluded, partially used, or summarized away
| into latent knowledge.
|
| Google will likely face the same issue as AI Mode expands.
| Generating answers is not the hard part. Defining what visibility
| means when the retrieval layer is no longer exposed is.
| left-struck wrote:
| I knew about duckduckgo for years and it was always too much
| friction to switch. I tried like 4 times but always went back to
| google when I had to research something quickly. Eventually the
| friction of using google became high enough though that the
| friction of switching was not that much higher. I've been using
| ddg and occasionally duck ai for over a year now.
| arrty88 wrote:
| you can buy ads on instagram, fb, tiktok, reddit, youtube,
| amazon, apple iOS apps, the M$ windows start menu (apparently),
| and soon OpenAI (gemini gotta be following right)!
| benjaminwootton wrote:
| The AdWords platform is extremely complicated nowadays, and try
| as I might I can't get any impressions from it. I then went
| through a period with an AdWords specialist from their team who
| also couldn't get any impressions. It's like they don't want or
| need my money.
| cvballoon wrote:
| This post and these comments give me low confidence in our HN
| community. No one here seems to understand ad platforms.
|
| Google is far from dead. It still has the majority of the world's
| online ad revenue, with Microsoft coming in second, then Meta at
| a far third. People assume that TikTok and Insta _must_ have the
| most since they assume that's what all of their friends use, but
| even though they're growing, they're still not there yet.
|
| Video ads on YouTube and others have a lot of play also, and
| everyone thinks of the TV commercials played during the Super
| Bowl.
|
| But Google is still f-ing everywhere.
|
| It's fine to call them dying, but are they really when they are
| best positioned for ads in AI? OpenAI or Anthropic don't have the
| data about users that Google has. There's a reason that Buffett
| invested in Alphabet recently.
| shevy-java wrote:
| I am glad to not be the only one to come to a similar conclusion.
| But we need to go one step further: I believe that Google has
| become harmful to the world in its present form. I'll skip
| listing all reasons, as there are many other websites that
| detailed this already, as well as (ironically) youtube videos.
| The problem goes much deeper than "merely" Google's monopoly in
| regards to all that ad-money. This is indeed probably the biggest
| reason why Google sucks so much nowadays, but the problem really
| is much bigger than that; it also taps into politics, what with
| the orange King meta-protecting these mega-corporations and the
| tech-bros ruthlessly abusing the rest of the world. We need real
| change, substantial change. Fixing Google is one important step
| but not the only one - but let's focus on Google mostly here, to
| simplify things a little.
|
| The big underlying problem is that Google has no real incentive
| to change the way how it operates. Its search engine, which they
| crippled, is not really that important to Google anymore compared
| to the ad-revenue and other business ventures here. AI is the
| current insanity rage and Google went for it too. When you
| cripple the search engine, you can sell more bullshit to people,
| fake-generate and hallucinate a world wide web that is controlled
| by these walled garden corporations (Facebook is probably the
| best example of a walled garden, but there are many similar;
| twitter run by a crazy oligarch too, "bla bla bla log in to read
| news bla bla bla" - never going to do that, so they cut off my
| access to an open world wide web here).
|
| I do not think Google can be fixed with the current setup though.
| It will just continue to steal money by taking our data and
| interconnecting this with other greedy private interests, now
| represented by lobbyists running the USA (and also other places,
| of course; just the USA being bigger than the other places,
| economically).
|
| Google has to be split up and removed. There is no other way to
| fix it anymore. They want down a path from which they can not
| change anymore, because any change means less revenue, and no
| corporation wants to do so on its own.
|
| > Research shows that many young people are getting their
| information from short video platforms like TikTok and Instagram.
| We are trying ads on there.
|
| Well - circusscientist adds to this problem. They depend on ads,
| so they contribute to the overall problem. The issue is not just
| Google here; it is also commercial interests who think they have
| a right to pester-harass people via irrelevant crap (aka ads).
| Google killed ublock origin. Google controls the web virtually
| via chrome. We have a conflict of interests here. Google has no
| reason to change this, and many companies think they need to use
| ads. This is a problem. I believe in an ad-free world. I don't
| want to see any ads. Many years of commercial interests confused
| people into thinking ads are the way to go. I disagree. I think
| ads are evil and must die. And companies that have no alternative
| business model, who rely on ads, also have to go. Google is just
| sitting on top of it all, acting as a greedy parasite.
|
| > We have an email newsletter
|
| They still think anyone cares about email spam. I never subscribe
| to any "newsletter". A better model is to read up on things WHEN
| YOU VISIT THE WEBSITE. This works on many private websites too
| such as github. I can read when I want to, not when some bot
| spams me down with this irrelevant stuff (and admittedly I would
| not read ads anyway, but my point is about DELIVERY versus
| VISITING something here).
|
| > We also plan to do some actual physical advertising
|
| So he chose confrontation.
|
| > I am AI assisted, very fast!
|
| Why would I want to give my money to anyone using ads or wanting
| to lower the overall quality via AI? That makes no sense. Some
| people are beyond hope.
| conductr wrote:
| > Right now, though - I'm broke. Anyone need a website or IOT
| project built? I am AI assisted, very fast!
|
| Oh wow, this author is tone deaf to the entire situation that is
| occurring in the world right now. I just had a conversation with
| my 70 year old Aunt (no tech skills) about AI and its impact on
| the labor market and I used the example of how for the first time
| ever I actually believe she could build her own iPhone app by
| just talking to her computer. This is an hypothetical app that
| would have cost her $10k-100k or more in the very recent past. I
| really think the market for the very services this author is
| selling is evaporating or at least on hold while everyone is at
| least trying to diy it with AI.
| TurnItOffAndOn0 wrote:
| that's true.Lots of people try to build app to solve their
| problem. ai make it easier. But I'm not sure if people want to
| make apps just like make a short
| sreekanth850 wrote:
| you wrongly assumed about tiktok or shortform content. In last 6
| months I only visited google for 2 things. Searching and looking
| at reviews of restaurants or shops. And of course navigation in
| maps. Other than that I never use google now a days. I'm sure
| there are a lot like me.
| drding wrote:
| The traffic goes to mobile and AI. Google is much stronger than
| ever before, in mobile and AI, not just web.
| throw-12-16 wrote:
| Google is a waste of brainpower.
|
| I wish it would actually die so that all those talented engineers
| could move on to solving non-ad problems.
| jjaksic wrote:
| Seriously, one random website getting less traffic means "Google
| is dead"? I imagine if you hit your toe, you call it "end of the
| world"? This sort of posts should be illegal. Flagged.
| rankiwiki wrote:
| You're definitely not alone in this, I've seen similar drops from
| Google Ads recently. It feels less like bad optimization and more
| like the ground shifting under everyone.
| bariswheel wrote:
| Gross clickbait title, do better with your article titles.
| aurelien wrote:
| Google is dead the day they remove their moto: Google is not evil
|
| And by the way announced the world they are the source of evil!!
| jalapenos wrote:
| Can someone explain why GOOG is still sky high despite this?
| wtcactus wrote:
| Instagram (one of the potential targets of the author to replace
| Google Ads) became unusable for me with this last update, where
| they make you wait for ads to finish.
|
| Not that I ever used it much (in fact, after all these years, I
| still didn't wrap my mind around anything but simple posts), but
| now, I basically only go there to do a post about a group I have
| (and that I had to remove from Meetup because Meetup is equal
| shares of terribly bad and terribly expensive) and answer some
| messages.
|
| There's a generation (in fact several) of people that still want
| to meet in person, and the platforms that allowed us to create
| and join groups for it (Meetup was great for that during a golden
| period of 3-4 years) are all turning into garbage.
| mediumsmart wrote:
| is this about the second single from Good Riddance?
| zen4ttitude wrote:
| Most people now conduct searches through AI chat. We never
| trusted Google with our search terms, IP address linked to WiFi
| and cell towers surveys with Google trucks for cross referencing
| on Google map, browser fingerprinting, time of day pattern
| detection, mouse reaction time measurement for age estimation,
| cross referencing with economic profiling of neighbourhoods,
| income bracket estimation algorithms, interest profiling based on
| search terms, browsing breadcrumbs, social network tracking, etc.
| Now imagine the new powers of AI chat adding reasoning patterns,
| deep thinking and complete trust to the equation. Let us organise
| a disconnect day where you turn off your phone and Internet
| router and ISP box just to confuse the algorithms! Where do we go
| from here? We stay home and invite disconnected friends for a
| rare moment of statistically insignificant privacy.
| miguelbemartin wrote:
| Google is not dead in this case; what is dead is Ads on top of
| Google. I think the best way to fix this is to ensure that your
| website is optimized for searches in Google and in the new AI
| world.
| miguelbemartin wrote:
| Every website should be optimized for searches in ChatGPT,
| Gemini, Claude,...
| jasonvorhe wrote:
| I'm amazed people on HN still use Google tbh. What for? Do you
| expect them to get better or treat your eyeballs and attention
| with more dignity anytime soon?
|
| There's Kagi, Brave Search, even DDG would be better.
| netdevphoenix wrote:
| The very concept of people going to a private digital plaza was
| very problematic in the first place and arguably still is.
| Humanity's drive towards convenience is the source of marvels but
| also many ills imo. Google's decline is a chance for change.
| Change towards something better. Not that I am optimistic that we
| will get there imo but the opportunity window is opening now.
| Don't look for a new digital overlord. Embrace the new age
| piokoch wrote:
| Well, the cycle is over.
|
| I remember the rise and the fall of AltaVista search engine.
|
| I remember the rise of Google that was able to circumvent all the
| "old days" SEO efforts by spamming keywords in the HTML headers.
| Then everyone was trying to guess how to game Google page rank
| algo.
|
| Finally people learned how to cheat Google, searches on many
| topics are returning endless pages of spam, marketing content
| that is supposed to earn AdSenens money (Google's "disruption" of
| online ads, better than all those cringe banners, that,
| eventually, destroyed Google search).
|
| Right now Bing is working better for me (Bing! WTF?), for some
| stuff I use Yandex (shrug), but most of the stuff goes through
| AI, if you ask them to provide source of the information and you
| check it, this seems to be working fine...
|
| For the time being, until people learn how to feed AI bots with
| the manipulated content they want. This will be probably more
| complicated, but it will happen (gaming page rank was also harder
| than adding "right" words to HTML keywords), unless AI providers
| will be careful with what they give as a food for their hungry
| Nvidia GPUs.
|
| But this will be more expensive than blindly scanning the
| internet. That's why I see here a proper place where governments
| should step in, finance curation of the content for AI, as this
| will benefit society in a big way.
|
| I see here an opportunity for smaller players, like Mistral, who
| can get some gov/EU funding and provide more quality than others
| who will devour whatever they find.
| fumar wrote:
| We don't know any details on OP's ad campaign. Did they happen to
| make any errors? Is holiday the most competitive time? Bids?
| Zavora wrote:
| Chegg's decline is a concrete example of how AI search is
| changing the web
|
| There's been a lot of debate about whether Google's AI Overviews
| and tools like ChatGPT are actually harming publishers. One
| publicly traded company's timeline is worth looking at: Chegg.
|
| What happened (with sources):
|
| 2021: Chegg launched Uversity, a platform for educators to share
| academic content. (Wikipedia)
|
| 2023: ChatGPT emerged as a serious competitor in homework help.
| Chegg responded by launching CheggMate, its own AI product built
| on OpenAI's models. (Wikipedia)
|
| Late 2024: Chegg reported accelerating subscriber declines,
| widely attributed to users shifting to free AI tools instead of
| paid study platforms. (WSJ, company filings)
|
| Feb 2025: Chegg sued Google, alleging that AI Overviews reduced
| traffic to Chegg by answering questions directly in search
| results, harming acquisition and revenue. (Search Engine Land,
| Reuters)
|
| May 2025: Chegg laid off ~22% of its workforce ([?]248
| employees), citing competitive pressure from AI and changes in
| search behavior. (Reuters)
|
| Oct 2025: Chegg announced another round of layoffs (~45%, [?]388
| employees), explicitly referencing "the new realities of AI" and
| reduced traffic from Google to content publishers. (Reuters / SF
| Chronicle)
|
| What the data suggests (more broadly):
|
| Independent studies show that when Google AI Overviews appear,
| users are significantly less likely to click through to external
| sites.
|
| "Zero-click" searches (where users get answers directly on the
| results page) have increased, especially for informational and
| educational queries.
|
| The impact isn't uniform -- some publishers report minimal
| effects -- but content that answers how-to, homework, or factual
| queries appears most exposed.
|
| Why this matters:
|
| Chegg isn't a small blog or SEO-driven site. It's a public
| company with audited financials, legal disclosures, and
| incentives not to exaggerate under scrutiny. Its filings and
| lawsuit don't claim AI is "bad" -- they claim that traffic flows
| are structurally changing.
|
| This doesn't prove AI search is "killing the web," but it does
| show:
|
| AI answers are substituting clicks, not just competing for them.
|
| Entire business models built on informational content are under
| pressure.
|
| "Build better content" may not be sufficient when answers are
| synthesized upstream.
|
| Curious how others here see it:
|
| Is this a temporary transition problem?
|
| Or are we watching the unbundling of the open web's traffic
| economy in real time?
| MrSkelter wrote:
| Googles ad business is riddled with fraud in all levels.
|
| Google profits directly from the fraud. It has no incentive to
| reduce it and is embarrassed by its extent.
|
| Google is essentially overseeing a huge criminal enterprise which
| funds its other activities. It's been well documented for over a
| decade and no one seems to care.
|
| The traffic is faked, the publishers are faked, the clicks are
| faked and the ad rates are manipulated.
|
| It's an incredibly lucrative way to steal money with extremely
| low risk and trivial penalties. The victims are the advertisers.
| Google has no interest in rocking the boat while they get paid.
|
| The effective ads via Google platforms are like the percentage of
| real drugs in what's bought off the street. Coincidental and ever
| being shaved.
| hackmack10 wrote:
| Can confirm this with YouTube advertising. When enabled for
| growth, it's nothing but bot farms. When I reached out to
| Google about it, they acknowledged the unusual traffic but did
| nothing about it. They are running a huge fraudulent business.
| jbrooks84 wrote:
| Get a real job
| tomjuggler wrote:
| Not much chance of that at this point - I'm almost 50 years old
| and managed to make a living purely from performing so far
| (with a small exception of the pandemic, where I did coding
| mainly)
| zkmon wrote:
| It is fantastic to see how a research paper by Google fueled the
| force that might kill Google. Attention is all that is sold by
| google. It is an attention broker. Now that very attention is
| thinly distributed, Attention as the most precious food for
| businesses, is under fierce struggle. Google has ruled the city
| center area will all the attention sinks, the billboards. But AI
| is the new mafia on the scene that kidnapped all attention and
| hoarded it inside the AI data centers.
| qubex wrote:
| As a game theorist and a cynic, my go-to response when I hear of
| non-zero-sum games is "yipee, both sides can lose!"
| ThinkBeat wrote:
| This is impolite but it might be that the services you offer are
| in decreasing demand in general.
|
| Your return customers know what a great show you do and it
| becomes tradition and they obviously love it.
|
| But the difficulty finding new clients (something we all face)
| may be partially due the world moving on.
| delis-thumbs-7e wrote:
| I thought SoMe replaced google for this sort of stuff like 6
| years ago? GoogleAds are prob fine if you have a big retail
| business or something, but for anything creative some has been
| the marketing route I have seen everyone doing for years.
|
| And looking at their site... Hacky creative coding. Mate, AI
| replaced you like 2 years ago.
| geekamongus wrote:
| I'm not a marketer (anymore), but as an end user, I feel that
| Google has shot themselves in the foot with the horrendous search
| experience they provide these days. This notion and topic of
| discussion is becoming more commonplace online.
|
| "Google results are just AI and sponsored content anymore." We've
| all seen it.
| jmrm wrote:
| The response is ChatGPT.
|
| They're going to add ads to their responses (if they didn't added
| it already), and people use it as search engine.
| ojosilva wrote:
| Google is in that game too with "AI Mode", stealing traffic
| from ChatGPT.
|
| But as OP and other threads here highlighted, the other ~half
| of the gold sits in more fenced communities like WhatsApp, IG,
| Telegram, and other messaging and non-digital communities that
| are getting their "news" and "information" from viral shorts
| from IG, TikTok and YT Shorts.
| arkt8 wrote:
| No matter which new technology arises on the horizon... what is
| tainted is not internet, not AI. Is the entire purpose on follow
| dollars.
|
| I hated when needed to see Google reports for ads. And be in a
| rush for SEO. This was a game of rats, no real knowledge, just
| attempts to satisfy an Algorithm that changed on weekly base.
|
| I quit Facebook / Instagram / Google ads 6 years ago. Why?
| Because my advertisement was feeding the system on who show
| concurrent advertisement, collecting habits of MY customers.
|
| So the system is broken. Stop pursuing the american dream and the
| wild capitalism. This new generation is building immunity to many
| of these things, at least until their engineers find a way to
| take control of these minds.
|
| About where to go... I think we need to be satisfied with less,
| in the sense we need to buy a new car every year, nor new clothes
| just for fashion, neither gadgets just by compulsive appeal.
|
| Buy the best you can, use it the most before discard it. Exchange
| fast food for what your granparents used to be fed. Know that you
| can be happy by yourself, not by what they said you need in the
| last 100 years. Life is that, the way is that. But many fall in
| the western system propaganda.
| ChicagoDave wrote:
| It's not the advertising or eyeballs.
|
| GenAI allows everyone to build their own stuff and find their
| customers without ads.
|
| The ad business is doomed.
|
| And if you think Gen-Z or Gen-Alpha are a capturable audience, I
| gotta bridge to sell you.
|
| You have one slim hope. Engage with smart young people that are
| savvy at today's comms and can create and edit their own content.
| chaostheory wrote:
| Ironically, Google's Ads division and CEO have blame for this.
| The Ads division forced the search division to weaken the quality
| of search results and Google's CEO sided with them.
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