211–220 of 317 posts
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Is it still? I thought /pol/ ate the whole site and drove everyone who wasn't a Nazi or edgelord troll away.
It's as good as it ever was. If anything, it's probably better since 8ch imploded.
> I miss the internet of the early 1990's, back before the World Wide Web had been visited by more than just a few computer geeks.
vs.
> Yes, alternative social networks [...]. But, they are not well-known or frequented by many.
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>if you work on this corporate shit and you're doing stuff you despise day in day out - please re-assess whether you could change things in your life to prevent that I once worked for an SEO agency and ended up quitting after 4 months. Everything about it went against my morals. I was disgusted with myself for pushing rubbish sites, snooping on peoples browsing behaviour, and working to squeeze every cent from it all…
Can you elaborate more on what that industry is doing? How would you snoop on people's browsing behavior? I'd be curious if you know of any industry blogs or forums that you'd read to stay current on techniques. I haven't followed SEO since the early days of link trading and keyword stuffing.
For one we had a service that records video of your site visit so we knew exactly how you interacted with it. It would be no different from be standing behind you and watching your screen as you navigated a website. While the data is anonymised, I'm still morally against essentially video recording someones interactions with a site. There was never any notice that they were being recorded.
The email marketing workflows were relentless, especially on e-commerce stores that required several points of contact in order to make a purchase. We were able to build profiles on most customers by combining purchase history, personal details, and details pulled from social media to get a fairly accurate portrait of someones behaviour. For example, if someone bought engine oil, we knew that a typical bottle of engine oil would last someone, say, 6 months. The email marketing workflow would automatically send out a promotional coupon 6 months later for a discount on more engine oil. But because we were able to build profiles on people, we were able to tell that "Joe Blogs" is a motoring enthusiast and therefore the likelihood of him using up that engine oil in three months rather than six months increases by 50%, so send out the marketing materials to him quicker than the regular customers. There were very smart people working on these campaigns. Statisticians, psychologists, linguists and the like.
Because we had several points of contact with customers, having them unsubscribe from an email list wasn't bad. If you unsubscribed from the email, you would just be sent SMS notifications. If you replied STOP to that, you were sent physical mail, and after all that it was still quite easy to target you with remarking ad campaigns.
The amount of complete and utter garbage we were pouring out onto the web on a daily basis was staggering. Hundreds of pages a day that were of absolutely no use to anyone but to Google would mean that we were able to rank clients for some very serious keywords where real people needed real help but were instead being presented with crap that we'd put out that wasn't meant to actually help anyone but to get the #1 position and the sell things. And when I mean people who need help, I mean people who seriously need help. We'd push crap to rank for things like depression, bankruptcy, divorce, a whole array of legal issues.
I hated working there.
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4chan is outright fantastic in some aspects. /g/ is actually quite useful and friendly, especially the DPT (Daily Programming Thread), more-so if you're a beginner. /trv/ (travel) is just good and perfectly slow where you won't feel pressure to keep up with a thread because it will still be there tomorrow. /fit/ has good information and really encapsulates what happens when the internet meets bro-gym culture. Compare…
Yeah 4chan is great but it differs from reddit in a fundamental way. You can have a normal thread where someone will casually drop the N word or other slur and it will just sit there, maybe not even acknowledged but also not downvoted or deleted. That alone is enough to turn people off immediately. They need that sense of retributive justice for a wrong they see in the universe. You're right that reddit can be just a…
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> Don't use any javascript frontends. I'm struggling to find the connection between a Javascript front end and content that has (to quote the article posted) "the voice of individuals"
If you use the same JS frontend as everyone else it isn't very individual and form constrains content. The reason people use JS frontends is because they're at work being paid to do it. Time and the ability for your coworkers to contribute matters. You don't have to bring these compromises forced on you at work to home.
And of course employability and the need for buzzwords on your resume.
I generally agree. I've taken to appending "reddit" to many of my search queries, because flawed though it is, reddit is one of the few places you can read an actual human thought. It feels like nearly all content on the internet is some de-personalized corporate "content marketing" blog at this point. Just give us your email address and we'll send you a PDF (and a drip marketing campaign.) I think the old internet w…
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Can you elaborate more on what that industry is doing? How would you snoop on people's browsing behavior? I'd be curious if you know of any industry blogs or forums that you'd read to stay current on techniques. I haven't followed SEO since the early days of link trading and keyword stuffing.
Sure. For one we had a service that records video of your site visit so we knew exactly how you interacted with it. It would be no different from be standing behind you and watching your screen as you navigated a website. While the data is anonymised, I'm still morally against essentially video recording someones interactions with a site. There was never any notice that they were being recorded. The email marketing w…
You lost me here though:
> Hundreds of pages a day that were of absolutely no use to anyone but to Google
Do you mean like spam/clickbait blog posts on their own domain? I'm having trouble connecting "producing garbage content" to "increased ranking from google".
I generally agree. I've taken to appending "reddit" to many of my search queries, because flawed though it is, reddit is one of the few places you can read an actual human thought. It feels like nearly all content on the internet is some de-personalized corporate "content marketing" blog at this point. Just give us your email address and we'll send you a PDF (and a drip marketing campaign.) I think the old internet w…
If you can find the right set of people, twitter's "people you follow" filter can be a great way to search for things, for similar reasons to those you bring up.
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> I've taken to appending "reddit" to many of my search queries, because flawed though it is, reddit is one of the few places you can read an actual human thought. Same. It's the only place to find the sort of genuine, informed opinion that used to be common on the first page of Google results, on a wide variety of topics, without an awful lot of digging.
I am six months into reddit detox. The amount of time I have back is amazing. Only semi social site I read is this one. I have internet down to BBCNews, NHK, Reuters, HN, a few comics, Ars, next platform, the morning paper, Matt Levine and el reg. I am much happier :)
Some of the stories ARS presents you won't even be able to parse as to why they were written unless you're aware of the general tech and social zeitgeist - which you can see on reddit somewhat