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The Web Began Dying in 2014 (2017)

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Re: The Web Began Dying in 2014 (2017)

#91
post #33

In addition, what's changed between 2017 and now is that back then Google was still admired by the tech people. "Google is evil" sounded ridiculous only a few years ago. I've been ridiculed by my colleagues and fellow engineers every time I said it. But I think it began to change with the introduction of AMP, a growing list of products discontinued for no apparent reason, failures of some of the new products often pr…

> the window of opportunity may be now

Google has secured a lot of top AI researchers. Depending on the dates when their options vest, we may see a lot of them leave.

Re: The Web Began Dying in 2014 (2017)

#92
Google is interested in building an AI that is designed to turn people into its products.

What do you do with a product when you're done with it? What do these people become?

All you need to do is search google for weight loss advice or anything that could remotely have a commercial interest and what pops up? Pages and pages of irrelevant clickbait. If you ever wanted to build an encyclopedia of nudges, persuaders, and other such exploits of the human mind, now would be a good time.

The entire game is forcing you to take actions, like answering "yes" to a sales guy over and over to build the habit so you'll agree to the sale. It's taxing on the mind, and like television, it got to the point you had to see 30 minutes of garbage ad's for 20 minutes of entertainment, that it's no longer worth it.

The "Trinet" is dieing because it has become useless; something far more useful will come along to replace it because people are viewing the recent infestation of marketing people as damage and are routing around it.

Re: The Web Began Dying in 2014 (2017)

#93
post #33

In addition, what's changed between 2017 and now is that back then Google was still admired by the tech people. "Google is evil" sounded ridiculous only a few years ago. I've been ridiculed by my colleagues and fellow engineers every time I said it. But I think it began to change with the introduction of AMP, a growing list of products discontinued for no apparent reason, failures of some of the new products often pr…

I'm refusing to implement Google Analytics on my startup's product. Because it's slow, but mainly because I don't trust Google enough to let them put whatever code they like on my page. I'm running into serious flak from the marketing team because they don't know how to use any other tool. GA is the industry standard, apparently, and every site uses it, etc etc. They're even hinting that not using it could affect our…

Yeah that's a tough one because there aren't many "legitimate" competitors to GA other than clicky from what I know. Sounds like an opportunity.

Re: The Web Began Dying in 2014 (2017)

#94
post #59

I don't think it's accurate to count stuff like youtube and google cloud as part of the %. It's gigabyte heavy but attention light. Just raw data about cat videos. Compare it with say whatsapp traffic - that has a crazy high amount of attention crammed into each gigabyte. Doesn't really change the message/conclusion but the metric used here seem flawed.

I had the same reaction. Bandwidth is only one metric of interest. I think time spent is a better proxy to the true metric of interest, which you rightly called out as attention.

Re: The Web Began Dying in 2014 (2017)

#95
post #33

In addition, what's changed between 2017 and now is that back then Google was still admired by the tech people. "Google is evil" sounded ridiculous only a few years ago. I've been ridiculed by my colleagues and fellow engineers every time I said it. But I think it began to change with the introduction of AMP, a growing list of products discontinued for no apparent reason, failures of some of the new products often pr…

Back in 2015-7 or so yes, you'd be immediately dogpiled on here and reddit and most other sites for daring to criticize Google. I was trying to warn people about them and was always banned or downvoted to some shadowban realm immediately.

Google isn't the actual problem though, advertising is. The backlash needs to be primarily about ads, not the companies that just lie repeatedly in order to bend all tech infrastructure towards the needs of advertisers.

Re: The Web Began Dying in 2014 (2017)

#96
post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But I wouldn't generalize my case nor should you generalize yours. The way I read statements that you replied to is with a silent prefix "based on the experience of folks I work/talk with". If one disagrees (i.e., sees different views prevalent), chime in and say so. There must be a way to express opinions that are between "that's my personal view" and "statistically significant, peer reviewed validation at this li…

That's exactly how you have to read things to take posts in good faith, which is one of the few rules 'round these parts. Similarly, I'm trying to eliminate the "I think" prefix from writing. It shouldn't be necessary to write "I think Google is evil". Of course the writer thinks that. They wouldn't have written it if they didn't. They can very safely just write "Google is evil".

I was more concerned about his usage of 'the tech people' terms.

Like you, I think when someone saying 'Google is evil' he implies 'I think Google is evil'.

But someone saying 'back then Google was still admired by the tech people" or "Losing our support" is more ambiguous. Like if all 'tech people' or a majority of them think like him which or he represents the majority.

tl;dr: I'm fine with him saying 'Google is evil' but not with him saying 'the tech people think Google is evil'.

Re: The Web Began Dying in 2014 (2017)

#97
post #88
post #33

In addition, what's changed between 2017 and now is that back then Google was still admired by the tech people. "Google is evil" sounded ridiculous only a few years ago. I've been ridiculed by my colleagues and fellow engineers every time I said it. But I think it began to change with the introduction of AMP, a growing list of products discontinued for no apparent reason, failures of some of the new products often pr…

” unfortunately there's no competition to Search on the horizon ”. What about duckduckgo? I’ve been using it roughly for a year and i’m happy with it.

DDG mostly uses Bing, Yahoo and Yandex (anonymized). To be honest apart from some obviously spammy web sites that rank high only on Google, their search results don't seem to be significantly different. My impression anyway. And so we don't even know whether what we see via these search engines is the real Internet or we all live in a bubble created by them.

Re: The Web Began Dying in 2014 (2017)

#98
post #33

In addition, what's changed between 2017 and now is that back then Google was still admired by the tech people. "Google is evil" sounded ridiculous only a few years ago. I've been ridiculed by my colleagues and fellow engineers every time I said it. But I think it began to change with the introduction of AMP, a growing list of products discontinued for no apparent reason, failures of some of the new products often pr…

> there's no competition to Search on the horizon

This is bunk, and it's time for this myth to die. DDG/Bing/Yandex will list the exact same pages that Google gives as a search result most of the time, and sometimes better ones. If you find that the pointless endless-scroll listing of millions of search results (in 0.333ms!) that Google and also DDG gives you isn't helpful, you can also try Startpage.com.

What are you searching for? Programming-related questions? Then go to stackoverflow.com directly (where you'll end up in 99% of cases when you search with DDG or Google anyway on these topics). Tip: to search SO, I've found it works best to create (but not submit) a new question with as much info in the headline as possible; the results that SO brings up to check for duplicate questions are excellent search results (btw have they changed it recently? I don't remember working it as good as it's now). Requires a StackExchange account though.

Are your searching for review of tech gadgets or christmas gifts? Then many people on HN admit to include "reddit" in their search terms. Then why not go directly to reddit.com for your search.

Are you searching on YouTube? Then indeed Google (YouTube itself) works best, but the real solution is to quit your media consumption habbit of spending your waking hours on monopolists video streaming sites that don't benefit creators. For just music without pointless and data-intensive video and ad noise, there are several alternatives.

Maybe it's time for new topic-related meta search engines and link aggregation sites.

In the end there isn't much new content worth searching for, thanks to Google and Facebook extracting almost all (70% in 2018) ad revenue, and the demise of the federated web in favour of 2010's portals such as github. I can assure you that the modest amount of new content worth reading can be easily summarized and searched by basic, non-personalized search algorithms; no ML required.

Going to Google to search things is really asking for the site with the most ads and trackers on them, is something that no self-respecting "Hacker" should be doing, and is a habbit you can quit at the turn of the decade if you haven't already. Because it's literally equivalent to asking "Ok Google, fill my feeble mind with shit".

Re: The Web Began Dying in 2014 (2017)

#99
post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No. The modulation and time sharing built into 5G only offers 15-20% increase in bandwidth available, MHz for MHz, when compared to 4G LTE. This is not a significant increase. It is not at all like the 3-4x increases in bandwidth, MHz for MHz, that the jump from 3G modulations to 4G LTE did. Almost all of any potential increase in total speed will have to come from using new parts of the electromagnetic spectrum. To…

Smaller cells do wonders. A LimeSDR with The reach can be increased for <50$ to at least a few hundred meters radius.

I don't understand, are you advocating for hobbyists to make their own 5G cells, or carriers?

Why not use Wi-Fi at this point?

Re: The Web Began Dying in 2014 (2017)

#100
post #17

Look I know this is going to get downvoted because of the token thing, but really, read it: https://qbix.com/token This is how we can rescue the Web, and maybe fulfill the vision of Xanadu

You can avoid the downvotes by (1) not predicting downvotes, and (2) expanding on how this will rescue the web.
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