Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

The Web Began Dying in 2014 (2017)

staltz.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

171–180 of 272 posts

Re: The Web Began Dying in 2014 (2017)

#171

Post by coldtea »

kgersen75 wrote: post #50
mojuba wrote: 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 then Google was still admired by the tech people" "Losing our support" why do you generalize 'tech people' as 'we' ? I'm in tech and I've been for 30+ years. I still admire Google. Sure some tech people don't like Google anymore or even never have. But I wouldn't generalize my case nor should you generalize yours. And it's not all or nothing: I want to believe most tech people are mature and educated enough to…

>But I wouldn't generalize my case nor should you generalize yours.

That's fine, but there also exist general sentiments in any group...

Re: The Web Began Dying in 2014 (2017)

#172

Post by pythux »

nathcd wrote: post #143
d33 wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Surprised nobody mentioned Matomo Analytics yet: https://matomo.org/ It's FLOSS, comes both self-hosted and as a paid service and it's pretty good. Perhaps good enough for your use case?

Or, we could stop sending people programs to track themselves on their own computers. Just use your server logs. I don't care how much of an inconvenience it is, you should never have started doing any client-side tracking in the first place.

Great point! We wrote about how we're doing it on whotracks.me a while ago, if anyone is wondering how that could work: https://whotracks.me/blog/private_analytics.html

Re: The Web Began Dying in 2014 (2017)

#173

Post by JohnDotAwesome »

d33 wrote: post #101
marcus_holmes wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Surprised nobody mentioned Matomo Analytics yet: https://matomo.org/ It's FLOSS, comes both self-hosted and as a paid service and it's pretty good. Perhaps good enough for your use case?

I’ve been using self-hosted Matomo for https://www.cannonvoice.com since I launched a couple of weeks ago. Man this is some neato software! On top of that it was super easy to deploy to the K8s cluster that runs the app. +1 would recommend.

To folks saying to “Just use server logs”, it’s simply too hard to connect the dots unless you really know what you’re doing. Digging through my nginx logs to find that the majority of my users are dropping off at the second step of sending an invoice would be nearly impossible. Oh I could connect those logs to my api’s database, now I need a place to aggregate that data together. Maybe I could send all of that data together to elasticsearch and query with kibana. Now I need to learn how To set those things up.

Or I could use Matomo for some analytics real quick

Re: The Web Began Dying in 2014 (2017)

#174

Post by puranjay »

irrational wrote: post #84
Ygg2 wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I like your parallel between Microsoft and Google. To me, it also implies Google probably won't ever lose the search crown directly, the same way Microsoft never lost it's OS crown, to Linux or MacOS. However, Windows is dwarfed by the Android install base.

How is Windows OS these days? I haven't used it since the early 2000s. I think the last version I used was... XP? Everyone at my work uses a MacBook. Some of my children are in their early 20s now and have never used Windows. It has always been OSX/MacOS, iOS, Ubuntu, Android, or ChromeOS. I don't know if my kids are typical or not but if many of the rising generation don't grow up using Windows, will they want to us…

I have a Macbook as well as a Windows laptop. I honestly find Windows to be a smoother experience than OS X. Windows management and file management have always been better on Windows, but it is now also much faster than it used to be. A recent update has made search very good.

At this point, all my heavy duty productivity work happens on Windows. The Macbook is mostly used only when I'm working away from my desk.

Re: The Web Began Dying in 2014 (2017)

#175

Post by chongli »

mojuba wrote: 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 no fan of Google these days (I use DuckDuckGo) but I’m not sure I can entirely fault them with the decline of search quality. Spamdexing is burying the web in mountains of garbage. Malicious SEO and fraud have exploded and continue to grow at an accelerating rate.

What do we do about all this? I don’t know. I want to see a new kind of search engine that can mine through all this crap. I would build it myself but I’m too busy with school right now. I would like to see an experiment with static websites that have no JavaScript and no cookies. The kind of thing that was the original promise of the web: a collection of information connected by hyperlinks. How we get a search engine to achieve that, I don’t know (it may take other tools as well), but I think it’s worth a try.

Re: The Web Began Dying in 2014 (2017)

#176

Post by pdimitar »

mynameishere wrote: post #111
irrational wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How is Windows OS these days? I haven't used it since the early 2000s. I think the last version I used was... XP? Everyone at my work uses a MacBook. Some of my children are in their early 20s now and have never used Windows. It has always been OSX/MacOS, iOS, Ubuntu, Android, or ChromeOS. I don't know if my kids are typical or not but if many of the rising generation don't grow up using Windows, will they want to us…

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_operating_syste... 87.76 percent. Not everyone is going to pay a massive premium for Macintosh no matter its alleged advantages. What are the advantages anyway? I used it for a while and came away mystified. Is it all about the appearance? They spend so much effort on its appearance that I suspect that's a big part of it. It does look and feel much nicer than a typical lap…

If macOS wasn't UNIX-based it wouldn't have taken off for professionals to use. I quite enjoy the much better screens and my eyes are less tired when sitting at a Mac, but again, if it wasn't for UNIX, it wouldn't matter.

Re: The Web Began Dying in 2014 (2017)

#177

Post by non-entity »

ci5er wrote: post #47
FpUser wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well I would say that web search takes good care of SNR. So far no troubles finding interesting stuff.

My particular need is finding particular stuff. Information. The Google used to be very very helpful. Now I have to McGuyver it into giving me what I am looking for. Now, my Google-fu is ok, and I can do it - but it used to be trivial. Maybe this is an artifact of the "web is too damn big!", but I suspect that Google itself is going through both organizational (not necessarily algorithmic) growing-pains, but learning…

Sadly it become a common occurrence for me lately to be working on researching problems and google giving me tons of results that only match a single word of my queries

Re: The Web Began Dying in 2014 (2017)

#178

Post by nathcd »

JohnDotAwesome wrote: post #173
d33 wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Surprised nobody mentioned Matomo Analytics yet: https://matomo.org/ It's FLOSS, comes both self-hosted and as a paid service and it's pretty good. Perhaps good enough for your use case?

I’ve been using self-hosted Matomo for https://www.cannonvoice.com since I launched a couple of weeks ago. Man this is some neato software! On top of that it was super easy to deploy to the K8s cluster that runs the app. +1 would recommend. To folks saying to “Just use server logs”, it’s simply too hard to connect the dots unless you really know what you’re doing. Digging through my nginx logs to find that the majori…

> To folks saying to “Just use server logs”, it’s simply too hard to connect the dots unless you really know what you’re doing.

No it's not, just stop overarchitecting your stuff.

> Digging through my nginx logs to find that the majority of my users are dropping off at the second step of sending an invoice would be nearly impossible. Oh I could connect those logs to my api’s database, now I need a place to aggregate that data together. Maybe I could send all of that data together to elasticsearch and query with kibana. Now I need to learn how To set those things up.

You can log requests/responses however you want on your server, it doesn't have to be an nginx log. Just put whatever request data that matters to you into your database immediately after you send a response.

> Or I could use Matomo for some analytics real quick

"Not being a jerk to my website visitors is too hard."

Re: The Web Began Dying in 2014 (2017)

#179

Post by marcus_holmes »

nathcd wrote: post #143
d33 wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Surprised nobody mentioned Matomo Analytics yet: https://matomo.org/ It's FLOSS, comes both self-hosted and as a paid service and it's pretty good. Perhaps good enough for your use case?

Or, we could stop sending people programs to track themselves on their own computers. Just use your server logs. I don't care how much of an inconvenience it is, you should never have started doing any client-side tracking in the first place.

What's the huge objection to client-side tracking over server-side tracking?

Re: The Web Began Dying in 2014 (2017)

#180

Post by CathedralBorrow »

nathcd wrote: post #178
JohnDotAwesome wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’ve been using self-hosted Matomo for https://www.cannonvoice.com since I launched a couple of weeks ago. Man this is some neato software! On top of that it was super easy to deploy to the K8s cluster that runs the app. +1 would recommend. To folks saying to “Just use server logs”, it’s simply too hard to connect the dots unless you really know what you’re doing. Digging through my nginx logs to find that the majori…

> To folks saying to “Just use server logs”, it’s simply too hard to connect the dots unless you really know what you’re doing. No it's not, just stop overarchitecting your stuff. > Digging through my nginx logs to find that the majority of my users are dropping off at the second step of sending an invoice would be nearly impossible. Oh I could connect those logs to my api’s database, now I need a place to aggregate…

I don't know, it seems like an arbitrary line to me. If I logged everything about your visit in a file, then wrote some code to analyze and reconstruct a picture of you as a user, would it be OK with you because I call it a server log?
Post reply on HN