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The Web Began Dying in 2014 (2017)

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Re: The Web Began Dying in 2014 (2017)

#211

Post by CalRobert »

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…

Google has attempted to build products suiting a regime that murders people for organs and operates concentration camps for over a million people. Evil enough? They have barely, supposedly, engaged in a very small climbdown thanks to the laudable efforts of some insiders, clearly against the leadership's desires.

Imagine if they scrubbed search results for child immigrant detention camps, or My Lai, etc. in the US

Re: The Web Began Dying in 2014 (2017)

#212

Post by Nextgrid »

EGreg wrote: 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

I think the downvotes are more about the fact that you're shilling this thing on pretty much every social-media-related post.

Re: The Web Began Dying in 2014 (2017)

#213

Post by marcus_holmes »

pythux wrote: post #172
nathcd wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

this is useful, thanks... couple questions:

1. Do you grab the country from the IP address before anonymising it? (I know VPN's are a thing, but we would like to know where our customers are coming from)

2. Why encrypt with a daily key instead of just hashing the IP address and storing the hash? Do you ever decrypt the IP address?

3. How have you found CloudWatch? I'm logging all requests to our own database, because it's so simple to do. What's the bonus for Cloudwatch?

Re: The Web Began Dying in 2014 (2017)

#214

Post by zepto »

marc_io wrote: post #139
buboard wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Corporations aren't good or evil. They are powerful That meant to imply that google is neutral? The strong nuclear force is powerful that doesn’t mean anything on its own. It can be harvested for good electricity or bad bombs. Of course the consensus on this is almost universal, the consensus on google is much more ambivalent. Corporations may well be good or evil

Yes, Google is not neutral, it definitely have a clear, intentional agenda. But it's non-moral (not imoral, or evil) as are all corporations. It just uses it's power as a way to complete it's objectives. This is way different from being neutral.

Objectives can be evil

Re: The Web Began Dying in 2014 (2017)

#215

Post by ehonda »

chongli wrote: post #175
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 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

You might find wiby.me interesting then

Re: The Web Began Dying in 2014 (2017)

#216

Post by nathcd »

marcus_holmes wrote: post #206
reaperducer wrote: post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I need to understand why my customers are not clicking on the "subscribe" button all I'm doing is trying to understand who my customer is and why they're not buying my product. Then ask them. The same way companies did for hundreds of years before javascript tricks made people lazy. These things can be achieved by simply talking to your customers. Why is that so hard to do? Also, what makes you think that your intere…

> Then ask them. Startup 101 "Mom Test" stuff. If you ask people what they think, you get their intentions. If you measure their behaviour, you get actual data. Talking to customers is excellent, but measuring what they actually do verifies that they're not lying to you because they're nice people. >Also, what makes you think that your interest in knowing your customer's behavior is more important than your customers…

I already responded to your shop analogy in another comment, so I won't do that here. But -

> Or is your objection just to the Javascript? If I "violate their privacy" by analysing server logs it's OK, but adding javascript to measure behaviour is "bad, hmmkay"?

If you misuse any data you collect from anywhere, you're being a jerk. We're talking about collecting data in the first place. If you collect data by having a webpage visitor execute code on their own computer in the background and send data back to you, they clearly aren't meaning to send you that data, so you shouldn't do it.

> Startup 101 "Mom Test" stuff. If you ask people what they think, you get their intentions. If you measure their behaviour, you get actual data. Talking to customers is excellent, but measuring what they actually do verifies that they're not lying to you because they're nice people.

Startup 101 is anathema to treating people well. That some data about people could help you run your business better doesn't mean you're entitled to that data.

Re: The Web Began Dying in 2014 (2017)

#217

Post by scarface74 »

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 think geeks overestimate their influence. Google’s end user products were not successful because of a few nerds.

1. Chrome was successful because it was hawked on Google’s home page.

2. Android was successful because Apple never played in the lowend market.

3. Gmail was successful because it was better than the alternatives and had more storage space.

Re: The Web Began Dying in 2014 (2017)

#218

Post by jancsika »

sago wrote: post #28
mirimir wrote: post #4

Actually, the web began dying in the late 90s.

The eternal September was 1993. I remember that change well and the earlier flavour I remember nostalgically. And it was tied to the rise of the web. There's a good argument to say the web killed the internet. But all things change. Every phase has good and bad points. IMHO

I'll take 2000-on to the 1993 web/net any day.

I get:

* an up-to-date encyclopedia

* all the music referred to by said encyclopedia (Napster)

* an impressive number of books referred to by said encyclopedia (Demonoid)

* 2010s bonus-- a lot of the scientific articles cited by said encyclopedia (Scihub)

* 2010s bonus-- a searchable cache of stupid questions to do an end-run around the pain of interacting with the asocial gate-keepers who wish the internet wasn't so full of people (StackOverflow)

* an archive of all the stuff you're nostalgic for (archive.org and Google's copy/paste of usenet junk)

My internet is like O'Brien to your Winston from 1984-- its mind includes yours.

Edit: clarification

Re: The Web Began Dying in 2014 (2017)

#219

Post by irq-1 »

nathcd wrote: post #192
marcus_holmes wrote: post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I need to understand why my customers are not clicking on the "subscribe" button. I'm not selling adverts to them. I'm not capturing personal information. all I'm doing is trying to understand who my customer is and why they're not buying my product. Why is this unethical? And why is it OK to analyse server logs, but not OK to use javascript, to do this?

> And why is it OK to analyse server logs, but not OK to use javascript, to do this? The data in your server logs is data that people sent to you on purpose (by visiting a page on your site, or filling out a form on your site). If you collect data about people by sending them code to execute and send data back to you, they're not meaning to send you that data; you're doing it behind their back. I'm glad you try to us…

> The data in your server logs is data that people sent to you on purpose

That's not true: people have no idea what is sent and they're not choosing what's sent (with the exception of some forms.)

It's OK to collect display width, or estimate the time on a page even though people didn't send it to you on purpose.

Re: The Web Began Dying in 2014 (2017)

#220

Post by scarface74 »

riffraff wrote: post #105
mojuba wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Doesn't seem to be the case [1] The article that comments on this chart says other sources (non-ad ones) look promising but it more sounds like a speculation because I don't see real signs of that. [1] https://www.theatlas.com/charts/n8ea9MPE0

why not? it's about ~9B in 2016, ~11 in 2017, ~19B in 2018 and ~10B in the first six months of 2019, with the last quarter being the largest in the past. Sure, it's less than the ad business but it's doubled in 3 years, surely that's a healthy rate of growth?

That’s revenue not profit.
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