Web by Google (TM) • Hacker News Board

Re: Web by Google (TM)

#181

Post by giancarlostoro » Sun, Aug 16, 2020, 2:30 PM UTC

jasode wrote: post #136

kristopolous wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Couldn't you have said the same thing 20 years ago and used "AOL" instead? There seems to be a large group of users who consistently fit this trend and the company names just get swapped occasionally

>Couldn't you have said the same thing 20 years ago and used "AOL" instead? There seems to be a large group of users who consistently fit this trend and the company names just get swapped occasionally AOL was dominant (~30 million dialup subscribers at its 2002 peak) but didn't build any "sticky" products such as Facebook's social graph (a very valuable online Rolodex contacts database of real names ). Each dialup us…

> dialup user of AOL didn't interact with each other that much back then because the internet wasn't as central to life like today.

Speak for yourself as a kid I would go on AOL chatrooms all day every single day. The kids rooms were packed with at least like 30 instances of them and like 10 to 20 kids in between. Learned what a/s/l meant back then something you dont hear as often these days hah.

MSN Messenger had MSN chat which was IRC esque and MSN Groups had their own instances or chat it was glorious. Anywhere you went with chatrooms the internet attracted people like crazy! AOL was definitely full of those types.

AOL also had annoying (to me) parental control settings. Thankfully I could justify internet access outside the AOL program by stating that games didnt work online otherwise I would be restricted to AOLs trashy browser.

Re: Web by Google (TM)

#182

Post by sbierwagen » Sun, Aug 16, 2020, 2:30 PM UTC

> Lacking native distributed search allowed Google to grab a monopoly position as the entry point to the web.

I am curious to hear what the author would propose instead. I’m not sure keeping a local cache of all web text would work very well.

Re: Web by Google (TM)

#183

Post by jhoechtl » Sun, Aug 16, 2020, 2:32 PM UTC

The internet economy is a winner takes it all economy. With the US being so weak in market regulations, the development of natural monopolies is just a natural effect of that.

Re: Web by Google (TM)

#184

Post by andromeduck » Sun, Aug 16, 2020, 2:32 PM UTC

searchableguy wrote: post #121

andromeduck wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IMO one if the biggest blunders of Moz was not having had the vision to champion the open web by becoming an alternative monitization platform like Patreon. The biggest reason why the open web failed and will continue to fail is not because of aggregators like Google, Facebook, Reddit, and Twitter but rather because there's simply no way for people to vote with their wallets. Moz was uniquely positioned to drive such…

https://webmonetization.org/ https://foundation.mozilla.org/en/blog/introducing-our-exper... https://hacks.mozilla.org/2020/03/web-monetization-coil-and-...

Nice to see that there are efforts but until they can roll it out as a core feature with prompts/nudges it's not going to cut it and I'm not entirely sure they have the market/mind share to pull it off these days. Pateron came out in 2013 and has strong community/network effects now, YouTube Red/Spotify also address much the same problem. The current state of affairs is like their idiotic mobile 6 full years after the iPhone came out and at a time when Android/iOS had already won and Microsoft efforts already imploded.

Re: Web by Google (TM)

#185

Post by a_bonobo » Sun, Aug 16, 2020, 2:34 PM UTC

cmrdporcupine wrote: post #129

kristopolous wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Couldn't you have said the same thing 20 years ago and used "AOL" instead? There seems to be a large group of users who consistently fit this trend and the company names just get swapped occasionally

AOL at least was pretty strictly a US phenomenon. Here in Canada it wasn't a thing, and it wasn't a thing in Europe or Asia. FB's tendril's are international. What's worse is it's very walled off, it's not really searchable or properly indexed. FB's search facilities are a joke, such as they are, but they are only available to FB users. Information that goes in there is basically available to FB and to nobody else.

I did have AOL in the early days of 56k in Germany.

It was the same walled garden as it was in the US, and I was 'locked in' that garden without knowing. I must've been 12 or 14 years old and this was our very first internet.

Re: Web by Google (TM)

#186

Post by makecheck » Sun, Aug 16, 2020, 2:35 PM UTC

jhoechtl wrote: post #166

I thought hell will freeze first but ... can we please have Safari on Windows? Just to have one real alternative?

Safari did exist on Windows, up to version 5 or so; was discontinued a couple years ago.

Re: Web by Google (TM)

#187

Post by Mary-Jane » Sun, Aug 16, 2020, 2:35 PM UTC

simias wrote: post #84

The problem is that, IMO, centralization of the internet is simply the natural course. Especially when people seem to care so little. Centralization is cheaper, easier to monetize, easier to control, easier to update and upgrade. That's why people prefer Discord to IRC, that's why people prefer Slack to SMTP or Jabber, that's why for many people these days the distinction between git and GitHub is blurry. I suspect t…

Centralization is clearly bad in the private sector. I'm curious why people here don't see centralization of government as similarly bad. With 3.5T in revenue, the US federal government is the single largest entity in existence, and it's scope is vast, covering things as disparate as mail and health care. There are plenty of examples of them abusing their position (and occasionally their people...), yet this forum rarely expresses the same level of frustration and outage found on this thread.

Re: Web by Google (TM)

#188

Post by jasode » Sun, Aug 16, 2020, 2:35 PM UTC

giancarlostoro wrote: post #181

jasode wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Couldn't you have said the same thing 20 years ago and used "AOL" instead? There seems to be a large group of users who consistently fit this trend and the company names just get swapped occasionally AOL was dominant (~30 million dialup subscribers at its 2002 peak) but didn't build any "sticky" products such as Facebook's social graph (a very valuable online Rolodex contacts database of real names ). Each dialup us…

> dialup user of AOL didn't interact with each other that much back then because the internet wasn't as central to life like today. Speak for yourself as a kid I would go on AOL chatrooms all day every single day. The kids rooms were packed with at least like 30 instances of them and like 10 to 20 kids in between. Learned what a/s/l meant back then something you dont hear as often these days hah. MSN Messenger had MS…

>Speak for yourself as a kid I would go on AOL chatrooms

My phrase of "interact that much" was relative to today's Facebook type of social penetration. Yes, I also interacted with others on old USENET, BBSs, Compuserve (CIS userid), AOL, etc. Many of us did.

But Facebook's social graph is the phenomenon that bridged the gap of grandparents seeing updates on the grandkids, high school alumni and past coworkers "finding" each other again and extending weak ties ("friend each other"). This type of social interaction is very sticky and difficult to switch away from. USENET/CIS/AOL level of interaction was much weaker.

Re: Web by Google (TM)

#189

Post by andromeduck » Sun, Aug 16, 2020, 2:37 PM UTC

alangibson wrote: post #178

thdrdt wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don't underestimate how Google is becomming the storefront of all retail on internet. Google can now dictate which webshop is shown first in search results on a product level. I know retailers are sick of this. They need Google to be found on the web but they don't like how Google is destroying retail.

There's a huge opportunity for Shopify to launch a slick shopping service that puts a (much nicer looking) Amazon-style interface in front of all the various shops. Combine that with Etsy's marketplace and you'd really have a contender.

They already do that.

Re: Web by Google (TM)

#190

Post by foobarian » Sun, Aug 16, 2020, 2:37 PM UTC

simias wrote: post #84

The problem is that, IMO, centralization of the internet is simply the natural course. Especially when people seem to care so little. Centralization is cheaper, easier to monetize, easier to control, easier to update and upgrade. That's why people prefer Discord to IRC, that's why people prefer Slack to SMTP or Jabber, that's why for many people these days the distinction between git and GitHub is blurry. I suspect t…

I think of it as grease blobs on the surface of your soup. They naturally tend to merge and merge and merge until there is only one. Unfortunately you need active regulation to counteract this.