181–190 of 427 posts
Fascinating observation. Maybe the real value of AI is bootstrapping solutions to these public goods problems.
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From the article > 12-moth plan > 6-month plan Why would a dating site have a 12-month plan, and why would a user of a dating site want a 12-month plan? Not only would you hopefully want to be off the site within 12 months, as soon as you found someone compatible, you would hopefully delete the app, but you've unnecessarily paid for months you will (hopefully) never use. I don't understand why anything but month-to-m…
Month-to-month is just as bad. The ideal business model for a dating site, from the users' perspective, is a one-time advance payment. This puts the business into the situation where they have an incentive to get you satisfied as quickly as possible, so that they can spend as little time/money on you as possible, so that your value to them doesn't go negative from allowing you to spend too much of their time/money. T…
I know one case where Google appears to be actually using "AI", and the results are terrible. A client of mine is continually having their listing on Google Maps "helpfully" updated by Google to be wrong. They change the services, they change the hours, all to be wrong. They added a new services section, duplicating their existing services and adding back ones that had been removed post-COVID. There is no way to make…
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> google created a negative feedback loop with the web Friendly note: this may be a "negative" (i.e. bad) effect, but it is not a negative feedback loop. A negative feedback loop is a part of a system that self-corrects back toward a stable position. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Negative_feedback
So a negative positive feedback loop?
Just another case of wishful thinking by someone who doesn't like how the web works in practice?
An annoying example which has gotten worse recently is recipes. I generally trawl through 5k words of someone's life story and product promotions to get to the piece of information I need, and they often rewrite the recipe 5 different times in different levels of detail -- is this because to make the first page rank on Google you need to pad out the SEO? I too always find myself doing site:reddit.com.
Many of the recipe sites you're finding are likely "food bloggers", so their interest is in being a personality/virtual cooking companion more than being just a source of a recipe. You have misaligned interests, and to be fair they're probably less interested in your patronage if you just hop to a page to grab a recipe. And of course the verbiage is a lot of long tail keyword inclusion (pandering to Google by talking…
There is, and has been, a very well known, nationally respected organization who does this, for years! Their recipe recommendations are usually good, and the narratives actually ADD to the recipe, by offering alternatives and reasons behind choices made, instead of just telling a nonsense story.
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Google page ranking depends on how long people spend on the webpage, so if you have to wade through longform text, it mistakenly assumes that the content is quality. Note that most recipe blogs are fake. Someone wrote the original content long ago. Then, someone else hired a copywriter off a freelancing platform to change the words of the text just enough to avoid copyright violation, then put up a new copycat websit…
> Google page ranking depends on how long people spend on the webpage, so if you have to wade through longform text, it mistakenly assumes that the content is quality. Is this true? I have a hard time believing it because it's a pretty naive assumption. A site that lets me get what I'm after quickly is generally going to be what I want.
How many people keep open 50+ tabs, or open a page and walk away?
I'm sure that time spent on a page, if it's given any weight, is given barely any. I'm sure returns to search to click a new link is a much higher indicator that the user didn't find what they wanted.
The bitter lesson.
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I literally append "site:reddit.com" like in the article whenever I'm looking for reviews and comparisons. Google is nearly useless for finding content among the sea of crap and autogenerated near-crap (like Slant). I might click on the links going to sites that I half-remember by name, but for open-ended searches it's a lost war.
> I literally append "site:reddit.com" Stop saying that! The more people repeat that on HN, the more we risk advertisers realizing it and doing reddit-targeted SEO and reddit will be useless too! (I'm only half joking) Also, it's funny, I was just reading the thread about malaria eradication and DDT-resistant mosquitoes; the problem of SEO is eerily similar (any countermeasure is eventually defeated by evolution).
An annoying example which has gotten worse recently is recipes. I generally trawl through 5k words of someone's life story and product promotions to get to the piece of information I need, and they often rewrite the recipe 5 different times in different levels of detail -- is this because to make the first page rank on Google you need to pad out the SEO? I too always find myself doing site:reddit.com.
It's not for SEO, it's to demonstrate engagement to the advertisers. Scrolling past the markov fluff they give you to read "while you wait for that to come to a boil" counts as engagement.