191–200 of 427 posts
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Probbably due to the memory of the deaths of millions of people: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mass_killings_under_communist_... You get bit by a viper in the bathroom and your going to avoid that bathroom for a while.
That doesn’t really explain anything, given there are millions of deaths under capitalism too.
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> But what made Google a money-printing machine is that search advertising is actually largely aligned with the interests of the user. That is, just by searching for something the user has shown an intent that other advertising doesn't have (where generally it's just attention thievery). Imagine I search for "how do I sleep on an airplane". Isn't a neck travel pillow an appropriate result here? This doesn't hold wate…
> This doesn't hold water. It's just being shown because someone paid for it to be, not because it's the best thing to be shown which is what algorithms would be tuned for if they were in the users interest. You are factually incorrect and this is part of the problem: a lot of proselytizing (and, honestly, virtue-signaling) by people who don't know how advertising actually works. Display advertising works on a CPM ba…
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Wasn't this also the story of a dating site (whose name escapes me. OKCupid? PoF?)? Original owner wrote an article about how paying for a dating site is a bad idea. Money is offered, article disappears. Searching is failing me at the moment edit: Was OKCupid: https://www.themarysue.com/okcupid-pulls-why-you-should-neve...
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…
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Everybody’s got a plan until they’re punched in the face (with hundreds of billions of dollars).
Yep. Money is the one unpatchable zero-day for every platform and service on earth.
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Everybody’s got a plan until they’re punched in the face (with hundreds of billions of dollars).
Or, maybe, "Everybody is altruistic until they have shareholders." The idea that companies should only be beholden to shareholders that has taken firm hold over the past 50(+/-) years doesn't look to be a good one, in hindsight.
"It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest." - Adam Smith, 1776
This is a big pet peeve of mine. People think because they're reading the web that they know things or they're "up to date" on current events. I've gotten a lot more out of books than the news, especially in the last 5-10 years.
And I feel like that's almost universally true (bad books are still better!)
Ironically Google Scholar is one place that you will find some real information. But it seems to be de-emphasized now. The main Google results will take you to a paywall for a paper (IEEE, etc.) But if you go to Google Scholar, you'll find the PDF. But I'd bet many Google users don't know that, even the ones that would read a journal paper.
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Aside from that, this is a great article that makes a great point. Google talks about AI all the time but it still relies on basic user curation to understand the web.
I think that shows you that the value lies. If webmasters stop doing work, then Google has nothing to index. Similarly I view the rise of these awesome lists as a manual Yahoo:
https://github.com/sindresorhus/awesome
If Google was providing so much value, then these lists would be redundant.
In fact I think Google was bootstrapped off at least partially off Yahoo. Yahoo had all these human editors curating links. That was great information for a nascent search engine to piggy back off of. Now that Yahoo no longer does that (AFAIK), Google has to rely on incentives for webmasters to provide metadata.
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To add something positive, I think YouTube is really where there is interesting user created content. Google has done a good job of stewarding and growing that ecosystem.
I remember I used to type random keywords in to Google and see what comes up. It used to be something interesting; it no longer is.
But YouTube has that flavor now. I typed in "sardines" and got a channel of this funny guy reviewing all sorts of canned fish :) It feels more like the early web.
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> 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).
You are 10 years too late for that concern. I often wonder if there are any real people commenting, submitting, or upvoting left on Reddit.
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Wasn't this also the story of a dating site (whose name escapes me. OKCupid? PoF?)? Original owner wrote an article about how paying for a dating site is a bad idea. Money is offered, article disappears. Searching is failing me at the moment edit: Was OKCupid: https://www.themarysue.com/okcupid-pulls-why-you-should-neve...
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…