Earlier quoted context omitted.
I consider Reddit to be a form of web directory in a way.
I can't use it though because I've got this disability that memes cause me extreme distress.
Panik!! Kalm. Panik!!
The Age of PageRank Is Over
321–330 of 380 posts
Re: The Age of PageRank Is Over
#322I've been using Kagi the last few months. I've never had a reason to complain about its search results - they seem to work plenty well enough day to day that I don't really 'notice' them. Like most, I now search reflexively, as an extension of the mind, so I only 'notice' search when it's bad. What really excites me is that is that I'm paying them. That sounds odd, but seriously. It's incredibly refreshing to know th…
>It's incredibly refreshing to know that the company providing my search results has an incentive to make things better for _me_ and not a legion of advertisers Cable television and netflix have made it quite clear that payment does not mean “no ads”, it just means “no ads, yet”. It still might be a better alternative in the short term, but the moment growth starts to peak, companies follow where the incentives lead…
Yes, we can't emphasize this enough.
Companies have an incentive to make money off of their customers' data, and technology just means that they can make money at every level (your ISP, your smart TV, the apps you use on it and the websites your browse).
We're so accustomed to entities gathering data about us that it's become part of the background.
Why is it the default that my home is on Google Maps/Google Earth? I should have to opt in, not opt out.
Just because there is "public" information about me as a registered voter or home owner doesn't mean that anyone should be able get a copy of this data, put it online and connect it to other data?
Re: The Age of PageRank Is Over
#323Post states that Google search is getting worse, "...the quality of search started to deteriorate", and links to this article to justify the claim:
https://dkb.io/post/google-search-is-dying
Big discussion here and on Reddit when that article was posted. It doesn't set out to say Google search is worse/getting worse, but that people don't trust its results as much as human generated content (thus appending 'Reddit' to queries).
Re: The Age of PageRank Is Over
#324Earlier quoted context omitted.
HBO started broadcasting 50 years ago, charging a monthly fee for commercial free movies (often released much earlier than on cable) and tv shows. With the exception of filler ads for their own content that occurs when they need to wait for the next quarter time, ex movie ended at 12:55pm. There have been no ads
It's the exception that proves the rule. HBO has always marketed as a premium service, while Netflix's goal is to reach every home.
I mean, also Showtime, Starz, Cinemax...
To say nothing of the fact that Hulu has maintained an "ad" and "ad-free" tier for their original programming.
Re: The Age of PageRank Is Over
#325I've been using kagi exclusively for the last 3 months. I pay $30 because I feel it's worth it and I can afford it. While I tried to use duckduckgo, I found myself reverting to google on every other search. With kagi, I never had to, and I have built myself a set of useful filters based on what project I'm working on. This, along with switching to mastodon, means that I almost never encounter ads anymore. I honestly…
Congrats! I’ve recently started the journey towards more decentralization and kagi seems to be the next logical fit. So far I’ve self hosted backups with s3 replication and next cloud over tailscale has been amazing but I’m still trying to figure out social media. How does the workflow look like for sharing an album of pics with friends and family (who are on traditional social media platforms)?
If you don’t mind piping data through cloudflare, you can use cloudflare access + tunnel and a self hosted photo app of your choice (I use photo structure).
Cloudflare access will handle auth and can use family members’ gmail or popular emails for authentication. It will also do https for you.
If you want the data encrypted from cloudflare, I’d probably install tailscale on family members’s machine and do ACL. Friends are gonna be challenging
Re: The Age of PageRank Is Over
#326Earlier quoted context omitted.
That’s still a small number of players dominating the market. That’s the definition of an Oligopoly, and the Disney/HBO offerings very much fall into that. They certainly have the ability to uniformly raise prices (tacit collusion) with no viable competition to enter the market and fill the gap (as even the vast sums others have thrown into it have shown how hard it is to produce good original content). This is proba…
> That’s still a small number of players dominating the market. That’s the definition of an Oligopoly, and the Disney/HBO offerings very much fall into that. The market is “content”. Netflix competes with YouTube content producers, TikTok and it even said that one of its biggest competitors is Fortnite. > This is probably due to the characteristic that producing goods (decent original content) This goes back to YouTu…
> Netflix competes with YouTube content producers, TikTok and it even said that one of its biggest competitors is Fortnite.
It competes with these for screen time, not for content.
Meanwhile Disney owns how much content (movies, series and related IP)?
Re: The Age of PageRank Is Over
#327Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm a little tired of the rhetoric about Netflix adding ads. It's only on an entry-level account that is subsidized from the normal pricing (IIUC, correct me if I'm wrong). You could argue that they've artificially inflated the price of the normal plan or that it's a slippery slope, but it's not like they've forced ads on the existing plans. I think what's more interesting/concerning/insidious is hidden ad content li…
I would consider the Netflix UI to be ad laden for some years now with hundreds of originals shoved in your face in a non-customizable fashion and autoplaying etc. Also personalized thumbnails based on past watching behavior. You could argue that it's a good UX for most people, but for me it's always felt a bit more like user hostile marketing.
It's not just netflix. I hate the my Google TV pops up with ads for media. My PS5 boots straight into the store. At least my Apple Tv mostly doesn't shove ads in my face though my iPhone seems try try to shove Apple Music and/or Apple TV+ at me now and then
Re: The Age of PageRank Is Over
#328Earlier quoted context omitted.
The blogspam has made Google and Bing/DDG almost completely unusable for technical searches. Go search for something like "postgres cte" and you won't find anything useful until probably halfway down the page. And maybe not at all.
"Do you want to learn about blogspam? If so, you are on the right page. You will learn about blogspam here. One of the most major things about blogspam is that it exists on the Internet. You just learned that blogspam exists on the Internet. In this way, you have become educated about blogspam. Now that you know about blogspam, we'll move on to the next topic: How to find blogspam. It's actually very easy to find blo…
This killed the blogosphere, and will kill any decentralized system that becomes popular unless they can do something extremely clever.
Instead of a dark forest (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Dark_Forest) think of the outer internet as a fake forest. If you wander off the beaten path - the same dozen sites that everyone uses and complains about - you wander into an endless, trackless zone of fakes all of which are ultimately trying to sell you something.
Re: The Age of PageRank Is Over
#329Earlier quoted context omitted.
"This is why tech companies keep pivoting to ads" I think another factor is the paradox that the user who has enough money to be willing to pay to not see another ad is exactly the most valuable user to advertisers— they've pre-qualified themselves on multiple axes. So there is always going to be an enormous moral hazard here with the ad-driven-freemium model— always a temptation to run an occasional high-value ad to…
This showed up at an internal Twitter meeting this week. Mr. Musk proposed making Twitter ad free for 8$ accounts before being politely informed that 8$ accounts actually produce 50$ per month in ad revenue. An angry bird informed me about this :)
How do they know that, given that $8 accounts must be still pretty rare given they were just introduced?
Re: The Age of PageRank Is Over
#330I've been using Kagi the last few months. I've never had a reason to complain about its search results - they seem to work plenty well enough day to day that I don't really 'notice' them. Like most, I now search reflexively, as an extension of the mind, so I only 'notice' search when it's bad. What really excites me is that is that I'm paying them. That sounds odd, but seriously. It's incredibly refreshing to know th…
The reason that I'm not using Kagi (and some of my paid subscriptions) is that payments require login, and login makes it possible to track my search history. I'm happy with paying them with money, but not with my keywords. Is there some zero-knowledge protocol that could help here? In particular, to establish that a user is currently subscribed, without revealing which subscription they have?
Anonoymous credentials covers that use case pretty well.