431–440 of 514 posts
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The Reddit trick is increasingly less viable as marketers are astroturfing Reddit.
That's been a significant factor on reddit since 2008 or so. It may be getting worse or the dynamics changing, idk, but it's nowhere near new.
Google on the other hand has automated centralized content moderation.
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Hmmh, so why do so many people complain about paying for all the different streaming services like Disney plus, Netflix, Amazon prime, etc.? It's really peanuts compared to the value delivered.
Eh it was great value when it was just Netflix or just two services but now I feel like there's often only 0-1 shows on a given platform that I'm interested in at any one time. It isn't "good value" to pay $15+ a month each for Netflix/Prime/Disney/HBO/Hulu/AppleTV and only use one or two of them in a given month. Because Prime Video is bundled with regular Amazon Prime I keep that active and activate and deactivate…
So, to me, even paying $60-$80 for various streaming services that are all on-demand (which wasn't the case for the cable I used to have) is still an amazing deal.
Oh, and I don't have to sit through ads every 5 minutes.
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A lot of people are using this term incorrectly lately. Gaslighting isn't simply telling someone that they are wrong about something. It's a specific, sustained, and intentional form of psychological abuse, most often found in a domestic setting. The origin is the play Gas Light and the plot revolves around a man trying to steal from his wife by making her think she is going insane.
I know what gaslighting is, and I am using the term correctly. When I tell people Google Search is not just bad, it is overt manipulation of your search to waste one's time sifting through prose nonsense because Google promote prose over facts, they often don't just disagree, they overtly over time try to change my mind, they can't let it lie, they have to change my thinking. And they use shallow, obvious insulting l…
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Try the search engine kagi.com It just works. Google stopped being a search company, and is an advertisement company now.
Must create account to use a search engine. Hard Nope.
I've been paying for Kagi for 8 months and it's been fine for me. I can live with it in a way I could never live with DDG.
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Must create account to use a search engine. Hard Nope.
I find the syllogism here a little hard to follow, because here is what the first bit looks like to me: 1. Web search is useful, both for work/productivity and recreation. 2. Running servers to index the internet is a scale of compute beyond the effort and expense of most or all of home users. 3. Web search has distinct economies of scale when applied. 4. Said economies must be funded in some way. 5. There are two pr…
I used kagi for a few months when it was still in beta (and thus free) and had to decide if I wanted to pay for it to keep using it, or go back to ad supported internet search.
After wincing at the price for a bit I realised that my expectations for how much search should cost were all based on free ad supported search engines. The value I derive from a good search engine is enormous, and easily visible if you imagine the internet without it.
This makes paying for kagi a nobrainer. Their search results are really good and they have an incentive to keep it that way. It's a solid product, with a great value proposition (if you recalibrate your expectation) and I am also regularly reminded that this is how to actually vote with your wallet. I feel like we need kagi (or something like it) to succeed. If it turns out that paid search is not a viable business, then what chance do we have left for a search engine that has its intentions aligned with its users?
But it's first and foremost a great experience. Fast, great results, clean layout and a bunch of nice user-centric features on top. The idealism just helps to accept a cost.
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Most people in the US love spending money. It's considered a recreational activity.
Hmmh, so why do so many people complain about paying for all the different streaming services like Disney plus, Netflix, Amazon prime, etc.? It's really peanuts compared to the value delivered.
Any given person is only going to care about some small fraction of the media available for watching, and when that fraction is spread out across 6 different streaming services, the "value" they're getting from any single one of those is fairly small.
Furthermore, similar to what ldhough says, many of us remember when we could get basically all that content on Netflix, and we know perfectly well that a) the content providers could be making reasonable amounts of money through a streaming deal like that, and b) the reason they decided to launch their own service is one part insatiable desire for ever increasing profit, one part unrelenting crusade for absolute control over everything they own. Nowhere in there is "value to the customer".
There's a quote that I've seen go 'round a few times, to the effect of "the streaming services really need to remember that their entire value proposition is being slightly more convenient than piracy."
"How do I fix some odd setting in Windows, Mac, whatever" 2007: results include documentation, a couple forums, if you're unlucky there's a potentially malware tool that's discovered people need to fix this. 2012: results include Reddit and Stack Exchange, documentation has disappeared, forums have opened that are full of "support specialists" telling you to reset your windows install. 2023: top results are just blog…
Am I the only one still searching Google primarily though keywords/phrases (and the exclusion of keywords/phrases)? I don't see much degradation in Google's results.
If you ask one of those people complaining here to share the query they use, it becomes very quickly very apparent that Google doesn't have a problem at all.
I don't know if it's Google that is dying. It's more like a large segment of the public facing internet is wilting. The user experience without an adblocker is almost nothing but ads, popovers, permission requests and chat boxes, sign-up-to-the-newsletter requests. And these are the websites that aren't trying to bait-and-switch you For example, this is the screen I'm showed when I navigate to www.producthunt.com: ht…
> I don't know if it's Google that is dying. I tried to use Google to see what would be good brand to replace a decade old small electrical appliance that failed a couple of months ago. Absolutely none of the results were helpful until I tried the "append Reddit to the search terms" trick. Immediately, I found a link someone had shared to a consumer reports style review of different brands at different price points.…
I tried looking up a picture of the shakras to help track the evolution of my mood from burnout to peace and where I feel that in my body. But it's so filled with sponsored links that I found myself squinting at blurred out preview images before I finally snapped out of it, perhaps 20 minutes later.
Information wants to be free. There should be glorious high-resolution images front and center that enthusiasts drew of their own accord and uploaded for free soon after the internet came online around 1995. Instead, we're funneled down the commercial carnival as marks. Sure, I'm a programmer, I know how to find what I'm looking for through various tricks. But I shouldn't have to.
Monetized search is one of the great blunders of the Information Age. Paid internet service is another. Walled gardens, the DMCA (using FUD and the threat of litigation to turn BitTorrent into the devil), scientific papers locked behind paywalls, even the capture of programming itself by centralized repositories and the trend towards microservices and the concentration of wealth away from programmers who could actually fix the tools we use.. just on and on and on, so much nonsense designed to trap our minds within the framework of profit for exploitation. The more I look around, the more it all looks like hot garbage.
It's frustrating to have a sense of knowing exactly what to do to fix things, even the knowledge and experience to pull off much of it, but spend the entirety of one's time running the rat race to survive. All while remembering a time not too long ago when it wasn't like that. I feel that central issue of wealth concentration and the dilution of disposable income and leisure time is what we're really fighting here. The loss of Google is just a symptom of that steady decline towards subservience.
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Reddit is one of the most astroturfed places on the internet, and there's an entire ecology of PR/marketing firms that focus exclusively on it. There's also a thriving market in "high karma" accounts, which can be bought for as little as $30. > Reddit also doesn't have "promoted" content / responses It does, though. Your karma basically determines the visibility of any new post you try to make. And low-karma or new a…
> Your karma basically determines the visibility of any new post you try to make. Are you sure? How do you know this?
Source: Don't have a persistent reddit account, just made a new one for the few times I wanted to post something.