Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Google has sent internet into 'spiral of decline', claims DeepMind co-founder

telegraph.co.uk

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

191–200 of 390 posts

Re: Google has sent internet into 'spiral of decline', claims DeepMind co-founder

#191

Post by p3rls »

dalbasal wrote: post #121

"Search results plagued with ‘clickbait’ would have been an understatement 20 years ago. The parts of the open web you access from Google/search (most of it) is almost entirely made-for-google' ranking algorithims. The situation is worse than it is on closed social media, including Google's YouTube. Professional YouTubers are also making content for rankings above all, but the fact that it's their own face/voice keep…

I dreamed of building a website like the type I grew up on in the late 90s and early 2000s. The gamefaqs, mrfixitonlines and casterrealms-type websites for me were at the forefront of making this internet medium to be better than books, voice or anything else for that matter for the transmission of information.

Fast forward 20 years later. I think I've spent close to 300k on the website and team to help with it. I don't even want to think about my own labor costs. These days the google results for my niche are entirely dominated by an ugly purple wordpress blog ran by non-native English speakers that gets hacked every few months with a redirect to porn or russian sites. Their information is frequently wrong. It doesn't hurt their rankings at all. Yoast through it bro. Keep up the great work Google.

The entire story was posted on twitter last year by some shocked SEO researcher last year https://twitter.com/paulk139/status/1550532282288508929

Re: Google has sent internet into 'spiral of decline', claims DeepMind co-founder

#192

Post by Am4TIfIsER0ppos »

moritzwarhier wrote: post #133
kmlx wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> when you search for something like "how to reverse a pushed commit in git" i use chatgpt for those kinds of questions. i don't have time to read an article or select a non-spam site or even look at the stack overflow answer.

So I understood you want to reverse a pushed commit on both your local repository and the remote. You can reverse that commit using just the following commands: git reset --hard HEAD~2 git reflog expire --expire-unreachable=now git push -f This reverses the most recent commit. The -f is needed to reverse the commit on your git server. ... I apologize if my previous response wasn't helpful. I see that you meant "rever…

> git reset --hard HEAD~2

Stupid computer. That does 2 commits.

> git reflog expire --expire-unreachable=now

For the love of god why? The reflog is there to save your bacon. I guess because they are still reachable from the remote's reference so they won't completely vanish just yet.

> git push -f

Now they're gone unless you can find the hashes somewhere else. The objects might still be present.

> I apologize that two of your commits are now gone

Is that you or still GPT?

Re: Google has sent internet into 'spiral of decline', claims DeepMind co-founder

#193

Post by mnky9800n »

radicalbyte wrote: post #87
simpaticoder wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's great but there's a step 2. The sub-culture of people who like things better that way need to sustain each other and itself. Ideally, to grow in happiness and other measures of strength such that the surrounding dominant culture cannot destroy it, and in fact can influence the dominant culture to become more like it. It's that step 2 that I think we haven't figured out yet. Without step 2 we are merely opinion…

I've been thinking for some time that we could do with having a sort of private internet for the nerds. The internet itself used to be like this back in the late 90s. Nowadays 95-99% of the web is the general public which means that it has turned into what TV was - the happy happy box to keep the dummies occupied.

https://indieweb.org/Homebrew_Website_Club

Re: Google has sent internet into 'spiral of decline', claims DeepMind co-founder

#194

Post by nologic01 »

clnq wrote: post #163

It has become quite difficult to find experts on Google. Google is probably catering to the "entertainment" category of reader now more than it was in 2013. This opinion stems from my experience. And my experience is that I'm an old school technical blogger who writes articles certainly not for the "entertainment" crowd, but for the professional crowd. My readership stays high from Monday to Friday and drops to nearl…

A lot of people would corroborate your statistics and observations.

The problem is that there is no "entertainment" category of reader. Just different domains and special interests. Nobody likes accessing the internet with a low signal to noise ratio or fighting cut-and-paste "AI" websites that have been engineered to rank on Google.

Re: Google has sent internet into 'spiral of decline', claims DeepMind co-founder

#195

Post by amiga386 »

speleding wrote: post #174
toldyouso2022 wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Cookie law is seriously underrated in how much damages it has done. No visible gains for privacy either.

I agree, but it's mostly in the poor implementation where that law fails, the idea behind it wasn't bad. I think it can still be fixed by stipulating: if the browser sends you an X-Privacy header with some well defined content then you are not allowed to show a popup and you should use the content of that header instead. The exact content of that header needs to be fleshed out but should offer a lot of customisation…

This was https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Do_Not_Track and it did not work. Surveillance capitalism is just worth too much to websites to even pay lip service to user privacy.

The only thing that works is having your user-agent mercilessly chop the survelliance shit out of web pages. Don't evaluate it, don't render it. Because thw websites will forever be hostile to your interests while they can enrich themselves by datamining you.

Re: Google has sent internet into 'spiral of decline', claims DeepMind co-founder

#196

Post by meiraleal »

jokethrowaway wrote: post #154
pyinstallwoes wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

SEO / billboards / paid-for advertising is basically legal propaganda (arguably a form of mind control or more neutral we can say reality shaping through narrative structuring). I think the only place advertising should be allowed is in a marketplace setting, anywhere else is "public domain" and shouldn't be allowed in my opinion. It is the root to many evils, it is the mechanism that trends towards hacking the user…

I hate ads as much as everyone else (and actively block the hell out of it) At the same time, ads made a lot of the free web possible. I run services making money with ads: I would not be able to work on them without. Or maybe the revenue I would make is too little to bother with all the stupid EU regulations around VAT - ads offer a simple solution and you get a single B2B transaction, while providing values to Cust…

> At the same time, ads made a lot of the free web possible.

What made all the free web possible was free software, not ads. Google and the likes created empires through ads and breaking laws, we owe nothing to them. The sooner they go, the better. Also, they don't own the ads business model, there are healthier ways to sell, buy and deliver ads and that's not what Google and Meta are doing. They need to go.

> And a big chunk of the last 20 years of internet innovations was sponsored with ads money.

and a much bigger chunk was killed with it.

Re: Google has sent internet into 'spiral of decline', claims DeepMind co-founder

#197

Post by wffurr »

leobg wrote: post #31

Recipe blogs are the most horrible example. The amount of BS you have to scroll through to get to the actual recipe.

Serious Eats has become by go-to. They make it real easy to go straight to the recipe. There’s also a well written article about the actual recipe development process with insights into why the recipe is the way it is. I also enjoy Kenji Lopez-Alt’s writing.

They found a way to write those SEO-friendly articles but also keep their site usable and even deliver actual value with the article. It’s really impressive.

Re: Google has sent internet into 'spiral of decline', claims DeepMind co-founder

#198

Post by meiraleal »

seanwilson wrote: post #112
donatj wrote: post #52

I wrote a not-very-coherent in retrospect article about 12 years ago while working for an SEO firm about how SEO was killing the internet. The basis being companies were creating pages and blog posts specifically to target keywords without actually having coherent things to say on the topic. Moreover people within Google like Matt Cutts seemed to be at the time if not outright encouraging it, at the very least giving…

> I wrote a not-very-coherent in retrospect article about 12 years ago while working for an SEO firm about how SEO was killing the internet. The basis being companies were creating pages and blog posts specifically to target keywords without actually having coherent things to say on the topic. Is there a way to improve the detection of posts like this so they can be deranked? If so, why isn't this done? You would hav…

> Is there a way to improve the detection of posts like this so they can be deranked?

Yes, there is. But not fixing it makes the user stay longer on Google results then driving ads revenue. Google makes money out of bad results so they won't change this.

Re: Google has sent internet into 'spiral of decline', claims DeepMind co-founder

#199

Post by NL807 »

dalbasal wrote: post #121

"Search results plagued with ‘clickbait’ would have been an understatement 20 years ago. The parts of the open web you access from Google/search (most of it) is almost entirely made-for-google' ranking algorithims. The situation is worse than it is on closed social media, including Google's YouTube. Professional YouTubers are also making content for rankings above all, but the fact that it's their own face/voice keep…

I'm rather shocked how the quality of their search results has tanked over the years. I used to be able to find decent academic content, or programming related topics quite consistently 5 years ago. Now I'm getting only a few vague results either from stackoverflow, math stackexchange, reddit, or apple, and the rest is just utter garbage. Yandex, of all search engines provide consistently better results. Fortunately, Google Scholar did not suffer this fate yet, but I'm dreading the day when it will.

Re: Google has sent internet into 'spiral of decline', claims DeepMind co-founder

#200

Post by krisoft »

SideQuark wrote: post #162
majewsky wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The first does not follow from the second. Historically, incentives on human behavior have tended much more towards collaboration than competition. If all human behavior was framed as a competition, we would not have been able to construct communities.

>Historically, incentives on human behavior have tended much more towards collaboration than competition Humans spent far longer in kill others mode than in don't kill others mode. Incentives to not kill others is fairly new in history.

When you say “fairly new” what timeframe are you thinking about?

Just because we have a ton of evidence of humans collaborating as far as historical artifacts go back. But then of course with the appropriate perspective almost everything is fairly new. Would you call Göbekli Tepe fairly new for example?

After all 9000 BCE was just yesterday compared to the invention of multicellular life for example. Which is also massively about cooperation.

Post reply on HN