341–350 of 407 posts
It feels like the web grew up into an bitter old fart who takes everything way to seriously. What's missing is the culture of "anonymity" where everyone was pretty much just a screen name and people did not give that much care to their long term reputations and the fall from that more or less started with facebooks real name policy, or rather when facebook stopped being an glorified phonebook and started being an con…
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I, and I'm sure there are many others in their 30's who would agree, prefer to get my information in written form. Pictures/diagrams are fine, but I don't want to watch a 10-15 minute video, or even a 2 minute video to get information I can read in less than 30 seconds. "Kids" these days seem to prefer the video medium much more. I don't know why, but I find it interesting that reading scores have also tanked a lot i…
S. P. Somtow nailed this 43 years ago in _Mallworld_. It's completely confusing to me also.
i think it was a mistake for most sites to disable comments. You just gave away your audience to facebook and tiktok. people are selfish, they like to give feedback and rant about anything. BigTech definitely nudged them away from that and into their garden. Yeah, spam does not scale, but you 'd have to deal with that, things that scale get eaten. The OP's blog would get a lot more engagement if it had a comment form…
It was not a mistake at all, and you stated exactly why. Spam.
Not just spam.
Spam. Spam. Spam. Spam. Spam. Spam.
A never ending torrent of shit. An ocean of it.
And that's before the mean spirited comments, trolls, outright illegal posts and more. Oh, and if you post anything really controversial, might as well get behind cloudflare now before you get blasted off the internet.
I have been thinking exact same things sometimes, I want to view some random websites, but I don't know many anymore, only some tools, which is great, but not exiting. I think it's cause there's no good Content Management system, there's wordpress, it's still very popular, but kind of bloated and hard so manage. I haven't found any Headless CMS, that I could just self host and attach the data to my website :/
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One of the last remaining remnants of this is the pirating community. Their work on cracking, emulation, system hacking and anonymity is such a wonderful place to make friends, push technology and just have fun. They still have that old school humour which made the internet so cool.
I'd say that video game modding and hacking communities have a similar vibe to them, as do fan created content sites and communities in general. Probably in all causes because being unable to legally make money from your activities scares away folks that just want to cash in on the latest grift, and don't care a single damn about quality.
There’s no debate any more, just banning and shadow banning. Forums used to be spicy! Now they are nothing but toxic positivity or bland nothingness.
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I can only imagine of Google faced the full firehose of their search traffic at your blog that most people would go broke paying their web bill. This said, I do think the bigger issue is we have pretty much 2 big search engines so there is no real competition in the market. And that those search engines are also ad companies and have a vested interest in showing ads.
I wonder if Google could build some custom variants of their search. That way they can use their underlying tech but reskin it to bias towards different things - eg favor local results, or scholarly, short form, or video/audio/text. Apply a lens or filter to results so we aren't all being served the same bland concoction of links. Sure AI could do this on a personal level but communities are built around shared exper…
But, also as an answer to your first question, no, there is no money in this that will show up on the next quarters income sheet.
As it is, the biggest way to deal with Google is regulations of breaking up search engines and ad networks. As long as Google controls the money making on the internet they'll be near unbeatable.
The causes seem two-fold. One is that most people consume content in apps, so most creators create contents for that audience. TikTok, Twitter, Reddit, Facebook, YouTube, etc are where users are, so it's where creators put their content for visibility. Related to this is, I feel, the switch to mobile, where the more limited UX of the device makes it a LOT easier to just stay in the same app rather than type URLs or m…
Google is in large part to blame for this, if not the main reason.
Many years ago, Google started updating their search algorithm to heavily prefer specific domains like govs, edus, or handpicked ones like Reuters or Microsoft.
I used to run my own blog and forum, and it used to be on the top of the search results for the niche it occupied. After the changes, it fell off the front pages and I'd often see the top search result being a link to a random reddit comment mentioning the search phrase and no other content.
It was at that point I realized that there was no point in running your own website to create "content". You can't compete with domains whitelisted by Google unless you have a lot of money to spend on SEO.
Some people point to the "Panda" update as when this all started happening.
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Web 3 as you described it never existed. I think Web 3 is more the TikTok and other mass content tools. Still dependent on their parties, but it's shifted to more access to rich content and more access, rather than the curated pinhole view of "posts", especially when it comes to live feeds.
Isn't TikTok solidly Web 2? It does not do any revolutionary. Maybe 2.3, but certainly it is pretty much same as for example Youtube. Just done bit differently.