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

Google made me ruin a perfectly good website (2023)

theluddite.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

41–50 of 551 posts

Re: Google made me ruin a perfectly good website (2023)

#41

Post by behringer »

zulban wrote: post #26
rustcleaner wrote: post #16

Maybe it's time for a market cap maximum. If your market cap exceeds the median GDP of all African countries, you get broken up. No more borg controlling the internet. This should help prevent vertical consolidation. Truly corporate death penalty any children of breakups who collude (full loss to equity, half loss to creditors, assets auction to public). Google shouldn't exist at its scale, nor should Apple, Microsof…

When you set an arbitrary cap like "GDP of all African countries" lots of people will argue it's too high, or too low, and you won't have any argument to make because it's arbitrary. Your solution sounds great but in practice it's simplistic.

The solution is much simpler than all that. Just make the idea of the public corporation illegal.

Re: Google made me ruin a perfectly good website (2023)

#43

Post by MyFirstSass »

seattle_spring wrote: post #9

I ran into this as well about 2 years ago. I thought it’d be cool to create a site that’d algorithmically estimate the snowpack for mountains based on observations and elevation. It was a very rough estimate, but still better than using 1 square mile observations, which obviously could vary by 10k+ feet of elevation. When I tried putting a few Google Ads on it to pay the hosting costs, it rejected it until I added lo…

Ah so this is why recipe websites are straight out of some demonic fever dream where you have to scroll 1 mile past 30 blocks of text, video, ads to get to the ingredients, then 1 mile further to get to the instructions.

All of those sites should be banned - but now i see it's Google encouraging them - such an extreme downgrade in usability from a basic html site from 30 years ago.

Something has gone extremely wrong on a huge scale culturally and politically.

Re: Google made me ruin a perfectly good website (2023)

#44

Post by bruce511 »

rustcleaner wrote: post #16

Maybe it's time for a market cap maximum. If your market cap exceeds the median GDP of all African countries, you get broken up. No more borg controlling the internet. This should help prevent vertical consolidation. Truly corporate death penalty any children of breakups who collude (full loss to equity, half loss to creditors, assets auction to public). Google shouldn't exist at its scale, nor should Apple, Microsof…

How has market cap got anything to do with monetizing the site?

You're suggesting that if Google was smaller then that would make this site more appealing to advertisers? That having more advertising companies would make this site more valuable?

Re: Google made me ruin a perfectly good website (2023)

#45

Post by dylan604 »

"Hey there, fellow political enthusiasts and furry friend lovers! We're Alex and Taylor, and we're on a mission..."

This really made me smile. It's one of the stupid phrases used in all of these types of sites that bothers me to no end. Iliza Shlesinger has a bit about two sisters doing a pitch to Shark Tank, and I read that whole "post" in the voice she uses. I always thought it was just me and my curmudgeon ways, but clearly if "AI" has picked up on it, then I see it as definite justification for my take.

i <3 this person for taking it this direction to prove a point. I've been known to do stupid stuff like this myself, and had the same ultimate point. It made a few people smile, but most people just rolled their eyes.

Re: Google made me ruin a perfectly good website (2023)

#46

Post by oakashes »

It's a fair point about how awful recipe sites look without ad blockers, but this part is just plain incorrect:

> You can tell just by looking at the URLs that those sites are going to be worthelss blogspam.

At least two of the three results in the screenshot are from legitimate baking sites (Cookie and Kate, Sally's Baking Addiction) which are generally trusted sources online. I don't know anything about the third. But Google seems to have actually done a good job of highlighting recipes from reliable blogs.

The points about the compromised experience on those sites due to intrusive ads remain.

Re: Google made me ruin a perfectly good website (2023)

#47

Post by ajross »

carl_sandland wrote: post #38
lupire wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's wrong with telling Google or whoever what you think your demographic is, and letting them place ads against it and optimize based on metrics. Why are words so important?

Why can't we use some sort of metadata tagging system instead? Isn't this what the person is indirectly trying to do: declare some simple tags, such as "US politics", but indirectly via a bunch of garbage fed into an auto-tagger?

Not to put too fine a point on it, but (1) we did once[1], because you're right that it seems like an obvious fit. But in practice (2) it got absolutely crushed in the market performance-wise by more sophisticated algorithms like Facebook's and Google's (Amazon plays in this world too, though they have an easier space to search). It turns out that the fundamental game in the ad world isn't serving ads that site administrators and content creators think their users want to see, it's figuring out what the users of that content actually want and showing them that instead.

And indeed, that cuts the site operator out of the loop, and forces them (if they want to make money from these ad algorithms) to design a site that will attract users with easily-intuited advertising needs. And the linked article doesn't have that.

[1] And still do in parallel niche markets like porn.

Re: Google made me ruin a perfectly good website (2023)

#49

Post by [deleted] »

bruce511 wrote: post #39
lupire wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's wrong with telling Google or whoever what you think your demographic is, and letting them place ads against it and optimize based on metrics. Why are words so important?

Well firstly, I'm not sure the site author knows the demographic. I'm pretty sure he doesn't ask that sort of thing before doing the calculation. Secondly the way Google determines the demographic is via the site content. Or to put it another way; site owners don't have a "right" to Adsense. Google is clearly allowed to choose those sites it considers "to be good advertising sites". Therefore if you have a site that…

[deleted]
Post reply on HN