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Google made me ruin a perfectly good website (2023)

theluddite.org

291–300 of 551 posts

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

#291

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…

But who are you (or me) to decide if they should exist at that size?

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

#292
post #226

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've been through this thought-process many times. 1. Google isn't working well any more. 2. Therefore bring humans back into the system of flagging good and bad pages. 3. But the internet is too big - so we have to distribute the workload. 4. Oh, a distributed trust-based system at scale... it's going to be game-able by people with a financial incentive. 5. Forget it. --- Edit: it's probably worth adding that whoeve…

I think the solution to this is both unique and trivial: you cannot trust something that is freely expandable,or did not require some amount of stake from the other party. That stake can be anything, time, work or money. If you want to trust a review, it's needs to have required a non expandable resource from the reviewer. That amount of resource should be an optimum of what an average user would be willing to expand…

I like your thinking, but there's a middle ground before full automation: when humans are incentivized, one way or another, to provide the biased reviews. This might be via straight-forward employment of people in lower-cost places (e.g. via Mechanical Turk) or other incentives. For example, note how a proportion of Amazon reviews are gamed and unreliable.

At the moment, the only tasks (that I can think of) that come close to the 'time-consuming-enough to not scale, but not quite annoying enough to put off committed individuals' are the various forms of CAPTCHA - which is unsurprising, given that we're discussing a form of Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart. (And of course, there are CAPTCHA-solving farms.)

But would people invest time in a review system that required them to complete a form of CAPTCHA regularly?

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

#293
post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I just looked up Cookie and Kate. On my iPad I had to flick 7 times to get past the exposition on Crispy Roasted Chickpeas and find the actual ingredients. When I found the ingredients, they occupied a small squeezed sliver of the page. As I was counting the number of simultaneous ads surrounding the ingredient list (4 separate ads), a pop up covered them all and suggested I sign up for her newsletter. The recipe loo…

That's not entirely fair. The problem is that Google forces actual good cooks to make their recipes look like worthless blogspam, but a good original recipe is not actually worthless blogspam, even when disguised in the way Google requires.

An earnest writer and spammer might reach the same method in different ways, but the result is still blogspam.

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

#295
post #7

“a link to what the site looked like last week, before Google made me make it worse on purpose to make money.” Sounds like you sold out. You should own up to your agency in the matter. They made me make it worse so I could make more money - it’s like you think you are under unique pressure to pay bills, thus excusing you, but everyone else in the world shouldn’t be excused.

Not only did they choose to make their website worse for money, doing so encourages Google to continue doing this.

This all coming from "an anticapitalist tech blog" humoured me a little.

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

#296

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…

But who are you (or me) to decide if they should exist at that size?

Not you or me, but you and me and everyone else collectively, in the way that's typical for regulation.

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

#297
post #226

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've been through this thought-process many times. 1. Google isn't working well any more. 2. Therefore bring humans back into the system of flagging good and bad pages. 3. But the internet is too big - so we have to distribute the workload. 4. Oh, a distributed trust-based system at scale... it's going to be game-able by people with a financial incentive. 5. Forget it. --- Edit: it's probably worth adding that whoeve…

I think the solution to this is both unique and trivial: you cannot trust something that is freely expandable,or did not require some amount of stake from the other party. That stake can be anything, time, work or money. If you want to trust a review, it's needs to have required a non expandable resource from the reviewer. That amount of resource should be an optimum of what an average user would be willing to expand…

> That stake can be anything, time, work or money.

I think you'll find that money should be removed from your list. There are some untrustworthy people that have tons of money. Sadly, I think trust must be EARNED, and that requires giving effort (work) and time. You cannot buy trust with simple money.

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

#298
post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

FWIW, I was certain this was GPT by the second paragraph.

Eerie..I looked at the account after I posted my comment...it made several other comments I noticed this week. Nearly every single comment I remember seeing and thinking it sounded like GPT, and yet, had enough content to be not-GPT, and I figured I was being cranky. Same vibe here except blatantly off-topic, and less content than the others Curious what you make of their other posts

I don't think it is "pure GPT" because of the "As someone...". It seems more likely that this is someone who is using GPT to make their comments longer or "fancier". Or it might be a rare example of someone who actually talks like that.

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

#299
post #273

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m afraid the problem is not indexing, but monetization. Alternative google search will not be profitable (especially if you have to pay a share to google indexing) because no one will buy ads there - even for bing it is a challenge

The hope though is that by splitting indexing that puts search providers on an equal footing in terms of results quality (at least initially). Advertisers go to Google because users go to Google. But users go to Google because despite recent quality regressions, Google still gives consistently better results. If search providers could at least match Google quality 'by default' that might help break the stranglehold w…

> Google still gives consistently better results

How sure are you about that? I find them to be subpar when compared to Bing, especially for technical search topics (mostly, PHP, Go, and C related searches).

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

#300

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This was already solved in the past. Don’t just build a web site, build a community. This way the community will advertise the site and attract more users.

How do you build a community if google prevents users from finding it?

The existence of meatspace never stopped the early web from flourishing, so why should the existence of the modern web stop anybody from making a second web? The only reason that Google was useful is because it tapped into the trust network that already existed before it.

I feel like the social media churn has destroyed people's brains, because they're more interested in stopping people from doing things they don't like than doing something awesome themselves.

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