> Instagram > I paid them for the app. What? IG is a paid app?
It was before it was bought by Facebook.
When?
You Will Not Understand This
111–120 of 265 posts
Re: You Will Not Understand This
#112>Search quality is no longer a core competency of Google, the Internet’s premiere search engine. For example: Two people type the same search string, each receives different results. While I sympathise with the general anti-social-media stance, it's clear from this phrase that OP does not understand the most basic elements of how internet services function at scale. Of course Google serves different results to differ…
Pretty sure OP gets the idea of personalization. Google's personalization is like piling up chairs in order to reach the moon. It's nowhere near its promise of reading the user's mind and helping him. Instead its present implementation simply stops your world view from expanding in any direction, by serving you the same stuff that you knew over and over again. This is not personalization. This is a child's imitation…
> Once upon a time, the internet allowed you to escape your geography. No longer.
For expats, this is one of the worst, constant reminders. One has to adjust every search/url to accommodate for the server's location-based interpretation of intent. Some sites won't even let visitors use the .com version. Surely regulation plays a part, but it's incredibly frustrating.
Re: You Will Not Understand This
#113Earlier quoted context omitted.
I can't find any sources for why Gmail has supposedly "broken" e-mail for "everyone in the world". Do you know what he's referring to?
If Google's spam filters block an IP or subnet that happens to be where you host your self-hosted mail server, it will be almost impossible for your mail server reputation to ever recover. Your emails to gmail users (a vast percentage of all email users in many places) will never be delivered and maintaining your own mail server will become a nightmare. Google has very good spam filtering, but their lack of human con…
I've been hosting my own mail server since 1997, at its current colo since 2007 or so. I've never had any issues with delivering email to gmail users.
So, I'm curious, am I just extremely lucky to have competent sysadmins as neighbours on the colo subnet, or is my IP address' reputation so good that it never gets affected by collateral damage?
Re: You Will Not Understand This
#114Earlier quoted context omitted.
> "Educating" users is not as profitable as serving users. Manipulating "uneducated" users is much more profitable.
This is a true statement, but how is this relevant? What do localized search results have to do with manipulating uneducated users?
> What do localized search results have to do with manipulating uneducated users?
Technology shouldn't be magic. People should understand, at least at a basic level, how the internet and search engines work, among many other things. Knowing to search for "cricket sport" shouldn't be arcane knowledge. People willing to allow companies to collect personal data and feed them data without understanding how it works end up living in bubbles such as the ones that got Donald Trump elected for instance.
If everything comes cheap and easy to access (like fake news) and people are sufficiently uneducated to accept them as truths, manipulation becomes much easier. Personally tailored search results are just a small part of the issue. It makes people trustful and dependent on services that might end up betraying them in the end.
Re: You Will Not Understand This
#115Earlier quoted context omitted.
>If I search for "takeaway pizza", I'm going to be pretty annoyed if the results are generated using PageRank alone, with no weighting for local relevance. Google "takeaway pizza [place of residence]". >If an American searches for "cricket", they almost certainly mean the cellular provider or the insect rather than the sport Google "cricket provider" or "cricket insect". >if a British person makes the same search, th…
For you. Maybe not for the median user though.
Maybe we, as technologists that are well positioned to think about the effects our technologies have on their users, should consider whether those effects are of net benefit to them or not.
The short-term consequence of using cocaine is euphoria, but we do not encourage cocaine use because for most users the long-term negative consequences vastly outweigh the short term benefits.
Likewise, we may want to consider what the long-term consequences of relieving our users of certain cognitive labors are. If we will guess for them what information they want, if we tell them what to read, if we tell them what news is fake, if we decide for them what they might like, are we empowering them to make their own choices, or are we increasingly (whether intentionally or unintentionally) directing their lives?
Re: You Will Not Understand This
#116Earlier quoted context omitted.
Pretty sure OP gets the idea of personalization. Google's personalization is like piling up chairs in order to reach the moon. It's nowhere near its promise of reading the user's mind and helping him. Instead its present implementation simply stops your world view from expanding in any direction, by serving you the same stuff that you knew over and over again. This is not personalization. This is a child's imitation…
> Once upon a time, the internet allowed you to escape your geography. No longer. For expats, this is one of the worst, constant reminders. One has to adjust every search/url to accommodate for the server's location-based interpretation of intent. Some sites won't even let visitors use the .com version. Surely regulation plays a part, but it's incredibly frustrating.
Lenovo has a policy of cancelling orders if the billing and shipping address country does not match. Fine. So they know I am Canadian because otherwise I couldn't make an order. Right? You can't get to the chat when travelling because it's geofenced based on your IP instead of order number / serial number of the laptop.
Re: You Will Not Understand This
#117>Search quality is no longer a core competency of Google, the Internet’s premiere search engine. For example: Two people type the same search string, each receives different results. While I sympathise with the general anti-social-media stance, it's clear from this phrase that OP does not understand the most basic elements of how internet services function at scale. Of course Google serves different results to differ…
Pretty sure OP gets the idea of personalization. Google's personalization is like piling up chairs in order to reach the moon. It's nowhere near its promise of reading the user's mind and helping him. Instead its present implementation simply stops your world view from expanding in any direction, by serving you the same stuff that you knew over and over again. This is not personalization. This is a child's imitation…
For practical usage e.g. finding information on technical topics (where reliably getting relevant results quickly is important, and randomly finding/exploring new "interesting" content is not), the google's personalization is immensely valuable to me; it gives me a source telling what I want on the first try, but the more-privacy-less-personalization alternatives can find the same thing only if I fine-tune the query multiple times.
Unfettered exploration is for dicking around when you have nothing better to do. If you actually know what you're looking for, then you want the answer you wanted to be on the top, and any exploration is a flaw that only gets in your way.
Re: You Will Not Understand This
#118Earlier quoted context omitted.
As someone doing a lot of language switching in my Google searches: should I preface every search with the language as well? I search for some error message. Now I get answers in English. What if the person is actually German? Is everyone now going to be stuck with English websites? What's the point of a search engine if you have to be super precise? Part of Google's magic is that it can figure you out even in imprec…
I'm Dutch, so I have to switch languages often as well. I don't think I get what you're trying to explain. Could you provide some examples? If I search for an English error message, I.. search for that message. If I search for a Dutch person, I look him up on the Dutch Wikipedia if he's well-known enough.
You're learning Django, and the error messages are in English.
There might be a Dutch programming blog talking about this error message, but they'll never be able to be discovered because any English source will end up on top.
Another example: you are traveling in a foreign country, and don't really know the local language. You Google for information about a restaurant, hoping to land on something Trip Advisor-y. You end up on the local website, that you're completely unfamiliar with.
You want to offer a blog for English-speaking expats in Paris. Your exposure in Google is really low because of the niche audience, and the fact that French sources about places you're talking about will be much more viewed.
Re: You Will Not Understand This
#119>Search quality is no longer a core competency of Google, the Internet’s premiere search engine. For example: Two people type the same search string, each receives different results. While I sympathise with the general anti-social-media stance, it's clear from this phrase that OP does not understand the most basic elements of how internet services function at scale. Of course Google serves different results to differ…
Pretty sure OP gets the idea of personalization. Google's personalization is like piling up chairs in order to reach the moon. It's nowhere near its promise of reading the user's mind and helping him. Instead its present implementation simply stops your world view from expanding in any direction, by serving you the same stuff that you knew over and over again. This is not personalization. This is a child's imitation…
...I'm quite happy that Google stops my world view from expanding to include Chicago restaurants when I'm looking for food in Seattle.
I'm also happy it doesn't include information about swifts the animal when I search for Swift the programming language.
Even when it's about political stuff - I'm rather happy I don't get anti-vax information when I'm searching for health information. I'm also happy Google doesn't show me clickbait because it knows I'm not interested.
The idea of a filter bubble is definitely worth addressing, but I see no reason why getting more information music notes when I'm trying to search for information about C# is remotely beneficial. I can use Startpage or Incognito if I want to avoid filter bubbling, but for the vast majority of searches I do, relevance to me is useful.
But it's not best addressed through fear-mongering. Don't call it a child's imitation just because you don't understand how it could be useful.
Re: You Will Not Understand This
#120> Instagram > I paid them for the app. Then they sold the app to Facebook. Now I see targeted ads and promoted posts. Was Instagram really a paid app at some point? Couldn't find any references to this.
The first post from Wired[1] about Instagram refers to it as a free app. I could see OP "misremembering" buying Instagram. [1] https://www.wired.com/2010/10/instagram-for-iphone-like-a-lo...
Maybe confused with Whatsapp? A used to be paid (is it now?) app bought by Facebook?