Well I for one enjoy being on Tumblr. I curate the content I want to see by choosing who I follow, and (hopefully permanently), its timeline is ordered chronologically. The mobile clients are certainly terrible, and it's full of hiccups, but it's the only social media I enjoy browsing these days.
You Will Not Understand This
121–130 of 265 posts
Re: You Will Not Understand This
#122>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…
>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…
>Google "takeaway pizza [place of residence]".
If I search "takeaway pizza [place of residence]" on a non-localised search engine, I get nothing. If I search "takeaway pizza [nearest large town]" I get a bunch of places that don't deliver to me. Google gives me what I want, which is a list of the dozen or so pizza places in the patchwork of villages and towns in the surrounding area.
Google could give me that sort of result without any personalisation, but it would need to do another contentious thing - fuzzy matching. It needs to understand that when I search for [place of residence], I actually mean [place of residence plus everywhere within a certain radius], but only in some contexts. It needs to search the index not for the exact words in my search term, but for what it predicts will give me the most useful results.
Again, this stuff is literally Google's job. I don't want to do the mental work of figuring out all the towns and villages within a five mile radius, I don't want to perform a bunch of different searches, I just want to see where I can get a decent pizza. Google shows me all the local places on a map, complete with reviews and opening hours. If I search on mobile, I can choose a place and call them or get directions with one tap. If I ask for directions, it'll warn me if there's traffic and offer me an alternative route.
If you can't see how 2017 Google gives far better results for this query than 2007 Google, then I can only assume that you're being wilfully ignorant.
Re: You Will Not Understand This
#123Earlier quoted context omitted.
They killed Google books What does this mean?
Google books is done. Yes, the website is up, but they aren't scanning new books and gave up on the backlog. Try it yourself, go look for any book published since 2016.
Wasn't there a large lawsuit that stopped that one?
Re: You Will Not Understand This
#124Earlier 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.
Same with languages. It's incredibly annoying when pages try to guess what language I want by my location, I rather be asked.
Same with marrying the language to the country, if I want to buy a flight from Germany, don't change the page to German!
Re: You Will Not Understand This
#125>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…
You indeed did not understand this. (Error lies partly in author's lack of specifics) The problem is; we taught Google how to look for whatever information we seek by seeking it. We taught it that we are too stupid to include location information in our searches. We taught it what is spam and what is not. That's our "not spam" choices accumulating as a service over time. That's our own translation suggestions. We gav…
Not to mention all the captchas we solved to train their OCR and self driving cars. https://xkcd.com/1897/
Re: You Will Not Understand This
#126Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I went to the settings page, selected "enable IMAP" and used the values in the provided link to set up my Gmail as an IMAP account in Thunderbird. No messing around with account security, no "obscure values" to change. A.K.A."It works on my machine". Lucky you. > Why were those documents ever on an Internet-connected device? Because that's the whole purpose of 0bin.net. The fact it's a good practice or not has noth…
> A.K.A."It works on my machine". Lucky you. It has worked flawlessly on multiple PCs, multiple operating systems, multiple email clients. It's my primary way of using Gmail and Gcal, through Evolution on Linux Mint. It even worked perfectly on my ancient Sony-Ericsson feature phone's terrible built-in email client, back when I still used that hunk of shit. There are no "obscure values" to change, just a completely o…
That sounds a lot like the people saying "wow, you knew you were going on that part of town with that sexy dress and you got harass. Blames on you.". Errr... no.
Re: You Will Not Understand This
#127I'm relived that at least some people are leaving social media. "Gamification of personal interaction" certainly degraded my health. Quitting Facebook "cold turkey" is the best decision I've made this year.
I've quit, but not entirely. I just unfollowed everyone . My newsfeed is blank, it doesn't even have ads amazingly. Without the feed, I still get the upsides of Facebook (I can communicate with people on a platform they almost all use, I can organise events easily), but (along with a suite of tracker-blockers) remove almost all the downsides. https://blog.mamota.net/posts/solving-facebook/
Thank you for offering this middle way. I am doing this now.
Re: You Will Not Understand This
#128Earlier 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…
...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 sho…
It's interesting how this entire thread was spawned and derailed by the original essay being a bit too imprecise.
You all are taking this one argument out of context. He wasn't talking about restaurants. But everyone here is.
Obviously restaurants should be personalized. But no one was saying they shouldn't.
You have to take the argument in the essay and try to think of the most persuasive possible interpretation. Is that "If I search for something in Seattle, it would be stupid to return results in Chicago"? Probably not.
My webdev friend was excited that her personal site was being returned in her search results whenever someone searched a project she had worked on. I suggested that google was serving her personalized results. She searched in incognito. Her site was still being returned. Pretty good, right? She was getting exposure.
When we used a VPN, she was not in the results. Google knew that our searches came from our IP address, and that searches from our IP should include her site, since she mostly visited her site from our IP. Or something along those lines. Either way, it was a misleading worldview.
I'm going to be harsh for a second, but I mean this lovingly: Stop being naive. It's important for us to be skeptical of Google. They're the thousand-pound gorilla, and the moment they do more than wink and nod at their "Don't be evil" philosophy then we should start getting scared.
Re: You Will Not Understand This
#129Earlier 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…
...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 sho…
> 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.
But this is part of the problem, isn't it? You might not get the anti-vax information, but others will see that instead of REAL information.
And, be honest with yourself. Some of what you do want to see would be considered clickbait by others, it's just that Google already knows you well enough to show you things that fit your own world view.
Re: You Will Not Understand This
#130Earlier quoted context omitted.
...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 sho…
> 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. But this is part of the problem, isn't it? You might not get the anti-vax information, but others will see that instead of REAL information. And, be honest with yourself. Some of what you do want to se…
The vast majority of Google results I see are very poor quality articles optimized for Google. Wikipedia is almost always the best option. Either the algorithm they are using seems to be optimizing for the wrong thing, or marketers have gotten really good at playing the game.