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You Will Not Understand This

stanleylieber.com

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Re: You Will Not Understand This

#151

Post by michaelbuckbee »

hzay wrote: post #74
jdietrich wrote: post #36

>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…

The personalization seems to help if only because you need to disambiguate the english language.

I'm often searching for "ruby" (the programming language not the gemstone) and need to find "gems" (modules for the "ruby" language) and often these have names that have other meanings like "devise", "pundit", "ransack", "bootstrap", "carrierwave", "paperclip", "fog", "cucumber", "refinery", etc etc.

Similarly, having some basics about your geographic location, spoken language, etc. would seem to be quite helpful. If only to help separate out things like that there are 8000+ "Park Street" in the US when I type in an address and Google gives me the one closest to my location.

Re: You Will Not Understand This

#152

Post by marksellers »

hobofan wrote: post #147
PeterisP wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> Unfettered exploration is for dicking around when you have nothing better to do. It's also very useful for learning new things. Yes, Google probably does a better job than ever before in finding me the most relevant StackOverflow result, but for exploration usage it's become very useless. I've had the theory that the growing popularity of "awesome"-lists and its likes is mainly due to Google's reduced explorability…

I find curated lists better for exploration than search, but perhaps I just lost my ability to search whimsically. To each their own I guess.

Re: You Will Not Understand This

#153

Post by Micoloth »

kome wrote: post #88

Beautiful! I agree 100% with it. Commercial web sucks, and what it's worse: it's boring and predictable. The resistance has started. So many people share the same feelings, that's why things like the tildeverse (tilde.club, tilde.town, neocities) do exist. Revolution won't use JavaScript.

Thanks for the javascript part.

By the way, here on HN there's been plenty of post about "websites" been cool lately. Please let's not confuse healthy individual control over the web with purely subjective old technology nostalgia.

Tbh, 90s pure html was UGLY lol.

Re: You Will Not Understand This

#154

Post by leephillips »

rootlocus wrote: post #67
vog wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Educating" users is not as profitable as serving users. Also, a system that adapts to its users is generally more successful than a system that requires users to adapt to it. Moreover, proper education across the whole population requires, well, a country with proper education across the whole population. So you might have luck in some Scandinavian countries, but not at global scale.

> "Educating" users is not as profitable as serving users. Manipulating "uneducated" users is much more profitable.

Syms: "An educated consumer is our best customer."

Google: "An uneducated consumer is our best product."

Re: You Will Not Understand This

#155

Post by corford »

toomanybeersies wrote: post #140

Is there anyone who's moved overseas and quit Facebook, and benefited from it? Because for me it's my primary link between my home country, where I live now, and all my other international friends. Sure, I could use email to keep in touch, but the problem with email is that it's an active communications medium, unless you have a mailing list and email everyone what you're up to, you don't keep up to date with what yo…

Yep. Not sure how old you are, maybe it's an age thing? I'm in my early thirties, live abroad and don't have an FB account.

I stay in touch with my friends and family back home with phone, sms, whatsapp, skype, email and birthday/christmas cards in the post. Works fine.

Re: You Will Not Understand This

#156

Post by indigochill »

speedplane wrote: post #130
tallanvor wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

I spent a few years in the marketing world, doing copywriting optimized for search engines among other things. Good marketers are like professional gamers in that every time Google "changes the meta" they're uncannily quick to find new ways to game the system.

Re: You Will Not Understand This

#157

Post by w0utert »

nludd wrote: post #98
agroot12 wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

exactly. un-teaching mankind how to fish.

This. My mother used to teach classes in primary school how to use the computer and the internet, but appears to have forgotten most of this when browser user interfaces started prioritizing Google search. Now it's hard to get her to navigate to a URL and (even using Google) she struggles to find the information she needs because she's not used to accurate queries anymore. I get the value proposition of Google Search…

>> Now it's hard to get her to navigate to a URL and (even using Google) she struggles to find the information she needs because she's not used to accurate queries anymore.

Haha, if my mother needs to navigate to a URL, she opens Google, types the URL there, then clicks the topmost result (not kidding ;-)

I completely agree that we are on a slippery slope when it comes to technology that tries to be so smart that we don't have to think for ourselves anymore. I sincerely fear for the future of society if I see how easily people are already influenced and cognitively limited by their dependence on technology. We are turning into a society where expending effort to learn and understand things has to come from purely intrinsic motivation, which means a very significant cross-section of society will never acquire basic skills and intelligence we've taken for granted for ages. Imagine the day there will be no Google to help them out, for whatever reason...

Edit: One analogy that comes to mind, which is sort of a pet peeve of mine and is (IMO) side-ways related to the perils of making things 'too convenient' for people, is giving people 'too many options' to choose. I see a parallel between giving people 'choice and options', and 'making things convenient' by removing the need to think for yourself. Everybody agrees that choice is good, and everybody likes convenience. But if you treat these almost as religion, you get 1001 kinds of toilet paper which are probably all shitty (pun intended), instead of three choices that are actually different. The same goes for convenience. Too much convenience will have unintended side-effects.

Re: You Will Not Understand This

#158

Post by Micoloth »

krick wrote: post #76
jf wrote: post #11

I'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'm constantly amazed by all this "I quit facebook" bragging on HN. I'm avoiding FB as much as I can, but it doesn't feel to me at all like a problem that doesn't affect me if I'm not using it. That's pretty much the point for me. It's harder and harder for me to avoid FB. Local businesses don't bother making their own websites anymore, gym will post updates in some FB group (or whatever it's called), pretty much eve…

That's the only reason i don't quit.

Other than that, i make clear to people that i rarely check my FB messenger, and just don't use websites whose only login option is through FB.

I haven't posted on there for years.

Re: You Will Not Understand This

#159

Post by another-dave »

jdietrich wrote: post #146
sillysaurus3 wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

As far as I can tell, your essential complaint is that Google is sometimes providing results that are too relevant . You're OK with Google doing some amount of personalisation, but there's a line that they shouldn't cross. How do you distinguish between "good" and "bad" personalisation at scale? How do their algorithms know what should and shouldn't be personalised? Do humans even agree on where to draw the line? Goo…

There's definitely a scale I think — showing me local pizza places is great. What about guessing my budget & ruling out places it thinks I won't book? That's getting into a grey area & personally I'd find that uncomfortable/undesirable.

What about applying it to non-transactional stuff like news? Should it personalise results based on what it thinks I like?

Again with subjective/objective distinction — I know my friend will tailor movie recommendations to me based on mutual interests / past discussions.

I expect though that a library catalogue would point me to the same info on global warming no matter who I am.

The trouble at the moment is that Google is conflating these two types of interaction & the user doesn't know which of their queries are personalised (and to what extent / based on what criteria).

> How do their algorithms know what should and shouldn't be personalised? Do humans even agree on where to draw the line?

In my opinion, this is the crux of it — are we happy with algorithms filling this blank unfettered, based on their own learning. If not, it's something that we have to discuss and agree on, and then enforce / bring visibility to.

At present, Google aren't negligent (legally anyway, as we haven't set any bar) and may not be acting maliciously. But if we think change is necessary (at least for visibility of what's happening under the hood), we need to ask the questions around these services to drive that change

Re: You Will Not Understand This

#160

Post by OzzyB »

jdietrich wrote: post #36

>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…

> takeaway pizza

I searched for "takeaway pizza" but didn't get a local match for pizza delivery, so I changed my search query by adding more keyword qualifiers

> takeaway pizza in san jose

Works!

> cricket

I actually _wanted_ to search for the sport so I added additional keyword qualifiers to bypass all the Cricket brand results

> cricket sport

Works!

It's like how I know I must use "Golang" or even "Golang Stackoverflow" to find relevant results to my query -- I didn't need all the "personalization help" that Google likes to offer -- I'm actually capable of crafting decent search terms.

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