161–170 of 229 posts
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Yea I thought the same. Sounded more like fragile “milennial” complaint than an actual good article with solid facts. You could find 100 solid ways to distrust google. Didnt think the author hit a single credible point.
If you don't think "Breitbart is not a credible news source" is not a valid point then oof, yikes, etc.
The most concrete complaints in this piece appear to be: - Google News includes stories from a source that the author doesn't want anyone else to be able to see. (If they just didn't want to see those stories themselves, then there's an easily accessible "hide sources from XXX" entry in the context menu). - Generic complaints about shopping searches returning links to Amazon, or pages having referral links to Amazon.…
The Epoch Times isn’t just a “source” that some people don’t want to see. And gmail etc has a shit ton of ads. This comment isn’t a reasonable critique of the article it’s denialism at best
I've yet to ever see an add in any of my Gmail accounts.
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> Do people miss the Google of old, or the Web of old? Yeah, I wish I knew how to get back to it, but I think that's impossible without a big enough movement. Yes, I know about tildeverse and some other things but the countervailing network effect is just too big for it to be sustaining right now. The closest is Mastadon but it's not really that great.
What would make Mastodon more appealing for you or the hypothetical user for whom you think it's not that great? The main thing that comes to mind for me would be more people I know in person using it.
I never forgot that remark. So that's a thing that I'd recommend to Mastadon: make it viewable by anyone, even if they don't have an account. Nothing smells quite like "you are the product" than requiring an account.
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What would make Mastodon more appealing for you or the hypothetical user for whom you think it's not that great? The main thing that comes to mind for me would be more people I know in person using it.
Many moons ago, someone on Reddit said "Facebook requires registration in order to view content, which tells you all you need to know." I never forgot that remark. So that's a thing that I'd recommend to Mastadon: make it viewable by anyone, even if they don't have an account. Nothing smells quite like "you are the product" than requiring an account.
Here's the profile directory on the biggest instance, for example: https://mastodon.social/explore
Do people miss the Google of old, or the Web of old? The Web used to be very information dense. It was built from the ground up by specialists and enthusiasts, educational and governmental institutions, and groups of like-minded individuals. Then it became commercialized and commodified. Entire industries popped up to shovel mass-produced crap to masses of people through Amazon, Google, Facebook, etc. Forums became s…
I miss the non-commercial web of old. It's got into the point where I think my ultimate search engine is one that ranks pages by fewest ads. And I get that people make a living by putting advertising on their pages. I'm not really against that. (Though I don't do that myself for my own reasons, I wouldn't presume to tell other people what to do with their websites.) But it's been abused to the point where number of a…
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Google also has an outsized influence on the kind of content that's on the web. At some point in the past, from what I remember, they started ranking blog content lower than more "authoritative" sources, hastening the decline of personal blogging. If you're wondering why every recipe on the internet has ten paragraphs on how this recipe is their grandmother's favorite and how it reminds the author of the freshness of…
Time to get back to curated lists of interesting websites.
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Supposing it's just a youthful phase. Like the fashion industry for example. Where skinny jeans were popular in the 80's then baggy jeans in the 90's. Then skinny jeans are back in sync now. Don't you think personal blogs and forums will come in sync at some point in the future?
Big news old man: skinny jeans died a few years ago and now the mom jeans of the '90s are back in
> I remember pretty fondly the era of the Yahoo directory, where things were cultivated by humans not looking for profit.
Wait, weren't those humans cultivating the Yahoo directory also just random internet strangers?
The fallacy of youth is that one of extremes. Things are never as bad as they seem. Likewise they're never really as good as they seem. The latter I think explains a lot of nostalgia and holding onto the first "past" we lived through. At the very least it's easy to view that as our baseline. What's "normal", if you will. I say this because as hard as can be to imagine how something like Google will cease to be domina…
Honestly, I think the fallacy is to just believe that Google's dominance will magically end. I have a different take, which is that tech leadership rarely changes in a particular technology , it's just that new technologies arrive that displace the old. Microsoft is still absolutely dominant in desktop operating systems. IBM has 90%+ marketshare in mainframes. Oracle is still the top enterprise database. So we seem t…