Have you noticed how much shit the internet has become now? (2007) • Hacker News Board

Re: Have you noticed how much shit the internet has become now? (2007)

#21

Post by gumballindie » Fri, Jun 09, 2023, 9:06 PM UTC

sigg3 wrote: post #4

> > Geocitites > Oh yes, the 90's was so much better... Yes they were, because geocities didn't control your search results and did not force you to donate 10 seconds to some creepily targeted ad before serving any multimedia experience. I'm not going to say technology was better, nobody misses Realmedia, but the internet was more like a street than a mall. You could look at some weird art or look at some interesting…

> Yes they were, because geocities didn't control your search results

No but altavista and metacrawler did.

Then there came google, heavily subsidised by vc money. Deep pockets. Then that turned out to be unsustainable and so they began controlling search results and showing excessive ads.

If we want an ad free internet we need to pay for services or have government provided alternatives.

There’s no in between i am afraid. Servers and engineers cost money.

I wouldnt mind spending 10£ a month for a proper search engine service with a means to stay connected with friends. That would also reduce bot generated content.

Re: Have you noticed how much shit the internet has become now? (2007)

#22

Post by nmilo » Fri, Jun 09, 2023, 9:12 PM UTC

blackhaz wrote: post #18

sigg3 wrote: post #4

> > Geocitites > Oh yes, the 90's was so much better... Yes they were, because geocities didn't control your search results and did not force you to donate 10 seconds to some creepily targeted ad before serving any multimedia experience. I'm not going to say technology was better, nobody misses Realmedia, but the internet was more like a street than a mall. You could look at some weird art or look at some interesting…

Just recently my wife came back home telling me about some tablet computer she has never ever seen before. I think she has googled for it on her phone. What do you know - my Facebook showed a few ads of that device - on that day. I've never heard about it before. I never searched for it and I never searched for a tablet even - I don't use them. Is this now the new normality - palantiring through databases? Is it OK f…

I've always read comments like this and just assume it's confirmation bias on two levels:

1. Out of the 1000s of ads you see every day, at least one of them might coincidentally relate to something you talked about. You don't notice all the ads that are wildly irrelevant.

2. Even if you personally didn't have a hyper-relevant ad experience, out of the 1000s of HN readers that might comment a reply, one of them surely did. You just might be the one lucky guy that got your hyper-relevant ad of the day.

Re: Have you noticed how much shit the internet has become now? (2007)

#23

Post by plagiarist » Fri, Jun 09, 2023, 9:13 PM UTC

gumballindie wrote: post #21

sigg3 wrote: post #4

> > Geocitites > Oh yes, the 90's was so much better... Yes they were, because geocities didn't control your search results and did not force you to donate 10 seconds to some creepily targeted ad before serving any multimedia experience. I'm not going to say technology was better, nobody misses Realmedia, but the internet was more like a street than a mall. You could look at some weird art or look at some interesting…

> Yes they were, because geocities didn't control your search results No but altavista and metacrawler did. Then there came google, heavily subsidised by vc money. Deep pockets. Then that turned out to be unsustainable and so they began controlling search results and showing excessive ads. If we want an ad free internet we need to pay for services or have government provided alternatives. There’s no in between i am a…

If you paid for that it would be less than a decade before that company was also doing the same bullshit and also collecting a subscription. Look at what is happening to streaming. "Oh, $10/mo for basically all the content, that's a no-brainer." Now it's returning to the cable television experience with ads every 10 minutes.

Re: Have you noticed how much shit the internet has become now? (2007)

#24

Post by lkrubner » Fri, Jun 09, 2023, 9:13 PM UTC

gumballindie wrote: post #21

sigg3 wrote: post #4

> > Geocitites > Oh yes, the 90's was so much better... Yes they were, because geocities didn't control your search results and did not force you to donate 10 seconds to some creepily targeted ad before serving any multimedia experience. I'm not going to say technology was better, nobody misses Realmedia, but the internet was more like a street than a mall. You could look at some weird art or look at some interesting…

> Yes they were, because geocities didn't control your search results No but altavista and metacrawler did. Then there came google, heavily subsidised by vc money. Deep pockets. Then that turned out to be unsustainable and so they began controlling search results and showing excessive ads. If we want an ad free internet we need to pay for services or have government provided alternatives. There’s no in between i am a…

But people didn't rely on search, as much, back then. I belonged to a few forums, and I'd visit one or two portals, almost every day as my starting point on the Web, and from there people would be recommending things, and I'd follow that. All through the 90s and into the early 00s, it was sites such as Everything and Digg and Slashdot that drove all traffic. Search-as-in-Altavista was ineffective, so people didn't rely on it. We all relied on certain forums, and those drove traffic in a more organic way. Of stuff we have nowadays, Reddit almost recreates that old world, but Reddit now operates in a context where online traffic has concentrated into 2 sites: Google and Facebook. There is no way to escape the current context, that traffic is now massively concentrated. There was a certain freedom to the 90s, in that no site could reliably capture even 1% of the Web traffic, a situation that we idealistically thought would last forever.

Re: Have you noticed how much shit the internet has become now? (2007)

#25

Post by [deleted] » Fri, Jun 09, 2023, 9:15 PM UTC

blackhaz wrote: post #18

sigg3 wrote: post #4

> > Geocitites > Oh yes, the 90's was so much better... Yes they were, because geocities didn't control your search results and did not force you to donate 10 seconds to some creepily targeted ad before serving any multimedia experience. I'm not going to say technology was better, nobody misses Realmedia, but the internet was more like a street than a mall. You could look at some weird art or look at some interesting…

Just recently my wife came back home telling me about some tablet computer she has never ever seen before. I think she has googled for it on her phone. What do you know - my Facebook showed a few ads of that device - on that day. I've never heard about it before. I never searched for it and I never searched for a tablet even - I don't use them. Is this now the new normality - palantiring through databases? Is it OK f…

[deleted]

Re: Have you noticed how much shit the internet has become now? (2007)

#26

Post by plagiarist » Fri, Jun 09, 2023, 9:17 PM UTC

nmilo wrote: post #22

blackhaz wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just recently my wife came back home telling me about some tablet computer she has never ever seen before. I think she has googled for it on her phone. What do you know - my Facebook showed a few ads of that device - on that day. I've never heard about it before. I never searched for it and I never searched for a tablet even - I don't use them. Is this now the new normality - palantiring through databases? Is it OK f…

I've always read comments like this and just assume it's confirmation bias on two levels: 1. Out of the 1000s of ads you see every day, at least one of them might coincidentally relate to something you talked about. You don't notice all the ads that are wildly irrelevant. 2. Even if you personally didn't have a hyper-relevant ad experience, out of the 1000s of HN readers that might comment a reply, one of them surely…

IDK, I think it is plausible they might be joining by IP or deeper connections. I've seen some ads that aren't relevant to me but are for something my partner was looking at on a different device.

Re: Have you noticed how much shit the internet has become now? (2007)

#27

Post by drdaeman » Fri, Jun 09, 2023, 9:18 PM UTC

highwaylights wrote: post #15

bagels wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You don't remember intrusive popup ads that took over the whole screen?

Yes, and I miss them every day. The ads were sleazy and brazen and right in your face trying to dragnet as many people as possible into buying something 99.999% had no interest in. Not like now, where massive dossiers are built on you automatically and you're tracked all over the internet by ad companies regardless of the steps you take as an individual to convince yourself you have privacy (like VPN/Private Relay/In…

> where massive dossiers are built on you automatically and you're tracked all over the internet by ad companies

...that still utterly fail to provide relevant ads. This is my pet peeve - I periodically disable adblocker and - suprise, no surprise - 100% of ads I see are irrelevant to me. I can even see how they're trying to target me, but they're totally missing what I really want or interested in. "Personalized" news feeds are sensationalist click-bait crapfests with accidentally useful local news (just by the virtue of local news being more relevant, in general). Book recommendations only work in "more from the same author I've read and liked" category. Summing it up, those massive dossiers aren't seem to be worth shit.

Either the industry needs to drastically ramp up their models' complexity (and maybe something will start to happen - although I wonder about the economy of this) or maybe someday they will have to admit all those profile data hoards were the new tulips.

The Internets of old at least hadn't pretended that ads were "useful" or "relevant". There typically was no positive quality to them, except for honest "this shit brings site owner (or host) some money".

Re: Have you noticed how much shit the internet has become now? (2007)

#28

Post by petsfed » Fri, Jun 09, 2023, 9:19 PM UTC

pfannkuchen wrote: post #20

karaterobot wrote: post #5

The purpose of posting this may be to reiterate that old canard about "twenty years ago, people were saying what we're saying now, therefore it isn't true." If not, I apologize for assuming so. In any case, my reading is, it was true in 2007, and it is much worse now. The predictions about centralization were incorrect only in the names of some of the players, and in not having the benefit of knowing about the role o…

Relatedly, some old quote from the Romans or Greeks is often brought up where someone laments youth behavior as lazy and immoral, and it’s referenced as proof that old(er) people always say that so it doesn’t mean anything. However, isn’t it possible that they were on a downward trajectory, and we are too? And that at other points in time, not referenced, old(er) people may have felt differently?

Considering that the old quote is Cicero criticizing pre-dictator Julius Caesar for the way he wore his toga (and not, you know, all the things that Sulla might've put him on the Proscription Lists for), I'd argue its more that old people consistently criticize the wrong thing about young people, focusing on the superficial, rather than the substantive.

EDIT because I forgot to add:

This missing the mark is rarely because there's something intrinsic about old people and other people's haircuts. Its more that we are generally raised to respect (as authorities) our elders, and sort of subconsciously expect that people younger than us will in turn grant us the same respect. So the criticism basically comes down "they're not giving me what's due to me".

Meanwhile, if the criticism leveled against Caesar came down to "he's waaaaay too ambitious, and has already shown a propensity for ignoring social mores to get what he wants", then Cicero's criticism might feel more prescient, and less like an old man shouting at a cloud.

All of that said, its actually really hard in the moment to identify what will be dangerous to society before it comes up. So maybe Cicero had a feeling in his gut, but all he could come up with is "he's kind of sloppy with his toga"

Re: Have you noticed how much shit the internet has become now? (2007)

#29

Post by [deleted] » Fri, Jun 09, 2023, 9:19 PM UTC

nmilo wrote: post #22

blackhaz wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just recently my wife came back home telling me about some tablet computer she has never ever seen before. I think she has googled for it on her phone. What do you know - my Facebook showed a few ads of that device - on that day. I've never heard about it before. I never searched for it and I never searched for a tablet even - I don't use them. Is this now the new normality - palantiring through databases? Is it OK f…

I've always read comments like this and just assume it's confirmation bias on two levels: 1. Out of the 1000s of ads you see every day, at least one of them might coincidentally relate to something you talked about. You don't notice all the ads that are wildly irrelevant. 2. Even if you personally didn't have a hyper-relevant ad experience, out of the 1000s of HN readers that might comment a reply, one of them surely…

[deleted]

Re: Have you noticed how much shit the internet has become now? (2007)

#30

Post by bamfly » Fri, Jun 09, 2023, 9:24 PM UTC

'07 was the height of Google's cat-and-mouse game with webspammers. It'd degrade to near-uselessness for a month or two, suddenly get a ton better, repeat. This went on though the whole of the middle years of the '00s.

'08 or '09 is when they seemed to surrender that fight, and just give up on indexing the entire Web. Major sites got a huge boost, and a great deal of the Web seemed to just drop off the index entirely. Google's never been really good since.