I went online to escape the mindless reporting and tabloid news that had taken over television. But it looks like they chased me into the internet.
The Web Is A Mess
21–30 of 62 posts
Re: The Web Is A Mess
#22Who uses google to find current news articles though? I think this is mostly a non-issue as people use aggregators like HN here or Subreddits or other news reader apps to filter top stories. Google is used for what I would call "archive search" and research these days (how to do X, etc) in my experience, not current news.
If I'm just looking for any news in whatever topic, then I'll use the sources you mentioned. However, if I'm looking for more information on a specific subject (e.g. features of Android 4.2), then I'll absolutely Google it.
Re: The Web Is A Mess
#23Earlier quoted context omitted.
Is it impossible to give people incentive to inform/educate people? I think this even worked for a short while, but I'm no expert on this matter.
I'm not sure. For what I can tell, it's a difficult and delicate topic, as intrinsic incentives tend to be overrided by extrinsic ones (e.g. pay someone for doing what he loves, he might soon start doing a worse job at it). See the RSA Animate talk about motivation[0]. But hey, we're a clever species, I do believe that someone will figure out how to structure reality so that we get more of the things we really want w…
Wow. I get a feeling that I saw it before, but I'm happy I got to watch this again. Now, doesn't solution seem obvious? Shouldn't there be a cap on how much you can earn from ads on your site? Just enough "to take the issue of money off the table" and not a cent more?
Ok, this really is not my area of expertise. I just feel that what we have now is both unfair to writers and disastrous for society :(
Re: The Web Is A Mess
#24Who uses google to find current news articles though? I think this is mostly a non-issue as people use aggregators like HN here or Subreddits or other news reader apps to filter top stories. Google is used for what I would call "archive search" and research these days (how to do X, etc) in my experience, not current news.
I get my daily headlines from Google News as a matter of course. I find Reddit unusable for day-to-day news, and only find aggregators such as HN valuable in proportion to their relatively narrow focus. Google News used to be pretty excellent for news dicovery, but it's being SEO'ed into the ground. In recent months I've started seeing letters to the editor presented as news stories.
Re: The Web Is A Mess
#25Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm not sure. For what I can tell, it's a difficult and delicate topic, as intrinsic incentives tend to be overrided by extrinsic ones (e.g. pay someone for doing what he loves, he might soon start doing a worse job at it). See the RSA Animate talk about motivation[0]. But hey, we're a clever species, I do believe that someone will figure out how to structure reality so that we get more of the things we really want w…
Wow. I get a feeling that I saw it before, but I'm happy I got to watch this again. Now, doesn't solution seem obvious? Shouldn't there be a cap on how much you can earn from ads on your site? Just enough "to take the issue of money off the table" and not a cent more? Ok, this really is not my area of expertise. I just feel that what we have now is both unfair to writers and disastrous for society :(
> Shouldn't there be a cap on how much you can earn from ads on your site? Just enough "to take the issue of money off the table" and not a cent more?
It could work for bloggers, but they're not the problem. The "news" services / aggregators / whatever are, and it's hard to put a cap on what a company should earn (I'm not even sure if it is a Right Thing to do).
> I just feel that what we have now is both unfair to writers and disastrous for society :(
Couldn't say it better myself.
Re: The Web Is A Mess
#26"You remember way back in the early ’00s when your favorite blogs posted a few times a day at most, had a handful of great writers, and were a joy to read." I fondly remember the golden days of Usenet. Eternal September was nothing compared to the devastation caused by blogs and twitter.
Yup, and your files you got via FTP. You searched for them using Archie. There was no web; but there was Gopher, and Veronica was the search engine for Gopherspace. Instead of Twittering, everybody was chatting on IRC. And the internet wasn't corrupted by commercials yet, as the Web is today.
Heh, fun times. I had a book [1] out on how to use all these different services around 1995, and it was obsolete within a year of publication. I thought the web was the hot new thing too, but I didn't expect it to so thoroughly destroy most of the other vectors.
1. http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1898275351?SubscriptionId=0... ...obscure enough that it's priced like a a rare book, ha ha.
Re: The Web Is A Mess
#27Why would banning content farms draw the eye of regulators when the content farms are gaming the search engines? Because search engines fell asleep at the wheel and now content farms are a sizable chunk of the economy? And they can always release some features like curated/customized search to weasel around any regulation dangers. Maybe search engines just don't care about the health of the web.
> Because search engines fell asleep at the wheel and now content farms are a sizable chunk of the economy? Fell asleep at the wheel? The major search engines run their own ad networks. They're content farms' key customers, and content farms are a core element in their business strategy.
Well it's hard to say how close the relationship is. Google changed algorithm to target content farms a while ago, caused a stir.
They definitely see the problem. The current ad/SEO setup incentives all sites to behave like content farms, duplicating content, quantity over quality, short articles, etc.
Re: The Web Is A Mess
#28"You remember way back in the early ’00s when your favorite blogs posted a few times a day at most, had a handful of great writers, and were a joy to read." I fondly remember the golden days of Usenet. Eternal September was nothing compared to the devastation caused by blogs and twitter.
Yup, and your files you got via FTP. You searched for them using Archie. There was no web; but there was Gopher, and Veronica was the search engine for Gopherspace. Instead of Twittering, everybody was chatting on IRC. And the internet wasn't corrupted by commercials yet, as the Web is today.
"Instead of"? People still chat on IRC. I'm on IRC right now.
Re: The Web Is A Mess
#29Who uses google to find current news articles though? I think this is mostly a non-issue as people use aggregators like HN here or Subreddits or other news reader apps to filter top stories. Google is used for what I would call "archive search" and research these days (how to do X, etc) in my experience, not current news.
I get my daily headlines from Google News as a matter of course. I find Reddit unusable for day-to-day news, and only find aggregators such as HN valuable in proportion to their relatively narrow focus. Google News used to be pretty excellent for news dicovery, but it's being SEO'ed into the ground. In recent months I've started seeing letters to the editor presented as news stories.
Even Reddit can be difficult for daily news.
You have to finely tune your subreddit subscriptions otherwise you get a meme whiteout from some of the other subs.
Crafted news content matching what I want, with little overhead, is an area I think you could see some disruption.
Re: The Web Is A Mess
#30One innovative "solution" is millionshort: http://millionshort.com/ Basically the idea is that you take sites that perform too well on search metrics and remove them. Of course, that only works as long as a majority uses services like google.
Cool idea. I tried it just now, I searched "how to make rocket", thought I'd get some cool old style pages on people launching rockets in their spare time. I did.
However the top result when I removed top 10k sites was the second result when I did it without removing anything. That was kind of disappointing.