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The Web Began Dying in 2014 (2017)

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Re: The Web Began Dying in 2014 (2017)

#201

Post by dang »

stopads wrote: post #95
mojuba wrote: post #33

In addition, what's changed between 2017 and now is that back then Google was still admired by the tech people. "Google is evil" sounded ridiculous only a few years ago. I've been ridiculed by my colleagues and fellow engineers every time I said it. But I think it began to change with the introduction of AMP, a growing list of products discontinued for no apparent reason, failures of some of the new products often pr…

Back in 2015-7 or so yes, you'd be immediately dogpiled on here and reddit and most other sites for daring to criticize Google. I was trying to warn people about them and was always banned or downvoted to some shadowban realm immediately. Google isn't the actual problem though, advertising is. The backlash needs to be primarily about ads, not the companies that just lie repeatedly in order to bend all tech infrastruc…

We've never banned people for "daring to criticize $bigco". That's half of HN. If we banned you, it was likely because there was something else abusive about your posts.

Re: The Web Began Dying in 2014 (2017)

#202

Post by mojuba »

nathcd wrote: post #192
marcus_holmes wrote: post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I need to understand why my customers are not clicking on the "subscribe" button. I'm not selling adverts to them. I'm not capturing personal information. all I'm doing is trying to understand who my customer is and why they're not buying my product. Why is this unethical? And why is it OK to analyse server logs, but not OK to use javascript, to do this?

> And why is it OK to analyse server logs, but not OK to use javascript, to do this? The data in your server logs is data that people sent to you on purpose (by visiting a page on your site, or filling out a form on your site). If you collect data about people by sending them code to execute and send data back to you, they're not meaning to send you that data; you're doing it behind their back. I'm glad you try to us…

Users are free to block the execution of client-side scripts though we all know what that means: much poorer to non-functional UX in many cases. Plus, to an extent browsers can control what can be collected on the client side, e.g. location, microphone input etc. (I wish there were similar restrictions on the keyboard and mouse, maybe some day we'll see that too)

But I'd agree that letting the users use a public resource on a condition that they should allow arbitrary scripts to be executed on their side can be considered unethical.

Re: The Web Began Dying in 2014 (2017)

#203

Post by chongli »

doctor_m wrote: post #198
chongli wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m no fan of Google these days (I use DuckDuckGo) but I’m not sure I can entirely fault them with the decline of search quality. Spamdexing is burying the web in mountains of garbage. Malicious SEO and fraud have exploded and continue to grow at an accelerating rate. What do we do about all this? I don’t know. I want to see a new kind of search engine that can mine through all this crap. I would build it myself but…

I feel like Wikipedia is doing a pretty solid job of holding onto that dream: no shouty content, pure information that's maintained by those who are interested in it, and a fairly well outfitted battalion of bots that fend off adversarial edits

Wikipedia is pretty good for its specific purpose but it’s far from the promise of the open web. Wikipedia has a number of authoritarian moderators who will revert people’s changes for opaque and arbitrary reasons.

Maybe if you took all wikis as a collective then you could get something a bit closer. There’s still the matter of finding them so it’s not ideal. Then there’s the matter of ads. Wikipedia doesn’t have them but other wikis are rife with them.

Re: The Web Began Dying in 2014 (2017)

#204

Post by userbinator »

tannhaeuser wrote: post #98
mojuba wrote: post #33

In addition, what's changed between 2017 and now is that back then Google was still admired by the tech people. "Google is evil" sounded ridiculous only a few years ago. I've been ridiculed by my colleagues and fellow engineers every time I said it. But I think it began to change with the introduction of AMP, a growing list of products discontinued for no apparent reason, failures of some of the new products often pr…

> there's no competition to Search on the horizon This is bunk, and it's time for this myth to die. DDG/Bing/Yandex will list the exact same pages that Google gives as a search result most of the time, and sometimes better ones. If you find that the pointless endless-scroll listing of millions of search results (in 0.333ms!) that Google and also DDG gives you isn't helpful, you can also try Startpage.com. What are yo…

Most of the time I'm searching for very very specific and niche technical topics, and while Google's result quality used to be the best, and it has significantly degraded since then, its competitors are unfortunately still far behind...

In the end there isn't much new content worth searching

True, and the old content that's actually worth reading seems to be getting more difficult to find.

Re: The Web Began Dying in 2014 (2017)

#205

Post by cvhashim »

ALittleLight wrote: post #182

>The Web’s diversity has granted space for multiple businesses to innovate and thrive, independent hobbyist communities to grow, and personal sites to be hosted on whatever physical servers can host them. A few months ago I was feeling the same way, especially about personal websites. I tried to find StumbleUpon as that seemed like a good alternative to see random unique websites. However, I was saddened to see it ha…

This is pretty cool. Thanks.

Re: The Web Began Dying in 2014 (2017)

#206

Post by marcus_holmes »

reaperducer wrote: post #199
marcus_holmes wrote: post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I need to understand why my customers are not clicking on the "subscribe" button. I'm not selling adverts to them. I'm not capturing personal information. all I'm doing is trying to understand who my customer is and why they're not buying my product. Why is this unethical? And why is it OK to analyse server logs, but not OK to use javascript, to do this?

I need to understand why my customers are not clicking on the "subscribe" button all I'm doing is trying to understand who my customer is and why they're not buying my product. Then ask them. The same way companies did for hundreds of years before javascript tricks made people lazy. These things can be achieved by simply talking to your customers. Why is that so hard to do? Also, what makes you think that your intere…

> Then ask them.

Startup 101 "Mom Test" stuff. If you ask people what they think, you get their intentions. If you measure their behaviour, you get actual data. Talking to customers is excellent, but measuring what they actually do verifies that they're not lying to you because they're nice people.

>Also, what makes you think that your interest in knowing your customer's behavior is more important than your customers' right to privacy?

I don't understand this. If I ran a physical shop and watched my customers browse to understand their behaviour, no-one would think this was unethical, intrusive or violating their privacy. Why is it all of those things online?

Or is your objection just to the Javascript? If I "violate their privacy" by analysing server logs it's OK, but adding javascript to measure behaviour is "bad, hmmkay"?

Re: The Web Began Dying in 2014 (2017)

#207

Post by marcus_holmes »

nathcd wrote: post #192
marcus_holmes wrote: post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I need to understand why my customers are not clicking on the "subscribe" button. I'm not selling adverts to them. I'm not capturing personal information. all I'm doing is trying to understand who my customer is and why they're not buying my product. Why is this unethical? And why is it OK to analyse server logs, but not OK to use javascript, to do this?

> And why is it OK to analyse server logs, but not OK to use javascript, to do this? The data in your server logs is data that people sent to you on purpose (by visiting a page on your site, or filling out a form on your site). If you collect data about people by sending them code to execute and send data back to you, they're not meaning to send you that data; you're doing it behind their back. I'm glad you try to us…

We have a Privacy Policy linked right from the landing page that states we will collect user behaviour information to improve our product.

If you walk into a shop, you have an expectation to be observed (both to check you're not shoplifting, and also to see how customers behave). They don't tell you that you'll be observed, it's just one of those things you expect when you walk into someone's shop.

We effectively have a notice on the front door that says we will be observing their behaviour while they're in our shop. They have every opportunity to walk away. I really don't see how this is unethical.

Re: The Web Began Dying in 2014 (2017)

#208

Post by WaltPurvis »

ttldude wrote: post #160
mindw0rk wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is ticker symbols of their stocks in the market.

Oh help, you can't be serious that he uses those on purpose.

It's a quite common practice to refer to companies by their ticker symbols. I see it all the time and it has never struck me as odd or noteworthy.

Re: The Web Began Dying in 2014 (2017)

#209

Post by marcus_holmes »

tejtm wrote: post #200
marcus_holmes wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's the huge objection to client-side tracking over server-side tracking?

What I do when am not on your site is my business and not any of your business.

I totally agree. And we're totally uninterested in what you do off our site.

I'm purely talking about tracking your behaviour on our site. We want to know if you spent 20 mins reading our "about" page and then looked at our pricing page, and then vanished.

In terms of the rest... country is probably interesting, language preference is interesting (when do we need to translate from English because we have enough customers not speaking English), platform is probably interesting (purely so we can prioritise development to match our customer base). Where you got referred from is probably interesting, I guess.

But all of that we'll be getting from the http request and ip address rather than any malign tracking cookie nonsense.

Re: The Web Began Dying in 2014 (2017)

#210

Post by nathcd »

marcus_holmes wrote: post #207
nathcd wrote: post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> And why is it OK to analyse server logs, but not OK to use javascript, to do this? The data in your server logs is data that people sent to you on purpose (by visiting a page on your site, or filling out a form on your site). If you collect data about people by sending them code to execute and send data back to you, they're not meaning to send you that data; you're doing it behind their back. I'm glad you try to us…

We have a Privacy Policy linked right from the landing page that states we will collect user behaviour information to improve our product. If you walk into a shop, you have an expectation to be observed (both to check you're not shoplifting, and also to see how customers behave). They don't tell you that you'll be observed, it's just one of those things you expect when you walk into someone's shop. We effectively hav…

> If you walk into a shop, you have an expectation to be observed (both to check you're not shoplifting, and also to see how customers behave). They don't tell you that you'll be observed, it's just one of those things you expect when you walk into someone's shop.

The problem is that this is a poor analogy to computer networking. I send you an HTTP request; you send me an HTTP response. I'm not visiting your shop; we're sending each other messages.

My expectation is that you won't follow me around, observing how long I look at certain parts of your message, gauging my reaction to different parts of your message. That this is the norm on the web is an unfortunate reality, but it doesn't make it okay.

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