261–270 of 272 posts
After yesterday's keynote and the changes to Search, it became clear in the near future, Google will cease to direct any traffic to websites and the search results will just become a footnote in Gemini's response.
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This is a funny (if it wasn't so sad) aspect of enshittification that was revealed to me through Chinese electronics. There is a line we cross where the lowest quality, most bottom dollar crap is actually better than it's actively malicious "premium" counterparts. It's like if a company spent billions of dollars creating the most perfect hammer that also happens to make itself bend to miss nails if you don't use the…
Yandex is not obscure, nor “lowest quality, most bottom dollar crap”. It has very good technology behind, though not the trillion dollars of investments Google can afford. Just because it does not come from California it does not mean it's a hobby project anyone could replicate.
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A feww options: 1. get some people who trust you to vouch for you when you join (similar to requiring an invite to join but maybe more flexible?) 2. some kind of induction process, maybe the algorithm surfaces your stuff and gets feedback, like the 'new' queue on HN 3. same as before but the AI tries to do it (scary though) 4. use the same account as on other sites, or otherwise tie it to a global reputation or somet…
I think the deeper problem is: How would legitimate new person with no reputation and no contacts be able to get a foothold at all if there are masses of bots pretending to be exactly such a person? A system which looks more at the content that is posted (probably using AI) and tries to decide whether it is spam feels fairer to me than effectively pulling up the ladder on new users.
If people are distinguishable from bots then you should be able to easily distinguish yourself. If they're not, then you need personal vouching to establish who the people are anyway.
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Yandex is not obscure, nor “lowest quality, most bottom dollar crap”. It has very good technology behind, though not the trillion dollars of investments Google can afford. Just because it does not come from California it does not mean it's a hobby project anyone could replicate.
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Is probably the Sputnik though commenters mistake it for backhanded-diss of Yandex. Conjures an alternative universe where Russian potatocraft lands live lobsters on Mars before Elon's spacesedan reaches Mars orbit.
I am intrigued by the possibility of minimalist defo of "enshittification" that tweaks "the purpose of a system is what it does".
"The purpose of a search engine system is to keep you searching" etc
I still have 42k page indexed, but previously I had 20k impressions per day, past week impressions started to change. And now I have 399 impressions per 24 hours :/
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> It's totally, and completely, unambiguous. The internet just has collective brain damage The point that continues to be missed is that instead of taking downvotes as validation that people simply failed to comprehend the argument you're making (they didn't), you should take them as a check to reevaluate whether your conclusion is as unambiguous as you believe.
It is rock solid. There is no way to reconcile an internet where the suckers who cannot figure out ad-block carry the overhead costs for those who do. It costs money to create the content you consume, it costs money to serve the content you consume. The internet is not some magical exemption from standard financial practice going back millennia. The cost is your burden, take it or leave it. But don't take it then do…
I'll leave a variant of your argument here for you to mull over, and consider whether the bathroom-breaker here is just as morally bankrupt as the online ad-blocker:
> There is no way to reconcile [over the air TV] where the suckers who cannot figure out [how to leave the room during ad breaks] carry the overhead costs for those who do. It costs money to create the content you consume, it costs money to serve the content you consume. [Broadcast television] is not some magical exemption from standard financial practice going back millennia. The cost is your burden, take it or leave it. But don't take it then do mental gymnastics about why it's not actually something you value while walking away with free,
One of the sad things about this story is that everyone has to read tea leaves to guess what reasoning might be going on at Google's end. Tech companies have normalized the practice of cutting people off with no explanation, or saying 'we investigated and found a violation' without articulating what the violation is. Naturally, they want to secure themselves against abuse and people trying to game their system, but r…
They're a private company, they can ban whoever they want. Or at least that's what I heard a few years ago when it was politically incorrect people complaining about being banned with no accountability. They're a private company, it's their servers. You may not even be paying anything. So they can do anything they want to you and you have no cause for complaint.
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The difference is that I am not preventing anyone else from finding their content. I whitelist ads on sites that have good ad policies, like limiting ad size, labeling ads, and not allowing animated ads. Advertisers only care about attention, if you don't impose editorial standards they'll contaminate your entire site.
In the tech space, using youtube as an example, tech youtubers, who are widely lauded, still have about 40-50% of users ad-blocking and So thank you, but you are one of about 14 people on the internet who actually use a whitelist.
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How does new content or content from new accounts get seen by anyone?
People search for a thing, find said thing, then share it themselves under their own name. You know, like how conversations work in real life
Google does not hate us... it is worse than that - it is indifferent to us. Hate requires some sort of recognition. I mean this single incident may not mean anything but overall google is heading to an _interesting_ place. In short, it was state of the art but in 20 years it became just another conglomerate sacrificing quality for shareholder gain, I think? As a search engine, it does not work for me. I see promoted…
I found that if I search Google Maps for a specific restaurant, it assumes I must just be hungry in general. Just now, I looked for A&W and also got results for Tim Hortons, Popeyes and McDonald's. Apple Maps never does that. Still, I usually use Google as I want an accurate idea of whether a business is actually open and what its hours are.
“Oh, you’re looking for a pharmacy open now? What about going to McDonalds, which is closed, and in a completely different city?”