You Will Not Understand This

I guess because I barely check the FB wall, I miss such things anyway ;) Thanks.

> Search quality is no longer a core competency of Google, the Internet’s premiere search engine. For example: Two people type the same search string, each receives different results. Yes, I am aware that this is likewise no accident.

This is not an example of low search quality and can easily be the opposite.

If I search for ruby gems, I probably want code. If someone else does, they may want actual gems.

> The quality of ads displayed alongside various Google services has steadily devolved from semi-relevant to absolutely irrelevant at all times. Yes, I am aware that this is no accident.

What possible incentive would they have to serve up less relevant adverts?

> telepathic contact

Reading and writing != telepathic.

> Not a replacement for anything.

That's a bad thing?

>Search quality is no longer a core competency of Google, the Internet’s premiere search engine. For example: Two people type the same search string, each receives different results.

While I sympathise with the general anti-social-media stance, it's clear from this phrase that OP does not understand the most basic elements of how internet services function at scale.

Of course Google serves different results to different users, that's why they're the market leader in search. The entire job of a search engine is to return relevant results. If I search for "takeaway pizza", I'm going to be pretty annoyed if the results are generated using PageRank alone, with no weighting for local relevance. If an American searches for "cricket", they almost certainly mean the cellular provider or the insect rather than the sport; if a British person makes the same search, the odds are reversed.

Google's "broken" email service came to dominate the market because it offered a vastly better user experience than the realistic alternatives at the time - Hotmail, AOL or some crappy POP3 server with no real spam filtering. The things that people hate about Gmail are all rational, defensible design decisions that serve the majority of users well.

The internet is a big place. Most statistics suggest that there are about 3.5bn people regularly using the internet. If you're optimising your service for the median user, there will be millions of outliers who hate your service with every fibre of their being. If you hate something, it might be irredeemably awful, or it might just not be for you. It's all too rare that people entertain the latter possibility.

Anectodally the internet was reliable, fast as hell, and there was a vast world to explore for me in the 90's. And I'm not talking just text downloads. And certainly not referring to 28.8k modems. 56k was ok, shotgun 56k was better. I went pro in CS once I got ADSl and I dearly miss client side registration because it was so damn reliable and snappy with rarely any desync problems. Back then it was very easy to just aim further ahead of your moving target with the distance being proportional to your ping. I distincly remember playing kingpin and quake in a hotel room once and I had a 250 ping. All I did was prefire way early or in the case of the long range shots.. Oh god it was so satisfying to lead them by a few extra "feet", click, sit back and then after what seemed like forever I'd hear that thump thump thump of the rifle and they'd drop. You simply can't do that these days with reliability. You play against jerks on VPNs from AU who warp 20 feet before shooting you.

I don't mean to say you're wrong, but I thought you might find it interesting. I was just a dumb kid but we downloaded stuff and had small 5-man lan parties where we played online too since we didnt have enough for balanced matches. It wasn't bad at all and we didn't even have a proper hub until much later on.

Nowdays every realtime app suffers it seems. No matter where I'm at. And if you go to a big regional lan party everyone is queueing online. No local servers, or if there are it's kinda dead or it's private hard core competitive games, which I do love, but I miss the goofing off and socializing in lan servers too. The changes for me have been less than ideal, as a pro gamer and just regular gamer.

Also as a UX/UI dev I've noticed things have become.. Annoying as hell to use. Even intentionally thanks to questionable business practices.

Today I can plan my day online in 20minutes or less. Back in the day it wasn't too easy for me I wasn't the best student.

Sorry for the novel. Thanks for sharing.

Well for example with the rage party regarding Trump. I knew all the political opinions of my friends that have lost their minds over that (so to speak). I'm socially liberal, so their political ideas mostly never bothered me (even when I disagree with them). Their behavior on the other hand, is grotesque. They've become what they proclaimed to dislike.

Almost all people behave differently under different social circumstances and pressures. Facebook seems to bring out - unleash - the worst in some very nice people. My observation is, as one would expect, they justify the bad behavior by proclaiming that the venom spewing is justified by the nature of the opponents they're attempting to counter. Means justified by the end goal.

It's said that online anonymity + forum = asshole behavior. I've come to wonder if enough time being acclimated to a public social network like Facebook, doesn't degrade the social niceties and manners that used to exist among friends in the early days of MySpace and Facebook.