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Google made me ruin a perfectly good website (2023)

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Re: Google made me ruin a perfectly good website (2023)

#31

Post by carl_sandland »

hotstickyballs wrote: post #15
carl_sandland wrote: post #11

thanks for the interesting read, one amusing thing: I went to the site and "where is the adds?", then I remembered I'm using a add-hardened firefox to view it ;) Sure enough using safari showed me the horror. Serious question: why do we put up with this as readers?

Safari has ad blockers now too

I keep safari "unblocked" just for this kind of scenario, as sometimes the blocking breaks stuff I want to see that doesn't work otherwise. It's becoming rarer for sure over time. Didn't mean to impinge on safari, it's a great browser that I use for work.

Re: Google made me ruin a perfectly good website (2023)

#33

Post by swores »

zulban wrote: post #26
rustcleaner wrote: post #16

Maybe it's time for a market cap maximum. If your market cap exceeds the median GDP of all African countries, you get broken up. No more borg controlling the internet. This should help prevent vertical consolidation. Truly corporate death penalty any children of breakups who collude (full loss to equity, half loss to creditors, assets auction to public). Google shouldn't exist at its scale, nor should Apple, Microsof…

When you set an arbitrary cap like "GDP of all African countries" lots of people will argue it's too high, or too low, and you won't have any argument to make because it's arbitrary. Your solution sounds great but in practice it's simplistic.

Isn't that true for many if not most laws? We don't not have taxes just because lots of people will argue they're too high or too low, we don't not have a criminal justice system because people will argue sentences are too harsh or too lenient.

Instead, for things deemed worth having as law, we try to set the rules at levels that as many people as possible find as reasonable as possible (albeit in an imperfect way because there's indeed no way to get universal agreement on anything, and because not everyone acts in good faith when choosing, and because money influences politics too much, and all the other reasons why democracy is the worst form of government except for all the others).

Re: Google made me ruin a perfectly good website (2023)

#34

Post by lupire »

bruce511 wrote: post #29

Of course Google didn't make the web site bad, you did. In a purely practical sense you changed the site, not them. Which leads us to the "why" of it. Which is you wanted to monetize the site (if only to cover its costs.) Since advertising seems to be the business model of the internet that's your first port of call. But here's a site that performs a task. Quite who uses this site is unclear. Sure lots of people migh…

What's wrong with telling Google or whoever what you think your demographic is, and letting them place ads against it and optimize based on metrics.

Why are words so important?

Re: Google made me ruin a perfectly good website (2023)

#35

Post by raincole »

zulban wrote: post #26
rustcleaner wrote: post #16

Maybe it's time for a market cap maximum. If your market cap exceeds the median GDP of all African countries, you get broken up. No more borg controlling the internet. This should help prevent vertical consolidation. Truly corporate death penalty any children of breakups who collude (full loss to equity, half loss to creditors, assets auction to public). Google shouldn't exist at its scale, nor should Apple, Microsof…

When you set an arbitrary cap like "GDP of all African countries" lots of people will argue it's too high, or too low, and you won't have any argument to make because it's arbitrary. Your solution sounds great but in practice it's simplistic.

Legal age of drinking is arbitrary and people accept it.

Hell, even legal age of consent is arbitrary (please don't argue this -- if it's not it won't vary across developed countries).

The absolute majority of legal lines we drew are arbitrary.

Re: Google made me ruin a perfectly good website (2023)

#36

Post by ffpip »

hotstickyballs wrote: post #15
carl_sandland wrote: post #11

thanks for the interesting read, one amusing thing: I went to the site and "where is the adds?", then I remembered I'm using a add-hardened firefox to view it ;) Sure enough using safari showed me the horror. Serious question: why do we put up with this as readers?

Safari has ad blockers now too

Even Edge has ad blockers to an extent. The only browser that doesn't natively block trackers, or does stuff to reduce the power of adblockers is Chrome. Coincidentally, they are owned by the biggest ad network on earth.

Re: Google made me ruin a perfectly good website (2023)

#37

Post by superb_dev »

gretch wrote: post #7

“a link to what the site looked like last week, before Google made me make it worse on purpose to make money.” Sounds like you sold out. You should own up to your agency in the matter. They made me make it worse so I could make more money - it’s like you think you are under unique pressure to pay bills, thus excusing you, but everyone else in the world shouldn’t be excused.

Everyone in the world should be excused from paying bills

Re: Google made me ruin a perfectly good website (2023)

#38

Post by carl_sandland »

lupire wrote: post #34
bruce511 wrote: post #29

Of course Google didn't make the web site bad, you did. In a purely practical sense you changed the site, not them. Which leads us to the "why" of it. Which is you wanted to monetize the site (if only to cover its costs.) Since advertising seems to be the business model of the internet that's your first port of call. But here's a site that performs a task. Quite who uses this site is unclear. Sure lots of people migh…

What's wrong with telling Google or whoever what you think your demographic is, and letting them place ads against it and optimize based on metrics. Why are words so important?

Why can't we use some sort of metadata tagging system instead? Isn't this what the person is indirectly trying to do: declare some simple tags, such as "US politics", but indirectly via a bunch of garbage fed into an auto-tagger?

Re: Google made me ruin a perfectly good website (2023)

#39

Post by bruce511 »

lupire wrote: post #34
bruce511 wrote: post #29

Of course Google didn't make the web site bad, you did. In a purely practical sense you changed the site, not them. Which leads us to the "why" of it. Which is you wanted to monetize the site (if only to cover its costs.) Since advertising seems to be the business model of the internet that's your first port of call. But here's a site that performs a task. Quite who uses this site is unclear. Sure lots of people migh…

What's wrong with telling Google or whoever what you think your demographic is, and letting them place ads against it and optimize based on metrics. Why are words so important?

Well firstly, I'm not sure the site author knows the demographic. I'm pretty sure he doesn't ask that sort of thing before doing the calculation.

Secondly the way Google determines the demographic is via the site content.

Or to put it another way; site owners don't have a "right" to Adsense. Google is clearly allowed to choose those sites it considers "to be good advertising sites".

Therefore if you have a site that doesn't offer good advertising opportunities, then don't be surprised if people don't want to advertise on it.

To be clear, I'm not saying all sites should be ad friendly. I'm saying that advertising alone cannot prop up every site, useful or not.

Re: Google made me ruin a perfectly good website (2023)

#40

Post by bruce511 »

carl_sandland wrote: post #38
lupire wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's wrong with telling Google or whoever what you think your demographic is, and letting them place ads against it and optimize based on metrics. Why are words so important?

Why can't we use some sort of metadata tagging system instead? Isn't this what the person is indirectly trying to do: declare some simple tags, such as "US politics", but indirectly via a bunch of garbage fed into an auto-tagger?

We tried that. It just lead to sites adding a million meta words to gather as much advertising as possible.

But, as a thought exercise. Let's say you were selling ads directly to the business paying. Which businesses do you suppose might be interested on a congressional apportionment calculator?

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