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Google is dead. Where do we go now?

circusscientist.com

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Re: Google is dead. Where do we go now?

#301

Post by bsimpson »

oblio wrote: post #254
bsimpson wrote: post #219

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's interesting to see how much of a behemoth Discord has become. Seems like there's a Discord for everything - from open source projects to hobbies and games to individual groups of friends/family. It's occupying the segment that subreddits historically have. However, it's perhaps-intentionally search-opaque. You can't Google to find a message/link/download that's gated by Discord. And it also gives a sense of comm…

Discord is IRC, just with modern features. I wonder if there are any old school protocols out there to create a huge business around by just centralizing them and offering features people have been asking for decades. Probably not.

Slack had the ability to be Discord, but they explicitly decided they wanted to be business-only.

React was the first open-source community I knew of that outgrew/got kicked off of Slack and moved to Discord. Now, it seems Slack is only used by companies, and occasionally by smaller groups (apartment buildings, school parents, etc) where someone in the group knows Slack from work and doesn't know it's hostile to non-businesses.

Discord was the opposite. I was working on an open source initiative at Google at the time, and the Discord folks openly welcomed us. They even gave us someone's contact info, in case we had needs they weren't addressing. This was when it was still targeted just for gaming, but they were very welcoming of OSS projects using it too!

As I write this, I realize that Discord is what "Google Apps for your Domain" was and Slack is the "Google Workspace" it became.

Re: Google is dead. Where do we go now?

#302

Post by consumer451 »

consumer451 wrote: post #269
crazygringo wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The question is, why has this post been massively upvoted? It contains zero useful information. Just somebody struggling with AdWords and they don't know why. Not helpful. I have to assume the vast majority of upvotes are based on the title alone, assuming it's about Search? A large proportion of top level comments are about Search too. Depressing.

I am fairly confident that the answer is that most people vote based on the title/headline without ever clicking through. I am likely guilty of this as well sometimes. It takes discipline to avoid this behaviour. > We find that most users do not read the article that they vote on, and that, in total, 73% of posts were rated (i.e., upvoted or downvoted) without first viewing the content. [0] In this case, my guess is…

meta comment separated for its own discussion

I tried to find that paper via google search first, and I failed after 3 different searches. I then opened my not-important-stuff LLM, chatgpt.com, and found it in 3 interactions, where in the 3rd I made it use search. Chatbots with search are just so good at "on the tip of my tongue" type things.

Google is in such a weird position because of their bread and butter legacy UX * scale. This has to be the biggest case of innovators dilemma of all time?

Re: Google is dead. Where do we go now?

#303

Post by alex1138 »

egypturnash wrote: post #282
mikepurvis wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Absolutely this. I recently got a nice photo taken with my kids and for the first time I... didn't post it on Facebook. I sent it to my family group chat. Yesterday I posted on Facebook for the first time in months and it was about the power being out for an hour in the ice storm. I haven't posted travel photos to FB in years. I'm mostly still on FB at all for the acquaintance-level connections to things like neighbo…

Everyone who was on Livejournal before G+ “invented” “Circles” had absolutely no problem with locking posts to “friends” (people they followed) or various “friends groups” that were subsets of their friends. It was fucking hilarious to see everyone say it was too hard on G+. Just two dropdowns right there on the new post page next to the main text field. Super simple. Creating and editing the groups was a pretty simp…

+ also got a bad rap due to what happened to Youtube - merged accounts - and yeah Google acted in some awful ways in more than one way but they were also trying to solve a problem of Zuck's shifting views on privacy (or rather the same view, that it shouldn't exist)

Re: Google is dead. Where do we go now?

#304

Post by mgaunard »

Is there such a thing as a good ad? I've always blocked them on all platforms.

Looking at instagram where I don't block anything, most of what it suggests to me are soft porn or soft scams (generic chinese dropships marketed as a unique innovation).

Re: Google is dead. Where do we go now?

#305

Post by CobrastanJorji »

egypturnash wrote: post #282
mikepurvis wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Absolutely this. I recently got a nice photo taken with my kids and for the first time I... didn't post it on Facebook. I sent it to my family group chat. Yesterday I posted on Facebook for the first time in months and it was about the power being out for an hour in the ice storm. I haven't posted travel photos to FB in years. I'm mostly still on FB at all for the acquaintance-level connections to things like neighbo…

Everyone who was on Livejournal before G+ “invented” “Circles” had absolutely no problem with locking posts to “friends” (people they followed) or various “friends groups” that were subsets of their friends. It was fucking hilarious to see everyone say it was too hard on G+. Just two dropdowns right there on the new post page next to the main text field. Super simple. Creating and editing the groups was a pretty simp…

I still mourn G+. It was clearly put together by somebody who thought first and foremost about privacy. It made deciding who to share what with the central, most visible part of how it worked. And that's probably part of why it failed. Was it hard to choose? Nope. But I guarantee you that if Facebook added a little "hey, are you sure you want to share this post publicly with the whole world under your real name? Yes/No" popup, organic content would drop 50% overnight, and not because of the difficulty of clicking "Yes." G+ died in part because it looked like a ghost town to a visitor, and it looked like a ghost town because everything was being done in private. And that was a great thing!

Mind you, G+ also made some insane and boneheaded decisions. I think at one point they tried to make all Youtube comments also be G+ posts under your real name, or something like that? That was fucking stupid.

Re: Google is dead. Where do we go now?

#307

Post by [deleted] »

chrchr wrote: post #293
cookiengineer wrote: post #278

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I had a very interesting discussion with a friend today, where I was talking to her about the /r/golang thread about Rob Pike's comments to OpenAI and how the thread was full of bots talking with other bots. No idea why the density of bots was so high in that thread, it was kind of absurd to see. Then she said: "I know nobody that comments on online forums. Nobody would ever comment to strangers on the internet. It's…

But your friend is wrong. She does know at least one person who comments on online forums. I bet she knows more too.

[deleted]

Re: Google is dead. Where do we go now?

#308

Post by andrewmcwatters »

agentifysh wrote: post #3
tomjuggler wrote: post #2

A blog post lamenting the demise of Google Adwords.

good riddance seriously i used to pay like $1~2 a click back in 2010s and remember feeling like a total scam. no way of knowing if those clicks were bots and any campaigns would always have inflation somehow even long tail words that shouldn't. AI should equal the playing field and promote businesses based on merit and capacity not how much they can spend.

[dead]

Re: Google is dead. Where do we go now?

#309

Post by Muromec »

__turbobrew__ wrote: post #241
bsimpson wrote: post #219

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's interesting to see how much of a behemoth Discord has become. Seems like there's a Discord for everything - from open source projects to hobbies and games to individual groups of friends/family. It's occupying the segment that subreddits historically have. However, it's perhaps-intentionally search-opaque. You can't Google to find a message/link/download that's gated by Discord. And it also gives a sense of comm…

Discord is really where it is at these days. Discord servers with 50-100 people form the new social fabric of the internet where real community lies. In theory Reddit was supposed to be this but 1. Reddit communities tend to get too large 2. Subreddits overflow into each other too much through cross posting and brigading 3. Post history being public meant that you could get banned/brigaded for your comments on a tota…

Whatsapp, viber, line and tg groups are very much a thing too. Everybody is a chat of their apartment complex and district it seems

Re: Google is dead. Where do we go now?

#310

Post by Eisenstein »

poszlem wrote: post #272
nostrademons wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In my anecdotal experience, it's moved to private, trust-based channels: iMessage, WhatsApp, email, face-to-face interactions. Our 30-year bender of putting our lives online and blurring the public and the private has finally ended: people don't want to be online, don't trust social media, don't really trust any media, and are living simple local lives with a small circle of friends that they get together with regula…

What’s really interesting to me is how this coincides with a larger push to break up more and more ties that kept our society going for the last 30–50 years. Look at what’s happening to globalization and the push to near-shore. Look at the fragmentation of media into private channels and closed groups, the erosion of shared narratives, and the growing skepticism toward institutions that used to act as connective tiss…

That doesn't really sound bad to me. I think we expanded our social reach too far and need to scale back to where we can feel like we have an impact and our voice matters.
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