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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)

#331
post #226

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How might you see solving this problem? How could we distribute the task or goal of curation amongst individuals? How do we incentivize and enable discovery of maven/curators?

I've been through this thought-process many times. 1. Google isn't working well any more. 2. Therefore bring humans back into the system of flagging good and bad pages. 3. But the internet is too big - so we have to distribute the workload. 4. Oh, a distributed trust-based system at scale... it's going to be game-able by people with a financial incentive. 5. Forget it. --- Edit: it's probably worth adding that whoeve…

Obviously the solution is to create a centralized system to electronically ID every human on the planet, and track what they post, talk, think, which medications and food they consume, who they are friends with, who they fuck, how much of this decade's evil chemicals they exhale, where they spend their money, and their real-time location.

Or, you know, just make your own open-source search engine, with blackjack and hookers.

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

#332
post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If your market cap exceeds the median GDP of all African countries What does this mean? In terms of GDP, the median African country is Benin, with a GDP of about $20 billion. Maybe you want mean instead. The average GDP across the 51 countries in Africa is $56 billion. Do you think that, um, Chipotle with its market cap of $88 billion should be broken up? What about Costco? Its market cap is over $300 billion, and…

I assume he picked some ridiculously high number as a starting point. In the end the problem is capitalism, the idea that investors (people merely looking to turn money into more money) should be considered the only owners of companies. That forces this eternal growth model on us that enshittifies everything.

Definitely don't move to Singapore or Switzerland, then. You're going to want to look at places like Eritrea and Bolivia

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

#333

Last year a friend and I made a website about the Nurburgring. It provided basic info for first time visitors that we were missing on our first visit. My friend spent a lot of time creating a UI with a custom map for displaying locations and routes. I wrote a bunch of content that was thoroughly researched. At a certain point we ended up being invited by one of the largest rental companies to see whether we could wor…

I'm curious now, can you give me a link to the site?

https://nring.info/

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

#334
post #226

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How might you see solving this problem? How could we distribute the task or goal of curation amongst individuals? How do we incentivize and enable discovery of maven/curators?

I've been through this thought-process many times. 1. Google isn't working well any more. 2. Therefore bring humans back into the system of flagging good and bad pages. 3. But the internet is too big - so we have to distribute the workload. 4. Oh, a distributed trust-based system at scale... it's going to be game-able by people with a financial incentive. 5. Forget it. --- Edit: it's probably worth adding that whoeve…

The really obvious thing to avoid is DMOZ which got captured by spammers immediately.

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

#335

Last year a friend and I made a website about the Nurburgring. It provided basic info for first time visitors that we were missing on our first visit. My friend spent a lot of time creating a UI with a custom map for displaying locations and routes. I wrote a bunch of content that was thoroughly researched. At a certain point we ended up being invited by one of the largest rental companies to see whether we could wor…

> I hate that Google gatekeeps the internet.

They really don't. People reach enormous audiences thorough social media.

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

#336

Last year a friend and I made a website about the Nurburgring. It provided basic info for first time visitors that we were missing on our first visit. My friend spent a lot of time creating a UI with a custom map for displaying locations and routes. I wrote a bunch of content that was thoroughly researched. At a certain point we ended up being invited by one of the largest rental companies to see whether we could wor…

How might you see solving this problem? How could we distribute the task or goal of curation amongst individuals? How do we incentivize and enable discovery of maven/curators?

The fix is a decentralized search network with nodes linked to people or legitimate businesses. You manually distribute trust to friends and businesses you like, and you can manually revoke that trust, with some network level trust effects occurring based on spammy/malicious behavior.

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

#337
post #215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t know, webrings?

Webrings were a lot of people doing work for free or with little return. Nobody has time to do this anymore, and the only way to support such project would be paid membership (hard to gain traction) or ads (back to square one). Sorry that I sound pessimistic but I just am.

> Nobody has time to do this anymore

Can you say more about that?

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

#338

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How do you build a community if google prevents users from finding it?

The existence of meatspace never stopped the early web from flourishing, so why should the existence of the modern web stop anybody from making a second web? The only reason that Google was useful is because it tapped into the trust network that already existed before it. I feel like the social media churn has destroyed people's brains, because they're more interested in stopping people from doing things they don't l…

Before people knew the web was vast and required digging through. Now people think google is the web, so if it doesn't come up by the third search it might as well not exist.

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

#339

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Windows is still the most popular desktop / laptop OS, and while it might come with a Chromium browser it defaults to Bing. Users who want Google search need to either change their browser settings, or install a new browser (two things this community claims that no average user would ever do on a platform where the default was Chrome and Google web search). I know it's imperfect, I know it's getting worse, I know it'…

> outperforms the competition. I've been using chromium and firefox side by side at work and play all day for abt 3 years now. Indistinguishable except chromium uses more memory and crashes and hangs. I get hundreds of tabs open in firefox for weeks and months. I reach about 50 before chromium gets lethargic. I used to do this under ubuntu 18 and 20 with 32GB ram, now under win11 w 64. I don't understand the Chrome r…

I think that's a slightly orthogonal issue - I'm talking Google Search vs other search providers. I doubt there's a significant gap between Chrome and Chromium.

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

#340

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This was already solved in the past. Don’t just build a web site, build a community. This way the community will advertise the site and attract more users.

How do you build a community if google prevents users from finding it?

You go to the myriads of car communities and systematically promote your content for Nurburgring. It’s a niche site, and by the OP’s description we can safely assume that it’s quite usable since he’s been already approached by a sponsor. And since this is a site about a specific car circuit you just go to the actual place, or make an arrangement with the organizers to promote your site. Give a leaflet, or build an accompanying mobile app.

I'm not saying that circumventing Google is the easiest thing in the world, or the cheapest, but it's not mission impossible either. I didn't find Hacker News from Google, not the dozens of other tech communities I'm following.

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