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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?

#431

Post by acjohnson55 »

CobrastanJorji wrote: post #305
egypturnash wrote: post #282

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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/…

IMO, their biggest problem was that they made a product that was terminally uncool.

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

#432

Post by imron »

crazygringo wrote: post #348
hgomersall wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Search died ages ago [1]. Ads dying is a direct consequence of that. [1] https://www.wheresyoured.at/the-men-who-killed-google/

> Search died ages ago You might want to let Google know that, because the number of searches on Google appears to continue to be growing massively: https://searchengineland.com/google-5-trillion-searches-per-... Those numbers look like the exact opposite of dead or dying to me. As does Google's growing stock price over the same time period.

‘Numbers go up’ is the exact type of thinking that caused the death of search.

From a user perspective, google search results are awful and almost always a complete waste of time.

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

#433

Post by rootsudo »

nostrademons wrote: post #160
SunshineTheCat wrote: post #61

I recently took someone to go and watch a hockey game. Been a little while but I personally played as a goalie myself. The person kept making the comment that she couldn't see/find the puck and it made it frustrating to watch. As a goalie, not being able to see the puck is pretty normal (especially with big bodies trying to screen you). What I told her was that what matters a lot more than where the puck is, is where…

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…

This is 100% what I see too.

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

#435

Post by bsimpson »

_alternator_ wrote: post #404
Muromec wrote: post #309

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Why doesn’t Signal have the same mindspace that these (imo) marginal apps have? It’s actually private. I wonder if people find it hard to use or something…

Does Signal scale?

Until recently, I think the only way to join a Signal was to be explicitly added by a member. It doesn't have all the channels etc. of something like Discord.

It doesn't have enough mindshare by normies either. In San Francisco, my entire social graph was on Signal. In NYC, I'm the weirdo that uses Signal for everything. Most locals seem to only use it for things that they explicitly want to be private. Among Euro friends, only the ones with ties to the US/tech industry use it.

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

#436

Post by jwrallie »

CobrastanJorji wrote: post #305
egypturnash wrote: post #282

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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/…

Another mistake is that they had a significant presence in Brazil through Orkut, but they didn’t bother to integrate and migrate the users in.

Orkut’s user base was already degraded through Facebook but it was not inexistent, as some features of Orkut were unique. One was that it allowed people to use alt accounts to participate on anonymous discussion, not much different from Reddit, I’m sure with some creativeness G+ could have benefited from extra users.

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

#437

Post by consumer451 »

arccy wrote: post #420
consumer451 wrote: post #302

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

then you have people complaining that search is no longer a keyword match when people claim to know exactly what they want...

Totally! Hence the dilemma.

Google.com has "AI mode," and it tries to intelligently decide when to suggest that based on a search query. I could have likely clicke AI Mode on google.com once it gave me a crap SERP response, and used that to find the same thing. But, I instinctively just went to chatgpt.com instead. I am not a total moron, I use gemini, claude, and gpt APIs in the 2 LLM enabled products that I am working on...

However, just last week I noticed that the AI mode default reply for some queries was giving me just horrible AI mode replies. Like gpt-3.5 quality wrong assumptions. For the first time I saw google.com as the worst option. I cannot be the only one.

I think that I might understand the problem. Google has the tech, but as a public company they cannot start to lose money on every search query, right? The quarterly would look bad, bonuses would go down. Same reason ULA can't build Starship, even if they could and wanted to. However, OpenAI can lose money on every query. SOTA inference is not cheap.

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

#439

Post by golem14 »

cookiengineer wrote: post #278
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…

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…

And yet, here you are, posting ...

BTW, I don't explicitly disagree with what you're saying, but it would be good to look at actual data instead of anecdata to know for sure, and the people who have the data are not telling ...

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

#440

Post by bsimpson »

AngryData wrote: post #409
bookofjoe wrote: post #251

Earlier quoted context omitted.

99% of the population hasn't a clue what Discord is/does

I think the only people who don't know what discord anymore is the 50+ crowd. Atleast 50% of the randos I talk with online have discord as their preferred method for texting and voice communication and immediately want to switch to it if possible. And if older people actually cared about doxxing themselves with every conversation they would probably have a higher percentage too.

I don't know what the right way to handle intersecting identities is.

Most of my online identities were started when I was in college and was happy to have them tied to my real name. (This is also when Facebook was popular, still good, and college-kids-only.) Since then, cancel culture et. al. has made me more wary of having my identity-adjacent usernames show up in hobbies like gaming.

If I want to be myname in some Discord servers and anonoguy in others, is there a safe way to enforce that boundary? What about if I want to work on gaming-related open source projects or 3D prints?

As the internet moves to logged-in-and-social-by-default, it's hard to know which identity to use for which service. Moreover, when things are constantly leaking/being hacked, I don't know that I want any service to know that anonoguy and myname are personas of the same individual.

And as LLMs become the standard, I'm not sure any of this is defensible. I imagine in a decade's time, it will be trivial for an LLM to go "this account and that account have similar interests/references/ways of typing - they must be the same person."

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