The real problem that happened to Internet and is more or less predestined to happen to anything popular enough: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September
Gives a whole new meaning to that Green Day song
Google emphasizes popularity over accuracy
81–90 of 280 posts
Re: Google emphasizes popularity over accuracy
#82Earlier quoted context omitted.
No. Exactly like reddit, it awards people that have the most popular comments. Some people are more insightful than most, but its the exact same system as reddit
Well, of course, that's tautologically true. The difference is that the most popular comments are more often to be insightful, and the people with the most karma have it because they post insightful things, rather than the type of comment I mentioned above. (Believe me, I would know if people were spamming those; there are only a handful of people that accumulate karma faster than I do, and they all do it "fairly".)
HN suffers from fanboy’ism just as much, if not more, than elsewhere. Though I’ll admit there’s many more critical comments as well.
Re: Google emphasizes popularity over accuracy
#83Earlier quoted context omitted.
> There was a promise of a marketplace of ideas Said commenter, as they type a comment in a marketplace of ideas where people discuss fairly complex ideas. The internet is a tool, not a solution. I absolutely disagree that it's hard to find for anyone looking for it. The issue is that most people aren't looking for it, and you can't force them. A lot of people are just looking for entertainment, and that's perfectly…
It is harder to find things on google than it used to be. The noise to signal ratio has increased considerably.
I wonder how much it would increase/decrease if we filtered out all blogging software.
Re: Google emphasizes popularity over accuracy
#84Fun experiment - try finding something on the World Wide Web without using a search engine. It's not as impossible as you might think. But it's certainly not easy.
I came on just around altavista/google so I don't remember, did people only use registries before ? or word of mouth ? must be weird to buy a domain name and still be mostly anonymous and invisible :)
Altavista was early. If you were on in 1996, that was only 5 years after the “birth” of the web. Before spiders, things were organized like Gopher. There were directories you could look up. Some pages kept archives of links.
Web crawlers were introduced in 1993. At that point, gopher probably had more content. Remember WAIS? All the libraries liked that protocol. Encarta was still selling like hot cakes.
Re: Google emphasizes popularity over accuracy
#85Earlier quoted context omitted.
I support the author here. There was a promise of a marketplace of ideas, making the world a better place, that being interconnected would make the world smarter and democratize knowledge. All that may be true, it may be out there, but it's damn hard to find. Google, Youtube, Reddit, and Facebook all prioritize freshness. Instead of being exposed to things outside our comfort zones, we take solace protected inside fi…
> google trying too hard to think what we want instead of guiding us to ask better questions. Can you explain what this means? I see people saying this wrt to Duck Duck Go: "No, the results aren't worse, you just have to re-learn how to search with it" and all they really mean is that you need to stack more context into the search input which is strictly worse since you can already do that in Google if you need to pu…
> you need to stack more context into the search input which is strictly worse since you can already do that in Google if you need to put a finer point on your search
Hum, not exactly. Google will ignore extra context that doesn't match your profile. People coped very well when it didn't.
Re: Google emphasizes popularity over accuracy
#86> The web was supposed to forcefully challenge our opinions and push back, like a personal trainer who doesn't care how tired you say you are. What does this even mean? The web wasn't "supposed to" be anything. Though I'm not sure what magic search engine OP actually has in mind and how it's supposed to work. Besides, one of the modern mysteries is that we're in the age of instant information yet you'll notice how ma…
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Re: Google emphasizes popularity over accuracy
#87In my opinion, "the Feed" ruined the internet. The news feed, the Twitter feed, the Reddit feed, etc. The addictive nature of the Feed, and the tendency to reward dramatic or outrageous or ridiculous content leads to the herd mentality and mindless dogpiling that occurs on these platforms. And then, because expression is compressed into short form soundbites, pics and videos, the platforms actively inhibit constructi…
A very good thought, but I don't think all feeds are equal. A strictly chronological feed under user control is a wonderful thing. I have that, for example, in my RSS reader. What sucks is the popularity-contest nature of most feeds. At the top of my Facebook or Twitter or Google News feed is a bunch of stuff that I think is crap, any semi-sensible algorithm could tell that it's crap, it shouldn't be shown to me anyw…
On your last point, that's more or less how HN works for comments. You can't tell if a comment has been upvoted 20 times or -5 times (until it reaches the negative threshold for fading out). But I agree, that would help.
Re: Google emphasizes popularity over accuracy
#88> The web was supposed to forcefully challenge our opinions and push back, like a personal trainer who doesn't care how tired you say you are. What does this even mean? The web wasn't "supposed to" be anything. Though I'm not sure what magic search engine OP actually has in mind and how it's supposed to work. Besides, one of the modern mysteries is that we're in the age of instant information yet you'll notice how ma…
I support the author here. There was a promise of a marketplace of ideas, making the world a better place, that being interconnected would make the world smarter and democratize knowledge. All that may be true, it may be out there, but it's damn hard to find. Google, Youtube, Reddit, and Facebook all prioritize freshness. Instead of being exposed to things outside our comfort zones, we take solace protected inside fi…
The funny part about democratizing knowledge is that it happens on the supply side too. In a knowledge democracy, knowledge comes not just from the knowledge elite, but from the knowledge poor as well! ;)
No but in all seriousness, the mistake was in relying so heavily on private corporations motivated by profit. An unpopular idea is an unprofitable one. I'm not sure what a non-profit Google would look like... maybe the same... but I feel pretty confident that a non-profit YouTube for example would likely have a totally different recommendation algorithm.
Re: Google emphasizes popularity over accuracy
#89Earlier quoted context omitted.
I support the author here. There was a promise of a marketplace of ideas, making the world a better place, that being interconnected would make the world smarter and democratize knowledge. All that may be true, it may be out there, but it's damn hard to find. Google, Youtube, Reddit, and Facebook all prioritize freshness. Instead of being exposed to things outside our comfort zones, we take solace protected inside fi…
Yup. one thing I hate about google search is that it gives me what it thinks I want rather than what I'm actually asking for. Also, the "politically correct" bubble mask is in full effect. Furthermore, it's so heavily weighted to only show results from sites with lots of SEO juice. I can't find what I'm looking for anymore. There are some areas where google really excels and that's in technical searches. Those are re…
I don’t know about the “politically correct” comment, but the one thing I would ask of google if I could ask for something that they would deliver is to ALWAYS return results where ALL of my search terms are included. It doesn’t have to be verbatim, I’m good with them doing conjugations and maybe synonym matching, but if I add a qualifier to my search query, I didn’t add it because I don’t need it. This is my biggest frustration on the web. Lots of different search engines think it is better to return lots of unrelated garbage rather than returning no hits. No hits has actual meaning to me about my search, changing my search to return stuff I don’t want is just noise.
Re: Google emphasizes popularity over accuracy
#90Earlier quoted context omitted.
Web rings were common. If you visited a webpage on a particular topic, they would usually contain links to other related sites on a side bar. Dmoz was an old registry and I think Yahoo had a registry at one time as well.
Yahoo was a registry back in the day.
Yet Another Hierarchically Organized Oracle