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> I'm increasingly of the opinion that Google (the advertising engine) has destroyed Google (the search engine), by the two step process of making it profitable

by remus 5y ago

> I'm increasingly of the opinion that Google (the advertising engine) has destroyed Google (the search engine), by the two step process of making it profitable to produce blogspam then forcing search to remove blogspam - and a lot of the useful content has gone out with that bathwater. If you're looking for someone to blame google seems like the wrong party here. Surely the people abusing the system (i.e. blog spam) should at least share a good chunk of the blame.

pjc50 5y ago
Sure, but emergent bad actors exploiting features of a system that pay them are kind of inevitable, faceless, and there's an endless supply of them. The internet would be a very different place if it wasn't for this phenomenon of human behavior. Google are just the most powerful and most visible actor in this, and replacing the early less profit orientated web with a dark forest of advertising and tracking is to a great extent on them. (I don't think the web3 people have realised how important it is that the cost/benefit ratio of "ham" (good content) needs to be above the cost/benefit ratio of spam, by quite a large margin, or spam drives out ham)
- cromwellian 5y ago
  I’ve been on the internet since the 80s and the bad actors were still around back then. USENET was made unusable at one point by people spamming, mass cross posting, and playing cancel wars. This was well before ads or profit existed on the net.
  - acdha 5y ago
    This is all true but Google and later Facebook made it easier to monetize spam and were clearly unconcerned about the impact on communities unless advertisers stopped buying. An unethical immigration law firm still needed to sign up clients but a teenager in Moldova could scrape someone else’s content, SEO it, and make a decent income without knowing who the money came from. I think pjc’s point is extremely important: micropayments could dramatically change things but it’s quite hard to set values which will deter enough spam to be effective without excluding innocent people or simply increasing the damages when someone is compromised. That was what killed proof-of-work email spam concepts decades ago: even if you could get adoption, it wouldn’t have hurt the people using botnets to spam as much as many legitimate users.
    - cromwellian 5y ago
      Anything that facilitates commerce makes it easier to monetize spam, just as it makes it easier to monetize porn, or even illegal activity (eg bitcoin). You can't really fault Google or Facebook for this, as soon as the internet moved away from hobbyists, academia, and scientists towards the general public, it was absolutely inevitable. The only way to have prevented something like that would have been to make the internet a giant closed-garden AOL like system with total control over users, identity, and content. Fundamentally, if you make something frictionless to join, you end up with parasites. If you impose a cost to join, you end up hurting average users, because it's hard to raise the price high enough to keep out bad actors, especially if the expected value is positive and high. (If I need to spend $5000 in order to get one sucker for a MAKE MONEY FAST scheme, it's still worth it) Part of Apple's value proposition is a tightly controlled walled garden with a high cost to entry. If you're willing to pay those costs, you're protected from a lot of spam, at the cost of a lot of friction to enter the ecosystem, and the lost of full autonomy over your devices.

by remus 5y ago

pjc50 5y ago

Sure, but emergent bad actors exploiting features of a system that pay them are kind of inevitable, faceless, and there's an endless supply of them. The internet would be a very different place if it wasn't for this phenomenon of human behavior. Google are just the most powerful and most visible actor in this, and replacing the early less profit orientated web with a dark forest of advertising and tracking is to a great extent on them. (I don't think the web3 people have realised how important it is that the cost/benefit ratio of "ham" (good content) needs to be above the cost/benefit ratio of spam, by quite a large margin, or spam drives out ham)

cromwellian 5y ago
I’ve been on the internet since the 80s and the bad actors were still around back then. USENET was made unusable at one point by people spamming, mass cross posting, and playing cancel wars. This was well before ads or profit existed on the net.
- acdha 5y ago
  This is all true but Google and later Facebook made it easier to monetize spam and were clearly unconcerned about the impact on communities unless advertisers stopped buying. An unethical immigration law firm still needed to sign up clients but a teenager in Moldova could scrape someone else’s content, SEO it, and make a decent income without knowing who the money came from. I think pjc’s point is extremely important: micropayments could dramatically change things but it’s quite hard to set values which will deter enough spam to be effective without excluding innocent people or simply increasing the damages when someone is compromised. That was what killed proof-of-work email spam concepts decades ago: even if you could get adoption, it wouldn’t have hurt the people using botnets to spam as much as many legitimate users.
  - cromwellian 5y ago
    Anything that facilitates commerce makes it easier to monetize spam, just as it makes it easier to monetize porn, or even illegal activity (eg bitcoin). You can't really fault Google or Facebook for this, as soon as the internet moved away from hobbyists, academia, and scientists towards the general public, it was absolutely inevitable. The only way to have prevented something like that would have been to make the internet a giant closed-garden AOL like system with total control over users, identity, and content. Fundamentally, if you make something frictionless to join, you end up with parasites. If you impose a cost to join, you end up hurting average users, because it's hard to raise the price high enough to keep out bad actors, especially if the expected value is positive and high. (If I need to spend $5000 in order to get one sucker for a MAKE MONEY FAST scheme, it's still worth it) Part of Apple's value proposition is a tightly controlled walled garden with a high cost to entry. If you're willing to pay those costs, you're protected from a lot of spam, at the cost of a lot of friction to enter the ecosystem, and the lost of full autonomy over your devices.