7 ms·

This. People don't realize that the early web was elitist. Now, the entire population is online. And, as you said, most people simply don't care about the stuff

by baxtr 5y ago

This. People don't realize that the early web was elitist. Now, the entire population is online. And, as you said, most people simply don't care about the stuff we care about. That's also why "Google's search results are soo bad." They're not. For the bulk of Google's visitors, they're good enough.

simulate-me 5y ago
Desiring choice isn’t elitist. Early web adopters were passionate and willing to put in more work. Nothing wrong with that, and nothing wrong with liking simple default settings either.
- mattcwilson 5y ago
  Wondering if, by “elitist”, GP meant more like “out of reach to many laypeople because of learning curve.” Is there a good single word for that? “Difficult” and “complex” aren’t quite right. Anyway - you’re right, nothing at all wrong with wanting choice. I think the point being made here though is that “layperson gravity” / mass market appeals / lowest common denominator is going to mean that tuneable web search will be a niche product, forever. Even if we’d both like that niche.
  - tobyjsullivan 5y ago
    "High barrier to entry" ie, only accessible to an elite class (1337, if you will) "Elitist" feels pejorative. Also a not-inaccurate way to describe a system which presents high barriers to entry.
    - gorjusborg 5y ago
      Yes. The early internet wasn't elitist but a higher percentage were elite than today.
    - nmstoker 5y ago
      What were these high barriers to entry? Not trying to be awkward, but even back in the early days of Netscape, it wasn't like you had to recall any arcane commands to use most search engines. Sure, they all had limitations then, such as not necessarily knowing similar word senses to create more nuanced searches, but that was a fairly level playing field. Is it simply that it was initially a bit obscure and not everyone had found out about it? That's not really a barrier in terms of difficulty - as soon as people got into the "in crowd" they could use it just like the rest of them.
      - ipaddr 5y ago
        When I started all modem calls required remembering 'atdt' When netscape came out if you were lucky to have ppp access setting it up on windows 3.1 was difficult but once you were up as long as no one picked up the phone you were fine. But even this was too difficult for the average person who lived in an aol world where the internet was limited to aol.
      - calvinmorrison 5y ago
        my first site was on geocities i made with a sort of pagebuilder inside yahoo on a crummy hand me down... i didn't know what 'programming' even was. Why is publishing documents so complex now? my site is all html, why not.
        RugnirViking 5y ago
        there are so many options, many complex, but many too are simple. One of my personal favorites is using github pages, you can host a plaintext html document for free in about 10 minutes (including downloading a text editor and github desktop)
      - jusssi 5y ago
        > What were these high barriers to entry? Cost was one. Hardware wasn't cheap and it would seem to have no practical use except to satisfy one's curiosity. A PC for the kids cost about half of our family's monthly gross income. A modem would be 10%. And the phone bill caused tourette's like symptoms more than once.
bamboozled 5y ago
Er, isn’t the whole point of Google tracking you and knowing your mothers blood type so they can give you better search results tailored to you ?
- nobody9999 5y ago
  >Er, isn’t the whole point of Google tracking you and knowing your mothers blood type so they can give you better search results tailored to you ? AFAICT, quality personalized search results isn't the goal for Google here. I think the point of all that is generating revenue via advertising sales. And while providing high quality search results might once upon a time have been a goal, both as a goal in itself and a tool to drive user adoption/engagement, that's no longer necessary as they have a (relatively) captive audience and a (relatively) captive customer base (advertisers). As such, quality search results are no longer all that important. I'm not a Googler, IMHO, YMMV, etc.
  - autoexec 5y ago
    I think this is exactly why Google's search has become trash. They don't need it. Even when their goals changed from "making searching the internet better" to "Making money and collecting data on everyone" they still depended on search to see what people were doing both online and offline. Now they have millions of cell phones collecting data and the GPS location of everyone offline, they run extremely popular DNS servers to see what websites people go to, most websites (including educational and government websites) include google's trackers so on most websites every page loaded will ping at least one of google servers. They've got people uploading their personal and work documents to their cloud. They are swimming in data collected from sources outside of web search. Between that and the lack of actual competition it's no surprise they aren't investing in making searching the internet better for people. In some ways they profit from search results being terrible. If anything beyond the first few results on the first page is filled with spam and irrelevant websites the top few results to any search become even more valuable.
- smitty1e 5y ago
  No, the point of amassing all of that pattern-of-life information is to pimp us to various customers.
mulmen 5y ago
Indeed. We live in the eternal September. But to be honest the internet is still the internet. The web still exists. Any lamentation at the loss of the "old" internet is that you don't have more angry uncles spewing political rhetoric on your motorcycle forum. Do you want the unwashed masses in your specialist forums? I certainly don't. Seems to me things are working pretty well. I do worry about the next generation but to be honest, the same was said about me. Instead of complaining about the state of the web just be the change. Host your site, run your forums, live your life. Stop worrying about how other people should live their lives. Take some youngsters under your wing and show them how a keyboard works instead of a touch screen.
- Shared404 5y ago
  > Take some youngsters under your wing and show them how a keyboard works instead of a touch screen. This x1000. The only way to ensure that future people can continue to maintain things is to teach those who are interested. While I think we need to scale back the opaqueness of tech to the average user[0], there will always be some who just know more. [0] By which I don't mean "more configuration options", because the average user doesn't want those. I mean make it easy to access the source - and just as importantly make it easy to use changes to said source, so those who think, hm, I want this, can learn to fix it themselves, or find someone who can.
- cdogl 5y ago
  Wonderfully put. I would add that we need to see things for their scale and proportion. Yes, the simple walled web is bigger than ever. So is the hacker community, and this website (so far as I can tell), Reddit (for all its faults), etc.
- throwaway2037 5y ago
  FYI: Wiki says: <<Eternal September or the September that never ended is Usenet slang for a period beginning around 1993[2] when Internet service providers began offering Usenet access to many new users. The flood of new users overwhelmed the existing culture for online forums and the ability to enforce existing norms. AOL followed with their Usenet gateway service in March 1994, leading to a constant stream of new users. Hence, from the early Usenet point of view, the influx of new users in September 1993 never ended.>> Ref: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September
user3939382 5y ago
> For the bulk of Google's visitors, they're good enough I'm not sure that's true. Just to pick an example, basically any type of product search now leads to auto-generated spam/borderline-spam websites that scrape reviews from Amazon, which are themselves often fraudulent. I guess you could say that's "good enough" but only in the sense that someone being scammed at some point consents to something that makes them a victim of the scam. For many searches, you'll see "reddit" autocompleted to the end of the search because Google's organic results are not good enough and people are trying to weed out the spam somehow, albeit in an imperfect way that restricts results to one site.
- redmen 5y ago
  To add to that, most people are satisfied with snake oil and false cures. I guess you could call that good enough.. I call it morally irresponsible.
- greyhair 5y ago
  Worse than that are the SEO results that don't give you what you want at all. For products, one of the worst offenders is Target. Yes, Target. They show up near the top of about 60% of my searches, including for things they simply do not carry. But hey, they carry a similar product that you might be interested in! (not) SEO results make Google money, but they also make the results suck.
- bottled_poe 5y ago
  The scammers are aware of this too, and many online forums are filled with astroturfers.
- unethical_ban 5y ago
  DuckDuckGo is horrendous for spam and malware distribution. I have stopped recommending it to non-technical people because they can't recognize the obviously evil/bad-pattern sites that are on the first page of many DDG searches I do
  - ipaddr 5y ago
redmen 5y ago
It's not true I don't think. Anyone I watch older than 50 years old is constantly frustrated by google, they just don't know what's good, what's not. I think they use it because it's the "norm" and that is the only reason. And as far as everyone else.. I have no idea to be quite honest. I have a fairly big handful of non-techie friends who think google sucks but is good enough so there is no real incentive to change. With any habit people don't change it unless they have a huge reason to. No one stops eating double cheeseburgers until their doctor literally tells them they are going to die. I think that's what we're up against here.
- technothrasher 5y ago
  > Anyone I watch older than 50 years old Hey, now wait a second there, you young whipper-snapper. I'm sitting here reading HN while I install Debian on an XCP-ng VM, and I hear I can't understand whether Google results are good or not? There are plenty of us over 50 that actually lived the early internet and watched it first-hand transform into what it is today.
  - redmen 5y ago
    I meant 60 ;)
  - smitty1e 5y ago
    Indeed, there was a time when Slashdot was as tech-heavy and full of learning as HN.
    - throwaway2037 5y ago
      What happened to Slashdot? Around 2000, I was a regular reader. Then, I fell away, but I cannot remember why.
      - pers0n 5y ago
        All the arguments were the same over and over. I remember reading the same comments that would come up all the time, the discussion got old. Plus the topics were very Linux, DRM focused. Digg had newer more interesting tech topics
tomc1985 5y ago
Which is why good is the enemy of great.
randmeerkat 5y ago
> That's also why "Google's search results are soo bad." They're not. For the bulk of Google's visitors, they're good enough. I’m sure that’s what Yahoo! used to think about Google before Google replaced it.
- rschroed 5y ago
  not us yahoo / Altavista / or whatever else was around at the time users. Google was so clearly better right out of the gate that I distinctly remember having conversations conveying the shock and awe at the quality of the results. Before Google everything was mediocre at best. I’d say the for the bulk of Google’s visitors the results aren’t merely good enough, they’re insanely great. Now, that said, the G monopoly is horrible and needs to die.
  - mech422 5y ago
    I had the opposite reaction...Google search was so 'generic' compared to how you could do laser focused searches with altavista... What pushed Google over the top for me was the sheer size of their index...
kovac 5y ago
It isn't elitism. It's competence. A system designed by competent users for competent users are going to be different from one made for general masses. There's nothing elitist about that.
- joneholland 5y ago
  What defines competence?
  - ipaddr 5y ago
    Ability to use booleans and quotes in a standard search.
smitty1e 5y ago
> This. People don't realize that the early web was elitist. Now, the entire population is online. That's an excellent demographic point. A counter-argument is that the move from port 80 to port 443 is the elitist drift. Instead of innocently putting information out there and sharing in an egalitarian fashion, we now have certificates and gatekeepers and lions and tigers and bears, oh my!
- quintushoratius 5y ago
  In an age of free SSL/TLS certificates, and built-in support in pretty much anything, is this really true? Making your content available via port 443 really isn't impeding anything at all.
  - smitty1e 5y ago
    Except that there is now massive additional complexity that is both fragile and tricky.

by baxtr 5y ago

simulate-me 5y ago

Desiring choice isn’t elitist. Early web adopters were passionate and willing to put in more work. Nothing wrong with that, and nothing wrong with liking simple default settings either.

mattcwilson 5y ago
Wondering if, by “elitist”, GP meant more like “out of reach to many laypeople because of learning curve.” Is there a good single word for that? “Difficult” and “complex” aren’t quite right. Anyway - you’re right, nothing at all wrong with wanting choice. I think the point being made here though is that “layperson gravity” / mass market appeals / lowest common denominator is going to mean that tuneable web search will be a niche product, forever. Even if we’d both like that niche.
- tobyjsullivan 5y ago
  "High barrier to entry" ie, only accessible to an elite class (1337, if you will) "Elitist" feels pejorative. Also a not-inaccurate way to describe a system which presents high barriers to entry.
  - gorjusborg 5y ago
    Yes. The early internet wasn't elitist but a higher percentage were elite than today.
  - nmstoker 5y ago
    What were these high barriers to entry? Not trying to be awkward, but even back in the early days of Netscape, it wasn't like you had to recall any arcane commands to use most search engines. Sure, they all had limitations then, such as not necessarily knowing similar word senses to create more nuanced searches, but that was a fairly level playing field. Is it simply that it was initially a bit obscure and not everyone had found out about it? That's not really a barrier in terms of difficulty - as soon as people got into the "in crowd" they could use it just like the rest of them.
    - ipaddr 5y ago
      When I started all modem calls required remembering 'atdt' When netscape came out if you were lucky to have ppp access setting it up on windows 3.1 was difficult but once you were up as long as no one picked up the phone you were fine. But even this was too difficult for the average person who lived in an aol world where the internet was limited to aol.
    - calvinmorrison 5y ago
      my first site was on geocities i made with a sort of pagebuilder inside yahoo on a crummy hand me down... i didn't know what 'programming' even was. Why is publishing documents so complex now? my site is all html, why not.
      - RugnirViking 5y ago
        there are so many options, many complex, but many too are simple. One of my personal favorites is using github pages, you can host a plaintext html document for free in about 10 minutes (including downloading a text editor and github desktop)
    - jusssi 5y ago
      > What were these high barriers to entry? Cost was one. Hardware wasn't cheap and it would seem to have no practical use except to satisfy one's curiosity. A PC for the kids cost about half of our family's monthly gross income. A modem would be 10%. And the phone bill caused tourette's like symptoms more than once.

bamboozled 5y ago

Er, isn’t the whole point of Google tracking you and knowing your mothers blood type so they can give you better search results tailored to you ?

nobody9999 5y ago
>Er, isn’t the whole point of Google tracking you and knowing your mothers blood type so they can give you better search results tailored to you ? AFAICT, quality personalized search results isn't the goal for Google here. I think the point of all that is generating revenue via advertising sales. And while providing high quality search results might once upon a time have been a goal, both as a goal in itself and a tool to drive user adoption/engagement, that's no longer necessary as they have a (relatively) captive audience and a (relatively) captive customer base (advertisers). As such, quality search results are no longer all that important. I'm not a Googler, IMHO, YMMV, etc.
- autoexec 5y ago
  I think this is exactly why Google's search has become trash. They don't need it. Even when their goals changed from "making searching the internet better" to "Making money and collecting data on everyone" they still depended on search to see what people were doing both online and offline. Now they have millions of cell phones collecting data and the GPS location of everyone offline, they run extremely popular DNS servers to see what websites people go to, most websites (including educational and government websites) include google's trackers so on most websites every page loaded will ping at least one of google servers. They've got people uploading their personal and work documents to their cloud. They are swimming in data collected from sources outside of web search. Between that and the lack of actual competition it's no surprise they aren't investing in making searching the internet better for people. In some ways they profit from search results being terrible. If anything beyond the first few results on the first page is filled with spam and irrelevant websites the top few results to any search become even more valuable.
smitty1e 5y ago
No, the point of amassing all of that pattern-of-life information is to pimp us to various customers.

mulmen 5y ago

Indeed. We live in the eternal September. But to be honest the internet is still the internet. The web still exists. Any lamentation at the loss of the "old" internet is that you don't have more angry uncles spewing political rhetoric on your motorcycle forum. Do you want the unwashed masses in your specialist forums? I certainly don't. Seems to me things are working pretty well. I do worry about the next generation but to be honest, the same was said about me. Instead of complaining about the state of the web just be the change. Host your site, run your forums, live your life. Stop worrying about how other people should live their lives. Take some youngsters under your wing and show them how a keyboard works instead of a touch screen.

Shared404 5y ago
> Take some youngsters under your wing and show them how a keyboard works instead of a touch screen. This x1000. The only way to ensure that future people can continue to maintain things is to teach those who are interested. While I think we need to scale back the opaqueness of tech to the average user[0], there will always be some who just know more. [0] By which I don't mean "more configuration options", because the average user doesn't want those. I mean make it easy to access the source - and just as importantly make it easy to use changes to said source, so those who think, hm, I want this, can learn to fix it themselves, or find someone who can.
cdogl 5y ago
Wonderfully put. I would add that we need to see things for their scale and proportion. Yes, the simple walled web is bigger than ever. So is the hacker community, and this website (so far as I can tell), Reddit (for all its faults), etc.
throwaway2037 5y ago
FYI: Wiki says: <<Eternal September or the September that never ended is Usenet slang for a period beginning around 1993[2] when Internet service providers began offering Usenet access to many new users. The flood of new users overwhelmed the existing culture for online forums and the ability to enforce existing norms. AOL followed with their Usenet gateway service in March 1994, leading to a constant stream of new users. Hence, from the early Usenet point of view, the influx of new users in September 1993 never ended.>> Ref: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September

user3939382 5y ago

> For the bulk of Google's visitors, they're good enough I'm not sure that's true. Just to pick an example, basically any type of product search now leads to auto-generated spam/borderline-spam websites that scrape reviews from Amazon, which are themselves often fraudulent. I guess you could say that's "good enough" but only in the sense that someone being scammed at some point consents to something that makes them a victim of the scam. For many searches, you'll see "reddit" autocompleted to the end of the search because Google's organic results are not good enough and people are trying to weed out the spam somehow, albeit in an imperfect way that restricts results to one site.

redmen 5y ago
To add to that, most people are satisfied with snake oil and false cures. I guess you could call that good enough.. I call it morally irresponsible.
greyhair 5y ago
Worse than that are the SEO results that don't give you what you want at all. For products, one of the worst offenders is Target. Yes, Target. They show up near the top of about 60% of my searches, including for things they simply do not carry. But hey, they carry a similar product that you might be interested in! (not) SEO results make Google money, but they also make the results suck.
bottled_poe 5y ago
The scammers are aware of this too, and many online forums are filled with astroturfers.
unethical_ban 5y ago
DuckDuckGo is horrendous for spam and malware distribution. I have stopped recommending it to non-technical people because they can't recognize the obviously evil/bad-pattern sites that are on the first page of many DDG searches I do
- ipaddr 5y ago

redmen 5y ago

It's not true I don't think. Anyone I watch older than 50 years old is constantly frustrated by google, they just don't know what's good, what's not. I think they use it because it's the "norm" and that is the only reason. And as far as everyone else.. I have no idea to be quite honest. I have a fairly big handful of non-techie friends who think google sucks but is good enough so there is no real incentive to change. With any habit people don't change it unless they have a huge reason to. No one stops eating double cheeseburgers until their doctor literally tells them they are going to die. I think that's what we're up against here.

technothrasher 5y ago
> Anyone I watch older than 50 years old Hey, now wait a second there, you young whipper-snapper. I'm sitting here reading HN while I install Debian on an XCP-ng VM, and I hear I can't understand whether Google results are good or not? There are plenty of us over 50 that actually lived the early internet and watched it first-hand transform into what it is today.
- redmen 5y ago
  I meant 60 ;)
- smitty1e 5y ago
  Indeed, there was a time when Slashdot was as tech-heavy and full of learning as HN.
  - throwaway2037 5y ago
    What happened to Slashdot? Around 2000, I was a regular reader. Then, I fell away, but I cannot remember why.
    - pers0n 5y ago
      All the arguments were the same over and over. I remember reading the same comments that would come up all the time, the discussion got old. Plus the topics were very Linux, DRM focused. Digg had newer more interesting tech topics

tomc1985 5y ago

Which is why good is the enemy of great.

randmeerkat 5y ago

> That's also why "Google's search results are soo bad." They're not. For the bulk of Google's visitors, they're good enough. I’m sure that’s what Yahoo! used to think about Google before Google replaced it.

rschroed 5y ago
not us yahoo / Altavista / or whatever else was around at the time users. Google was so clearly better right out of the gate that I distinctly remember having conversations conveying the shock and awe at the quality of the results. Before Google everything was mediocre at best. I’d say the for the bulk of Google’s visitors the results aren’t merely good enough, they’re insanely great. Now, that said, the G monopoly is horrible and needs to die.
- mech422 5y ago
  I had the opposite reaction...Google search was so 'generic' compared to how you could do laser focused searches with altavista... What pushed Google over the top for me was the sheer size of their index...

kovac 5y ago

It isn't elitism. It's competence. A system designed by competent users for competent users are going to be different from one made for general masses. There's nothing elitist about that.

joneholland 5y ago
What defines competence?
- ipaddr 5y ago
  Ability to use booleans and quotes in a standard search.

smitty1e 5y ago

> This. People don't realize that the early web was elitist. Now, the entire population is online. That's an excellent demographic point. A counter-argument is that the move from port 80 to port 443 is the elitist drift. Instead of innocently putting information out there and sharing in an egalitarian fashion, we now have certificates and gatekeepers and lions and tigers and bears, oh my!

quintushoratius 5y ago
In an age of free SSL/TLS certificates, and built-in support in pretty much anything, is this really true? Making your content available via port 443 really isn't impeding anything at all.
- smitty1e 5y ago
  Except that there is now massive additional complexity that is both fragile and tricky.