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Yeah this seemed completely bizzare to me, too. Not only are operators like site: and inurl: more necessary than ever, they're not even sufficient a lot of time

Yeah this seemed completely bizzare to me, too. Not only are operators like site: and inurl: more necessary than ever, they're not even sufficient a lot of times, because if you don't know what website you're looking for you have to wade through oceans of blogspam that can't easily be filtered through operators since they're designed to match anything you search for. That's mainly a problem with the indexing; Google should be ignoring these sites. But it's probably padding their bottom line, so I guess they're not incentivised to. I'll keep saying it again and again. When companies have almost no incentives other than maximising profit, this kind of BS will invariably be what we end up with. Dark patterns are just too good for business if not kept in check through regulatory or other means.

hallway_monitor 4y ago
This is exactly the problem. Most companies put 90 plus percent of their effort towards maximizing profit once they go public. Your reason for existence as a company is to serve customers and provide for employees, not only to make money. Besides regulation for some industries, societal pressure and norms were the means of keeping companies in check in the past it seems. Boycotts would still work if people coordinated and cooperated on a massive scale.
- pessimizer 4y ago
  But this is the same argument that the companies make, and they start foundations and think-tanks to write papers and do press releases against the stuff that they themselves do. Companies are here to make money doing risky things. They (nominally) do this for the government, because the government wants to do things that are risky, but also wants to last forever, so it needs to offload the risk where it can. In return, they get limited liability, and often subsidy. It's the government's duty to set limits on what they should be doing. Any effective social pressure should be directed towards the responsible government decision-makers. Attacking companies directly is for emergencies and immanent danger. Also, companies have access to a lot of tools that we try to make it illegal for governments to use (although they do anyway, but sometimes it's stopped and sometimes it doesn't hold up in court.) They can look at everyone influential in your movement, find the most morally flexible and charismatic of them, then indirectly finance them and inflate their social media metrics - then hire them or put them at the heads of foundations. They can look at the others and pay people to troll them all day, get their ex-husband to file for full custody of their children and pay the lawyer, and get articles in the Atlantic about how they may have plagiarized their dissertation. It's a delusion that everything can be solved by slavishly imitating the early struggle for black civil rights in the US. Black civil rights weren't even improved by that movement directly, they were improved indirectly through white people watching the movement get absolutely brutalized, jailed, and murdered, and feeling ashamed. [edit: and also by the energy of young white men who feared the draft, and that fear made them feel like they were black people.] Corporate CEOs aren't going to be ashamed, and if they get ashamed, they'll get replaced. The funds that you've invested your own retirement into will be the ones whose pressure replaces them, too. Your mouth will be moving the CEOs heart, while your wallet is getting them fired.
skummetmaelk 4y ago
Maximizing profit is great if the side effects are beneficial. Currently maximizing profit means shoving as many ads down people's eyeballs as possible and that's the root cause of blogspam. Google is obviously not going to fight it when they often take a cut of the ad money shown on blogspam sites. We have to move towards a system where profit maximization closely correlates with consumer good.
- phkahler 4y ago
  >> We have to move towards a system where profit maximization closely correlates with consumer good. That's easy to say but IMHO requires the consumer to pay directly rather than the whole advertising nonsense that has nothing to do with the consumer searching for stuff. Starting to think the only way to stop this kind of thing is to remove the profit motive as much as possible. The whole 401k plan idea for retirement savings is causing huge inflows of cash into the market which is probably where a lot of the money looking for returns is coming from. When a whole society is seeking profits it seems like that's going to make things worse. I'm not even sure how much return rich folks were looking for in the old days - if you owned a big company and it was making money, was there such thing as "enough"? There definitely isn't today.
  - skummetmaelk 4y ago
    Sure it's easy to say and difficult to achieve. Would it be easier to eliminate profit motive rather than limiting the ways in which it can be done? Eliminating profit motive would be an attempt to change human nature, we are greedy after all. Regulating the ways in which the profit motive can be expressed is an administrative exercise. If we could ensure that people are more like to get rich doing valuable things (value != money, value == things that match our values), then we wouldn't see the brightest minds of each generation slave away in ad-tech and finance. Spending their work lives manipulating people into buying things they rarely need or fighting it out in a zero-sum financial game for negative societal gain.
jjoonathan 4y ago
> The goals of the advertising business model do not always correspond to providing quality search to users. http://infolab.stanford.edu/~backrub/google.html http://infolab.stanford.edu/~backrub/google.html
- koheripbal 4y ago
  When you don't pay for a service, you are the product, not the customer. This isn't a flaw of capitalism. If search ever became onerous or inaccurate enough - a paid service will emerge. For the moment, we've collectively "decided" that the current state is still worth it.
- mtlmtlmtlmtl 4y ago
  Wow, well they sure proved themselves right, didn't they. Interesting paper after a skim though, will peruse later, thanks!
Robotbeat 4y ago
Of course, regulations are not a real substitute for having values beyond pure profit motive because regulations can actually reinforce profits by creating a regulatory moat. Regulatory capture is also a real threat.
- jjoonathan 4y ago
  > having values That's your plan? THAT'S YOUR PLAN? For the people in charge to magically start valuing your quality of life without beating them over the head with regulation? Look, I hope as much as the next guy that a competitor emerges with a better offering, against all odds beats the incumbent, and unlike the last 5 times this happened does not follow the market incentive to become evil, but hope is not a strategy.
  - mtlmtlmtlmtl 4y ago
    Not the GP, but: I wouldn't call it a plan, more of a goal.
  - thesuitonym 4y ago
    The real answer is to change who's in charge. One way to do this is regulations, another is socialization.
    - falcor84 4y ago
      The paradox is that as long as it's difficult to become in charge, only the really ambitious people will get there, and these generally aren't the people who'll serve others. Back to the lottery system?
      - thesuitonym 4y ago
        If we move ownership from boards of investors to the people who work at a company, and make leadership democratically elected, such as in a co-op, things work out a little better. Yeah, ambitious people will still raise to the top, but their incentives will be to make the company better, not necessarily more profitable.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]

hallway_monitor 4y ago

This is exactly the problem. Most companies put 90 plus percent of their effort towards maximizing profit once they go public. Your reason for existence as a company is to serve customers and provide for employees, not only to make money. Besides regulation for some industries, societal pressure and norms were the means of keeping companies in check in the past it seems. Boycotts would still work if people coordinated and cooperated on a massive scale.

pessimizer 4y ago
But this is the same argument that the companies make, and they start foundations and think-tanks to write papers and do press releases against the stuff that they themselves do. Companies are here to make money doing risky things. They (nominally) do this for the government, because the government wants to do things that are risky, but also wants to last forever, so it needs to offload the risk where it can. In return, they get limited liability, and often subsidy. It's the government's duty to set limits on what they should be doing. Any effective social pressure should be directed towards the responsible government decision-makers. Attacking companies directly is for emergencies and immanent danger. Also, companies have access to a lot of tools that we try to make it illegal for governments to use (although they do anyway, but sometimes it's stopped and sometimes it doesn't hold up in court.) They can look at everyone influential in your movement, find the most morally flexible and charismatic of them, then indirectly finance them and inflate their social media metrics - then hire them or put them at the heads of foundations. They can look at the others and pay people to troll them all day, get their ex-husband to file for full custody of their children and pay the lawyer, and get articles in the Atlantic about how they may have plagiarized their dissertation. It's a delusion that everything can be solved by slavishly imitating the early struggle for black civil rights in the US. Black civil rights weren't even improved by that movement directly, they were improved indirectly through white people watching the movement get absolutely brutalized, jailed, and murdered, and feeling ashamed. [edit: and also by the energy of young white men who feared the draft, and that fear made them feel like they were black people.] Corporate CEOs aren't going to be ashamed, and if they get ashamed, they'll get replaced. The funds that you've invested your own retirement into will be the ones whose pressure replaces them, too. Your mouth will be moving the CEOs heart, while your wallet is getting them fired.

skummetmaelk 4y ago

Maximizing profit is great if the side effects are beneficial. Currently maximizing profit means shoving as many ads down people's eyeballs as possible and that's the root cause of blogspam. Google is obviously not going to fight it when they often take a cut of the ad money shown on blogspam sites. We have to move towards a system where profit maximization closely correlates with consumer good.

phkahler 4y ago
>> We have to move towards a system where profit maximization closely correlates with consumer good. That's easy to say but IMHO requires the consumer to pay directly rather than the whole advertising nonsense that has nothing to do with the consumer searching for stuff. Starting to think the only way to stop this kind of thing is to remove the profit motive as much as possible. The whole 401k plan idea for retirement savings is causing huge inflows of cash into the market which is probably where a lot of the money looking for returns is coming from. When a whole society is seeking profits it seems like that's going to make things worse. I'm not even sure how much return rich folks were looking for in the old days - if you owned a big company and it was making money, was there such thing as "enough"? There definitely isn't today.
- skummetmaelk 4y ago
  Sure it's easy to say and difficult to achieve. Would it be easier to eliminate profit motive rather than limiting the ways in which it can be done? Eliminating profit motive would be an attempt to change human nature, we are greedy after all. Regulating the ways in which the profit motive can be expressed is an administrative exercise. If we could ensure that people are more like to get rich doing valuable things (value != money, value == things that match our values), then we wouldn't see the brightest minds of each generation slave away in ad-tech and finance. Spending their work lives manipulating people into buying things they rarely need or fighting it out in a zero-sum financial game for negative societal gain.

jjoonathan 4y ago

> The goals of the advertising business model do not always correspond to providing quality search to users. http://infolab.stanford.edu/~backrub/google.html http://infolab.stanford.edu/~backrub/google.html

koheripbal 4y ago
When you don't pay for a service, you are the product, not the customer. This isn't a flaw of capitalism. If search ever became onerous or inaccurate enough - a paid service will emerge. For the moment, we've collectively "decided" that the current state is still worth it.
mtlmtlmtlmtl 4y ago
Wow, well they sure proved themselves right, didn't they. Interesting paper after a skim though, will peruse later, thanks!

Robotbeat 4y ago

Of course, regulations are not a real substitute for having values beyond pure profit motive because regulations can actually reinforce profits by creating a regulatory moat. Regulatory capture is also a real threat.

jjoonathan 4y ago
> having values That's your plan? THAT'S YOUR PLAN? For the people in charge to magically start valuing your quality of life without beating them over the head with regulation? Look, I hope as much as the next guy that a competitor emerges with a better offering, against all odds beats the incumbent, and unlike the last 5 times this happened does not follow the market incentive to become evil, but hope is not a strategy.
- mtlmtlmtlmtl 4y ago
  Not the GP, but: I wouldn't call it a plan, more of a goal.
- thesuitonym 4y ago
  The real answer is to change who's in charge. One way to do this is regulations, another is socialization.
  - falcor84 4y ago
    The paradox is that as long as it's difficult to become in charge, only the really ambitious people will get there, and these generally aren't the people who'll serve others. Back to the lottery system?
    - thesuitonym 4y ago
      If we move ownership from boards of investors to the people who work at a company, and make leadership democratically elected, such as in a co-op, things work out a little better. Yeah, ambitious people will still raise to the top, but their incentives will be to make the company better, not necessarily more profitable.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]