4 ms·

I think people have a lower tolerance for this than that, and will just go back to relying on personal recommendations and other reliable forms of curation.

brianmcc 3y ago
Yep. Case in point - I've given up buying on Amazon UK and use Argos as my go-to shop instead, for products of far better assured provenance without having to really overthink it all.
citizenpaul 3y ago
I think we will see the pendulum swing back. Yahoo lost to google because they were a manually curated search engine and could not keep up with google indexing and search. Now that all search is SEO gamed garbagebwe are going to see a new curated search engine rise in market share again
- vbezhenar 3y ago
  I'm pretty sure that Google uses human adjustments for their search results.
  - realusername 3y ago
    Knowing how Google is allergic to anything human in their product loop and obsessed with automation at all costs, I doubt they make a difference.
- hedora 3y ago
  That’s not why Yahoo lost. They switched CEOs and corporate direction / business models more than once a year on average toward the end. Also, during the collapse of yahoo, it was a poorly kept secret that google had already mostly abandoned page rank, and had large manual curation teams. To add insult to injury, in unbranded head to head tests, Yahoo search had better search result quality than google for many years before it was sold to Microsoft.
hedora 3y ago
The streaming services business model more-or-less outlaws collections that are curated by third parties. We already know what happens when piracy is the most convenient/highest quality option, but I’m guessing media distributors will need a reminder soon.
userbinator 3y ago
Unfortunately, "personal recommendations" seems to mean "influencers" these days.
- dylan604 3y ago
  that's the part that I love love love. society has gotten to this ridiculous follower stage that people seem to think it is a personal connection. maybe i've just spent too much time too close to the ad agency world to see how nasty they are, but anytime i see some random person on the internet that i do not personally know recommending anything, i immediately assume they are paid for that "recommendation". too much "inside baseball" to know that nothing you see in an ad is real even if you don't consciously recognize the fact what you are looking at is an ad.
  - throwaway2037 3y ago
    Hell yes. +9000 for your post. To me, the solution is much transparency around paid product placement through strong regulation. See "Parasocial interaction". Parasocial interaction (PSI) refers to a kind of psychological relationship experienced by an audience in their mediated encounters with performers in the mass media, particularly on television and on online platforms. Viewers or listeners come to consider media personalities as friends, despite having no or limited interactions with them. PSI is described as an illusory experience, such that media audiences interact with personas (e.g., talk show hosts, celebrities, fictional characters, social media influencers) as if they are engaged in a reciprocal relationship with them. The term was coined by Donald Horton and Richard Wohl in 1956. Ref: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parasocial_interaction https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parasocial_interaction
  - eropple 3y ago
    I'm currently noodling on a blog website and I'm thinking about adding a "recommendations" page largely in an anti-influencer sort of way--any affiliate marketing money is pretty incidental to somebody working in tech, but I want companies that make stuff that's good and valuable to stick around and continue to make stuff, so I want a way to spread the good news in a credible manner.
kubanczyk 3y ago
> relying on personal recommendations Taking things off the net would be a huge step back for economy. LLMs will cause a total collapse of trust online. This problem will be solved by a brand new online trust model (instead of the old one "has gained some followers by formulating text messages and forwarding gifs"). The trustees (bots/humans/orgs mixed) would probably need to sacrifice much more of their privacy. Not for the sake of orwellian Big Brother, but for re-establishing any trust whatsoever online.
- JohnFen 3y ago
  > The trustees (bots/humans/orgs mixed) would probably need to sacrifice much more of their privacy. I'll just ignore the internet instead. The internet cannot be trusted when it comes to privacy, so I'm not going to give up any in the first place.

brianmcc 3y ago

Yep. Case in point - I've given up buying on Amazon UK and use Argos as my go-to shop instead, for products of far better assured provenance without having to really overthink it all.

citizenpaul 3y ago

I think we will see the pendulum swing back. Yahoo lost to google because they were a manually curated search engine and could not keep up with google indexing and search. Now that all search is SEO gamed garbagebwe are going to see a new curated search engine rise in market share again

vbezhenar 3y ago
I'm pretty sure that Google uses human adjustments for their search results.
- realusername 3y ago
  Knowing how Google is allergic to anything human in their product loop and obsessed with automation at all costs, I doubt they make a difference.
hedora 3y ago
That’s not why Yahoo lost. They switched CEOs and corporate direction / business models more than once a year on average toward the end. Also, during the collapse of yahoo, it was a poorly kept secret that google had already mostly abandoned page rank, and had large manual curation teams. To add insult to injury, in unbranded head to head tests, Yahoo search had better search result quality than google for many years before it was sold to Microsoft.

hedora 3y ago

The streaming services business model more-or-less outlaws collections that are curated by third parties. We already know what happens when piracy is the most convenient/highest quality option, but I’m guessing media distributors will need a reminder soon.

userbinator 3y ago

Unfortunately, "personal recommendations" seems to mean "influencers" these days.

dylan604 3y ago
that's the part that I love love love. society has gotten to this ridiculous follower stage that people seem to think it is a personal connection. maybe i've just spent too much time too close to the ad agency world to see how nasty they are, but anytime i see some random person on the internet that i do not personally know recommending anything, i immediately assume they are paid for that "recommendation". too much "inside baseball" to know that nothing you see in an ad is real even if you don't consciously recognize the fact what you are looking at is an ad.
- throwaway2037 3y ago
  Hell yes. +9000 for your post. To me, the solution is much transparency around paid product placement through strong regulation. See "Parasocial interaction". Parasocial interaction (PSI) refers to a kind of psychological relationship experienced by an audience in their mediated encounters with performers in the mass media, particularly on television and on online platforms. Viewers or listeners come to consider media personalities as friends, despite having no or limited interactions with them. PSI is described as an illusory experience, such that media audiences interact with personas (e.g., talk show hosts, celebrities, fictional characters, social media influencers) as if they are engaged in a reciprocal relationship with them. The term was coined by Donald Horton and Richard Wohl in 1956. Ref: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parasocial_interaction https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parasocial_interaction
- eropple 3y ago
  I'm currently noodling on a blog website and I'm thinking about adding a "recommendations" page largely in an anti-influencer sort of way--any affiliate marketing money is pretty incidental to somebody working in tech, but I want companies that make stuff that's good and valuable to stick around and continue to make stuff, so I want a way to spread the good news in a credible manner.

kubanczyk 3y ago

> relying on personal recommendations Taking things off the net would be a huge step back for economy. LLMs will cause a total collapse of trust online. This problem will be solved by a brand new online trust model (instead of the old one "has gained some followers by formulating text messages and forwarding gifs"). The trustees (bots/humans/orgs mixed) would probably need to sacrifice much more of their privacy. Not for the sake of orwellian Big Brother, but for re-establishing any trust whatsoever online.

JohnFen 3y ago
> The trustees (bots/humans/orgs mixed) would probably need to sacrifice much more of their privacy. I'll just ignore the internet instead. The internet cannot be trusted when it comes to privacy, so I'm not going to give up any in the first place.