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The problem is that the internet we remember from when google was good no longer exists. Blogs are dead. Personal websites are dead. Noncommercial, informationa

The problem is that the internet we remember from when google was good no longer exists. Blogs are dead. Personal websites are dead. Noncommercial, informational or niche interest websites are dead. Search sucks primarily because there’s nothing worth searching for anymore. Yes, we can most of us name real websites that we still read & rely on. When did those sites start publishing? How many of the creator-controlled, non-commercial websites/blogs you read began less than say 5 years ago? I bet the number rounds down to 0. Google search sure as hell played their part in creating this world, but fixing search isn’t going to bring back an internet worth searching.

jstarfish 3y ago
> Search sucks primarily because there’s nothing worth searching for anymore. I thought the same until recently. Google doesn't appear to be indexing/prioritizing anything that's old, infrequently updated, or noncompliant with AMP, even if it's an authoritative source. People blame SEO gaming but I'd sooner accuse them of alignment tweaking (all old/outdated beliefs are purged; my queries were religious and controversial in nature). For some topics, there is still an entire other internet out there they pretend doesn't exist...that starts on page 1 of fucking Yandex. Not advocating for Yandex specifically (I don't trust them) but...try other options (Kagi, Bing, etc.).
xnx 3y ago
A lot of what I liked about the fun quirkiness of the old web can be found on TikTok. Huge variety of things I would not have encountered on my own. Recently: footwear suggestions for the Appalachian trail, an absolutely massive ceramic raku firing, 1x1 meter 3D printer, calisthenics tips, clips of the Twilight Zone, handsfree bareback horseriding, independing one-woman Daily Show-style political commentary, synthesizer tutorials, Chinese underground mall walkthrough (psyops propaganda?), glacial pool swimming, etc. All that with no unskippable ads. There have been some enshittification changes: TikTok live and TikTok shop, but overall, it's still great.
sdsd 3y ago
I spend a lot of time on Urbit and there are plenty of blogs and nothing is commercial. They're even working on an Urbit search engine now. Not trying to promote Urbit, just saying that whether the internet is like this depends on how you use it. Using Google to access the web now, is like using the Yahoo portal to access the internet in the early 2000s.
jyunwai 3y ago
To offer a prominent counter-example, consider the success of Substack, Ghost, Medium, and other blogs-and-newsletter platforms. Blogs are thriving for quality writers (especially those with unique experiences), as evidenced by the ability of certain writers (including some I subscribe to) to make a full-time living through these platforms. Outside of blogs, I personally know people in non-technology fields who have their own personal website, to make it easier for people to contact them and view their portfolio of work. They made their through page builders to avoid the need to learn how to program, and they personally found some collaboration opportunities due to their personal websites. Searching for someone's name and possibly finding their personal website still has value. Though I do admit that there are far more heavily commercialized or clickbait articles nowadays (such as padded-out listicle-style articles that bury the important information, which may also have questionable accuracy), I personally believe there are still good websites out there to find and learn from, which I've discovered through personal recommendations or searches on niche topics of interest. A major source of well-written personal websites for me have been those that focus on the use of specialized software (such as Anki and SuperMemo) in spaced repetition: I've learned a lot from excellent recently-published, non-commercial blogs found directly through Google searches. I've also found similar very high-quality and non-commercial personal websites and blogs when searching about other specialized topics, such as workflows to use the Vim text editor to create technical documents with LaTeX typesetting.
- MichaelNolan 3y ago
  > focus on the use of specialized software (such as Anki and SuperMemo) in spaced repetition I’d love to hear any recommendations you have. I’ve found several good articles on SRS, but I’m always interested in reading some more.
  - LittleFishyChan 3y ago
    I have a blog, like the early 2000’s! I’m also working on a book, hopefully I’ll have it done by the end of this year. The blog is called supermemoadventures. I’ve been using SuperMemo for 17 years, every single day. If you have any questions, feel free to ask here.
ethbr1 3y ago
I can't believe 'There's no good content anymore.' There are more people; there's more connectivity; there are more digital cameras. IMHO, the thing that changed was the signal:noise ratio. When Google started, it was, what? 1:10? 1:100? Interesting pages : crap. Now it's... 1:10,000? 1:1,000,000? That turns a challenging problem into a possibly impossible one. Granted, Google bears culpability in this, because at some point they realized: we can make as much or more money if we optimize for ad delivery than user search intent. And once they showed those cards with a wink, content optimized to this for its own monetization. FFS, look at National Geographic these days: https://www.nationalgeographic.com/ https://www.nationalgeographic.com/
- jazzyjackson 3y ago
  I would still speculate that the content that gets published will depend on the environment it's being published in. A smaller, tighter knit community will encourage the sharing of more intimate details. If, however, all the action is happening on larger stages that pull people's attention out of the phpbb's and into the tiktok reels, those conversations no longer happen, even if the volume of communication has increased 1000fold
- amrocha 3y ago
  What changed is that people post their content on platforms now, instead of on the open web.
  - AtlasBarfed 3y ago
    I kind of hope some walled gardens pop up and close off other parts of the internet. I still reflect when I go back on tours of 70s / 80s / 90s media, and while I get some of the "oldies tour" is also kind of a "greatest hits" effect, but there seemed to be a lot more creativity, especially wacky creativity, in the past. Some of that is callous mass market media calculations by "big media": multi-hundred million dollar movies/games aren't going to be off the beaten path. What is strange is the ARMIES of "content producers" and all they do is produce things in basically the same way. So the "SEO" optimization seems to clip the wings of all grassroots content production. Google should have enabled the long tail. It ... sort of ... has, but man its hard to find it drowned out by all the mediocre crap out there. People don't seem to be isolated from the internet and let some path of creativity percolate for years or even decades like what used to happen. Internet monoculture really seems to be destroying interesting creativity more than it delivers novel creativity from around the world. "Comorbidity" with this is the death of patience and attention for wacky stuff, people click away too quickly. About the only actual evidence I can deliver is the oppressive nature of the cinema sequel. For some reason, I just mark the first Matrix movie (1999) as the death of creativity in Hollywood. However, of course, that may be the point in the 18-40 demo that I aged out of the great popular culture recycling machine. I think a lot of that 18-40 demographic number comes from the fact that by the time you hit 40, you've seen all the tricks, and the repackaging of the tricks/tropes just seems cheap compared to the "original" experience you had with the trick/trope.
Gigachad 3y ago
Blogs are dead but YouTube is thriving. I can find endless high quality content on basically any topic. Even compared to 10 years ago it’s so much better today. I don’t think there has ever been a better time to learn on the internet than today.
- throw9away6 3y ago
  If you want to learn by video I agree. The problem with video is that it takes forever to extract the info you need
  - evilduck 3y ago
    Videos as a medium are also incentivized to reach certain lengths so they can inject ads into otherwise boring and mundane topics. As an example, try to look up on YouTube how to replace your car fob’s battery (doesn’t matter what brand) and you will absolutely encounter an 8-10 minute video offered up for what’s probably a 15 second value and something the manufacturer could have provided in a decent 3 panel illustration hosted on a static .html page, but won’t.
    - midoridensha 3y ago
      >for what’s probably a 15 second value and something the manufacturer could have provided in a decent 3 panel illustration hosted on a static .html page, but won’t. Right, because you're not supposed to do that yourself. You're supposed to go to your dealership and pay them $50 to change the $0.20 battery in 15 seconds. Do you really think you're qualified to do such a difficult operation by yourself? I actually got into an argument on Nextdoor once because someone was promoting a battery store that charged "only" $20 for this "service", and felt it was a "good value" and got mad that I was pointing out that you can just buy the battery by itself for less than a dollar and do it yourself.
  - kingds 3y ago
    yes! try to learn anything related to home maintenance and it feels like youtube is your only option. and you are stuck trying to scrub through a 20 minute video to find the 10 second slice on info you’re looking for.
goodbyesf 3y ago
> but fixing search You can't fix search no more than you can fix social meda because search and social media has grown so big that they are politically important and hence state property. Once search and social media reached critical mass, the state got involved. The state was probably always involved but they took control when it got 'too big to be independent'. When google and social media showed that they can overthrow governments and affect elections, the party was over. Even if there was an internet worth searching, google would not showing us that. Google will be showing us what the state wants. 'Beyond a critical point within a finite space, freedom diminishes as numbers increase.' - Dune
psadri 3y ago
What happened is that people didn’t want to pay for high quality content. So sites need to rely on ads. Delivering more ads is not aligned with user interests. If we lived in a world where people paid for content, the incentives would have been better aligned.
- brnt 3y ago
  People didn't pay for content 20-25 years ago either. What changed is that people want to make money with the web, not just share.
  - psadri 3y ago
    That is true. The initial wave was driven by the sheer excitement of being able to “publish”. I do think that the ad supported model is still responsible for what happened next. Ads encourage optimizing for eyeballs and traffic vs quality. And that’s exactly what happened. The good stuff was buried by the ad optimized garbage everyone is complaining about. Btw, I’m not dogmatically against ads. I believe they serve a purpose and are necessary. Just pointing out the side effects.
    - midoridensha 3y ago
      25 years ago, people were happy to post their own personal webpage on Tripod for free and look at how many hits their hit counter got, and get thank-you emails from people who liked whatever they posted. Now everyone wants to get paid for whatever they produce.
  - Dan_Sylveste 3y ago
    > What changed is that people want to make money with the web People always wanted to make money on the web, but the sites of people that didn't still appeared in search results. Now search result positioning depends on the amount of ads you're prepared to host. So, the people who are optimizing for revenue are listed way above the people who aren't optimizing at all and are just creating. There are times when I've searched for a tumblr page literally by the exact and totally unique name and still not found it on the 3rd page of results, all of which were unrelated garbage. They've decided that they'd rather piss you off than lose money sending traffic to sites that won't pay to play. It's toxic.
gsatic 3y ago
Google was supposed to solve the info overload problem that growing networks produce. Instead they focused on growing the network and making content creation and broadcast of content free. So today less than .5% of content produced is consumed according to the UN report on the attention economy. Whats the fix? Content production needs to be scaled down. A better system is required that decides Who gets to broadcast, how much and when. Bandwith Advertising consumes within such a system must have a cap. Now there is no cap. Ads can be shown on everywhere and all the time. "Scaling things up" should be a political/social decision not a business/technical decision. The focus must be brought back to solving info overload.
- hedora 3y ago
  Content targeted / display ads would fix this. By design, they pay sites a premium for quality content, unlike user targeting which pays for quality eyeballs. If user targeting were banned, we’d be back to economic incentives for content creators that are similar to pre-internet media and publishing. In particular, you’d be paid for having a consistent measurable audience, which means the money would go to distribution channels that had high quality editors and curation. Today’s ad netwoks funnel that money to clickbait farms.
  - gsatic 3y ago
    Only partly cuz Content is easy to copy and duplicate and rebroadcast. All of which the platforms have made free and easy. That has to be addressed. Cuz One journo surfaces info. 6000 journos copy it and broadcast it and all expect to paid. The solutions have to built around content reduction cuz right now we are over loaded with millions of people creating nothing new and expecting to be rewarded.
    - hedora 3y ago
      Not true. The 6000 copycat “journalists” aren’t going to be able to find quality advertisers for their chatgpt garbage mill / copyright infringement site. Today, they get paid the same as the original journalists, specifically because ad auctions are designed to transfer all wealth to the middlemen, and therefore commoditized content creation and distribution.
mark_l_watson 3y ago
I am not sure about “Blogs are dead. Personal websites are dead.” because I find a wide range of interesting blog articles and personal web sites from people I follow on Mastodon and X. I broadly agree with your points, and yes we can fight back by spending most of our consumption time on personal web sites and blogs. Long form reading feels better than doom scrolling.
- marcus_holmes 3y ago
  Agree. It's not that blogs don't happen, it's that they're hard to find. The signal:noise ratio has gone up. I'm hoping ActivityPub sorts out the discoverability somehow.
1vuio0pswjnm7 3y ago
In a noncommercial context, "search" and "advertising" are mutually exclusive. An internet where all ordering of information is done via secret algorithms that are constantly being tweaked behind the scenes, optimised to prioritise popularity and other metrics useful to advertising. Online advertising services companies formed from high traffic websites calling themselves "tech" companies. In 1997, the founders announced Google in a paper where they vowed to offer a search engine that could be studied in the "academic realm". http://infolab.stanford.edu/pub/papers/google.pdf http://infolab.stanford.edu/pub/papers/google.pdf But we soon learned Google lacks integrity. Say one thing, do another. Fast forward. Outside of Google, who actually studies the Google search engine. People without any university education, or at least no need for it, calling themselves "SEO consultants". When Google publishes academic papers about their internal operations is this done to push search engine technology into the academic realm. No. It's purely commercial, a recruiting tactic; Google is "showing off".[1] 1. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37313826 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37313826 High traffic websites incorporated as so-called "tech" companies have sought to bury noncommercial websites beneath all the advertising-driven garbage and/or to discourage web exploration and development outside their walled gardens. However, it's still possible to use the internet for noncommercial purposes. High web traffic or market cap does not give any single website the authority to define how the internet can be used. Arguably it's easier to use the internet today than it ever has been. The web is not the internet. And the internet is not a handful of gigantic websites calling themselves "tech" companies. In practice, the internet is reliant on non-binding cooperation. As such, no one can own the internet, and no one can control it. One can try. And that's what large so-called "tech" companies have done. It may have worked in the past and it may continue to work, for now. But things can change, they will change, and Google could become just like AltaVista. Contrary to most stories people tell about the mid 90's, I actually liked AltaVista better than Google. When someone first showed me Google I was not interested and I did not switch immediately. I liked comprehensive searching, combing through large numbers of results. Google seemed antithetical to that, focusing only on the "top" results. One difference between then and today is that no one back then was patiently and desperately waiting for something better to come along, publishing articles such as "The End of the AltaVistaverse". There are people today who really want to get past Google and on to something better. They have been waiting for years. Progress has really stallled.
HlessClaudesman 3y ago
The internet points to useful things, those things are still there. It's just that Google search increasingly prioritises recent over relevant, because recent pays the bills.
skilled 3y ago
Google itself is reluctant to reward new sites. They throttle every single site and increase the number of visitors they send you in extremely small increments. They'll do things like shuffle the pages that get traffic on your site without increasing the "daily cap" that you're predisposed to. And when asked about this, their answer is that "no, we don't do this", but all you need to verify this is to create a new site and see it for yourself. But this is great news for the conglomerates that have been around since early 2010s that can now enjoy being always #1 because Google itself has locked those sites in as "reputable" and "trustworthy". You can only imagine how those sites exploit this for personal gain.
- isaacfung 3y ago
  Please show proof of your claims. Do you really think it is feasible/a good idea that the moment someone makes a new site google should send all the traffic to that site? Please THINK how easily that would be abused.
  - hnfong 3y ago
    I've been running a low-ish volume site since 2014. It gets a YoY increase in traffic of like 20%. We didn't really do much SEO, at least not consistently enough that it warrants a consistent 20% YoY increase. Then last year I made a English version of that website. Traffic has been very very slow initially, but slowly and steadily increasing. I suspect if we don't do anything to it for a couple years traffic will just keep increasing just like the original. I generally have better things to do than to jump onto the cargo cult that is SEO, but the GP's description of how Google throttles web sites is exactly what I observe anecdotally, and is exactly how I hypothesized what Google is actually doing (without doing any SEO research). Of course, there's not going to be any conclusive "proof" of such claims unless they admit it themselves, or unless you start an antitrust lawsuit against Google. I definitely agree it's not a good idea to route all traffic to a new site that hasn't "proven" itself through some test of time, but that's more evidence that they're probably doing this throttling.
EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK 3y ago
And Internet significantly deteriorated in the recent months: last remaining public spaces are closing up out of fear of being scraped for AI.
Gud 3y ago
Although what you say is mostly true, I refuse to live in a world where the open web is dead. I run my own blog that does attract a near-zero amount of daily visitors(except of course the countless robots). Because what is the alternative? Use the sterile platforms provided by Silicon Valley mega Corps? Fuck that. I will continue self publishing my half baked thoughts on my personal website like it’s 1998. link is in my profile
- rambambram 3y ago
  Psst, add an RSS feed so I can more easily follow your posts. ;)
  - Gud 3y ago
    Here you go! https://stonkys.com/feed/ https://stonkys.com/feed/ Let me know if you have any suggestions!
    - rambambram 3y ago
      Works flawlessly with my reader/feed-combination that I call Really Social Sites. RSS needs a new name that winks at the social opportunities, I think. Thanks! P.S. Space content, always nice to read!
  - Gud 3y ago
    It’s something I’ve been thinking to do for a while now. I’ll get on it asap, just for you
    - rambambram 3y ago
      Thanks, you will notice my future visits in your stats because of the parameter '?rss_ref=' as part of my referrer url.
sillyfluke 3y ago
This may feel correct, but it's easy to prove that this is not the primary reason search sucks because searching the commercial internet also sucks. By your logic, finding tech companies relevant to your search should be easy since they by and large still put their general info websites on their own domain. Nope. You still get mostly SEO junk. If you're still not convinced just look at Youtube search. There's no excuse for that to be terrible, yet it is.
dools 3y ago
I see heaps of useful blogs and personal websites linked from the HN homepage every day.
njharman 3y ago
Blogs are far from dead. Mass appeal is maybe dead. Niches are alive and well. OSR ttrpg blogs paper wargame blogs (fewer) but still more content than I can keep up with. And niches have always been the strength, the value of the open web. That you and the 14 other people on the planet with same obscure interest can connect.
- lacrimacida 3y ago
  I agree but it’s still hard to search and find such content. And it goes back to google for routing all search traffic towards ads
superchroma 3y ago
Um excuse me there is always http://zombo.com http://zombo.com
lifeplusplus 3y ago
Blogs and forum live on in the shape of YouTube, Reddit and Facebook groups

jstarfish 3y ago

> Search sucks primarily because there’s nothing worth searching for anymore. I thought the same until recently. Google doesn't appear to be indexing/prioritizing anything that's old, infrequently updated, or noncompliant with AMP, even if it's an authoritative source. People blame SEO gaming but I'd sooner accuse them of alignment tweaking (all old/outdated beliefs are purged; my queries were religious and controversial in nature). For some topics, there is still an entire other internet out there they pretend doesn't exist...that starts on page 1 of fucking Yandex. Not advocating for Yandex specifically (I don't trust them) but...try other options (Kagi, Bing, etc.).

xnx 3y ago

A lot of what I liked about the fun quirkiness of the old web can be found on TikTok. Huge variety of things I would not have encountered on my own. Recently: footwear suggestions for the Appalachian trail, an absolutely massive ceramic raku firing, 1x1 meter 3D printer, calisthenics tips, clips of the Twilight Zone, handsfree bareback horseriding, independing one-woman Daily Show-style political commentary, synthesizer tutorials, Chinese underground mall walkthrough (psyops propaganda?), glacial pool swimming, etc. All that with no unskippable ads. There have been some enshittification changes: TikTok live and TikTok shop, but overall, it's still great.

sdsd 3y ago

I spend a lot of time on Urbit and there are plenty of blogs and nothing is commercial. They're even working on an Urbit search engine now. Not trying to promote Urbit, just saying that whether the internet is like this depends on how you use it. Using Google to access the web now, is like using the Yahoo portal to access the internet in the early 2000s.

jyunwai 3y ago

To offer a prominent counter-example, consider the success of Substack, Ghost, Medium, and other blogs-and-newsletter platforms. Blogs are thriving for quality writers (especially those with unique experiences), as evidenced by the ability of certain writers (including some I subscribe to) to make a full-time living through these platforms. Outside of blogs, I personally know people in non-technology fields who have their own personal website, to make it easier for people to contact them and view their portfolio of work. They made their through page builders to avoid the need to learn how to program, and they personally found some collaboration opportunities due to their personal websites. Searching for someone's name and possibly finding their personal website still has value. Though I do admit that there are far more heavily commercialized or clickbait articles nowadays (such as padded-out listicle-style articles that bury the important information, which may also have questionable accuracy), I personally believe there are still good websites out there to find and learn from, which I've discovered through personal recommendations or searches on niche topics of interest. A major source of well-written personal websites for me have been those that focus on the use of specialized software (such as Anki and SuperMemo) in spaced repetition: I've learned a lot from excellent recently-published, non-commercial blogs found directly through Google searches. I've also found similar very high-quality and non-commercial personal websites and blogs when searching about other specialized topics, such as workflows to use the Vim text editor to create technical documents with LaTeX typesetting.

MichaelNolan 3y ago
> focus on the use of specialized software (such as Anki and SuperMemo) in spaced repetition I’d love to hear any recommendations you have. I’ve found several good articles on SRS, but I’m always interested in reading some more.
- LittleFishyChan 3y ago
  I have a blog, like the early 2000’s! I’m also working on a book, hopefully I’ll have it done by the end of this year. The blog is called supermemoadventures. I’ve been using SuperMemo for 17 years, every single day. If you have any questions, feel free to ask here.

ethbr1 3y ago

I can't believe 'There's no good content anymore.' There are more people; there's more connectivity; there are more digital cameras. IMHO, the thing that changed was the signal:noise ratio. When Google started, it was, what? 1:10? 1:100? Interesting pages : crap. Now it's... 1:10,000? 1:1,000,000? That turns a challenging problem into a possibly impossible one. Granted, Google bears culpability in this, because at some point they realized: we can make as much or more money if we optimize for ad delivery than user search intent. And once they showed those cards with a wink, content optimized to this for its own monetization. FFS, look at National Geographic these days: https://www.nationalgeographic.com/ https://www.nationalgeographic.com/

jazzyjackson 3y ago
I would still speculate that the content that gets published will depend on the environment it's being published in. A smaller, tighter knit community will encourage the sharing of more intimate details. If, however, all the action is happening on larger stages that pull people's attention out of the phpbb's and into the tiktok reels, those conversations no longer happen, even if the volume of communication has increased 1000fold
amrocha 3y ago
What changed is that people post their content on platforms now, instead of on the open web.
- AtlasBarfed 3y ago
  I kind of hope some walled gardens pop up and close off other parts of the internet. I still reflect when I go back on tours of 70s / 80s / 90s media, and while I get some of the "oldies tour" is also kind of a "greatest hits" effect, but there seemed to be a lot more creativity, especially wacky creativity, in the past. Some of that is callous mass market media calculations by "big media": multi-hundred million dollar movies/games aren't going to be off the beaten path. What is strange is the ARMIES of "content producers" and all they do is produce things in basically the same way. So the "SEO" optimization seems to clip the wings of all grassroots content production. Google should have enabled the long tail. It ... sort of ... has, but man its hard to find it drowned out by all the mediocre crap out there. People don't seem to be isolated from the internet and let some path of creativity percolate for years or even decades like what used to happen. Internet monoculture really seems to be destroying interesting creativity more than it delivers novel creativity from around the world. "Comorbidity" with this is the death of patience and attention for wacky stuff, people click away too quickly. About the only actual evidence I can deliver is the oppressive nature of the cinema sequel. For some reason, I just mark the first Matrix movie (1999) as the death of creativity in Hollywood. However, of course, that may be the point in the 18-40 demo that I aged out of the great popular culture recycling machine. I think a lot of that 18-40 demographic number comes from the fact that by the time you hit 40, you've seen all the tricks, and the repackaging of the tricks/tropes just seems cheap compared to the "original" experience you had with the trick/trope.

Gigachad 3y ago

Blogs are dead but YouTube is thriving. I can find endless high quality content on basically any topic. Even compared to 10 years ago it’s so much better today. I don’t think there has ever been a better time to learn on the internet than today.

throw9away6 3y ago
If you want to learn by video I agree. The problem with video is that it takes forever to extract the info you need
- evilduck 3y ago
  Videos as a medium are also incentivized to reach certain lengths so they can inject ads into otherwise boring and mundane topics. As an example, try to look up on YouTube how to replace your car fob’s battery (doesn’t matter what brand) and you will absolutely encounter an 8-10 minute video offered up for what’s probably a 15 second value and something the manufacturer could have provided in a decent 3 panel illustration hosted on a static .html page, but won’t.
  - midoridensha 3y ago
    >for what’s probably a 15 second value and something the manufacturer could have provided in a decent 3 panel illustration hosted on a static .html page, but won’t. Right, because you're not supposed to do that yourself. You're supposed to go to your dealership and pay them $50 to change the $0.20 battery in 15 seconds. Do you really think you're qualified to do such a difficult operation by yourself? I actually got into an argument on Nextdoor once because someone was promoting a battery store that charged "only" $20 for this "service", and felt it was a "good value" and got mad that I was pointing out that you can just buy the battery by itself for less than a dollar and do it yourself.
- kingds 3y ago
  yes! try to learn anything related to home maintenance and it feels like youtube is your only option. and you are stuck trying to scrub through a 20 minute video to find the 10 second slice on info you’re looking for.

goodbyesf 3y ago

> but fixing search You can't fix search no more than you can fix social meda because search and social media has grown so big that they are politically important and hence state property. Once search and social media reached critical mass, the state got involved. The state was probably always involved but they took control when it got 'too big to be independent'. When google and social media showed that they can overthrow governments and affect elections, the party was over. Even if there was an internet worth searching, google would not showing us that. Google will be showing us what the state wants. 'Beyond a critical point within a finite space, freedom diminishes as numbers increase.' - Dune

psadri 3y ago

What happened is that people didn’t want to pay for high quality content. So sites need to rely on ads. Delivering more ads is not aligned with user interests. If we lived in a world where people paid for content, the incentives would have been better aligned.

brnt 3y ago
People didn't pay for content 20-25 years ago either. What changed is that people want to make money with the web, not just share.
- psadri 3y ago
  That is true. The initial wave was driven by the sheer excitement of being able to “publish”. I do think that the ad supported model is still responsible for what happened next. Ads encourage optimizing for eyeballs and traffic vs quality. And that’s exactly what happened. The good stuff was buried by the ad optimized garbage everyone is complaining about. Btw, I’m not dogmatically against ads. I believe they serve a purpose and are necessary. Just pointing out the side effects.
  - midoridensha 3y ago
    25 years ago, people were happy to post their own personal webpage on Tripod for free and look at how many hits their hit counter got, and get thank-you emails from people who liked whatever they posted. Now everyone wants to get paid for whatever they produce.
- Dan_Sylveste 3y ago
  > What changed is that people want to make money with the web People always wanted to make money on the web, but the sites of people that didn't still appeared in search results. Now search result positioning depends on the amount of ads you're prepared to host. So, the people who are optimizing for revenue are listed way above the people who aren't optimizing at all and are just creating. There are times when I've searched for a tumblr page literally by the exact and totally unique name and still not found it on the 3rd page of results, all of which were unrelated garbage. They've decided that they'd rather piss you off than lose money sending traffic to sites that won't pay to play. It's toxic.

gsatic 3y ago

Google was supposed to solve the info overload problem that growing networks produce. Instead they focused on growing the network and making content creation and broadcast of content free. So today less than .5% of content produced is consumed according to the UN report on the attention economy. Whats the fix? Content production needs to be scaled down. A better system is required that decides Who gets to broadcast, how much and when. Bandwith Advertising consumes within such a system must have a cap. Now there is no cap. Ads can be shown on everywhere and all the time. "Scaling things up" should be a political/social decision not a business/technical decision. The focus must be brought back to solving info overload.

hedora 3y ago
Content targeted / display ads would fix this. By design, they pay sites a premium for quality content, unlike user targeting which pays for quality eyeballs. If user targeting were banned, we’d be back to economic incentives for content creators that are similar to pre-internet media and publishing. In particular, you’d be paid for having a consistent measurable audience, which means the money would go to distribution channels that had high quality editors and curation. Today’s ad netwoks funnel that money to clickbait farms.
- gsatic 3y ago
  Only partly cuz Content is easy to copy and duplicate and rebroadcast. All of which the platforms have made free and easy. That has to be addressed. Cuz One journo surfaces info. 6000 journos copy it and broadcast it and all expect to paid. The solutions have to built around content reduction cuz right now we are over loaded with millions of people creating nothing new and expecting to be rewarded.
  - hedora 3y ago
    Not true. The 6000 copycat “journalists” aren’t going to be able to find quality advertisers for their chatgpt garbage mill / copyright infringement site. Today, they get paid the same as the original journalists, specifically because ad auctions are designed to transfer all wealth to the middlemen, and therefore commoditized content creation and distribution.

mark_l_watson 3y ago

I am not sure about “Blogs are dead. Personal websites are dead.” because I find a wide range of interesting blog articles and personal web sites from people I follow on Mastodon and X. I broadly agree with your points, and yes we can fight back by spending most of our consumption time on personal web sites and blogs. Long form reading feels better than doom scrolling.

marcus_holmes 3y ago
Agree. It's not that blogs don't happen, it's that they're hard to find. The signal:noise ratio has gone up. I'm hoping ActivityPub sorts out the discoverability somehow.

1vuio0pswjnm7 3y ago

In a noncommercial context, "search" and "advertising" are mutually exclusive. An internet where all ordering of information is done via secret algorithms that are constantly being tweaked behind the scenes, optimised to prioritise popularity and other metrics useful to advertising. Online advertising services companies formed from high traffic websites calling themselves "tech" companies. In 1997, the founders announced Google in a paper where they vowed to offer a search engine that could be studied in the "academic realm". http://infolab.stanford.edu/pub/papers/google.pdf http://infolab.stanford.edu/pub/papers/google.pdf But we soon learned Google lacks integrity. Say one thing, do another. Fast forward. Outside of Google, who actually studies the Google search engine. People without any university education, or at least no need for it, calling themselves "SEO consultants". When Google publishes academic papers about their internal operations is this done to push search engine technology into the academic realm. No. It's purely commercial, a recruiting tactic; Google is "showing off".[1] 1. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37313826 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37313826 High traffic websites incorporated as so-called "tech" companies have sought to bury noncommercial websites beneath all the advertising-driven garbage and/or to discourage web exploration and development outside their walled gardens. However, it's still possible to use the internet for noncommercial purposes. High web traffic or market cap does not give any single website the authority to define how the internet can be used. Arguably it's easier to use the internet today than it ever has been. The web is not the internet. And the internet is not a handful of gigantic websites calling themselves "tech" companies. In practice, the internet is reliant on non-binding cooperation. As such, no one can own the internet, and no one can control it. One can try. And that's what large so-called "tech" companies have done. It may have worked in the past and it may continue to work, for now. But things can change, they will change, and Google could become just like AltaVista. Contrary to most stories people tell about the mid 90's, I actually liked AltaVista better than Google. When someone first showed me Google I was not interested and I did not switch immediately. I liked comprehensive searching, combing through large numbers of results. Google seemed antithetical to that, focusing only on the "top" results. One difference between then and today is that no one back then was patiently and desperately waiting for something better to come along, publishing articles such as "The End of the AltaVistaverse". There are people today who really want to get past Google and on to something better. They have been waiting for years. Progress has really stallled.

HlessClaudesman 3y ago

The internet points to useful things, those things are still there. It's just that Google search increasingly prioritises recent over relevant, because recent pays the bills.

skilled 3y ago

Google itself is reluctant to reward new sites. They throttle every single site and increase the number of visitors they send you in extremely small increments. They'll do things like shuffle the pages that get traffic on your site without increasing the "daily cap" that you're predisposed to. And when asked about this, their answer is that "no, we don't do this", but all you need to verify this is to create a new site and see it for yourself. But this is great news for the conglomerates that have been around since early 2010s that can now enjoy being always #1 because Google itself has locked those sites in as "reputable" and "trustworthy". You can only imagine how those sites exploit this for personal gain.

isaacfung 3y ago
Please show proof of your claims. Do you really think it is feasible/a good idea that the moment someone makes a new site google should send all the traffic to that site? Please THINK how easily that would be abused.
- hnfong 3y ago
  I've been running a low-ish volume site since 2014. It gets a YoY increase in traffic of like 20%. We didn't really do much SEO, at least not consistently enough that it warrants a consistent 20% YoY increase. Then last year I made a English version of that website. Traffic has been very very slow initially, but slowly and steadily increasing. I suspect if we don't do anything to it for a couple years traffic will just keep increasing just like the original. I generally have better things to do than to jump onto the cargo cult that is SEO, but the GP's description of how Google throttles web sites is exactly what I observe anecdotally, and is exactly how I hypothesized what Google is actually doing (without doing any SEO research). Of course, there's not going to be any conclusive "proof" of such claims unless they admit it themselves, or unless you start an antitrust lawsuit against Google. I definitely agree it's not a good idea to route all traffic to a new site that hasn't "proven" itself through some test of time, but that's more evidence that they're probably doing this throttling.

EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK 3y ago

And Internet significantly deteriorated in the recent months: last remaining public spaces are closing up out of fear of being scraped for AI.

Gud 3y ago

Although what you say is mostly true, I refuse to live in a world where the open web is dead. I run my own blog that does attract a near-zero amount of daily visitors(except of course the countless robots). Because what is the alternative? Use the sterile platforms provided by Silicon Valley mega Corps? Fuck that. I will continue self publishing my half baked thoughts on my personal website like it’s 1998. link is in my profile

rambambram 3y ago
Psst, add an RSS feed so I can more easily follow your posts. ;)
- Gud 3y ago
  Here you go! https://stonkys.com/feed/ https://stonkys.com/feed/ Let me know if you have any suggestions!
  - rambambram 3y ago
    Works flawlessly with my reader/feed-combination that I call Really Social Sites. RSS needs a new name that winks at the social opportunities, I think. Thanks! P.S. Space content, always nice to read!
- Gud 3y ago
  It’s something I’ve been thinking to do for a while now. I’ll get on it asap, just for you
  - rambambram 3y ago
    Thanks, you will notice my future visits in your stats because of the parameter '?rss_ref=' as part of my referrer url.

sillyfluke 3y ago

This may feel correct, but it's easy to prove that this is not the primary reason search sucks because searching the commercial internet also sucks. By your logic, finding tech companies relevant to your search should be easy since they by and large still put their general info websites on their own domain. Nope. You still get mostly SEO junk. If you're still not convinced just look at Youtube search. There's no excuse for that to be terrible, yet it is.

dools 3y ago

I see heaps of useful blogs and personal websites linked from the HN homepage every day.

njharman 3y ago

Blogs are far from dead. Mass appeal is maybe dead. Niches are alive and well. OSR ttrpg blogs paper wargame blogs (fewer) but still more content than I can keep up with. And niches have always been the strength, the value of the open web. That you and the 14 other people on the planet with same obscure interest can connect.

lacrimacida 3y ago
I agree but it’s still hard to search and find such content. And it goes back to google for routing all search traffic towards ads

superchroma 3y ago

Um excuse me there is always http://zombo.com http://zombo.com

lifeplusplus 3y ago

Blogs and forum live on in the shape of YouTube, Reddit and Facebook groups