7 ms·

The web thrived for a decent number of years with ads before it began to really spiral down. For me the biggest cause of that spiral was the shift from most us

The web thrived for a decent number of years with ads before it began to really spiral down. For me the biggest cause of that spiral was the shift from most users using desktops to most users using mobile to interact with google. In the desktop search world, google used to respond with large comprehensive articles on subjects that not just answered peoples questions but also educated them on the subject around their question. This was the golden age so to speak, it answered your question along with 10 others on a subject but also helped you to understand if your question was even the right one in the first place. With mobile, google shifted to trying to directly answer the question you asked and nothing else, presumably because people were far less willing to read large articles on mobile and just wanted fast answers. This latter approach is much easier to SEO garbage than the original that took real knowledge and effort to write.

ad404b8a372f2b9 3y ago
The salvation of the web lies in banning all the normies and mobile users.
_ahxg 3y ago
And here we have the tyranny of the marginal user as posted here a while ago =/ https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37509507 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37509507
onetokeoverthe 3y ago
[dead]
pentae 3y ago
These days most non technical people just have their phone and live inside the FB/IG/TT/X/Gmail/Google apps on their phones and don't even go on the web. And app developers are doing everything to keep them inside the app with a crappy in-app browser which also benefits the Apple/Google app store ecosystem. Apples intention with Safari was inside the name. "Safari - you're in the African jungle, theres lions and tigers, be careful, probably best avoided." They don't want you using it. Download an app and pay us 30% instead. And that's what people do. Convenience-seeking users don't really seem to care. Why bother with desktops and even google search when they have apps on their phone to do stuff. Nobody even trusts the web anymore because of all the SEO content spam and potential to be scammed. If you were Google making billions a year off the app ecosystem because its a superior experience.. wouldn't your incentive be to make web as bad as possible?
- mnky9800n 3y ago
  I've recently deleted Facebook, Instagram, Reddit, etc from my phone and it's like night and day. I basically only go to hacker news now or look at my own websites. Suddenly all of the noise of the internet was silent.
  - simpaticoder 3y ago
    That's great but there's a step 2. The sub-culture of people who like things better that way need to sustain each other and itself. Ideally, to grow in happiness and other measures of strength such that the surrounding dominant culture cannot destroy it, and in fact can influence the dominant culture to become more like it. It's that step 2 that I think we haven't figured out yet. Without step 2 we are merely opinionated nerds that are easily isolated and alienated and ignored.
    - Roark66 3y ago
      I think step 2 has been figured out a long time ago: personal not for profit blogs and sites with an rss feed and a "links" section (preferably divided by interests). Such sites still do exist, but usually around various hobbies.
      - simpaticoder 3y ago
        Yeah but we need a name and a recognizable advocacy position. The open web, the indie web, minimalists, even luddites are related terms, but nothing really fits. Then there is the community, the scene - like a webring, but better. Dignified, driven by a simple, solid technical aesthetic, capable, self-sufficient, independent, rational, (classic) liberal, etc. Those are some adjectives I associate with these ideas. I don't know the answer, I'm thinking out loud. (I was excited by the indieweb label but it sounds good but its off-putting with levels of compliance and weird microformat stuff. It's not focused on the important universal qualities and distracted by details of technical implementation.).
        3y ago
mattlondon 3y ago
It is interesting to think about where this will be headed in the future with LLMs. Will people just ask the AI in their phone for their immediate answer and the click baity articles lose a bunch of traffic as a result? I think that is kinda inevitable. What will that mean for bona fide quality sites? I don't know but part of me hopes that those detailed sites will flourish to offer more details than can be offered in a single LLM response. Wishful thinking perhaps. They'll be a huge backlash of course from the click-bait sites - just like with news sites protesting about losing traffic.
- mnky9800n 3y ago
  Don't worry. There will be click baity LLMs soon.
- sshine 3y ago
  > What will that mean for bona fide quality sites? I probably know what you mean by quality, because we’re in the same demography: sites that offer free, unobstructed reading material and software on any subject, technical or prose. Sites maintained mainly by individuals, universities, interest groups, source forges. There will always be a market for those sites, but they’re a little harder to find via Google lately. There was a time before Google was great, and it was an exciting time, too. What Google will continue to do great is provide a platform for quickly finding things you can pay money for. The only time I search Google is when I prefix the query with “buy”. I can be sure that the companies most interested in selling me this have put in ads, and price comparison and review sites have gamed the SEO.
- dageshi 3y ago
  Yes, I think the clickbait sites are done long term, people will just ask the AI on their phone. The people who were capable of writing those large detailed posts on subjects have most likely already moved to youtube or moved on. The data that's actually useful to the LLM's will exist in places like Discord, reddit, twitter. It's pretty obvious that twitter and reddit are going to sell their data to the LLM companies for a lot of money. Which leaves Discord, I would be very suspicious of anyone trying to buy Discord...
ionwake 3y ago
Eternal summer
Roark66 3y ago
>In the desktop search world, google used to respond with large comprehensive articles on subjects that not just answered peoples questions but also educated them on the subject around their question. This was the golden age so to speak IDK, for me it seems the worst plague are the sites that when you search for something like "how to reverse a pushed commit in git" don't give you a single sentence answer you seek, but you scroll and scroll over, what is git, how it works, why do people use it, how to install it, if you're lucky the answer will be at the very bottom after you clicked through the infuriating cookie consent and you closed two full page video ads. If you're unlucky the answer is hidden somewhere in the "content"... Oh and comparing mobile with desktop? What is it on the desktop with all the shitty sites that try detecting you're moving to close it(often when you just move your mouse while reading) and they suddenly try to take over the entire window with some full page flashing modal dialogs. Insanity... My take on why this happened is twofold: 1- Google, yes. 2-the stupid cookie consent law of the EU. Yes, it made launching a huge window obscuring the entire site's content on entry acceptable. It was all downhill from that.
- kmlx 3y ago
  > when you search for something like "how to reverse a pushed commit in git" i use chatgpt for those kinds of questions. i don't have time to read an article or select a non-spam site or even look at the stack overflow answer.
  - moritzwarhier 3y ago
    So I understood you want to reverse a pushed commit on both your local repository and the remote. You can reverse that commit using just the following commands: git reset --hard HEAD~2 git reflog expire --expire-unreachable=now git push -f This reverses the most recent commit. The -f is needed to reverse the commit on your git server. ... I apologize if my previous response wasn't helpful. I see that you meant "revert" and not "reverse". I apologize that two of your commits are now gone and I understand that you mean "revert", not "reverse"? You could try git revert HEAD git push If you have any more questions, I'll be glad to help. :) Maybe I'm underestimating GPT-4 here, but when I tried to get it to write my some CLI commands, it failed in often non-obvious ways (I was trying to resize and compress an image using imagemagick). Seemed like a waste of time to try&error with the responses, compared to looking up the documentation. But well, man yelling at cloud I guess. For programming and computer questions, I'm still grateful for StackOverflow and its sister sites. Finding a conprehensive answer with lots of updates and comments describing different aspects of the problem, all for exactly the question I asked, is satisfying and it feels very time-efficient too.
jakub_g 3y ago
Desktop to mobile was also a big shift from the perspective of wanting to offer the "continue your journey" experience + having the same experience on both. Which initiated moving features from being done locally to "log in and sync in our cloud", or dumbing features down on desktop, or downright removing them so that "it's the same on desktop and mobile". Which IMO is related to the next thing in chain: - It was really easy to subscribe to an RSS feed in 2000s; if you had a proper meta tag in the website header, the browser UI would show up a prominent RSS logo in the URL bar. Firefox had this built-in. Apparently Chrome too [1]. At some point this was killed. Perhaps due to mobile gaining traction, lack of space on mobile, and Chrome's annoying minimalist approach? Or perhaps because Google wanted to promote its own (R.I.P.) Google Reader, (R.I.P.) Google Wave, (R.I.P.) Google+? (Having said that, I must admit I have declared RSS bankruptcy at some point, after subscribing to _way_ too many feeds). - I remember there used to be a lot of blog platforms and discussion boards, people would write a lot of good stuff there, each of those platforms would create a de facto community. Then, Google managed to make Blogger/Blogspot UX terrible; and most of other platforms died and got replaced with Facebook and Twitter. (I'm still not sure why many of those seemingly thriving platforms have died). - Facebook and Twitter over years slowly change the algo, to not show you stuff you subscribed to, but random viral crap which optimizes "engangement". [0] https://www.chromium.org/user-experience/feed-subscriptions/ https://www.chromium.org/user-experience/feed-subscriptions/
dalbasal 3y ago
That shift (pc to smartphone) represents a lot more "who and how many" users than how they use it. As late as late 2000, web was still pretty exclusive club. I went to college mid-2000s. Even among students, it was a geeky minority that really "consumed" internet massively. If the web was real life, we'd have recognised this very easily.
paradox460 3y ago
I'd argue that its even lower than that. Barring short-form video content, phones (and tablets) are almost exclusively consumption devices. Writing anything long-form on a phone is a pain in the ass, and so there's an implicit discouragement. Forget programming. Artists have procreate, but they had Wacom tablets before, so that hasn't changed much.

ad404b8a372f2b9 3y ago

The salvation of the web lies in banning all the normies and mobile users.

_ahxg 3y ago

And here we have the tyranny of the marginal user as posted here a while ago =/ https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37509507 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37509507

onetokeoverthe 3y ago

[dead]

pentae 3y ago

These days most non technical people just have their phone and live inside the FB/IG/TT/X/Gmail/Google apps on their phones and don't even go on the web. And app developers are doing everything to keep them inside the app with a crappy in-app browser which also benefits the Apple/Google app store ecosystem. Apples intention with Safari was inside the name. "Safari - you're in the African jungle, theres lions and tigers, be careful, probably best avoided." They don't want you using it. Download an app and pay us 30% instead. And that's what people do. Convenience-seeking users don't really seem to care. Why bother with desktops and even google search when they have apps on their phone to do stuff. Nobody even trusts the web anymore because of all the SEO content spam and potential to be scammed. If you were Google making billions a year off the app ecosystem because its a superior experience.. wouldn't your incentive be to make web as bad as possible?

mnky9800n 3y ago
I've recently deleted Facebook, Instagram, Reddit, etc from my phone and it's like night and day. I basically only go to hacker news now or look at my own websites. Suddenly all of the noise of the internet was silent.
- simpaticoder 3y ago
  That's great but there's a step 2. The sub-culture of people who like things better that way need to sustain each other and itself. Ideally, to grow in happiness and other measures of strength such that the surrounding dominant culture cannot destroy it, and in fact can influence the dominant culture to become more like it. It's that step 2 that I think we haven't figured out yet. Without step 2 we are merely opinionated nerds that are easily isolated and alienated and ignored.
  - Roark66 3y ago
    I think step 2 has been figured out a long time ago: personal not for profit blogs and sites with an rss feed and a "links" section (preferably divided by interests). Such sites still do exist, but usually around various hobbies.
    - simpaticoder 3y ago
      Yeah but we need a name and a recognizable advocacy position. The open web, the indie web, minimalists, even luddites are related terms, but nothing really fits. Then there is the community, the scene - like a webring, but better. Dignified, driven by a simple, solid technical aesthetic, capable, self-sufficient, independent, rational, (classic) liberal, etc. Those are some adjectives I associate with these ideas. I don't know the answer, I'm thinking out loud. (I was excited by the indieweb label but it sounds good but its off-putting with levels of compliance and weird microformat stuff. It's not focused on the important universal qualities and distracted by details of technical implementation.).
      - 3y ago

mattlondon 3y ago

It is interesting to think about where this will be headed in the future with LLMs. Will people just ask the AI in their phone for their immediate answer and the click baity articles lose a bunch of traffic as a result? I think that is kinda inevitable. What will that mean for bona fide quality sites? I don't know but part of me hopes that those detailed sites will flourish to offer more details than can be offered in a single LLM response. Wishful thinking perhaps. They'll be a huge backlash of course from the click-bait sites - just like with news sites protesting about losing traffic.

mnky9800n 3y ago
Don't worry. There will be click baity LLMs soon.
sshine 3y ago
> What will that mean for bona fide quality sites? I probably know what you mean by quality, because we’re in the same demography: sites that offer free, unobstructed reading material and software on any subject, technical or prose. Sites maintained mainly by individuals, universities, interest groups, source forges. There will always be a market for those sites, but they’re a little harder to find via Google lately. There was a time before Google was great, and it was an exciting time, too. What Google will continue to do great is provide a platform for quickly finding things you can pay money for. The only time I search Google is when I prefix the query with “buy”. I can be sure that the companies most interested in selling me this have put in ads, and price comparison and review sites have gamed the SEO.
dageshi 3y ago
Yes, I think the clickbait sites are done long term, people will just ask the AI on their phone. The people who were capable of writing those large detailed posts on subjects have most likely already moved to youtube or moved on. The data that's actually useful to the LLM's will exist in places like Discord, reddit, twitter. It's pretty obvious that twitter and reddit are going to sell their data to the LLM companies for a lot of money. Which leaves Discord, I would be very suspicious of anyone trying to buy Discord...

ionwake 3y ago

Eternal summer

Roark66 3y ago

>In the desktop search world, google used to respond with large comprehensive articles on subjects that not just answered peoples questions but also educated them on the subject around their question. This was the golden age so to speak IDK, for me it seems the worst plague are the sites that when you search for something like "how to reverse a pushed commit in git" don't give you a single sentence answer you seek, but you scroll and scroll over, what is git, how it works, why do people use it, how to install it, if you're lucky the answer will be at the very bottom after you clicked through the infuriating cookie consent and you closed two full page video ads. If you're unlucky the answer is hidden somewhere in the "content"... Oh and comparing mobile with desktop? What is it on the desktop with all the shitty sites that try detecting you're moving to close it(often when you just move your mouse while reading) and they suddenly try to take over the entire window with some full page flashing modal dialogs. Insanity... My take on why this happened is twofold: 1- Google, yes. 2-the stupid cookie consent law of the EU. Yes, it made launching a huge window obscuring the entire site's content on entry acceptable. It was all downhill from that.

kmlx 3y ago
> when you search for something like "how to reverse a pushed commit in git" i use chatgpt for those kinds of questions. i don't have time to read an article or select a non-spam site or even look at the stack overflow answer.
- moritzwarhier 3y ago
  So I understood you want to reverse a pushed commit on both your local repository and the remote. You can reverse that commit using just the following commands: git reset --hard HEAD~2 git reflog expire --expire-unreachable=now git push -f This reverses the most recent commit. The -f is needed to reverse the commit on your git server. ... I apologize if my previous response wasn't helpful. I see that you meant "revert" and not "reverse". I apologize that two of your commits are now gone and I understand that you mean "revert", not "reverse"? You could try git revert HEAD git push If you have any more questions, I'll be glad to help. :) Maybe I'm underestimating GPT-4 here, but when I tried to get it to write my some CLI commands, it failed in often non-obvious ways (I was trying to resize and compress an image using imagemagick). Seemed like a waste of time to try&error with the responses, compared to looking up the documentation. But well, man yelling at cloud I guess. For programming and computer questions, I'm still grateful for StackOverflow and its sister sites. Finding a conprehensive answer with lots of updates and comments describing different aspects of the problem, all for exactly the question I asked, is satisfying and it feels very time-efficient too.

jakub_g 3y ago

Desktop to mobile was also a big shift from the perspective of wanting to offer the "continue your journey" experience + having the same experience on both. Which initiated moving features from being done locally to "log in and sync in our cloud", or dumbing features down on desktop, or downright removing them so that "it's the same on desktop and mobile". Which IMO is related to the next thing in chain: - It was really easy to subscribe to an RSS feed in 2000s; if you had a proper meta tag in the website header, the browser UI would show up a prominent RSS logo in the URL bar. Firefox had this built-in. Apparently Chrome too [1]. At some point this was killed. Perhaps due to mobile gaining traction, lack of space on mobile, and Chrome's annoying minimalist approach? Or perhaps because Google wanted to promote its own (R.I.P.) Google Reader, (R.I.P.) Google Wave, (R.I.P.) Google+? (Having said that, I must admit I have declared RSS bankruptcy at some point, after subscribing to _way_ too many feeds). - I remember there used to be a lot of blog platforms and discussion boards, people would write a lot of good stuff there, each of those platforms would create a de facto community. Then, Google managed to make Blogger/Blogspot UX terrible; and most of other platforms died and got replaced with Facebook and Twitter. (I'm still not sure why many of those seemingly thriving platforms have died). - Facebook and Twitter over years slowly change the algo, to not show you stuff you subscribed to, but random viral crap which optimizes "engangement". [0] https://www.chromium.org/user-experience/feed-subscriptions/ https://www.chromium.org/user-experience/feed-subscriptions/

dalbasal 3y ago

That shift (pc to smartphone) represents a lot more "who and how many" users than how they use it. As late as late 2000, web was still pretty exclusive club. I went to college mid-2000s. Even among students, it was a geeky minority that really "consumed" internet massively. If the web was real life, we'd have recognised this very easily.

paradox460 3y ago

I'd argue that its even lower than that. Barring short-form video content, phones (and tablets) are almost exclusively consumption devices. Writing anything long-form on a phone is a pain in the ass, and so there's an implicit discouragement. Forget programming. Artists have procreate, but they had Wacom tablets before, so that hasn't changed much.