8 ms·

"Search results plagued with ‘clickbait’ would have been an understatement 20 years ago. The parts of the open web you access from Google/search (most of it) i

"Search results plagued with ‘clickbait’ would have been an understatement 20 years ago. The parts of the open web you access from Google/search (most of it) is almost entirely made-for-google' ranking algorithims. The situation is worse than it is on closed social media, including Google's YouTube. Professional YouTubers are also making content for rankings above all, but the fact that it's their own face/voice keeps some of the rot at bay. Google is literally content made by uninterested copywriters exclusively for Google rankings. I was recently looking for general travel advice on Google. I found it completely impossible. The content is all written by people (or ais) that had never visited. Everything reads like a middle school essay. I often resort to searches in a smaller language, where economic incentives are 100X smaller than English. Google created incentives for littering the web with garbage. Then they took away incentives for anyone else to even bother. Google killed the thing that gave them life. They gave Vince Serf a sinecure and a hows-your-mother for the rest. Thieves.

medion 3y ago
Amen.
jorvi 3y ago
“site:reddit.com” saves the day, but I feel very uneasy doing so ever since they did their nasty API + demodding ploy.
- seydor 3y ago
  It's odd that reddit has not surpassed google in profits
- V1ndaar 3y ago
  Honestly, the "golden days" of using reddit for that purpose are over, too. Both the fact that random other crap comes up due to how stuff is linked on reddit and generally most search engines being too lenient with your search terms and finally more and more conversation going to discord and other places that cannot be searched. It really is one of the most unfortunate things of the modern internet. :(
  - clnq 3y ago
    Reddit is very wrong about almost every discipline I have experience in and can speak on as an expert. I feel like I'd suffer from Gell-Mann amnesia if I paid it any mind. I think there's a good degree of pseudo-intellectualism on the site. Not necessarily in the conduct, but in claims of knowledge and the certainty they present it with. There was a period in my life I've been active on Reddit myself. Looking back on that period in my life, I presented many strong and celebrated opinions there without much basis in reality. I'm not beyond blame for this, just stating an observation. From my perspective, Reddit works as a validation machine, where validation is given somewhat randomly. It's like a self-service bias entrenching device. So perhaps it's natural to see pseudo-intellectual content there written by people such as my younger self.
    - foooorsyth 3y ago
      Reddit is awful for anything controversial, but it’s good for uncontroversial hobby communities. If I need recommendations on new hockey skates, Reddit is a good place. It basically replaced independent phpBB forums of old — which were even better and less subject to sweeping centralized policy changes like all their subreddit replacements are now.
      - clnq 3y ago
        I disagree, but probably because we have different definitions of "good". To me, "good" means quite high quality. Like an expert sharing their thoughts in their niche. If you wish to use these thoughts, they will be very reliable and correct. If you consider "good" to be anything that is not "bad" or "harmful", then I would be more inclined to agree with you. My niche of tech is full of hobbyists and enthusiasts who want to participate in it - it's a part of the video games industry. And there is a very large amount of misleading knowledge on Reddit. Of course, even misleading knowledge can push people generally in the right direction, so I don't see the discourse as harmful. But I also don't see it as of particularly high quality. It might be "good" on some terms, or "neutral" on others. With hockey skates - I'm not an expert. But I would expect that the recommendation on Reddit won't have to do with materials, blade quality, ankle support, footbeds, tongue design, heat moldability, weight distribution, holders and runners, energy transfer, foot health features and similar things that you could find on expert forums. I would expect that the recommendation would be based on entry-level things, like what feels good, or what brand is popular. This is not to say that this advice has no value. There is value. But they might not consider how materials might limit skill growth, how there is a knowledge gap in fit assessment in most new skaters, or how different skates protect the skater's feet from injury. There is value in some advice, just not enough to consider it "good", in my opinion. Others might have different opinions.
- holoduke 3y ago
  I always add +forum and end up at conpletely unknown personal websites with sometimes great advice.
  - gardenhedge 3y ago
    Wow, that is a new one for me. Thanks.
- tpmx 3y ago
  Many product/brand-specific subreddits are infiltrated by marketing teams.
- ykonstant 3y ago
  Precisely my predicament; I had contributed a lot of technical and mathematical content in Reddit, and got tons of content in response; but I can no longer engage with it in good faith. Unfortunately, none of the alternatives capture or even understand the point of reddit. They focus on secondary features like decentralization, when the primary appeal of reddit is the network of communities (that are, furthermore, properly threaded, moderated forums) at the same place, using the same format, accessed with a single user identity. In fact, precisely this aspect of reddit is what made it accumulate so much genuine information, and the reason it has replaced raw Google search for many kinds of questions. (well, it is definitely not the horrible facebook-post-like-with-no-discussion functionality they have been pushing forever).
pinkslipper3 3y ago
> Google created incentives for littering the web with garbage. Then they took away incentives for anyone else to even bother. exactly this. I have very extensive knowledge in a certain niche that is profitable (for other people). I really enjoy building sites, so I tried to build a site that explains all the important topics for both short attention span 'TLDR' people, but also have more in-depth articles for people wanting to learn more. I built additional tools, a custom crawler with GPT regularly analysing new incoming data etc... and had a lot of fun building it. the "organic" users I get (about 30-40) a day, have an average visit time of 3-4 minutes, which is pretty long for text-only sites I think. but i absolutely loathe "off-page" seo, e.g. buying links. so now the site will keep rotting away, after all the fun of building it is gone. and I have no incentive to work on it much more apart from the occasional maintenance, as it's not my primary business. And I don't want to sink thousands into buying links. The only way to get "organic" traffic nowadays in even remotely profitable verticals, is by investing a shitton into backlinks. the amount of shit low quality articles that have just been written for placing a link to game the google rankings is absolutely insane.
resolutebat 3y ago
> I was recently looking for general travel advice on Google. I found it completely impossible. Try Wikivoyage, the Wikipedia Foundation's open travel guide. Listings are a mixed bag, but the general advice is often spot on.
- Kye 3y ago
  Everyone centralizing around a few sources to deal with the web turning to garbage is a symptom of the problem. Google should return travelogues and official websites for locales, maybe offer hotel and flight bookings, not an endless scroll of spun and AI-generated trash. They shouldn't have to site:wikivoyage.org just to find anything useful. You shouldn't need site:reddit.com to make general searches useful. This is broken.
  - lacrimacida 3y ago
    It’s broken for us but I would argue it isn’t for google, they cash in on advertising handsomely and that what they only care about. If they noticed a trend they thought was not okay they easily could have done something about it. They didn’t. Nowadays they’re cracking down on ad blockers on youtube, because that’s what they care about: ads
  - dalbasal 3y ago
    You know, I don't think they can anymore. The web is not what itwas, so they can't just "revert." They need talent, execution, ideas. IDK if websearch still has that at google. A possibility of big(ish) ideas about how websearch should be. Innovators' Dilemma, and just general difficulty of changing core things that don't change often. Google are optimizers. Local plateaus are hard to beat.
t0bia_s 3y ago
Because there is audience that like garbage and clickbaits. We need to learn how consume digital media and have this stimuli under control. For example there are plugins like Unhook that let you stop autoplay or suggested videos to show on YT. It's so refreshing to watch YT only for purpose that you initially come for, without garbage distractions...
theGnuMe 3y ago
I guess the lonely planet books are still valuable.
- wood_spirit 3y ago
  Yes. We’d used one to do a backpacking adventure a twenty years ago but kinda forgotten about them. But recently went on a sun holiday and quickly got frustrated by the normal websites and travel blogs found online, and instead brought them the LP and also the Rough Guide. Both were soooo much better content and advice than the online blogs. (My pref was for LP).
- blululu 3y ago
  Lonely Planet travel guides are fantastic value. If you are going to spend >$500 to visit a foreign country/culture, spending $20 to learn the basics is cheap. And the practical knowledge can easily cover the cost of the book. I recently picked up one of these for a trip to Bosnia, and it offered a wealth of information about the country. The writer had a deep understanding of the country, the culture, the language and what you should know and what you should see. Even the restaurant recommendations were solid. If you are going to spend 8 hours traveling you ought have enough time to learn the basics of the place you are going to visit and lonely planet does a great job providing a high quality summary.
p3rls 3y ago
I dreamed of building a website like the type I grew up on in the late 90s and early 2000s. The gamefaqs, mrfixitonlines and casterrealms-type websites for me were at the forefront of making this internet medium to be better than books, voice or anything else for that matter for the transmission of information. Fast forward 20 years later. I think I've spent close to 300k on the website and team to help with it. I don't even want to think about my own labor costs. These days the google results for my niche are entirely dominated by an ugly purple wordpress blog ran by non-native English speakers that gets hacked every few months with a redirect to porn or russian sites. Their information is frequently wrong. It doesn't hurt their rankings at all. Yoast through it bro. Keep up the great work Google. The entire story was posted on twitter last year by some shocked SEO researcher last year https://twitter.com/paulk139/status/1550532282288508929 https://twitter.com/paulk139/status/1550532282288508929
- aktenlage 3y ago
  Is there a way to read it without an ex-twitter account? I just see the first tweet
  - Scandiravian 3y ago
    Here you go https://nitter.net/paulk139/status/1550532282288508929 https://nitter.net/paulk139/status/1550532282288508929
- rwmj 3y ago
  I don't get it. kprofiles sounds like it provides a service. It might not be a great one or one I'm interested in, but collating all that information about K-Pop bands and publishing one or two articles a day is non-trivial.
  - p3rls 3y ago
    I would argue that the word trivial is exactly what would describe their entire operation.
  - yterdy 3y ago
NL807 3y ago
I'm rather shocked how the quality of their search results has tanked over the years. I used to be able to find decent academic content, or programming related topics quite consistently 5 years ago. Now I'm getting only a few vague results either from stackoverflow, math stackexchange, reddit, or apple, and the rest is just utter garbage. Yandex, of all search engines provide consistently better results. Fortunately, Google Scholar did not suffer this fate yet, but I'm dreading the day when it will.
- bad_username 3y ago
  The Russian search engine pops up in the comments whenever Google search quality is discussed here. I am sure this is non-organic astroturfing.
  - l33t7332273 3y ago
    Comrade, I have personally tried that search engine and found it similar in quality to Bing with just a hint of added excitement from the fear in the back of my mind.
  - srackey 3y ago
    Nah he’s right. Yandex is pretty good. Easily on par with Google/Bing. I suspect just no one uses it in America so the results aren’t SEO’d to death. I’d bet Baidu is decent too but that one really isn’t set up to interface with the Western internet.
    - ThrowAwayChris 3y ago
      Baidu is fully integrated into the Party's censorship apparatus and delivers absolutely nothing of use for many categories of query. Couldn't even search for wrist watches for a while.
  - dartos 3y ago
    I like kagi
  - knaik94 3y ago
anovikov 3y ago
Sadly, for smaller languages, usually pay of copywriters is also much smaller than English, so they aren't protected from it at all. How bad are things? Bad indeed. I even buy my airline tickets from a traditional brick-and-mortar agent with whom i built a relationship over years and who finds good deals for me and knows the pitfalls better than the internet could suggest.
CM30 3y ago
> Professional YouTubers are also making content for rankings above all, but the fact that it's their own face/voice keeps some of the rot at bay. YouTube's stuck in its own algorithm hellhole. Mostly due to their insistence that creators have to post on a regular basis, creative block or lack of things to cover be damned. So if your niche has nothing to talk about right now, well you'll need to find something, anything to cover to stay relevant. And if your fans/viewers want something that you don't care about anymore, well that sucks even more. Changing to a topic you do care about will probably tank everything for weeks, potentially longer. It's like a video creating version of a factory production line for those trying to become popular/famous there.
- likeabbas 3y ago
  Hmm, Jesse Michels posts videos so infrequently (he just did the first one in a year) and he still got 2 million views instantly..
  - dartos 3y ago
    I think the algorithm is geared now towards higher production value videos that encourage viewers to click on other videos That’s why there are so many collabs now
    - dalbasal 3y ago
      Maybe at the margin. Broadly though, the way to do YouTube professionally is high frequency. Most channels these days attract pretty consistent views per vid. The most straightforward way to increase revenue is frequency.
- narag 3y ago
  If the experts that I've listened to are right, the thing that YouTube promotes is keeping the user hooked for the longest time possible. That doesn't mean that you, the youtuber, must create a lot of videos or very long videos or very frequently, but you must create a video that induces the person watching it to watch more videos, yours or others'. There are different kinds of videos that fits that purpose: a series of videos for a course of some subject, a video that points to another video of the same subject, a video that complements other video that the user might have watched before...
jdub 3y ago
Vint Cerf
- dalbasal 3y ago
  Apologies. I did know that at some point.
nsagent 3y ago
Ironically, the title of the article is literal clickbait. The first four paragraphs (out of 21) of the article are related to the title. The majority of the article (11 paragraphs) are dedicated to AI safety. I avoid companies like Google as much as possible, but is it really their fault that so many people fall for clickbait? If that's what a majority of people click on, shouldn't users share the blame?
- lacrimacida 3y ago
  Clickbait is basically a shortcut to traffic and it is incentivised by design.
- sgc 3y ago
  How can you know the link won't correspond to the title and snippet? Should we just avoid all interesting-looking content because we might have been duped? The only way to avoid clickbait working is if those who have actually seen the entire page can indicate it is not worth viewing - which brings us right back to search engine placement algorithms and curation.
  - nsagent 3y ago
    Yes, but the algorithm is optimizing for clicks, not curation. Curation is a much more costly process requiring humans in the loop, which often leads to cries of censorship (e.g. my otherwise popular article is being unfairly down-weighted). Clicks are much easier to track and provide a lot of signal. I'm not saying that Google can't do better. Clearly they have mismatched incentives with their users due to advertising. Moving organic search placements below the fold to increase ad revenue is a major issue, but isn't akin to prioritizing clickbait. Instead what I'm saying is that due to Google's dominant market position they are under higher scrutiny if they start labeling certain media outlets as frequently generating clickbait and down-weighting them, where smaller search engines like Kagi can get away with that without being labeled a manipulator. That said, if Google did allow block lists like Kagi, that could go a long way, but likely would still lead to complaints about bias.
    - 3y ago
TacticalCoder 3y ago
> I often resort to searches in a smaller language, where economic incentives are 100X smaller than English. I wonder for how long that's going to work: the cost of translating with LLM are now basically $0 and LLMs are exceptionally good at doing that. So basically: have LLMs generate complete, total and utter crap in english. Then have LLMs decline this crap in all the world's languages.
johnalbertearle 3y ago
Yandex
thiht 3y ago
Non ironically, you might wanna try Tiktok for searches where you want an actual human point of view. My searches are now split evenly between TikTok, Google with site:reddit.com, ChatGPT and Google with no filter as a last resort. And I really want to give Kagi another try in the coming weeks.

medion 3y ago

Amen.

jorvi 3y ago

“site:reddit.com” saves the day, but I feel very uneasy doing so ever since they did their nasty API + demodding ploy.

seydor 3y ago
It's odd that reddit has not surpassed google in profits
V1ndaar 3y ago
Honestly, the "golden days" of using reddit for that purpose are over, too. Both the fact that random other crap comes up due to how stuff is linked on reddit and generally most search engines being too lenient with your search terms and finally more and more conversation going to discord and other places that cannot be searched. It really is one of the most unfortunate things of the modern internet. :(
- clnq 3y ago
  Reddit is very wrong about almost every discipline I have experience in and can speak on as an expert. I feel like I'd suffer from Gell-Mann amnesia if I paid it any mind. I think there's a good degree of pseudo-intellectualism on the site. Not necessarily in the conduct, but in claims of knowledge and the certainty they present it with. There was a period in my life I've been active on Reddit myself. Looking back on that period in my life, I presented many strong and celebrated opinions there without much basis in reality. I'm not beyond blame for this, just stating an observation. From my perspective, Reddit works as a validation machine, where validation is given somewhat randomly. It's like a self-service bias entrenching device. So perhaps it's natural to see pseudo-intellectual content there written by people such as my younger self.
  - foooorsyth 3y ago
    Reddit is awful for anything controversial, but it’s good for uncontroversial hobby communities. If I need recommendations on new hockey skates, Reddit is a good place. It basically replaced independent phpBB forums of old — which were even better and less subject to sweeping centralized policy changes like all their subreddit replacements are now.
    - clnq 3y ago
      I disagree, but probably because we have different definitions of "good". To me, "good" means quite high quality. Like an expert sharing their thoughts in their niche. If you wish to use these thoughts, they will be very reliable and correct. If you consider "good" to be anything that is not "bad" or "harmful", then I would be more inclined to agree with you. My niche of tech is full of hobbyists and enthusiasts who want to participate in it - it's a part of the video games industry. And there is a very large amount of misleading knowledge on Reddit. Of course, even misleading knowledge can push people generally in the right direction, so I don't see the discourse as harmful. But I also don't see it as of particularly high quality. It might be "good" on some terms, or "neutral" on others. With hockey skates - I'm not an expert. But I would expect that the recommendation on Reddit won't have to do with materials, blade quality, ankle support, footbeds, tongue design, heat moldability, weight distribution, holders and runners, energy transfer, foot health features and similar things that you could find on expert forums. I would expect that the recommendation would be based on entry-level things, like what feels good, or what brand is popular. This is not to say that this advice has no value. There is value. But they might not consider how materials might limit skill growth, how there is a knowledge gap in fit assessment in most new skaters, or how different skates protect the skater's feet from injury. There is value in some advice, just not enough to consider it "good", in my opinion. Others might have different opinions.
holoduke 3y ago
I always add +forum and end up at conpletely unknown personal websites with sometimes great advice.
- gardenhedge 3y ago
  Wow, that is a new one for me. Thanks.
tpmx 3y ago
Many product/brand-specific subreddits are infiltrated by marketing teams.
ykonstant 3y ago
Precisely my predicament; I had contributed a lot of technical and mathematical content in Reddit, and got tons of content in response; but I can no longer engage with it in good faith. Unfortunately, none of the alternatives capture or even understand the point of reddit. They focus on secondary features like decentralization, when the primary appeal of reddit is the network of communities (that are, furthermore, properly threaded, moderated forums) at the same place, using the same format, accessed with a single user identity. In fact, precisely this aspect of reddit is what made it accumulate so much genuine information, and the reason it has replaced raw Google search for many kinds of questions. (well, it is definitely not the horrible facebook-post-like-with-no-discussion functionality they have been pushing forever).

pinkslipper3 3y ago

> Google created incentives for littering the web with garbage. Then they took away incentives for anyone else to even bother. exactly this. I have very extensive knowledge in a certain niche that is profitable (for other people). I really enjoy building sites, so I tried to build a site that explains all the important topics for both short attention span 'TLDR' people, but also have more in-depth articles for people wanting to learn more. I built additional tools, a custom crawler with GPT regularly analysing new incoming data etc... and had a lot of fun building it. the "organic" users I get (about 30-40) a day, have an average visit time of 3-4 minutes, which is pretty long for text-only sites I think. but i absolutely loathe "off-page" seo, e.g. buying links. so now the site will keep rotting away, after all the fun of building it is gone. and I have no incentive to work on it much more apart from the occasional maintenance, as it's not my primary business. And I don't want to sink thousands into buying links. The only way to get "organic" traffic nowadays in even remotely profitable verticals, is by investing a shitton into backlinks. the amount of shit low quality articles that have just been written for placing a link to game the google rankings is absolutely insane.

resolutebat 3y ago

> I was recently looking for general travel advice on Google. I found it completely impossible. Try Wikivoyage, the Wikipedia Foundation's open travel guide. Listings are a mixed bag, but the general advice is often spot on.

Kye 3y ago
Everyone centralizing around a few sources to deal with the web turning to garbage is a symptom of the problem. Google should return travelogues and official websites for locales, maybe offer hotel and flight bookings, not an endless scroll of spun and AI-generated trash. They shouldn't have to site:wikivoyage.org just to find anything useful. You shouldn't need site:reddit.com to make general searches useful. This is broken.
- lacrimacida 3y ago
  It’s broken for us but I would argue it isn’t for google, they cash in on advertising handsomely and that what they only care about. If they noticed a trend they thought was not okay they easily could have done something about it. They didn’t. Nowadays they’re cracking down on ad blockers on youtube, because that’s what they care about: ads
- dalbasal 3y ago
  You know, I don't think they can anymore. The web is not what itwas, so they can't just "revert." They need talent, execution, ideas. IDK if websearch still has that at google. A possibility of big(ish) ideas about how websearch should be. Innovators' Dilemma, and just general difficulty of changing core things that don't change often. Google are optimizers. Local plateaus are hard to beat.

t0bia_s 3y ago

Because there is audience that like garbage and clickbaits. We need to learn how consume digital media and have this stimuli under control. For example there are plugins like Unhook that let you stop autoplay or suggested videos to show on YT. It's so refreshing to watch YT only for purpose that you initially come for, without garbage distractions...

theGnuMe 3y ago

I guess the lonely planet books are still valuable.

wood_spirit 3y ago
Yes. We’d used one to do a backpacking adventure a twenty years ago but kinda forgotten about them. But recently went on a sun holiday and quickly got frustrated by the normal websites and travel blogs found online, and instead brought them the LP and also the Rough Guide. Both were soooo much better content and advice than the online blogs. (My pref was for LP).
blululu 3y ago
Lonely Planet travel guides are fantastic value. If you are going to spend >$500 to visit a foreign country/culture, spending $20 to learn the basics is cheap. And the practical knowledge can easily cover the cost of the book. I recently picked up one of these for a trip to Bosnia, and it offered a wealth of information about the country. The writer had a deep understanding of the country, the culture, the language and what you should know and what you should see. Even the restaurant recommendations were solid. If you are going to spend 8 hours traveling you ought have enough time to learn the basics of the place you are going to visit and lonely planet does a great job providing a high quality summary.

p3rls 3y ago

I dreamed of building a website like the type I grew up on in the late 90s and early 2000s. The gamefaqs, mrfixitonlines and casterrealms-type websites for me were at the forefront of making this internet medium to be better than books, voice or anything else for that matter for the transmission of information. Fast forward 20 years later. I think I've spent close to 300k on the website and team to help with it. I don't even want to think about my own labor costs. These days the google results for my niche are entirely dominated by an ugly purple wordpress blog ran by non-native English speakers that gets hacked every few months with a redirect to porn or russian sites. Their information is frequently wrong. It doesn't hurt their rankings at all. Yoast through it bro. Keep up the great work Google. The entire story was posted on twitter last year by some shocked SEO researcher last year https://twitter.com/paulk139/status/1550532282288508929 https://twitter.com/paulk139/status/1550532282288508929

aktenlage 3y ago
Is there a way to read it without an ex-twitter account? I just see the first tweet
- Scandiravian 3y ago
  Here you go https://nitter.net/paulk139/status/1550532282288508929 https://nitter.net/paulk139/status/1550532282288508929
rwmj 3y ago
I don't get it. kprofiles sounds like it provides a service. It might not be a great one or one I'm interested in, but collating all that information about K-Pop bands and publishing one or two articles a day is non-trivial.
- p3rls 3y ago
  I would argue that the word trivial is exactly what would describe their entire operation.
- yterdy 3y ago

NL807 3y ago

I'm rather shocked how the quality of their search results has tanked over the years. I used to be able to find decent academic content, or programming related topics quite consistently 5 years ago. Now I'm getting only a few vague results either from stackoverflow, math stackexchange, reddit, or apple, and the rest is just utter garbage. Yandex, of all search engines provide consistently better results. Fortunately, Google Scholar did not suffer this fate yet, but I'm dreading the day when it will.

bad_username 3y ago
The Russian search engine pops up in the comments whenever Google search quality is discussed here. I am sure this is non-organic astroturfing.
- l33t7332273 3y ago
  Comrade, I have personally tried that search engine and found it similar in quality to Bing with just a hint of added excitement from the fear in the back of my mind.
- srackey 3y ago
  Nah he’s right. Yandex is pretty good. Easily on par with Google/Bing. I suspect just no one uses it in America so the results aren’t SEO’d to death. I’d bet Baidu is decent too but that one really isn’t set up to interface with the Western internet.
  - ThrowAwayChris 3y ago
    Baidu is fully integrated into the Party's censorship apparatus and delivers absolutely nothing of use for many categories of query. Couldn't even search for wrist watches for a while.
- dartos 3y ago
  I like kagi
- knaik94 3y ago

anovikov 3y ago

Sadly, for smaller languages, usually pay of copywriters is also much smaller than English, so they aren't protected from it at all. How bad are things? Bad indeed. I even buy my airline tickets from a traditional brick-and-mortar agent with whom i built a relationship over years and who finds good deals for me and knows the pitfalls better than the internet could suggest.

CM30 3y ago

> Professional YouTubers are also making content for rankings above all, but the fact that it's their own face/voice keeps some of the rot at bay. YouTube's stuck in its own algorithm hellhole. Mostly due to their insistence that creators have to post on a regular basis, creative block or lack of things to cover be damned. So if your niche has nothing to talk about right now, well you'll need to find something, anything to cover to stay relevant. And if your fans/viewers want something that you don't care about anymore, well that sucks even more. Changing to a topic you do care about will probably tank everything for weeks, potentially longer. It's like a video creating version of a factory production line for those trying to become popular/famous there.

likeabbas 3y ago
Hmm, Jesse Michels posts videos so infrequently (he just did the first one in a year) and he still got 2 million views instantly..
- dartos 3y ago
  I think the algorithm is geared now towards higher production value videos that encourage viewers to click on other videos That’s why there are so many collabs now
  - dalbasal 3y ago
    Maybe at the margin. Broadly though, the way to do YouTube professionally is high frequency. Most channels these days attract pretty consistent views per vid. The most straightforward way to increase revenue is frequency.
narag 3y ago
If the experts that I've listened to are right, the thing that YouTube promotes is keeping the user hooked for the longest time possible. That doesn't mean that you, the youtuber, must create a lot of videos or very long videos or very frequently, but you must create a video that induces the person watching it to watch more videos, yours or others'. There are different kinds of videos that fits that purpose: a series of videos for a course of some subject, a video that points to another video of the same subject, a video that complements other video that the user might have watched before...

jdub 3y ago

Vint Cerf

dalbasal 3y ago
Apologies. I did know that at some point.

nsagent 3y ago

Ironically, the title of the article is literal clickbait. The first four paragraphs (out of 21) of the article are related to the title. The majority of the article (11 paragraphs) are dedicated to AI safety. I avoid companies like Google as much as possible, but is it really their fault that so many people fall for clickbait? If that's what a majority of people click on, shouldn't users share the blame?

lacrimacida 3y ago
Clickbait is basically a shortcut to traffic and it is incentivised by design.
sgc 3y ago
How can you know the link won't correspond to the title and snippet? Should we just avoid all interesting-looking content because we might have been duped? The only way to avoid clickbait working is if those who have actually seen the entire page can indicate it is not worth viewing - which brings us right back to search engine placement algorithms and curation.
- nsagent 3y ago
  Yes, but the algorithm is optimizing for clicks, not curation. Curation is a much more costly process requiring humans in the loop, which often leads to cries of censorship (e.g. my otherwise popular article is being unfairly down-weighted). Clicks are much easier to track and provide a lot of signal. I'm not saying that Google can't do better. Clearly they have mismatched incentives with their users due to advertising. Moving organic search placements below the fold to increase ad revenue is a major issue, but isn't akin to prioritizing clickbait. Instead what I'm saying is that due to Google's dominant market position they are under higher scrutiny if they start labeling certain media outlets as frequently generating clickbait and down-weighting them, where smaller search engines like Kagi can get away with that without being labeled a manipulator. That said, if Google did allow block lists like Kagi, that could go a long way, but likely would still lead to complaints about bias.
  - 3y ago

TacticalCoder 3y ago

> I often resort to searches in a smaller language, where economic incentives are 100X smaller than English. I wonder for how long that's going to work: the cost of translating with LLM are now basically $0 and LLMs are exceptionally good at doing that. So basically: have LLMs generate complete, total and utter crap in english. Then have LLMs decline this crap in all the world's languages.

johnalbertearle 3y ago

Yandex

thiht 3y ago

Non ironically, you might wanna try Tiktok for searches where you want an actual human point of view. My searches are now split evenly between TikTok, Google with site:reddit.com, ChatGPT and Google with no filter as a last resort. And I really want to give Kagi another try in the coming weeks.