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The fundamental dynamic that ruins every technology is (over-)commercialization. No matter what anyone says, it is clear that in this era, advertising has royal

by titzer 3y ago

The fundamental dynamic that ruins every technology is (over-)commercialization. No matter what anyone says, it is clear that in this era, advertising has royally screwed up all the incentives on the internet and particularly the web. Whereas in the "online retailer" days, there was transparency about transactions and business models, in the behind-the-scenes ad/attention economy, it's murky and distorted. Effectively all the players are conspiring to generate revenue from people's free time, attention, and coerce them into consumption, while amusing them to death. Big entities in the space have trouble coming up with successful models other than advertising--not because those models are unsuccessful, but because 20+ years of compounded exponential growth has made them so big that it's no longer worth their while and will not help them achieve their yearly growth targets. Just a case in point. I joined Google in 2010 and left in 2019. In 2010 annual revenue was ~$30 billion. Last year, it was $300 billion. Google has grown at ~20% YoY very consistently since its inception. To meet that for 2024, they'll have to find $60 billion in new revenue. So they need to find two 2010-Google's worth of revenue in just one year. And of course 2010-Google took twelve years to build. It's just bonkers.

plagiarist 3y ago
There used to be a wealth of smaller "labor-of-love" websites from individuals doing interesting things. The weeds have grown over them and made it difficult to find these from the public web because these individuals cannot devote the same resources to SEO and SEM as teams of adtech affiliate marketers with LLM-generated content. When Google first came out, it was amazing how effective it was. In the years following, we have had a feedback loop of adtech bullshit.
- waveBidder 3y ago
  such websites still get made all the time, they're just not useful for Google to surface. https://blog.kagi.com/small-web https://blog.kagi.com/small-web
  - Groxx 3y ago
    I've pretty much just seen evidence that this segment keeps growing, and is now much MUCH larger than the Internet in The Good Old Days. Discovering them is indeed hard, but it has always been hard - that's why search engines were such a gigantic improvement initially, they found more than the zero that most people had seen. But searches only ever skimmed the surface, and there's almost certainly no mechanical way to accurately identify the hidden gems - it's just straight chaos, there's a lot of good and bad and insane. Find a small site or two, and explore their webring links, like The Good Old Days. They're still alive and healthy because it keeps getting easier to create and host them.
    - rchaud 3y ago
      Sites today don't have blogrolls. Back in the '00s it was sacrilege not to have one on the sidebar of your site. That massively improved discoverability. Today you have to go to another service like Twitter to see this kind of cross-pollination.
      - Groxx 3y ago
        tbh I have only ever seen a couple in an omnipresent sidebar in my lifetime. The vast majority I encountered around then and earlier were just in the "about" (or possibly "links") pages of people's websites, and occasionally a footer explicitly mentioning "webring". Also if you squint hard enough, they're massively more common now. They're just usually hidden by adblockers because they're run by Disqus or Outbrain or similar (i.e. complete junk).
  - stemlord 3y ago
    Parent didn't say that they don't still get made, just that they are now much more difficult to discover which you repeated
- josh-sematic 3y ago
  This search engine is designed to find such sites: https://search.marginalia.nu/ https://search.marginalia.nu/
- rchaud 3y ago
  > There used to be a wealth of smaller "labor-of-love" websites from individuals doing interesting things Those websites are long gone. First, because search engines defaulted to promoting 'recent content' on HTTPS websites, which eliminates a lot of informational sites that were not SSL-secured and archived on university web servers for example. Second, because the time and effort required to compile this information today feels wasted because it can be essentially copied wholesale and reproduced on a content-hungry blogspam website, often without attribution to the original author. In its place are cynical Substacks, Twitters or Tiktoks doing growth marketing ahead of an inevitable book deal or online course sales pitch.
  - mangodrunk 3y ago
    Not only are the search engines promoting newer content but they are also (at least Google is) penalizing sites with “old” content [1]. Somewhat related, it’s outrageous to me when a university takes down a professor’s page when they are no longer employed or come up with a standard site for all faculty that is devoid of anything interesting, just boring bios. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37068464 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37068464
- 6510 3y ago
  They made this wild mistake where moderation (which is a good thing) grew into dictating what websites should look like. Search is a struggle to index the web as~is. Like biologists look at a species from afar and document their behavior. It's not like, hey if you want to be in the bird book you can lay 6 eggs at most, they should be smooth egg shaped, light in color and no larger than 12 cm. You must be able to fly and make bird sounds only and only during the day. Most important you must build your own nest! Little Jimmy has many references under his articles, he is not paginating his archives properly, he has many citation.... Lets just take him behind the barn and shoot him.
- sanroot99 3y ago
  What are current search strategy one employees to find such articles. Nowadays I find it increasingly hard to find such articles.

by titzer 3y ago

plagiarist 3y ago

There used to be a wealth of smaller "labor-of-love" websites from individuals doing interesting things. The weeds have grown over them and made it difficult to find these from the public web because these individuals cannot devote the same resources to SEO and SEM as teams of adtech affiliate marketers with LLM-generated content. When Google first came out, it was amazing how effective it was. In the years following, we have had a feedback loop of adtech bullshit.

waveBidder 3y ago
such websites still get made all the time, they're just not useful for Google to surface. https://blog.kagi.com/small-web https://blog.kagi.com/small-web
- Groxx 3y ago
  I've pretty much just seen evidence that this segment keeps growing, and is now much MUCH larger than the Internet in The Good Old Days. Discovering them is indeed hard, but it has always been hard - that's why search engines were such a gigantic improvement initially, they found more than the zero that most people had seen. But searches only ever skimmed the surface, and there's almost certainly no mechanical way to accurately identify the hidden gems - it's just straight chaos, there's a lot of good and bad and insane. Find a small site or two, and explore their webring links, like The Good Old Days. They're still alive and healthy because it keeps getting easier to create and host them.
  - rchaud 3y ago
    Sites today don't have blogrolls. Back in the '00s it was sacrilege not to have one on the sidebar of your site. That massively improved discoverability. Today you have to go to another service like Twitter to see this kind of cross-pollination.
    - Groxx 3y ago
      tbh I have only ever seen a couple in an omnipresent sidebar in my lifetime. The vast majority I encountered around then and earlier were just in the "about" (or possibly "links") pages of people's websites, and occasionally a footer explicitly mentioning "webring". Also if you squint hard enough, they're massively more common now. They're just usually hidden by adblockers because they're run by Disqus or Outbrain or similar (i.e. complete junk).
- stemlord 3y ago
  Parent didn't say that they don't still get made, just that they are now much more difficult to discover which you repeated
josh-sematic 3y ago
This search engine is designed to find such sites: https://search.marginalia.nu/ https://search.marginalia.nu/
rchaud 3y ago
> There used to be a wealth of smaller "labor-of-love" websites from individuals doing interesting things Those websites are long gone. First, because search engines defaulted to promoting 'recent content' on HTTPS websites, which eliminates a lot of informational sites that were not SSL-secured and archived on university web servers for example. Second, because the time and effort required to compile this information today feels wasted because it can be essentially copied wholesale and reproduced on a content-hungry blogspam website, often without attribution to the original author. In its place are cynical Substacks, Twitters or Tiktoks doing growth marketing ahead of an inevitable book deal or online course sales pitch.
- mangodrunk 3y ago
  Not only are the search engines promoting newer content but they are also (at least Google is) penalizing sites with “old” content [1]. Somewhat related, it’s outrageous to me when a university takes down a professor’s page when they are no longer employed or come up with a standard site for all faculty that is devoid of anything interesting, just boring bios. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37068464 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37068464
6510 3y ago
They made this wild mistake where moderation (which is a good thing) grew into dictating what websites should look like. Search is a struggle to index the web as~is. Like biologists look at a species from afar and document their behavior. It's not like, hey if you want to be in the bird book you can lay 6 eggs at most, they should be smooth egg shaped, light in color and no larger than 12 cm. You must be able to fly and make bird sounds only and only during the day. Most important you must build your own nest! Little Jimmy has many references under his articles, he is not paginating his archives properly, he has many citation.... Lets just take him behind the barn and shoot him.
sanroot99 3y ago
What are current search strategy one employees to find such articles. Nowadays I find it increasingly hard to find such articles.