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The reason for this misalignment in my opinion is painfully simple. Imagine you are making Youtube videos for money. You write a clickbait title. You make a fu
by AlienRobot 3y ago
The reason for this misalignment in my opinion is painfully simple.
Imagine you are making Youtube videos for money. You write a clickbait title. You make a funny face in the thumbnail. You talk about your sponsors. You tell your viewers to like, share on Facebook, and subscribe.
A nerd would hate this. They use an ad-blocker and a browser extension to skip sponsors in Youtube videos. They deleted their Facebook. They might not even have a Google account to subscribe. They think anyone who writes clickbait titles and make funny faces in thumbnails is a moron who makes low quality videos not worth watching.
But the nerd's father, mother, grandma, sister, uncle, wife, and child couldn't care less. They all have Facebook accounts. They get baited by the titles all the time. They feel some deep, irresistible attraction to shocked faces in tiny clickable images. They share their funny videos constantly and shamelessly. And they even watch ads by accident sometimes thinking it's the actual video.
Metrics are a popularity contest and nerds just can't win a popularity contest.
There is just no way to quantify that professionalUnbiased and proHobbyist are better when SEO spam and professionalBiased are getting all the likes, shares, and links. And this is all partly due to the fact that the nerd audience of these first two deliberately wants to be out of the metrics in first place.
By hating and avoiding the modern system so hard, they failed to influence it in their favor.
Now that I think about it, I just realized that if nerds stop using Google because Google results suck, that will make Google suck even more for them because they are no longer influencing Google's algorithms.
- ethbr1 3y agoA future in which Google degrades further because intelligent people are using Kagi et al. and Google's feedback loops further degrade their own product is a future I want to live in. Eventually, superior products win. That's how Google beat Yahoo.
- AlienRobot 3y agoYeah, about that... reread my entire post. >Metrics are a popularity contest and nerds just can't win a popularity contest. Even if Google SERPs are all garbage, they still win if most people are fine with garbage results. It doesn't matter if a loud minority of nerds bitch about it in their blogs and podcasts and research papers and hacker forums. Most people will still use Google and they will be "okay" with spammy results. I know this sounds crazy, but if spammy results weren't drawing real numbers, they wouldn't be a viable business model in first place.
- ethbr1 3y ago> I know this sounds crazy, but if spammy results weren't drawing real numbers, they wouldn't be a viable business model in first place. I would agree... in a competitive marketplace open to new entrants. I don't think we've had that after ~2010. Defaults or pushed adoption on dominant platforms are powerful. Look at Chrome adoption once Google started using the homepage to push it. So nowadays, I would say we can be stuck in a local optimum by virtue of marketing dollars and platform defaults/controls. Or to put it another way -- if Google delivered half as quality (by some objective metric) search results as a free version of Kagi -- do you honestly think search share (including mobile) would shift? And how long would that take?