5 ms·

Sure, let's blame all of society's problems on Facebook some more. That's a new idea. I hate how much this idea get's promoted here. That fact is that 99% of bl

by spyspy 12y ago

Sure, let's blame all of society's problems on Facebook some more. That's a new idea. I hate how much this idea get's promoted here. That fact is that 99% of blogs are complete shit. Along with the democratization of opinions came a lot of crud. Of courses there are good quality ones commenters will be frothing to post about, but expecting an ecosystem of junk to remain consistently successful is purely utopian.

graeme 12y ago
>That fact is that 99% of blogs are complete shit. Along with the democratization of opinions came a lot of crud. But good stuff came out of that crud. Now people do their writing on Facebook and Reddit. Those have much lower or no placement in Google. I find google results impoverished compared to 6-10 years ago. You used to get commentary from people, and it wasn't half bad. Now most searches return commercial results. I often give up and go search relevant subreddits for many types of queries. 99% of Reddit and Facebook are crap too. Anything produced by humanity in general will be. But good stuff gets produced too.
- kingmanaz 12y ago
  Agreed. The web seemed far more sincere in the days of Deja News. Today's search results carry all the candidness of a car lot teeming with felony-convicted-used-minivan-salesmen. Somewhere, somehow, a switch was flipped and "discourse?" became "discounts!".
  - Yhippa 12y ago
    People were excited to be part of something new an add to the overall discourse of humanity. Then it became a question of "How can I monetize content?" which require pumping out low-value content just to try to make a few bucks.
- ashark 12y ago
  It seems to me that somewhere around 2007-2009 the spammers won, and Google's search quality plummeted. It hasn't recovered. If anything it's kept gradually getting worse. A handful of top sites show up for damn near every search, followed by page after page of spam sites and clickbait. Remember when the second page would sometimes have some nice and relevant links on it?
  - graeme 12y ago
    I think that's only half the equation though. I follow a few niches where non-spammers produce content regularly, and you get good results. My own niche is one. The barrier to entry to create reasonable content is high, so spammers have stayed out. The second and third and even fourth pages routinely produce good results. But in niches where there's no reason for experts or ordinary people to create text on standalone sites, the results are junk. I remember this being different. Now to find good stuff I have to search Hacker News, Reddit, etc.
- visakanv 12y ago
  Yup! Here's the interesting, counter-intuitive thing: 99.9% of blogs can be shit, but there are literally millions of blogs. So if you have 1,000,000 blogs, and 99.9% are shit, you still have 1,000 good blogs! If only 0.01% of blogs were good, you'd still have 100 great blogs- which is excellent for the public good. The same long tail effects appear on things like Wikipedia, too. Wikipedia on average might have say 10-20% reliability, because 80-90% of the pages are crap. But that's because most of those pages are really obscure. The 10% that are most observed- say, pages about chemistry and physics- are updated very regularly, even quicker that science textbooks. It seems that people are really bad at thinking about this clearly, probably because we imagine quality is a yes-or-no proposition.
deleted 12y ago
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pyre 12y ago
> Sure, let's blame all of society's problems on Facebook some more. For you to make this claim, you are also claiming that the parent post is blaming "all of society's problems" of yester-year (pre-Facebook) on AOL. That's a rather obtuse reading, bordering on deliberate.
zabramow 12y ago
Actually, I think that FB has been good for blogging. It helps get the crap off of blogging. People who can't actually maintain a blog write on FB and think of it as their blog.
visakanv 12y ago
> Expecting an ecosystem of junk to remaain consistently successful is purely utopian I'm curious to hear your opinions on the quality of Wikipedia, and its success and/or failure! Is it doing well, or poorly? Do you prefer say, Encyclopedia Britannica? Genuinely curious.
deleted 12y ago
[deleted]

by spyspy 12y ago

graeme 12y ago

>That fact is that 99% of blogs are complete shit. Along with the democratization of opinions came a lot of crud. But good stuff came out of that crud. Now people do their writing on Facebook and Reddit. Those have much lower or no placement in Google. I find google results impoverished compared to 6-10 years ago. You used to get commentary from people, and it wasn't half bad. Now most searches return commercial results. I often give up and go search relevant subreddits for many types of queries. 99% of Reddit and Facebook are crap too. Anything produced by humanity in general will be. But good stuff gets produced too.

kingmanaz 12y ago
Agreed. The web seemed far more sincere in the days of Deja News. Today's search results carry all the candidness of a car lot teeming with felony-convicted-used-minivan-salesmen. Somewhere, somehow, a switch was flipped and "discourse?" became "discounts!".
- Yhippa 12y ago
  People were excited to be part of something new an add to the overall discourse of humanity. Then it became a question of "How can I monetize content?" which require pumping out low-value content just to try to make a few bucks.
ashark 12y ago
It seems to me that somewhere around 2007-2009 the spammers won, and Google's search quality plummeted. It hasn't recovered. If anything it's kept gradually getting worse. A handful of top sites show up for damn near every search, followed by page after page of spam sites and clickbait. Remember when the second page would sometimes have some nice and relevant links on it?
- graeme 12y ago
  I think that's only half the equation though. I follow a few niches where non-spammers produce content regularly, and you get good results. My own niche is one. The barrier to entry to create reasonable content is high, so spammers have stayed out. The second and third and even fourth pages routinely produce good results. But in niches where there's no reason for experts or ordinary people to create text on standalone sites, the results are junk. I remember this being different. Now to find good stuff I have to search Hacker News, Reddit, etc.
visakanv 12y ago
Yup! Here's the interesting, counter-intuitive thing: 99.9% of blogs can be shit, but there are literally millions of blogs. So if you have 1,000,000 blogs, and 99.9% are shit, you still have 1,000 good blogs! If only 0.01% of blogs were good, you'd still have 100 great blogs- which is excellent for the public good. The same long tail effects appear on things like Wikipedia, too. Wikipedia on average might have say 10-20% reliability, because 80-90% of the pages are crap. But that's because most of those pages are really obscure. The 10% that are most observed- say, pages about chemistry and physics- are updated very regularly, even quicker that science textbooks. It seems that people are really bad at thinking about this clearly, probably because we imagine quality is a yes-or-no proposition.

deleted 12y ago

[deleted]

pyre 12y ago

> Sure, let's blame all of society's problems on Facebook some more. For you to make this claim, you are also claiming that the parent post is blaming "all of society's problems" of yester-year (pre-Facebook) on AOL. That's a rather obtuse reading, bordering on deliberate.

zabramow 12y ago

Actually, I think that FB has been good for blogging. It helps get the crap off of blogging. People who can't actually maintain a blog write on FB and think of it as their blog.

visakanv 12y ago

> Expecting an ecosystem of junk to remaain consistently successful is purely utopian I'm curious to hear your opinions on the quality of Wikipedia, and its success and/or failure! Is it doing well, or poorly? Do you prefer say, Encyclopedia Britannica? Genuinely curious.

deleted 12y ago

[deleted]