words have meanings (though of course they evolve over time - fascism used to mean government control over businesses through regulation, now it's just "everything you disagree with")
but "capitalism" has been fairly consistent - rewarding people for investing in the future instead of spending for today.
Since quite some time, but general amnesia is current zeitgeist, which is part of the problem. An endless cycle of forgetting and reposting, information overload. Not that curated, long-lived library of distilled knowledge, that I imagined this would become 20 years ago.
But there's many niches; let's hope things survive where they ought to.
Funny that this article has a huge cookie pop-up that takes up all the visible space on my phone while it denounces how unusable the web has become. Come on.
We all make choices. I agree that the author probably has no power over the newspaper cookies. But they do choose to work for a newspaper with poor decisions.
And they choose to write an article complaining about usability when they know that their newspaper isn’t very usable.
Past the cookie popup one gets a paragraph or two of content, and then a half-screen section of other stuff to drive engagement with the site, rinse, repeat.
Although it's not a very thoughtful article and manages to ignore the sheer number of people that today use the internet compared to even 10 years ago, I can myself relate to what's said. Old days internet was about communities and businesses ran by people with their own interests and products and servers, now it's tech giants and their networks ran by algorithms trying to milk and eat and replace those communities and businesses. I myself stopped using social networks and all of sudden I have nowhere else to interact. Sad.
My theory is that there will eventually be an 2nd dot bomb, as it's further demonstrated that targetted advertising doesn't actually get any better results than just advertising on subject matter related web sites...
The dictionary definition of advertising, according to the OED excluding obsolete and rare usages, is:
"
Verb
3. transitive. To give notice of (something); to make generally known.
4.
a. transitive. To make generally known by means of an announcement in a public medium; spec. (a) to publish information about (a person (now rare), thing, circumstance, or event) so as to attract public attention; (b) to describe or present (a product, service, or the like) in order to promote sales. Frequently with by, in, on the medium specified (as a journal, radio, television, etc.). (Now the most common sense.)
b. intransitive. To publicize or promote something in this way.
Noun
2.
a. The action or process of advertise v. 4; publication of an announcement in a public medium; (concrete) the result of this; advertisements collectively. Cf. self-advertising n. at self- prefix 1b(b).
b. The activity, trade, occupation, or profession of advertising or producing advertisements, now typically for a commercial product or service.
"
I would argue that just because something fits into the definition doesn't mean the thing is what the definition claims it is.
When Plato gave the definition of man as "featherless bipeds", Diogenes plucked a chicken and brought it into Plato's Academy, saying, "Behold! I've brought you a man"
I would limit advertising restrictions to (1) paid (2) indirect (3) commercial speech: any speech where you explicitly compensate a 3rd party to either include (alongside their own speech) or produce (i.e. to launder as their own speech—see homemade NordVPN adverts in YouTube videos, and essentially all "influencers" on IG) in order to affect commercial activity.
As a first party, you could of course be paid to produce any speech you want by the recipients of that speech (e.g. people can buy a book you write yourself, join your YouTube channel, etc.). You can also promote your own commercial activity (e.g. "buy my t-shirts" is allowed because it is direct).
Practically speaking, this would mean that, e.g. Procter and Gamble could promote Tide on their own website, but they couldn't pay anyone else to promote it. An individual could make a video about how much they love Tide, but PG couldn't pay them to make that video (or give them free product, discounts, etc. to induce them to make that video).
Businesses wouldn't be able to pay people to review products, or leave reviews on Amazon, etc.
Things PG could do: go around the country giving free laundry courses where they show people how to use Tide in the best way, while simultaneously extolling the virtues of using Tide vs. its competitors (buy they would not be able to advertise these events, of course, instead relying on word of mouth and their own website).
IMO, limiting advertising (as defined above) would dramatically improve the signal-to-noice ratio of the speech in the world, without limiting anyone's fundamental rights. If anything, it's normalizes the reach of everyone which enhances the positive benefits of free speech.
Ads provide the budget to make cool things happen. I would expect that it would further widen the gap between the haves and the have-nots in terms of inequality.
The internet also didn't have the traffic it does today, nor the storage or bandwidth demand. Once anything gets popular, scale becomes a problem without a significant budget.
A bit of an exaggeration. There's more noise for sure, but you can get a lot more done on the internet now than you ever could before, with more new and useful things emerging all the time. And even if there are issues it's just a clear money making opportunity by improving them.
I've seen various articles about this and frankly, yes lots of people know it's an issue. I'm tired of hearing about the problems, does anyone have any ideas for a solution to this issue? Maybe creating a curated index of sites that are dedicated to small and well known bloggers?
I recall seeing there was a site that someone was personally building with this idea in mind, but I don't recall what it was called.
People need social validation for their personalities. Social media drives people into perfectionism - yet never being enough. You need to modify your entire self image to fit somekind of hazy image of perfect whatever. You are fighting for attention, you need to do ever more crazy and better shit to get more attention.
Other huge societal problems:
- sensorship, misinformation, death of journalism and therefore truth and therefore democracy
Is a well functioning distributed system a possibility? Your own device, or your goverments, or some global 3rd party, you choose, as a host? Let's not give the control of the internet to another monopoly with hardware like amazon, or monopoly with the traffic like cloudfare or whatever. Let's avoid these giant tech monopolies.
The article author is non-technical. I found it interesting that things are apparently now broken enough that non-technical audiences are starting to get upset. Their complaint is really twofold: (a) search used to work but now doesn't, and (b) there is now too much extraneous bullshit on the pages that they get directed to.
Both of these complaints could be fixed by a better internet search engine. Articles like this feel like a signal that conditions for a change in search dominance are finally materialising.
"RIP John Smith, beloved citizen and employee. Bravely sacrificed his health, happiness, and life to bring value to company executives and shareholders."
Written from the ground perspective of general web consumption, but those who moved to higher ground looking for better places to surf the web with higher quality signal / data, saw this problem coming a long while ago. The web moved from being something that served its users, to one that needed to censor the signal / information some people were looking for, due to groupthink (eg politics,) due to copyright or other concerns. First we lost the fantastic web string search engines that could really pinpoint topics, than regular search engines depowered slowly in spits and spats in the decade that followed. Then a few years ago the tables turned and suddenly search engines figured they didn't really need to compete very hard ... here we are today, no more 1000 or 2000 results if the user wants to look over that list, it seems the main crawler search engines have agreed to serve a handful of results instead, fuck the people, what are they going to do about it ...
I have long toyed (since 2011) to address this very BS, with the idea of creating a new simple web format, but token fee for access, the likes of the music and movie industry reps need to pay a $$$$$$$$$ fee to have a limited account, BS search engines are banned outright (along with LLM,) various site types declared by default (ie banner, or a redirector) as well as each page having a token to sum up what it is, eg not spam or spam, - however I've long recognised everything my poor head has been through the last couple of decades I'm frankly not equipped to do it. Oh well, I guess at some point someone will strike on the same type of idea.
> one that needed to censor the signal / information some people were looking for, due to groupthink (eg politics,) due to copyright or other concerns
At the moment, I don't feel like these factors had even a bit part in shaping where we are or what happened. I don't think the web has it any worse than anywhere else in the world generally, and I think it's much better than most places & the rest of computing, which tends to have bigger guard rails as it massifies than the web.
There's been a lot of bad incentives & profit motive slowly eroding conditions, I yeah. Massified systems & consolidation have changed the power dynamic, & stasis/stagnation has somewhat set in.
I'm not sure what you want out of the web then, or what your experience of it is. I'm not referring to social media and associated services at all to be clear, the majority of these social media sites I've encountered the last dozen years hadn't searched well (for something specific) since many, initially or a couple years in, either by agreement with search engines or via constructed means to wall off the bulk of user content ie search for a quote text and search engines bounced around it, even if the term was highly unusual.
As for impact, very much so, just many wouldn't have had a reason to have run into or know what obstacles are on the field. I have done a lot of research on behalf of other people, a lot is plain and simple, some of it was iffy but from my point of view, legitimate. (IMO you only really own something if you can fix it, otherwise you're just paying renting fees albeit under a different name.) It has meant for much of my net use the last two decades, has been using search engines for a wide range of topics, quite the journey sometimes - frankly I've been surprised how much effort some companies put into burying information (even as far as creating a honeypot affair (site/account) to just bush any one seeking a bit of help) - a lot of the time it's something that might otherwise stop some poor sod from becoming a sucker of an overpriced fix. This action prompts spammers (some are direct, some are very subtle and involve themselves in forums) who try to capitalise on a market that's had the information contained by offering easy results to find - generally illegal downloads which further waters down legitimate search results. At some point there's a huge number of results and yes it further swamps search engines that are genuinely trying to deliver. Overall this now means I've not offered to do so much researching the last few years due to the very limited pool most search engines want to swim in.
Apps not built to be searchable are 100% of native apps, so any web apps that are searchable are a win, as far as internetworking goes.
Regardless, this feels both conspiratorially couched (when simple bland Occam's Razors issues of these being necessary massification as a couple billion people all login). These complex issues don't feel like censorship today. The information has a harder time competing to get out but if you have a network of people who listen to you you will have fairly unimpeded channels in almost every place on earth.
You're also standing on authority with 'trust me' & I don't have any known reasons I would trust you.
In a sense anything behind an app, is an app that only runs on a smart phone or similar, but not an ordinary computer, thus closed off from the ordinary World Wide Web, it isn't really included in the trouble this article alludes to.
Logging in isn't something one should have to do to see the web. Again the search results in question should be in regard to the WWW, ie anything like twitter, just what faces the WWW for open viewing.
Primarily it's the problem that in wanting to know something that should be easy to find out - in a given town, when are various events on and where ... since most regions have at least one official site with an event planner buried somewhere in their site, for when certain functions are on or who is holding an event, that the search engines don't duly return a link that's fulfils the request by selecting the region's given list of events ... more often, barely even tries to, barring focusing on the user's history / location and triggering suggestible businesses that have paid for advertising, or who knows, for some other reason. Yes it should be something a good search engine can work out, the person is looking for events or functions, and the algorithm should have long worked out at least one of the better results is from the list of events most local authorities in a given region post up to the web eg [1] but not left for the person to try and focus themselves what words might help herd the search engine to coughing up a more suitable result.
I guess you meant appeal to authority ... well, I can't help that if you see someone who claims as such who actually does have vast experience using search engines. Yes you don't have to believe a word I say, nor trust me. I am however rather comforted that others who are of my vintage, who'd recall computing.net in its golden years at the start of the 00s, would likewise resonate with the view these issues were beginning to plague search results some time in the early 10s, though we might not agree on when it got to the point of annoyance. I guess it depends on soon the likes of google started to fight against those who always used focused a search entry for every request.
It's not just one thing though, sure it seems like search engines aren't trying so hard lately, but it certainly doesn't help that so many websites have shut off simple html access to all visitors, and created for permitted crawlers, some texty BS to capture interest ... so it's little wonder amongst many other problems why it's hard for basic search engines competing with the web's leaders to do comparable job.
As for censoring by various means, I've struck it many many times, more commonly the tactic has been artificial sites, burying hundreds of red herring results posted to different areas of the web to hide real results. I've also seen large forums wiped without cause or reason apart from someone disclosing "apparently harmless" titbits on something technical and perhaps protected under copyright, but finding none of the forum was cached at google afterwards is certainly odd when previously google used to cache various results from the forum. Again I'm not asking for anyone to believe me, I don't need to, those who did what I did for some time have already bumped into it for themselves perhaps to a larger extent depending on what areas they were searching ... no doubt they would insist they could have said similar as I've written with much less words as well as better - they're probably right. But I do say this from the many many years of being on the net doing little else but conducting searches, a boring existence but much for the benefit of other people, some of it for professionals (locating old drivers for MS3.1 onwards) and as well as lending my limited expertise to various hobby areas like music identification forums and help forums like computing.net back in the early 00s.
Tbh, “live music in …” wasn’t searchable back then either, I believe. The issue with that is that places, products and people may or may not list their full characteristics on the internet or this is simply unrankable due to the noise from other sources.
Btw, I opened a local city-map app on my phone and “cafe with live music” yielded a full map of them. Maybe you just search in a wrong place. Search for a city map instead. For decorative flowers/etc, maybe you should look for cosplay blogs and yt channels, they already solved it. Not saying that’s the true way, but naive queries were always weak google-fu, even before aggressive seo.
48 comments
[ 0.25 ms ] story [ 104 ms ] threadbut "capitalism" has been fairly consistent - rewarding people for investing in the future instead of spending for today.
But there's many niches; let's hope things survive where they ought to.
And they choose to write an article complaining about usability when they know that their newspaper isn’t very usable.
No hard feelings. But it’s not great.
Otherwise the article is pretty bland.
Not because of this but rather the zeitgeist : I will give Gemini another shot.
It would turn the world upside down but probably in a good way.
I think you're right, I think it's a huge bubble.
I want to know how you equate normal conversation to advertisement, because to me that seems like the linguistics version of moral relativism.
" Verb
3. transitive. To give notice of (something); to make generally known.
4. a. transitive. To make generally known by means of an announcement in a public medium; spec. (a) to publish information about (a person (now rare), thing, circumstance, or event) so as to attract public attention; (b) to describe or present (a product, service, or the like) in order to promote sales. Frequently with by, in, on the medium specified (as a journal, radio, television, etc.). (Now the most common sense.)
b. intransitive. To publicize or promote something in this way.
Noun
2. a. The action or process of advertise v. 4; publication of an announcement in a public medium; (concrete) the result of this; advertisements collectively. Cf. self-advertising n. at self- prefix 1b(b).
b. The activity, trade, occupation, or profession of advertising or producing advertisements, now typically for a commercial product or service. "
When Plato gave the definition of man as "featherless bipeds", Diogenes plucked a chicken and brought it into Plato's Academy, saying, "Behold! I've brought you a man"
As a first party, you could of course be paid to produce any speech you want by the recipients of that speech (e.g. people can buy a book you write yourself, join your YouTube channel, etc.). You can also promote your own commercial activity (e.g. "buy my t-shirts" is allowed because it is direct).
Practically speaking, this would mean that, e.g. Procter and Gamble could promote Tide on their own website, but they couldn't pay anyone else to promote it. An individual could make a video about how much they love Tide, but PG couldn't pay them to make that video (or give them free product, discounts, etc. to induce them to make that video).
Businesses wouldn't be able to pay people to review products, or leave reviews on Amazon, etc.
Things PG could do: go around the country giving free laundry courses where they show people how to use Tide in the best way, while simultaneously extolling the virtues of using Tide vs. its competitors (buy they would not be able to advertise these events, of course, instead relying on word of mouth and their own website).
IMO, limiting advertising (as defined above) would dramatically improve the signal-to-noice ratio of the speech in the world, without limiting anyone's fundamental rights. If anything, it's normalizes the reach of everyone which enhances the positive benefits of free speech.
Once people started calling typing to each other on the internet "community", it was basically over for actual community...
Now, you're pwn'd...
I recall seeing there was a site that someone was personally building with this idea in mind, but I don't recall what it was called.
Let's start with the huge societal problems:
- optimizing for addiction
- fighting for attention
People need social validation for their personalities. Social media drives people into perfectionism - yet never being enough. You need to modify your entire self image to fit somekind of hazy image of perfect whatever. You are fighting for attention, you need to do ever more crazy and better shit to get more attention.
Other huge societal problems:
- sensorship, misinformation, death of journalism and therefore truth and therefore democracy
- centralized greedy growth-seeking monopolist culture kills innovation, creates dystopia
Is a well functioning distributed system a possibility? Your own device, or your goverments, or some global 3rd party, you choose, as a host? Let's not give the control of the internet to another monopoly with hardware like amazon, or monopoly with the traffic like cloudfare or whatever. Let's avoid these giant tech monopolies.
Both of these complaints could be fixed by a better internet search engine. Articles like this feel like a signal that conditions for a change in search dominance are finally materialising.
This is really the current state of capitalism as a whole.
Why would anyone even get a disease except to support shareholder value...
I have long toyed (since 2011) to address this very BS, with the idea of creating a new simple web format, but token fee for access, the likes of the music and movie industry reps need to pay a $$$$$$$$$ fee to have a limited account, BS search engines are banned outright (along with LLM,) various site types declared by default (ie banner, or a redirector) as well as each page having a token to sum up what it is, eg not spam or spam, - however I've long recognised everything my poor head has been through the last couple of decades I'm frankly not equipped to do it. Oh well, I guess at some point someone will strike on the same type of idea.
At the moment, I don't feel like these factors had even a bit part in shaping where we are or what happened. I don't think the web has it any worse than anywhere else in the world generally, and I think it's much better than most places & the rest of computing, which tends to have bigger guard rails as it massifies than the web.
There's been a lot of bad incentives & profit motive slowly eroding conditions, I yeah. Massified systems & consolidation have changed the power dynamic, & stasis/stagnation has somewhat set in.
As for impact, very much so, just many wouldn't have had a reason to have run into or know what obstacles are on the field. I have done a lot of research on behalf of other people, a lot is plain and simple, some of it was iffy but from my point of view, legitimate. (IMO you only really own something if you can fix it, otherwise you're just paying renting fees albeit under a different name.) It has meant for much of my net use the last two decades, has been using search engines for a wide range of topics, quite the journey sometimes - frankly I've been surprised how much effort some companies put into burying information (even as far as creating a honeypot affair (site/account) to just bush any one seeking a bit of help) - a lot of the time it's something that might otherwise stop some poor sod from becoming a sucker of an overpriced fix. This action prompts spammers (some are direct, some are very subtle and involve themselves in forums) who try to capitalise on a market that's had the information contained by offering easy results to find - generally illegal downloads which further waters down legitimate search results. At some point there's a huge number of results and yes it further swamps search engines that are genuinely trying to deliver. Overall this now means I've not offered to do so much researching the last few years due to the very limited pool most search engines want to swim in.
Regardless, this feels both conspiratorially couched (when simple bland Occam's Razors issues of these being necessary massification as a couple billion people all login). These complex issues don't feel like censorship today. The information has a harder time competing to get out but if you have a network of people who listen to you you will have fairly unimpeded channels in almost every place on earth.
You're also standing on authority with 'trust me' & I don't have any known reasons I would trust you.
Logging in isn't something one should have to do to see the web. Again the search results in question should be in regard to the WWW, ie anything like twitter, just what faces the WWW for open viewing.
Primarily it's the problem that in wanting to know something that should be easy to find out - in a given town, when are various events on and where ... since most regions have at least one official site with an event planner buried somewhere in their site, for when certain functions are on or who is holding an event, that the search engines don't duly return a link that's fulfils the request by selecting the region's given list of events ... more often, barely even tries to, barring focusing on the user's history / location and triggering suggestible businesses that have paid for advertising, or who knows, for some other reason. Yes it should be something a good search engine can work out, the person is looking for events or functions, and the algorithm should have long worked out at least one of the better results is from the list of events most local authorities in a given region post up to the web eg [1] but not left for the person to try and focus themselves what words might help herd the search engine to coughing up a more suitable result.
I guess you meant appeal to authority ... well, I can't help that if you see someone who claims as such who actually does have vast experience using search engines. Yes you don't have to believe a word I say, nor trust me. I am however rather comforted that others who are of my vintage, who'd recall computing.net in its golden years at the start of the 00s, would likewise resonate with the view these issues were beginning to plague search results some time in the early 10s, though we might not agree on when it got to the point of annoyance. I guess it depends on soon the likes of google started to fight against those who always used focused a search entry for every request.
It's not just one thing though, sure it seems like search engines aren't trying so hard lately, but it certainly doesn't help that so many websites have shut off simple html access to all visitors, and created for permitted crawlers, some texty BS to capture interest ... so it's little wonder amongst many other problems why it's hard for basic search engines competing with the web's leaders to do comparable job.
As for censoring by various means, I've struck it many many times, more commonly the tactic has been artificial sites, burying hundreds of red herring results posted to different areas of the web to hide real results. I've also seen large forums wiped without cause or reason apart from someone disclosing "apparently harmless" titbits on something technical and perhaps protected under copyright, but finding none of the forum was cached at google afterwards is certainly odd when previously google used to cache various results from the forum. Again I'm not asking for anyone to believe me, I don't need to, those who did what I did for some time have already bumped into it for themselves perhaps to a larger extent depending on what areas they were searching ... no doubt they would insist they could have said similar as I've written with much less words as well as better - they're probably right. But I do say this from the many many years of being on the net doing little else but conducting searches, a boring existence but much for the benefit of other people, some of it for professionals (locating old drivers for MS3.1 onwards) and as well as lending my limited expertise to various hobby areas like music identification forums and help forums like computing.net back in the early 00s.
[1] the-printer ↗ I cannot feel sympathy when the pincers of capitalism deflate the ego of a web denizen. wruza ↗ Tbh, “live music in …” wasn’t searchable back then either, I believe. The issue with that is that places, products and people may or may not list their full characteristics on the internet or this is simply unrankable due to the noise from other sources. dopidopHN ↗ I live in New Orleans, Live music is a serious business. Like … a major revenue stream for the City. [dead] aaron695 ↗ [dead] smogger914 ↗ Cookie consent pop up and broken back button. I could not read this.
Btw, I opened a local city-map app on my phone and “cafe with live music” yielded a full map of them. Maybe you just search in a wrong place. Search for a city map instead. For decorative flowers/etc, maybe you should look for cosplay blogs and yt channels, they already solved it. Not saying that’s the true way, but naive queries were always weak google-fu, even before aggressive seo.
Theirs is a myriad of source. Most sucks. The best is : « wwoz music calendar ». A local radio station. Barebone website but it’s exhaustif or almost.
Then some ad-driven free newspapers and website combo ( « gambit », but it can’t follow the every day schedule of wwoz )
Then a long list of crappy website that will have a sub section of the above.
Recently I’ve seen a user content powered website advertise…
And it looks great : black&white not image, php website.
-/- My point : Google will bring wwoz on third places. And then a boatload of « event » websites that sucks.
Second points : the best source are incredibly low tech and free of ads.