I don't know if it's Google that is dying. It's more like a large segment of the public facing internet is wilting. The user experience without an adblocker is almost nothing but ads, popovers, permission requests and chat boxes, sign-up-to-the-newsletter requests. And these are the websites that aren't trying to bait-and-switch you
For example, this is the screen I'm showed when I navigate to www.producthunt.com: https://imgur.com/a/9GgLIBM -- like you can't even tell what website it is, they're covering their own logo with pop overs. This simply can not be good UX, or marketing. It's not a good first impression.
There are healthy websites out there but they're really struggling to punch through all the crap.
It's curious because I feel we've seen this process play out once before. In the late-stage dot com era, there was a moment where you had these websites that were just absolutely plastered in ads and vomited popups at you when you visited them in a way that is very reminiscent of today. It's in part what led to the first popup blockers, and later ad blockers. Search engines were also cracking down on this stuff pretty hard since they just weren't good search results.
I imagine Google is in an awkward spot because, since ads is their bread and butter, they can't meaningfully penalize these websites without eating into their own bottom line. Many of the most intrusive ads are google ads.
I tried to use Google to see what would be good brand to replace a decade old small electrical appliance that failed a couple of months ago. Absolutely none of the results were helpful until I tried the "append Reddit to the search terms" trick.
Immediately, I found a link someone had shared to a consumer reports style review of different brands at different price points.
The content I wanted was out there, but Google is now optimized for ad revenue, not finding the content I asked for.
Agreed. What I've seen become more common is the following:
* They'll start by having <5 real comments that seem like a legitimate person wrote them
* Account suddenly starts just re-posting very popular older posts, and other bots chime in that also copy the top comments from that post letter-for-letter
It is impressive that Google manages to rank reddit threads very well though. They don't have reddits internal data, do they look at reddit upvote scores or what? Why would the helpful thread be higher ranked than all the content spam on reddit? Google must do something really clever in order to be so good at indexing useful reddit threads.
I've found that Google is willing to return one or two Reddit links but then reverts to its usual SEO crapspam for the rest of the results. Even "site:reddit.com" only returns only a fraction of the discussions related to the topic. The site's been around for over a decade, and most topics have been discussed dozens of times or more.
The way the original pagerank algorithm works, links to the original article would increase the score of a Reddit post linking to the article. Why Reddit posts are ranked higher in a default search I’m not sure, but this would definitely explain why site:Reddit works.
Do people link to reddit threads a lot? I'd assume such a signal would be very noisy and not very reliable, so spam sites would just link a lot to their content spam on reddit.
No, I mean why does it find the right reddit thread instead any of the billions of other reddit threads? That can't be trivial to do since reddit themselves don't do it well.
It was probably linked to by other websites. I've been seeing more news organizations directly linking to reddit, and I believe Google manually boosted reddit results a few years ago. You used to never see them in search results, but now they have started showing up.
Google used to have a "Forums" tab right on the top that would filter results to random PHPbb instances and the like. It was generally pretty great. As far as I'm concerned, the decision to remove that was when Google started dying.
Uh, reddit is 99% influencers influencing these days. You enthusiastically consumed and even recommended an ad and have no idea.
You can't even tell who they are anymore. How do I know? Because I've been paid to post on reddit. I only do it for products I've actually used and things I like, but I got paid nobody has a clue. Not even you.
It's just the state of the web. Google search uses metrics for the web sites (number of links, etc) so Reddit threads do not rank high compared to real web sites.
Our attention is the only valuable thing left. Browsers run competing tech stacks and pile on and draw off a mass of blinking things trying to get the attention. It's a tiny little war happening in real time on our screens.
AI chat things are liquids held in vials, a thumb flick away from pouring into our favorite places online, changing them irrevocably. Will our attention in these places (reddit, here, et al) remain high when most of the people we're talking with are algorithmic?
Media companies create new shows and pull them away more quickly than we can finish consuming them, as realtime engagement metrics quickly show their bosses which must be most profitable, most popular, most attention grabbing.
It makes a good case for going back: watching shows from decades earlier, that have a beginning middle and end. Dropping social media time for books. And the missing analogue, how to give up on google searches because they too, are at a parity of value with their offering and their attention stealing properties.
I'm just an angry person shaking his fist at the sky from an armchair. I love these threads because I always come away with a new perspective.
> Our attention is the only valuable thing left. Browsers run competing tech stacks and pile on and draw off a mass of blinking things trying to get the attention. It's a tiny little war happening in real time on our screens.
This seems fantastically counter-productive though. If you want to capture someone's attention, you've got to remove the distractions and clean up your presentation. The effort seems misplaced to focus entirely on drawing attention at the expense of maintaining it.
It’s more about selling someone’s attention than holding it. The best possible outcome for both websites and Google is for a user to click on on a website from search and then immediately click on an ad. To the extent you find the site useful and don’t need what’s being advertised, that’s a fail for both of them.
I'm not saying one is necessarily better than the other, but I think the 2 different UIs are serving 2 different goals. Focus requires commitment at some level, and I don't think most websites are predicated on the notion that the average user is committed, at least initially. Maybe once you make a sale to them and they get access to your product you can safely prioritize focus because you now have that commitment.
I think engineers generally are above average on the skill of summoning focus, as you kind of need it in order to perform math, analysis, and logic.
Media companies pulling shows so quickly makes me sad. It's one of those cases where I think they constantly misread the data. "People don't watch shows with a long story arc as they come out, so we should cancel them" is really "people don't trust us to continue shows with a long story arc until a good stopping place, so they don't want to invest the time in starting new ones"
You know what's still more valuable than our attention? Our money.
The only reason they want our attention is to get our money.
A big part of the problem is how many people simply don't have enough money, due to the stagnation of real wages and the increase in the cost of housing, health care, and higher education, among other things. If everyone had a reasonable amount of disposable income, as is true in a healthy society/economy, it would be much, much more viable for many websites and apps to charge for their usage, rather than being ad-supported.
Hmmh, so why do so many people complain about paying for all the different streaming services like Disney plus, Netflix, Amazon prime, etc.? It's really peanuts compared to the value delivered.
If you consider "the value delivered" to be the totality of all the content on the platforms, then sure. But that's not actually valuable to most of the people subscribing, so it's ultimately a useless way of looking at it.
Any given person is only going to care about some small fraction of the media available for watching, and when that fraction is spread out across 6 different streaming services, the "value" they're getting from any single one of those is fairly small.
Furthermore, similar to what ldhough says, many of us remember when we could get basically all that content on Netflix, and we know perfectly well that a) the content providers could be making reasonable amounts of money through a streaming deal like that, and b) the reason they decided to launch their own service is one part insatiable desire for ever increasing profit, one part unrelenting crusade for absolute control over everything they own. Nowhere in there is "value to the customer".
There's a quote that I've seen go 'round a few times, to the effect of "the streaming services really need to remember that their entire value proposition is being slightly more convenient than piracy."
Seems to me the insatiable desire here is that of the customer for free or nearly free stuff. What is a reasonable amount of money? You know that Amazon spent $465 Million dollars on just one season of Lord of the rings, right?
"Value" is a very personal thing, though. You may find something is great value for money, and others may not, and neither is wrong.
Personally, I don't find that the streaming services are good value. I don't complain about it, though. I just don't subscribe to them.
Also, buying services doesn't satisfy the "shopping as a recreational activity" itch. A big part of the recreation is the actual shopping, and coming home with physical stuff.
I think it depends. All else being equal in terms of your daily commute, owning a big and expensive car is often seen as better than owning a more affordable smaller car.
Eh it was great value when it was just Netflix or just two services but now I feel like there's often only 0-1 shows on a given platform that I'm interested in at any one time. It isn't "good value" to pay $15+ a month each for Netflix/Prime/Disney/HBO/Hulu/AppleTV and only use one or two of them in a given month. Because Prime Video is bundled with regular Amazon Prime I keep that active and activate and deactivate the others based on when they come out with seasons of shows I care to watch. I also think a lot of complaints are about the platforms increasingly making the experience worse like making me pay to remove ads when I'm already paying for the service, or what Netflix is pulling with their family plans.
About a decade ago I used to pay $45+ a month for a very basic cable package that contained mostly public stations and a few of the standard stations that you get a hotels, etc. At the same time my parents paid around $100+ a month for their cable package with a better channel selection.
So, to me, even paying $60-$80 for various streaming services that are all on-demand (which wasn't the case for the cable I used to have) is still an amazing deal.
Oh, and I don't have to sit through ads every 5 minutes.
> A big part of the problem is how many people simply don't have enough money
Sounds like money isn’t valuable as a target if it doesn’t exist.
But fwiw the scarcity of disposable income is why there is such an arms race with advertisers- they’re all chasing the same fleeting dollars across the internet.
> I imagine Google is in an awkward spot because, since ads is their bread and butter, they can't meaningfully penalize these websites without eating into their own bottom line. Many of the most intrusive ads are google ads.
The fun thing is that NOT fixing this will kill them long term as well - they're like meth heads seeing how the drug is destroying their body and the short-term optimizing managers, C-suites and, in the end, stock market cannot make a decision to make a bit less money to clean themselves up and wean off the drug that's killing them. Easier to fire people isn't it?
Their only Hope at long term viability is something like the wall between advertising and editorial at old school media companies. Yes, it’s fashionable to be jaded but it really did work that way.
Google needs its product people to not know or care about as revenue. They need to make search as efficient as possible, without regard for whether a good search result reduces ad clicks.
Revenue would go do, but not catastrophically. And they’d have a sustainable business that would be hard to disrupt.
This is basically a pricing problem. G needs to strike a balance between the naked profitability of selling more ugly and dysfunctional ads versus increasing user delight by delivering more useful search results. While adding more ads boosts their revenue per search, the concomitant loss in value to the user is driving us away per result. The consequence: the user is increasingly looking elsewhere to escape the imbalance between Google's single minded focus on boosting revenue, damn the user.
Many of us have blunted the worst of G search's ugliness using ad blockers, but the polluting of their results by hiding useful content behind myriad lines of useless SEO detritus still dominates, and this loss of value as a utility inescapably poisons their life blood.
Until G's management realizes that their salvation lies NOT in blithely driving away customers, and instead strike a better balance by employing filters that better reject the more irrelevant and less profitable noise among their results, they will continue their current march toward oblivion -- as smarter competitors serve up more palatable search fare, and eat Google's lunch.
Honestly the problem is that Google has been trying to fix it. Alternative and diverse incomes is the solution.
Everyone wants to make a good product, but ads make a product worse. Everyone wants to make a heavily used product but pay-per-use or subscriptions are limiting.
Google Cloud+Workplace, YouTube Premium, Play Store, Nest, ahem Stadia. Google has plenty of attempts at building products that make money without ads. The problem is that they’re expensive and not nearly as profitable.
LLM are bad at search, but people seem to like they. It gives them a clean re-start of search and maybe they’ll use it to do a search subscription where they can retry building their one good product without ads. Probably not though.
> What almost everyone wants to make is a profitable product
I actually think Google and many tech companies have the opposite problem. They forget about monetization until after they made a desirable product, then they have no way to make money unless they shoe-horn ads into it.
> a large segment of the public facing internet is wiltin
I noticed that many teenagers today, despite the abundance of technology around them, are a lot less technological than the previous generation. When I was young, almost everyone in my school knew how to download (pirate) stuff from the internet, burn CDs, copy cracks, modify config files, etc. Nowadays, I see some young people not knowing how to use the maps' functionality on their phones, and only be "proficient" in a few apps like Email, TikTok and Instagram.
I do think that the PC/internet being less accessible before forced people to learn more about computers. Because everything is so fast and easy nowadays and there are so many sources of information, no one really needs to spend that time.
So what about a search engine that penalises ads heavily? Would that not be interesting to companies like Wikipedia or Apple that don't need ads to survive?
Sounds to me like such a search engine could gain market share rapidly. Is there such a search engine already out there?
I tried my test search "California style burrito in Austin" and the first page was entirely reddit results. Clicking over to "map" resulted in a single wrong result.
Isn't this the exact problem? How can websites stay afloat unless you pay for it in one way or another? I guess the choice is buy the product or be the product.
I've been paying for Kagi for 8 months and it's been fine for me. I can live with it in a way I could never live with DDG.
I find the syllogism here a little hard to follow, because here is what the first bit looks like to me:
1. Web search is useful, both for work/productivity and recreation.
2. Running servers to index the internet is a scale of compute beyond the effort and expense of most or all of home users.
3. Web search has distinct economies of scale when applied.
4. Said economies must be funded in some way.
5. There are two proposed models: ad-supported and subscription.
6. We do not like the effects of ad-support in the context of Google.
So the options are to either choose a different add-supported method (with the understanding that it may well meet Google's fate) or else pay for the product directly (subscription).
Frankly, the only reason I haven't signed up for something like this is that DuckDuckGo has been good enough for me lately. It might not always be, but it has been so far.
So I take the view after step 6 that, for the time being, I'm willing to jump from ad supported platform to ad supported platform, but I say that while admitting I'm a bad search stretch away from switching.
In case you need a nudge from another very happy kagi user, consider trying it out.
I used kagi for a few months when it was still in beta (and thus free) and had to decide if I wanted to pay for it to keep using it, or go back to ad supported internet search.
After wincing at the price for a bit I realised that my expectations for how much search should cost were all based on free ad supported search engines. The value I derive from a good search engine is enormous, and easily visible if you imagine the internet without it.
This makes paying for kagi a nobrainer. Their search results are really good and they have an incentive to keep it that way.
It's a solid product, with a great value proposition (if you recalibrate your expectation) and I am also regularly reminded that this is how to actually vote with your wallet. I feel like we need kagi (or something like it) to succeed. If it turns out that paid search is not a viable business, then what chance do we have left for a search engine that has its intentions aligned with its users?
But it's first and foremost a great experience. Fast, great results, clean layout and a bunch of nice user-centric features on top.
The idealism just helps to accept a cost.
Seconding (as a paying consumer) -- sign up for a month and try the experience for yourself.
It shows you the alternative Internet (ad-free, spam free, SEO-crap listicles not on the results page) that everyone here is constantly carping about missing.
If you want this reality, pay for it to help it exist. Else, put up with ads.
> 5. There are two proposed models: ad-supported and subscription.
For the record, there are many other possible models. (I realize you may be saying that in this thread there are 2 proposed models, but I want to say this because people here seem to think there are only ever 2 possibilities.)
Some other models include:
1. Patronage ala public radio/TV where you are asked to pay for it, but don't have to. If enough people do, everyone can use it for free. (Wikipedia, one of the top 10 sites on the internet by traffic, works this way.)
2. Donations (probably not viable for most businesses, but sometimes works out)
3. Partially or fully funded by some other business which benefits from people using it. For example, if Apple wanted to start their own search engine without ads, but that only worked with their devices, they could probably figure out a way to do that and they would make money from selling the devices, and not ads on the search engine. (Not that they wouldn't try to have ads, too these days. Ugh.)
4. Pay as you go - instead of a subscription that is recurring even if you don't use the product and that you eventually forget about, you just pay whenever you actually use it and pay for only as much as you use. Not sure it work with a search engine, but nobody's ever tried, so it's hard to say.
5. Government funded. I realize this would rub people the wrong way, but a government search engine funded by tax payer dollars that had no ads could be very useful if done correctly. You just wouldn't want to use it to look up illegal things. (And it doesn't necessarily have to be the Federal government. A state government might benefit from running it, as well.)
Edited to add: For the record, I pay for and use Kagi and love it.
Completely agree. I think the fundamental problem, is that the public facing internet is kind of like electricity or water - it is a utility, that isn't inherently monetizeable. So the only way to make money off of it is to advertise. And then advertisement itself is a cancer upon humanity ...
The worst is the SEO pages, especially for popular how-to topics. Every single first page result will be a page that has expanded what used to be said in bullet point form, into a 1500 word essay that you must now slog through in order to get the information you need. And this is by necessity, because Google values prose over bullet points.
The majority of things that come up on search nowadays consist of computer-generated essays. The only way around this is to limit your search to Reddit. And I fear that soon Reddit will be flooded with AI generated fluff to take advantage of the residual "real-user" SEO.
Limit your search to Reddit, HN and/or Stack Exchange!
I really loved the first paragraph of the article about Reddit: "Reddit is currently the most popular search engine. The only people who don’t know that are the team at Reddit". I want to add this that just happened at my company, that shows really bad execution on the Reddit side. Bad as if the current Reddit management is surfing tiny waves in some paradise.
Our company tried to use Reddit Ads for years. We are not US based and there was problems using every credit or debit card. The ones that work everywhere and. obviously, in Google Adwords.
We retried a few months ago and it worked but our Reddit ads were not approved because they were in the crypto space where indeed we are in the security auditing and research side and also work for Web3 projects.
Then, they assigned a higher level Reddit contact, they gave us several forms to fill to show that we were not in the wrong Web3 side. We completed every form over several weeks, until they say they don't have an account manager for our account. At this point I don't know if the right thing is to talk to the CXO level directly. Yes, Reddit management doesn't understand their own business and most probably loosing a lot of money.
BTW: I specifically ranted about ways of challenging Google back in 2013 in the same vein [1].
Maybe this is giving reddit too much credit, but I do see people say "append reddit to searches" literally every time the topic of search is brought up, so what if reddit is aware people do that but doesn't want to be a search engine?
Imagine you're one of the few remaining sources of human content on the Internet, and you look at the terrible cat and mouse game google plays forever with spam, you don't really envy it. So imagine telling the world hey, reddit is the new google, everyone come do your searches (and spam) here, gl mods.
This doesn't ring true to me. Reddit has clearly demonstrated a desire/mandate to monetize, even at the expense of its users. If they thought they had a viable Google competitor they wouldn't look that gift horse in the mouth.
The fact that unpaid volunteers (mods) are handling the spam problem is an upside.
I disagree with that. It doesn't matter if Reddit doesn't want to be a search engine. People are already using it a search engine and they simply will never stop no matter what those ppl in Reddit are thinking. Better to embrace the search use case and make it search friendly.
> "Reddit is currently the most popular search engine. The only people who don’t know that are the team at Reddit"
It's more that it's the current blogsphere. All those things that were there at the organic distributed web didn't completely go away, they just became walled, and Reddit is the only one with walls low enough to be discoverable.
It's not a search engine, it's only the place with a full link quality enumeration.
To me all signs point to Reddit never having been a commercial venture, but rather an influence and propaganda machine for United States government agencies. So they already have their budget paid.
I don't see Chinese communist party buying Reddit stocks as proof against US government agencies using Reddit to influence the population, that's what I mean.
>>Limit your search to Reddit, HN and/or Stack Exchange!
Yup, Google and it's main result set has for quite a while been dead to me (ya, I use DDG, and pretty much threat the main result set that way too). Finding valid detailed comments on Reddit, HN, or SE is what I use for primary clues.
Sadly, this has a predictably limited shelf-life.
When using Amazon for product search, for a short while, it worked really well to sort results by avg review grade. Very short while, as the reviews rapidly filled with fakes. Now, I need to go manually into each review set and compare the quantities and qualities of 1_Star + 2_Star reviews as a primary filter for scam products (& ignoring the idiot posts giving 1_Star for a shipping problem). Now, even using Fakespot and those tactics, the well of Amazon Reviews is quite fully poisoned, to the extent that I now specifically avoid shopping there for entire categories.
Now that this is being discovered about Reddit, HN, & SE, we can expect the inevitable "flooding of the zone with shit".
People have been astroturfing on reddit for a long time, the only reason it's not a cesspool is that reddit has a hardcore anti-marketing bent in a lot of subs and they'll aggressively out shills. I expect that GPT powered reddit bots will make the shills a lot harder to identify though.
It has always been a cesspool for a long time though. Only fit for consuming memes, cat pics, and financially motivated stunts like when Keanu Reeves was there the other day, using the social media account of the company for his upcoming film in a few weeks.
Each subreddit is controlled by a few essentially random people that likely have personal gain as one of their motivations.
If you think you aren't being advertised to on reddit just because the spam isn't as obvious as elsewhere, think again. The advertising there is more sophisticated than bots dropping links in comments.
There was a leak a while ago showed one of the moderators of wallstreetbets that was posting fake options gains, and it still gave him a massive following which he used to sell them a newsletter or something.
There are many subreddits where there will be a link in the sidebar to a monetized website affiliated with one of the mods.
And even 10 years ago, I remember at least 1 moderator of the programming subreddit somehow always had his blog posts highly voted and ending up on the front page, while any other submissions, especially ones that might counter his claims, would end up being stuck in the "spam filter". And if you messaged to have it unblocked, they'd only respond 1 day later, which means it would never show up on the front page due to the age factor of the ranking algorithm.
So, assuming that this "mismanagement" is not just happening in the crypto space, but across the board in other spaces too, they are missing out on short-term money, but are more valuable for the searches that users are now doing (including me). So.. is it actually bad execution?
The mismanagement is not between quotes since all compliance was filled and acknowledged.
Could you please elaborate on your question? Since our issue was supposely solved filling all the requirements there is no difference about the different spaces. This is bad execution by the book.
Literally anything google values will be abused and ruin the internet. If they valued shortness then everything would be trimmed to bullet points removing useful info.
The problem is really not that google is doing a bad job, it’s that the incentives to get views on pages ruins the internet.
I disagree that whatever ranking system google uses will just be gamed to the same extent. If google downgraded the rank of pages with lots of ads and trackers it would substantially reduce the incentive to game the system, the reason it won’t is because most of those pages are running Adsense so there’s every incentive for google to keep the status quo.
The first point is best served by sources that I like and trust, often authoritative to some degree. If they already have a good search (like MDN or Wikipedia) I will often use that directly or go via DDG: !mdn keyords..., !wiki keywords... If not, I type the name of the website as a keyword in front (like reddit...)
The second is really more about finding specific types of websites. For example John Smith's blog that I don't remember etc.
What I'm saying is that to fix the web, we need more sites that can act as the first point above. Whether they are wikis or not is more of a practical consideration. The point is that they don't suck and that there's not enough of them IMO.
Those sites will demand a % of sales to let anybody into their garden, while search engines demand nothing. That can work for digital products that are of unlimited supply.
Page publishers would still have the same incentive to game the system, only putting a smaller numer of ads, perhaps then more expensive and more carefully selected.
If you want to live in that world, you can today by running an adblocker. All major browsers enable you to use one. Even on mobile, vast majority of ads are easily defeated with a simple DNS-based blocking. I only see a handful of ads on Tik Tok and mobile Twitter. They're still mostly bad.
> If you want to live in that world, you can today by running an adblocker.
That misses the entire point: Google search results will still be manipulated to push those low quality results higher because even if you don't see the ads enough people do that investing in SEO is worth for those sites.
That was my point: if Google rewarded sites with fewer ads, you would get all the same manipulation and low-quality content but with fewer (but perhaps more expensive and carefully selected) ad blocks. You can have that today.
No, the reason they won't is that trackers and ads have little to do with the value of the content.
As long as there are any ads, the incentives stay the same. You're saying an internet completely free of monetary incentives would be better. I doubt that's true but it really doesn't matter, because it won't be happening.
You misunderstand, if you penalize excessive advertising then the revenue generated per page view decreases. This will reduce but not eliminate the amount of effort spent on these projects resulting in fewer such webpages.
So ‘How to unclog a toilet’ is always going to get SEO optimized spam. However, most topics don’t get that many views making them less viable for this business model.
That assumption is worth reconsidering. It may be that fewer ads would just be more expensive to run and would work out similarly revenue-wise in the long run. The value of lots of ads may be diversification and smoothing out revenue, not increasing net.
If every single website on the planet had fewer ads then the new equilibrium might be roughly equivalent revenue, but many websites only have a single banner advertisement. So much of the redistribution of revenue would end up on those websites.
> If you provide less monetisation for content creators
But I don't want to "consume content", I want to "get information". Most "content creators" don't provide any info. Or at best there is some info there but you have to watch an hour worth of video for the 20 useful seconds.
You could reward the type of monetization that is correlated to high-quality content and penalize the type that is associated with spam.
Site offers extra paid content or services, or takes donations? Rank up. Ads? Neutral or rank down based on type of ads. Affiliate links? Rank way down.
I don't want "content", some generic attention grabbing placeholder around which they spam ads. I don't want some professionally made lowest common denominator product designed to appeal to the widest possible audience. I want creations with heart and soul. I want to read the opinions and writings of real human beings, not corporate PR articles with cleverly disguised pitches at the end.
People who don't have enough intrinsic motivation to create regardless of financial reward probably aren't producing anything of value. That basically excludes every for profit website out there that would be "killed" by less monetization. Killing them off is a good thing.
Agreed. If content creators are more interested in getting something back (money) then they are creating something of value to society and disseminating it in a simple and clean way then I'm forced to think twice about their motives.
If you put the cart (making money) before the horse (creating value) then you are not really a productive member of society. Takers are like irresponsible children, they take without any awareness of the ramifications their behavior has on society.
This kind of attitude is similar to colonialism, an attitude representative of most of commercial enterprises today. Givers give value knowing that when they give, they receive, without any need to unnaturally focus on the end result.
The real problem is that Google holds an effective monopoly in search, so any digital marketer worth a salt will optimize the crap out of their blogs and pages to get higher and higher rank within Google alone. This will, in turn, lead to what we see today: a race to the bottom in terms of quality to get the best SEO results.
I've found that a mix of search engines give me the best results, I'm trying my best to incentivize competition. If I want super local results anywhere outside the US, I'll use Google+uBlock because that's what it works, but everything else I use Kagi or DDG.
That sounds like it makes sense - but if human readers know what's a good search result and what isn't, why would Google not be able to optimize their algo accordingly? If the results for a query don't match the "nature of the query", it's a bad result. If the algo can be gamed, it isn't aiming for the actual goal, i.e. it fundamentally fails at information retrieval.
Because anything google can detect, the spammers can generate to match. We will soon enter an era of GPT generated spam which not even humans can tell if it's real info or just garbage that looks real.
Luckily on Kagi I can just block sites the moment I realize it is nonsense.
Or boost or even pin sites that I feel are extra valuable.
Back in the old days I had a txt-file on my desktop containing domains with a minus in front, llke -example.com -example.org for all the worst offenders, so that I could post them on the end of every contested search.
After a while I think Google found a way to ignore those as well as every other filter I had - at least I gave it up.
if human readers know what's a good search result and what isn't
That assumes there's a single, canonical idea of what a "good result" looks like. I imagine that's dependent on a lot of factors, from the context of why the user is searching, their demographic, and their biases. When I search for "chocolate chip cookie recipe" I want straight facts - ingredients and bullet point steps and nothing else. My mother would want some background about the recipe, where it's from, and what makes it different. You can't get that from the search term alone. You need a lot more context.
It's exactly what the promise of 'personalized search' based on tracking everyone around the internet told us it would give us but it doesn't seem to work very well.
> That assumes there's a single, canonical idea of what a "good result" looks like
Maybe we can't agree on what people want, but what I'm sure we can agree on is what people don't want. I don't recall anyone ever saying "I wish there were more ads in the content I'm consuming".
Yes, and now turn that sentiment into a metric that can be measured as input to the model.
At first it was click-through rate, but that turned SEO into sites into clickbait to get high click scores. Then they switched to time spent on the site, and as a consequence we get recipes that are filled with 2h of prose above them just so people stay longer on the site.
Recipes are a pain in general, even without google, doubly so for baking.
Baking is a science, not art... so recipes calling for a cup of flour and two teaspoons of butter are useless to me, while recipes with ingredients in grams are useless to many american grandmas.
On the other hand, a pinterest page with a photo and a large overlay asking me to register is useless to both of us.
Nowadays a cup and a tablespoon are standard unities of volume. They are not any worse than milliliters. There are a few people that insist on ignoring the standards, but those also tend to not publish their recipes.
The issue is that for a lot of ingredients -- flour notably among them -- you can't measure accurately by volume. If you're looking for reproducibility, you have to measure by weight.
And once you start measuring some things by weight, you quickly realize that most things are easier to measure out by weight than volume (particularly sticky ingredients like honey), so you start wanting to measure everything that isn't a tiny amount by weight.
I convert all of the recipes I collect to gram measurements for this reason.
> Literally anything google values will be abused and ruin the internet.
That is true to the extent that the "anything" is only a proxy for quality. Keywords, reputation, etc are all proxies.
But now with these AI models Google should be able to assess the true value of a page. Does it provide useful information? In what area? Etc. Then invert that in order to answer queries. I really hope this is where page ranking is headed.
> But now with these AI models Google should be able to assess the true value of a page
That'd be nice, but I am skeptical for a number of reasons. Not the least of which is that where Google has already applied AI, it has seemed to make things worse, not better.
Why do people even care about views? Because of advertising. It is the root cause of all problems on the web today. All Google has to do to fix the web is put itself out of business by delisting pages with ads including its own. Search and the web at large would be fixed in days.
Maybe I am wrong about this, and maybe the SEO junk sites would find a way to evolve, but what I really want from google is a plonk button so I can have a personal kill file for sites that I never want to see again.
Google used to support this[0], and I used it happily for blocking low-quality domains such as Experts Exchange, certain Wikia subdomains, and Pintrest. The feature was later removed[1] in favor of a browser extension, but the extension was less functional because it could only filter out results from the current page, so heavily-spammed keywords had result pages with only one or two links.
Nowadays, with the results being entirely spam for multiple pages, I think a return of the server-side filtering would be necessary if it's to be at all useful. Otherwise you'll get page after page of blank SERPs.
It would be possible to do that at browser level through extensions, for example there is one to filter out Pinterest results from search results. I wouldn't however expect that potentially great feature to be natively available in Google search anytime soon, unless they made it as a analytics filled paid service and in a way that gave their advertisers and investors the power of circumventing it, that is, both plonk and unplonk as a service.
As a bonus, Google would have access to the list of who had blacklisted what sites -- surely that would be useful to them as a signal to detect "SEO spam sites".
Because of a recent HN article on the subject, I was searching for "correlation of ACT scores and IQ", and the first 5 hits were the _same_ crappy 1500 word essay, where various section headers were programmatically changed to include exactly what I searched for.
How challenging would it be to just check common searches and generate a page that hits all relevant wordings by including those words right in the page.
I tried several different variations like "How to convert ACT score to IQ", etc. Same stupid page.
The computer generated essay and the fake stackoverflow clones are the worst thing ever. It's harder to code now than just a few years ago because of all the BS people put on the internet.
I'm finding some value in live chats with the repo maintainers, but that's not really viable for everything, plus won't be easy for juniors to do either.
And the worst of SEO pages are cooking recipes, where you have to scroll down screens of badly written meaningless text before you actually get to ingredients list. At least Google still keeps indexing recipe microformats.
Even worse, I've found myself directed to long recipe pages with a huge amount of prose about the history of the recipe, how the author developer it etc, BUT THEN THERE IS NO ACTUAL RECIPE! This has happened multiple times in the past year. And this was often the first or second result when Googling the recipe. wtf?
Hi guys! Last month I was visiting my grandma... (3 minutes of this) ...so don't forget to like and subscribe this! Now, i usually use this kind of flour, but I decided to replace it with this special kind from my local farmers market, which is great, because it's sold by this old lady who works... (5 more minutes of that) ... so if you like putting ginger into your cookies, write it down in a comment (3 more minutes of this) ... now you have to fold in the cheese... i have a separate video (15 minutes) just explaining how to fold it in, so I won't show that here, but click the link in the description to see that ...
Yeah... i prefer text. It's even wors with tech stuff.... do they expect me to retype the commands/code from the video?!
For recipes I've had good results with YouTube. Short videos, to the point, with a leaflet in the beginning showing ingredients needed. YouTube for tech stuff is the worst, I agree.
You're getting downvoted because those of us who have tried for ourselves often find videos vastly less useful, efficient or relevant than a bit of text. Especially in the world of the 'influencer'. Now you have half a video pimping their dozens of YouRedTwitTok accounts you just have to click on, the other influencers they're mutually shoveling traffic to, the products they're being paid to pimp...and if you're lucky you might get some information tacked onto the end.
We all have to sift. No matter if the content is text, video or audio. If I'm undertaking a project of some magnitude - like cooking a new dish or changing my brakes - then I don't mind spending a little time to find the highest quality information. And for many things, that will be inside a YouTube video. Even if you have 100 million low quality content creators, you have at least a million high quality content creators.
I can look at a blob of text and have an idea if it's worth looking deeper at in a glance, especially something structured like a recipe. I have to watch the video. That doesn't scale, and I frankly have better things to do than vet content creators via several or many minutes of inane video at a time, much less 'millions' of creators. In fact, the most efficient way I've found to find a new recipe that isn't a waste of time is to start with "ignore video sites" and "ignore influencer infested sites" (e.g. Instagram).
Not that everything on YouTube is crap, just most things. Sometimes seeing a video of someone doing something is the only way I can figure it out. There are many particularly useful videos of how to use complicated test and measurement gear. And tying knots. But the video isn't efficient enough for me to start there.
This is what I'm trying to say: Sometimes you don't have better things to do, because you need the knowledge that is in the video. If you're doing something important and somebody comes up to offer to show you a much better way of doing the task, does this have to be the response? "I have better things to do".
Some YouTube videos are worth the time to watch, and I would argue that for recipes you'll spend your time better starting with videos vs search engines. Unless it's something you already know how to make and just need a reminder of the measurements of the recipe.
Talking about cooking, you have the BBQ channels on YouTube, with people showing you how to best cut and prepare different cuts of meat. If you don't personally know somebody to show you these techniques you'd be lost with only text content and no video.
I think it's easier for people to rage at an annoying YouTube video when trying to find information, than to rage at worthless SEO spam. But the solution is the same: close the tab and go back. It doesn't take many seconds to notice if a YouTube presenter is an idiot.
Not at all! It depends greatly on the content and the person. For recipes it is actually useful to see with your own eyes how to do something. The same thing with many other things, such as for example carpentry and mechanics. I agree that text is better for tech content and for a lot of other things that are mostly text based, or more abstract.
We've been conditioned into thinking text is better because we've all been through schooling, which consists of text books and a person yelling in front of a blackboard. If you let kids watch high quality YouTube videos instead, they would get a much better education.
Well, I should have said "text is better for me". Especially for recipes, which are a list of instructions. I just need to see the list, not have someone tell it to me.
Videos aren't dense enough, information-wise. I can't just put them up on a screen as a reference, and they require too much interaction as I have to back up, play, back up, play, back up, etc. in order to use the information being relayed.
If I only have a video telling me something, it's better than nothing, but it's going to slow me down, reduce my understanding, and will inevitably leave out detail that is important to me.
If you're already adept or not looking into things that are challenging to you, then you might just need a list of ingredients. If somebody who has never cooked needs to dice onions for the dish and doesn't know how to do that, YouTube will help much more than any text. There are so many things and aspects that we don't have vocabulary for and is just faster showing.
I haven’t noticed, but I usually hang around King Arthur’s website for bread recipes and they use mass and bakers’ percentages, so do other baker blogs that I may find. Maybe it’s different for things other than bread, but I can’t say. Hail Eris!
Yeah this, if I want to know how many chapters are there in a game, I have to real an entire article telling me useless stuff before I can get the info I want. Witj ChatGPT I can avoid this. I would say most of my Google searches were for answering questions, not to find articles related to a topic.
The industry term for it is "made for advertising". It is a constant battle because some people in adtech want to increase impressions at all costs, and some people want to block these sites from their systems. Guess which one wins out when executives see how much money it makes?
Why do you believe that users will start using this "AI AdBlock"? Regular ad blockers are enough to cover current ads. Google also controls the main browser in the biggest mobile OS (Chrome on Android), and it doesn't support ad blockers. There are options (Firefox, Brave, Kiwi, etc.), but most users don't bother.
The bit of social media people use to talk to their IRL friends and family will be fine.
But the bit of social media where people are listening to celebrities, getting their news, sharing memes, discussing common interests? It might get flooded with bots so convincing as to be indistinguishable from normal users.
It's as soon as it learns that X celebrity is dead generates clicks.
Then folks will learn not to trust it just because it is a computer once everyone is announced dead, and everyone will have to make claims that they aren't.
I simply cannot imagine being willing to provide identity documents to any of the social media/advertising companies. They would have to somehow demonstrate they're trustworthy first.
This is a major reason I think LLMs could help with SERPs - presumably it will be a lot harder to do SEO effectively because now it involves the model training barrier.
Model training is already trivial, just expensive. As LLM optimized HW appears the expense will drop. By 2030, I’d expect decent consumer hardware to be both faster and two orders of magnitude cheaper than what’s in use today for model training.
"How do I fix some odd setting in Windows, Mac, whatever"
2007: results include documentation, a couple forums, if you're unlucky there's a potentially malware tool that's discovered people need to fix this.
2012: results include Reddit and Stack Exchange, documentation has disappeared, forums have opened that are full of "support specialists" telling you to reset your windows install.
2023: top results are just blogspam pushing malware tools and the above-mentioned useless support forums. It's hard to know if Microsoft and Apple even know what their software does.
Thankfully Linux-related searches are still useful.
> forums have opened that are full of "support specialists" telling you to reset your windows install
God this is such a pet peeve, those stupid Microsoft forums especially where the customer reps spend 80% of the comment apologizing and wishing a good day and suggest fuck all. They ought to just pull the plug on the site and let reddit handle their support for free.
I'm Kevin from the Microsoft Customer Support Team. I'm sorry to hear you're having a problem with Windows 10 support forums today. We're here to help and would like to get this problem resolved for you!
I understand that the issue you're currently facing is that "Microsoft forums where the customer reps spend 80% of the comment apologizing" are appearing on your Windows 10 forum search results?
Oftentimes unwanted ads or other unexpected configuration changes are caused by unintended software being installed on your computer, or from other errors.
Please try the following steps to resolve your issue:
1. Log into your computer. Click on the Start Menu and click Shutdown. Then click reboot. Allow any pending updates to install.
If this doesn't work, you can try the following solutions:
1. Log into your computer and click the Start Menu
2. Type "update" into the Search Bar and click Windows Updates
3. Click "check for updates now" and follow the instructions to install any pending updates.
If this still doesn't resolve your situation, you can check the following KBs for further help:
KB: 324829 - Restore from a System Restore Point
KB: 293111 - Update Windows Defender
KB: 299024 - Check for Errors using Windows Network Troubleshooter
I hope this has helped resolved your problem today.
Most of that support is free. It's some weird universe where Microsoft gives out fake credentials (forum badges and crap) to people that don't know what they are doing. These poor people in India and other places are spamming tons of useless "fixes" for internet cred.
Apple's official support website is the same. 100% useless feedback from the "Support Specialist". Yet it always shows up at the top of the search result.
See I understand that, with Microsoft and Apple support you would get a response along the lines of:
"I see you are trying to find the Static IP of your Raspberry Pi, a static IP is a .....<long paragraph describing static ips>. You also have a raspberry pi which is....<long paragraph describing raspberry pi's>. Given all of that I think you should really start by resetting your Raspberry Pi and ensure that your Windows license is up to date.
Apple forums are also quite bad. Every suggestion is to reset SMC and thats it.
The Stack overflow / stack exchange websites are often the only ones where you get useful answers when having any sort of problems regarding the user facing part of the OS.
(And also for anything else to be honest. I think 30% of my questions on google are answered by stack exchange websites)
Apple's dev forums are actually useful but only because of the mind-bending efforts of superhuman Quinn "The Eskimo!", who appears to have been at Apple since forever, is an actual programmer, gives real answers with meaty information and can even look things up in the source code for you. I've lost track of how often I've needed to learn something obscure about Apple's platforms and ended up at a thread where Quinn gives an answer. I've also filed a DTS incident in the past asking a seriously obscure question I wasn't even meant to ask (to do with their code signing system), and got a detailed and correct response back from Quinn+colleagues very quickly. It was by far the best support experience I ever had from a tech firm.
Quinn, if you're out there reading this, I really hope Apple has a succession plan in place for when you take a well deserved retirement!
"The barber surgeon, one of the most common European medical practitioners of the Middle Ages, was generally charged with caring for soldiers during and after battle. In this era, surgery was seldom conducted by physicians, but instead by barbers, who, possessing razors and coordination indispensable to their trade, were called upon for numerous tasks ranging from cutting hair to amputating limbs."
Am I the only one still searching Google primarily though keywords/phrases (and the exclusion of keywords/phrases)? I don't see much degradation in Google's results.
I keep trying, but the result quality continues to degrade. Most such searches either return nothing, one or two links, or a host of spam. Google is useless except for business phone numbers and hours they are open.
If you ask one of those people complaining here to share the query they use, it becomes very quickly very apparent that Google doesn't have a problem at all.
For the last five technical questions I asked ChatGPT every single one yielded an answer that was either wrong or uselessly vague :( I've now given up. You have to cross-check everything against Google anyway so why not just skip straight to that point.
Had to finally register there to check. This was the answer.
"There are a few things you can try to fix large PDF files:
Compress the PDF: You can use online or offline tools to compress the PDF file. This will reduce the file size and make it easier to work with. Some popular tools for compressing PDFs include Adobe Acrobat, Smallpdf, and PDF Compressor.
Remove unnecessary elements: If the PDF file contains images, graphics, or other non-essential elements, you can try removing them. This can significantly reduce the file size. You can use Adobe Acrobat or other PDF editing tools to do this.
Split the PDF: If the PDF file contains multiple pages, you can split it into smaller files. This can be done using Adobe Acrobat or other PDF editing tools.
Optimize PDF: Many PDF viewers have the option to optimize PDF files. This may include reducing the quality of images or fonts to reduce the file size. You can try using the built-in optimization tools in Adobe Acrobat or other PDF viewers.
Use a different file format: If the PDF file is still too large, you may consider using a different file format, such as JPG or PNG for images, or DOCX or RTF for text. This may not always be possible, but it can be a good alternative if the PDF file is causing too many issues.
"
Adobe has a method of compressing pdf files that is quite effective while retaining the quality of images, etc, e.g. 50 MB to 3 MB, so you can now email it. However you can only use the free version a few times before it wants all your data as well as the data of your first born. I'm too stingy to pay Adobe...
I haven't (yet) found free pdf compression that doesn't mangle images... (would be glad to try any that HN might suggest!).
Asking it "What is the best open source software to do option 1" it's first suggestion is Ghostscript, which is actually what I use. It can walk you through installing it and describing how to change the quality of the compression.
Or if you prefer the old fashioned way you can just read about it yourself here https://ghostscript.readthedocs.io/en/gs10.0.0/VectorDevices... the settings are modeled around what Adobe does and names them. I've never really messed with any GUI options though.
In the German market for any product related query where you want a product comparison or test, you get results from 2 companies, which are in the business to place multiple very well SEO optimized pages on popular high quality websites (mostly newspapers).
These pages are in all regards very well created, they strike all SEO best practices, have zero affiliate links (as they are hidden behind javascript) and fulfil all SEO content quality guidelines. And are constantly updated.
And they are in all regards, SPAM. Always the same rotation of products get recommended, and win these "tests".
They are so widespread and this is going on for years, as Google clearly must know about this. But they choose to do nothing about them. Probably as they are looking for an algorithmic solution. Well, it does not work.
And Product search for popular every day technical products has become unusable for years now.
Google must have become a deeply dysfunctional company to let this go on for so long.
Google knows, has commented on it that it's fine "but you should be careful who you let publish on your domain" and they won't do anything about it. It was a somewhat big topic two or so years ago, and since then everyone has understood that you just need to buy in on media company sites to get ranked.
Hey, maybe it's Google's gift to media companies to allow them to monetize, because they surely are making money with it.
And the number of ordinary people that try to gas light me for stating that Google has failed in their most basic mission. It's been years, and unless you work in tech or marketing, you're apparently obvious to the situation, and still think of Google as one may have during the 90's.
A lot of people are using this term incorrectly lately. Gaslighting isn't simply telling someone that they are wrong about something. It's a specific, sustained, and intentional form of psychological abuse, most often found in a domestic setting. The origin is the play Gas Light and the plot revolves around a man trying to steal from his wife by making her think she is going insane.
I know what gaslighting is, and I am using the term correctly. When I tell people Google Search is not just bad, it is overt manipulation of your search to waste one's time sifting through prose nonsense because Google promote prose over facts, they often don't just disagree, they overtly over time try to change my mind, they can't let it lie, they have to change my thinking. And they use shallow, obvious insulting language, as they is all they know. It is the duration of time they spend on this mind changing aggression. That's gaslighting
For this to be gaslighting the person would have to believe google search is terrible, but be engaging in a concerted effort to convince you otherwise. That doesn't seem like the case?
How's about the person's personality is such that whatever it is they use to gaslight does not matter, they take the opposite stance just to be aggressive, as that is their personality. They probably have no opinion on the matter at all, just like to ride me with aggression. That is gaslighting too.
I'm totally with you on that, but who, besides us, knows about this and understands the inner workings?
Ask your parents or whomever and they'll probably tell you that they are glad, that stern.de is doing all those recommendations and tests.
They'll trust them, be it out of naivety of lack of alternatives or the "glory" those newspapers might have had in "the old times" (or still have today).
> Always the same rotation of products get recommended, and win these "tests".
Wouldn't this be expected for product comparison sites? How many winning vacuum cleaners can there possibly be? Is the expected state that the best white goods in any category are experiencing constant churn?
I mean, your criticism seems to be that this content is "very well created" but spam because you don't believe the recommendations are the result of some genuine comparison process. How could Google or really anyone know that, or decide if you're right/wrong? The data is all there, it seems useful, and on stern.de they even have a page that explains how they select products and rank them. In fact the Stern carousel doesn't even appear to be from the same source. The first two use the same icons and such but the third doesn't.
> The long answer is that most of the web has become too inauthentic to trust.
Reddit was also partly successful in that regard because it catered to niche communities who ask the most interesting questions and, trolls aside, responses from the community that's generally trustworthy. There are literally subreddits with discussions on solutions that are deemed better than what you get from customer support. Reddit also doesn't have "promoted" content / responses, which is largely the issue with Google ads outlined by author.
Reddit is one of the most astroturfed places on the internet, and there's an entire ecology of PR/marketing firms that focus exclusively on it. There's also a thriving market in "high karma" accounts, which can be bought for as little as $30.
> Reddit also doesn't have "promoted" content / responses
It does, though. Your karma basically determines the visibility of any new post you try to make. And low-karma or new accounts are de facto shadowbanned.
> Your karma basically determines the visibility of any new post you try to make.
User karma isn't factored into the site's sorting algorithms. Post score is, and that influences karma, but not the other way around.
edit: On reflection, you may have been referring to the ability to post, rather than the popularity of the post. In that case, the misunderstanding was mine.
It’s not part of the ranking algorithm, it’s part of the anti spam system. If you make a new account and comment, it’s almost never visible to anyone else.
You have to warm up accounts with a few comments over a week before they start showing up.
An alternative: create an account, don't use it for a while, use it.
Mods essentially have two variables to work with: account age and karma. Some subs do set minimum karma (I've stumbled upon some that wouldn't accept below 2k karma), but most just go by account age to prevent banned users from going around the ban.
And a tip for spotting karma farmers: just go to one of those big subs that accept screenshots of tweets. If the screenshot has engagements/timestamp cropped, click on a profile. Like 8 times out of 10 it's gonna be an older account that never posted before reposting one of the older popular submissions.
That's often true. Individual subreddits may filter new accounts or low-karma thresholds to prevent spam. The better subreddits will simply flag it for manual review rather than remove it outright.
When two people say ´reddit´ they might be referencing two completely different worlds.
The prime reason I created a reddit account many moons ago was to get rid of all the default and behemoth subreddits from my feed, as they all looked like incredibly toxic and I´d have jumped through a window if I had to stay in them for more than 5 min. But these subreddits are all of reddit for many other people. And some user might only ever be looking at porn. And some others live in a diy bubbles.
That is to me the beauty of it, but also why it´s difficult to generalize trends. Low karma accounts getting shadowbanned ring nothing in my mind, but as there´s subs where you can only submit post titles ´cat´, there sure must be others were karma is everything.
As a reddit-addict this really depends on the subreddit you're using. In /r/askreddit you don't stand a chance that your question will attract serious attention, but there are so many subreddits with small usergroups and enough reactions. In /r/askreddit or other popular subreddits, my answers get reasonable attention, even if I'm not on the reddit timeschedule.
> It does, though. Your karma basically determines the visibility of any new post you try to make. And low-karma or new accounts are de facto shadowbanned.
It's used more as protection from SEO spammers and this is just unfortunate side effect for new users.
Other problem is that karma is global which basically means user on popular subreddits will gain it quickly so any karma-based filtering is doomed to fail anyway
And it's not a great protection system at all. Just like how content generators are gaming Google search, there is a problem now with bots that find what is popular and repost it later (with a wording change) for karma farming.
> And low-karma or new accounts are de facto shadowbanned.
User karma is impacted by mods' use of AutoMod on a per subreddit basis or fraudulent[1] accounts, but otherwise there is no site-wide application of user karma.
Source: I spent some time experimenting and implementing alternative rankings at Reddit.
0: Subreddit hot score, not applicable to logged in users' default feed.
1: Shadow banning (vs direct banning) fraudulent accounts makes it more difficult to reverse engineer signals used to identify malicious accounts.
Spoken like someone in a bubble. "Nobody goes there anymore; it's too crowded."
Well, if "nobody" goes there, how are the bots able to farm karma? Who's giving them the views and upvotes?
I guarantee you anything that's the "default" is being visited by many, many casual visitors, people not "in the know", and people who don't recognize karma farming bots for what they are.
I said nobody goes there for advice because there usually isn't any there, we mainly go to those for arguing nonsense and laughing at memes. And I'm not saying that there aren't many advertisements on those, but they are usually painfully obvious.
Because the tiny niche audience isn't a cost effective marketing group? Advertisers want to maximize their reach and well, it's not like they know these groups even exist.
I'm sure it happens a lot regardless, but the vast majority of content in those is still just from regular people. You can tell by the information posted as it tends to be more or less truthful and useful. Once it stops being that it'll be obvious enough. Like when Russian bots invade your average Ukraine related r/worldnews post.
Except that there is a culture of looking for and outing shills in a lot of subs, and since you can see someone's entire post history it's usually not hard to confirm or at least provide solid evidence for it once you suspect it. I had someone out an astroturfer who posted a banal non-response to one of my comments just the other day.
1) That's a whack-a-mole exercise when the astrorufer buys accounts in bulk.
2) You can tune these systems to be indistinguishable from a flesh and blood product fanboy at first glance. Not all spammers drop the same comments mentioning their product everywhere. You can dilute it with meaningless AI generated banter so the mod has to scroll through a couple pages and connect the dots before deciding whether you're a bot or just an idiot who happens to like some product.
You don't need to be the size of Coca Cola to successfully astroturf, there are enough companies specialized in social media marketing.
Take r/mechanicalkeyboards for example, arguably a niche community. The enthusiasts there are very motivated to buy new things and are willing to pay quite a lot of money for them. Place a few of your bots there to promote your artisan keycaps and watch people pay top bucks for them.
They also have an okay s:n ratio in my experience, as the mod team can work the experience. Like for example, q&a type threads tend to be useful. There are folks promoting things but it’s obvious when they are.
But in the context of TFA - searching Reddit to get factual answers - what appears on the reddit.com front page from day to day is largely irrelevant, surely?
By extension, high-karma accounts that are run by marketing companies can post in a niche subreddit to subtly promote their product or disparage their competition, and they'll end up on the front page of that subreddit. They'll get a lot of views and a lot more engagement than the average unsophisticated user's post would -- and those astroturfed posts would, on average, rank higher in searches.
This is analogous to SEO, but rather more insidious and sneaky. You can spot SEO blogspam from a mile away. You don't know if a Reddit user is a real person, a bot, or a company's representative.
Reddit bots are used for upvote manipulation of legitimate posts by brand ambassadors/etc. The post histories are just to make the bot look legitimate.
I always assumed the botted accounts on Reddit were in the hands of marketing companies, ready to upvote posts saying "My Brand X headphones sound great" or "I changed from Brand Y to Brand Z cigarettes because the smooth taste never leaves me feeling over-smoked" or "I made big gains by putting my life savings into this sketchy investment" or whatever they're being paid to promote at the time.
I'd wager you could do a lot to influence public opinion with just an upvote ring, without the botted accounts actually needing to post messages.
I think what they're trying to say is some subreddits auto-collapse comments from users with low karma and recent date of creation to combat bots. If reddit gives any more weight to high karma users I can tell you as one that it definitely doesn't seem noticeable at all. Right time and right place comments are always the ones that end up on top.
Yes, it was somewhat good in the past but an alternative is sorely needed. Most popular subs (at least the one I frequent) are moderated to the point that censored would be the more appropriate word to describe the situation. Then there are whole subs banned (including non political) for wrongthink.
There's nothing wrong with a sub banning/censoring people. That's a critical part of having a trust value within a social network and if moderators of a popular sub don't think a poster is meeting the bar to post it is good for them to ban it and become higher trust. If they go too far than there won't be content on the sub at all though.
For instance /r/AskHistorians has a very high bar for posting and threads are commonly removed. As a result (and because they still have posters that meet that bar), the sub is considered very high trust. Some other subs anybody can say anything and I go so far as to filter the entire sub out so I never see it again.
I muted USA Today in Apple News recently because their filtering was below the bar (click bait headlines, low quality writing). I don't know who the editors are that are making their decisions but I no longer trust that outlet anymore.
Channels with higher quality selection (Financial Times) now have more of my time because I trust them more based on previous decisions they have made (to show me fewer low quality articles under click bait headlines).
> I muted USA Today in Apple News recently because their filtering was below the bar (click bait headlines, low quality writing). I don't know who the editors are that are making their decisions but I no longer trust that outlet anymore.
YOU MUTED is the key here.
"Majority of subreddit didn't like it so it got downvoted" is somewhat democratic will of community.
You muted a user coz you don't want their content is personal choice.
Moderator choosing to do so on a whim is neither of those. You do need moderators coz some people won't behave but many times rules of subreddit are basically there so moderator can point to excuse on banning or removing whatever they don't like, not to ban something people don't want there.
I completely agree with the point that banning/censoring people is necessary in order to operate any internet forum. But I know from firsthand experience that bans are used to stifle valuable discussion both on major subreddits and niche ones. I've seen it happen to me and to others.
For example, on an r/news post a few years ago about the Israeli/Palestinian conflict, I replied to another comment where my content was basically the following: "If someone threatened to bomb your house, and they had a history of bombing houses, would you respond? What about after they destroyed your house?". That's almost exactly the wording I used (wish the comment hadn't been deleted so I could repost it exactly). This not only got me permanently banned from r/news, but also reported to the admins who censored the account. I suspect I pissed off a reddit admin or power user who followed me around reporting me, as shortly afterwards in a niche sub, I made another post discussing the continuum of force when it came to violent crime, quickly received several reports, and my account was permabanned from reddit. Note that both the content and tone of my posts there were similar to how I post on HN, which I think is generally appropriate.
This sequence of events bothered me a lot, because I think discussion of the use of force continuum and the ethics of preemptive or retributive force are highly relevant to today's world, and that the places where I continued (didn't start) discussion of them were the appropriate places for them. If this conversation can't happen on reddit, which it appears it can't, then we need another forum. It is clear to me today that reddit has hit it's eternal september. I can't bring myself to respond to the multitude of low effort posts that typically bombard you when you post something other than memeing.
There's absolutely something wrong. They're not banning people for not adhering to posting rules in a sub, they're literally banning wrongthink, they're often banning political opinions they dislike or don't align with US democrat party hegemony.
They suppress subs or influence mods to suppress them for them.
There's a myriad of ways in which censorship to shape a narrative happens, and that narrative is as true as the narrative a few twitter users can set, if highlighted as "the majority opinion/the people have spoken" by mainstream media.
There's intervention via subterfuge, not an open contract you either adhere or not.
> That's a critical part of having a trust value within a social network and if moderators of a popular sub don't think a poster is meeting the bar to post it is good for them to ban it and become higher trust. If they go too far than there won't be content on the sub at all though.
That's implying that there is a single one-dimensional quality metric. The problem is when moderators of popular subreddits (for a particular niche) or those with the most obvious names for a particular topic start to enforcing their own personal biases in the discussion rather than sticking to keeping the discussion on-topic.
High bar is subjective, you're only filtering by the most superficial aspects: are there swear words? Do they have citations? Do they "sound" smart? Are they saying something "problematic"? Same here. There's no cadence. (I'm not talking about /r/AskHistorians though)
I've found hidden gems in free for all, no-karma, no-upvote forums such as 4chan. And you pay attention there, because people are not trying to sound smart.
> Then there are whole subs banned (including non political) for wrongthink
I don't really like defending Reddit, because I don't like them as a company, but I don't think this is correct. There's a financial incentive for them to not ban subreddits, so groups have to behave quite obnoxiously or blatantly break Reddit's rules to get banned. Just having a certain political disagreement is not nearly enough.
And if you disagree, please post some examples.
As an aside, I was curious about the use of the word "wrongthink". It sounds like something Orwell would have come up with, but a search suggests that it's actually a neologism that is used mainly by the alt-right.
Orwell's term is crimethink of course. I can only think of one party that recently passed laws making it a felony to say certain things to certain people. Thankfully you're still allowed to actually hold the thoughts in your head.
They banned a large Covid sub r/NoNewNormal where the bulk of the content would be accepted as common sense today.
Themes in that sub were that “the cure is worse than the disease” (it was) and that “we shouldn’t throw away our way of life for Covid” (we chose not to in hindsight).
If you are a member of subs like r/lockdownskepticism even today then you frequently get banned from other subs.
"Common sense" indeed. That subreddit was a hotbed of unscientific anti-vaccine lies. However, it was actually banned for breaking Reddit rules on brigading.
Claims of “brigading” are common and often hard to quantify. However, in this case, we found very clear signals indicating that r/NoNewNormal was the source of around 80 brigades in the last 30 days (largely directed at communities with more mainstream views on COVID or location-based communities that have been discussing COVID restrictions). This behavior continued even after a warning was issued from our team to the Mods.
no, this is BS. pretty much every big political sub does "brigading" against other subs, it's impossible to stop. a handful of bad actors can ruin it for everyone. reddit admins apply the anti-brigading rules selectively. there are big subs that have gotten away with it forever.
That’s some revisionist history. That sun was a cesspool of bad behavior. It wasn’t banned for believing the wrong thing, it was banned for organized attacks on anyone who dared to believe differently from them.
The poster child for vote manipulation? Where front page articles would have 5000 upvotes 10 minutes after posting? The sub that fetishized persecution despite receiving warning by after warning?
This point is always brought up and it has no relevance in terms of what we're discussing which boils down to opinions on products and services from people who have some expertise in the matter.
You're not going to get banned from a hobby sub for asking a question on something related to a product in that hobby.
Try asking why Aragorn is a black man in the future LotR set on /r/magicTCG and see how long you can ask a question on something related to a product in that hobby after that. There are other swift ways to get ban, like noting that the body shape of some characters were changed drastically in-between old and newer cards. Basically anything going against the pandering of WotC to some twitter users.
I got banned out of /r/games for asking "what rights trans people don't have that other humans do?" under post about someone yelling "trans rights are human rights" about Hogwart's legacy. Not being snarky at all, just curious (as I'm not from US and don't really get what the fuss is about).
Still haven't got a coherent answer out of anyone I asked, just insults
I don’t think anyone would take you seriously enough to give a coherent answer if you’re echoing the language of the bigots, even just unintentionally. It’s like asking “why should black people be able to use the same restrooms?” during the civil rights movement. Even as a totally honest and not at all disingenuous question, it blends into the rhetoric of the reactionaries.
It's a good question, and one that their activists don't like answering because "the right to impose oneself on spaces designated solely for the opposite sex" isn't what most people would accept as a human right. So they ignore or block or ban or attack instead of engaging reasonably.
How is that well-deserved? His comment was literally about the topic of the post, and the post was apparently allowed. "We allow politics but sorry, you're only allowed to have the Right Opinion here. Take all other opinions to Twitter!"
The whole story related to Rowling supposedly being transphobe is crazy. All that canceling because she stated in a twit that "person who menstruate" is a stupid circumlocution around the word woman. Then, like religious taboo, it extended to whatever was linked to it. The irony is that all these cancelers are acting very 10-100 worst against whoever is the target of the anger than what happened to the people they are supposedly defending.
It's getting a lot worse I agree. It seems like anything that might be offensive to anyone having any emotions under any circumstance is now blurred and labeled "NSFW".
The biggest form of this advertising isn't actually done with the knowledge of Reddit. Organizations use Reddit accounts to astroturf narratives together, since Reddit is pseudonymous. Companies who need better PR, or just a good controversy, can do this much more cheaply on Reddit than any other internet forum.
Still, the high-quality advice on Reddit that is authentic can be the most useful stuff on the internet.
True but, for example, I still find that restaurants and travel advice is far superior on Reddit than Google.
Reddit is often my starting point for beginning research on purchasing decisions.
Although when buying a digital piano, I ended up finding dedicated boards like pianoworld to be better
EDIT
Ironically, I also find YouTube to be a great source of research, mostly because the cost to produce content is higher and I think it's somewhat harder to produce inauthentic content (at least to me so far for the things I am researching)
I never understood how Reddit isn’t an advertising powerhouse. Their users literally voluntarily segregate by interest, but the proper tech never got built out. Last I checked they integrated a 3rd party solution for that.
Especially that places like Reddit attract more "tech-savvy" people who have a high amount of ad block users. Naive web ads on places like that or e.g. Ars Technica is tricky most probably.
I think that was the case a few years back, but these days a lot of casual users are accessing it through the official app and getting served tons of ads.
It was a weird moment seeing a reddit comment where someone referred to the site as "this app." Made me feel old.
Google held control of who they reward using AdWords, they decided who lives and who dies, who goes bancrupt and who prosper
It is their system that rewards SEO spam
If you are a creator, you can put up a website, pat for deiagn and hosting fees, and hopw google finds you amongst SEO spam.
Or you cam put a oage on instagram, for free, and deal with none of that shit
You can submit your site to Google and they will index it. If your content is good, you can rank highly - even if nobody links to you! Even if you don't pay Google a dime.
Instagram doesn't allow links out, so you can not promote or sell your content - only if you pay them through their spy/ad service.
> If your content is good, you can rank highly - even if nobody links to you!
I m sorry, this is like news from a different universe.
There is an absolutely world-shattering report on how children have lost all freedom ovet the past 40 years. They used to roam the neighbourhood, then they were allowed to stay in one street, and today we dont let them out of backyard.
I have it on my PC, but can't find it in Google. Its impossible now
I can only talk from my own experience, I've launched several websites that became high ranking on Google solely because of content and speed. Without anybody linking to them. Hell, there's still nobody linking to them years later, and Google still keeps them highly ranked. In niches with well established competitors.
Without Google, I doubt I would have had any chance to reach a public, because nobody except search engines will give you the time of day when you're not already established.
There's many bad things about Google, but they truly allow many people a chance to get their voice out and many small businesses a chance to exist. That is brilliant.
You seem to be providing a brilliant explanation why Google has failed -> I don't need to be found, I need to find a specific piece of information. It's a report by a major university about children. It's basically impossible to find. The university probably has crap website, maybe it's slow, it doesn't follow google guidelines - but so what? As a consumer, I don't care if the website is fast, if it's providing wrong information.
Alternatively, if I search for something related to registering a company in UK, the top 3 results are scams. Does Google rate scammers higher because their website is fast? Is it too difficult for Google to identify the .gov domain and rank the result appropriately?
I am not claiming Google is evil, I am claiming Google is incompetent.
They have destroyed their own food supply or they failed to protect it, and that's why now their search results have gone to shit.
It seems the average Joe that used to run their own website or forum has gone bankrupt or is berried under SEO spam. Joe was replaced by Average Tom.
Average Tom doesn't even know how to make a website, instead he registers on 5 different platforms - Instagram, Ticktok, Etsy, whatever else is popular, and pushes their content there. No SEO spam, they get results. Yes, they lose freedom, have to deal with arbitrary rules, moderation, etc. They are willing to take that deal over what google is offering. Maybe Google should have parted with some of the profit to convince content creators not to go to closed platforms.
Users have voted with their feet, and most of the world's content is no longer accessible to Google. Today's teenagers don't even search on Google to find a barber, they search on Instagram, and make a booking right there.
Google search is already dead inside, they just don't know it yet.
Google has seen a massive decline in quality and they are a company of very questionable morals. I think it's fair to say they are evil.
Still, Google is the reason millions of people can make a living, who would have been locked out of their industry by gate keepers if search engines didn't exist.
The standard static HTML website that can be found by Google is vastly superior to social media offerings. Creators and businesses can not sell their products through social media like Instagram, because you can not even put a link unless you purchase their spy ads. With crusty old WordPress you can create great online publications and articles as long as you want - no popular social media offers that.
The general public use the internet exclusively for social media, and at most a couple of web sites for work or other functions. That is because the general public has an insatiable appetite for mindless entertainment. That doesn't mean the traditional web has failed, it's still there and Google is still king on that hill. The social media hordes are the same people who would be glued in front of the TV in the past. Social media attention and likes are close to worthless in the end for creators and businesses. I'd rather have 100 customers brought by Google and a traditional web site, than 1 000 000 Instagram likes from people looking at my post for 0.03 seconds while scrolling. When people are looking for important information or want to make a purchase online, they go by Google almost all of the time, and almost never by social media.
> They are willing to take that deal over what google is offering. Maybe Google should have parted with some of the profit to convince content creators not to go to closed platforms.
Google is not taking anything from anybody. You can index your content with them for free, and they will send visitors to your site. Social media will just use your content to get eyeballs for their own ads.
The average business owner treats their traditional website as an annoying hassle, when it could be a window into the world and massively increase their sales and customer service. They love social media, because Facebook and Instagram feeds them like and heart icons.
> Reddit also doesn't have "promoted" content / responses
Reddit does have promoted content, but it's only at the toplevel, if you use new.reddit (possibly the official client as well) and you don't have an adblocker you'll see them interspersed in feeds (on subreddits anyway, not sure e.g. /r/all has ads as I don't use it, and usually use the old theme anyway).
It also suffers quite a bit from astroturfing / content farms, but it's not always clear how the accounts are monetised, they're mostly visible as repost bots farming karma.
For example, this is the screen I'm showed when I navigate to www.producthunt.com: https://imgur.com/a/9GgLIBM -- like you can't even tell what website it is, they're covering their own logo with pop overs. This simply can not be good UX, or marketing. It's not a good first impression.
There are healthy websites out there but they're really struggling to punch through all the crap.
It's curious because I feel we've seen this process play out once before. In the late-stage dot com era, there was a moment where you had these websites that were just absolutely plastered in ads and vomited popups at you when you visited them in a way that is very reminiscent of today. It's in part what led to the first popup blockers, and later ad blockers. Search engines were also cracking down on this stuff pretty hard since they just weren't good search results.
I imagine Google is in an awkward spot because, since ads is their bread and butter, they can't meaningfully penalize these websites without eating into their own bottom line. Many of the most intrusive ads are google ads.