1) It's no longer the search intent destination for advertisers. You find information on TikTok, you research products on Reddit, you send your purchase intent to Amazon, etc. These platforms will accrete more advertiser dollars.
2) Google SERPs sucks now. Low quality ads at top, low quality results that follow. A lot of SEO bullshit. Information returned is often irrelevant. Users know this and are getting fed up.
3) Google Search tech / product itself sucks. Power queries no longer work. This might be hard to unwind from as revenue numbers are propped up by answering "dumb queries" with ads.
4) AI will eat search's lunch. You'll increasingly ask LLMs, and these LLMs will push search ad revenue to a much lower margin, especially if the goal is to gain a reputation for quality.
Google has to figure this out quick. 50% of their revenue is from search. I think they're checkmated. There's no way out except to build something new and hope it works. That wouldn't be easy for anyone, but Google especially hasn't shown a history or aptitude for doing this.
The cool thing about Reddit is you might just be able to ask for a recommendation and someone will give it to you. Either someone else has asked before, or you find the right sub where the people with the answer are.
Just imagine what AI will do this in 4 years. You can no longer trust the recommendations, there are whole threads written by bots to push specific products.
Am I old? What kind of information. Not to be on Googles side here but, for information in video form... YouTube is at least somewhat reasonable still. Right?
YouTube's monetization and algorithms incentivized content to be bloated with fluff like long intros, outros, intermissions, shoutouts, life updates, sponsorships, etc. Basically content that added no value to the user and only exists to make the video long enough to qualify for more ad pods. A 10 minute video would often only have 2 minutes of relevant content.
TikTok encourages the opposite: so content creators cram in as much information as possible, often speeding up music and talking. Sometimes with supercuts to even minimize the natural pauses between words. The same 2 minutes of content gets sped up and cut down to 30s and shares more similarities with a lightning talk and slide deck than a video.
TikTok encourages fast consumable content (fast fashion), not information. And yes there could be fluff in longer form videos? But that also can included context, and allow the viewer to skip or watch at their own pace.
You could listen to an audio book at 10x speed, but would you retain much of it?
I guess i would say, TikTok information is the personification of the meme of "How to Draw an Owl" quick and short. But does it convey enough information, could a longer form be better?
from my recollection of Scott Young's blog and to a certain extent my personal experience, you can generally up the video speed to 1.5x-2x and retain the same amount of comprehension - people generally talk much slower than you you can understand, because it takes more effort to say something than understand it.
Those Audible/SkillShare/VPN ads ruined YouTube for me, and I consume a lot less content on YouTube nowadays. Sponsor Block addon has saved me hours automatically skipping them, but I can't help but worry that it is only going to make things worse in the long term as creator revenue drops.
Yeah, most youtubers simply read off some prepared generic script... although there are a few exceptions like HeavyDSparks who at least make the effort to make a fun story tied in with the video's topic for whatever supplements they're shilling.
> YouTube's monetization and algorithms incentivized content to be bloated with fluff like long intros, outros, intermissions, shoutouts
I can watch YouTube on a television though.
And, just like a book, I can skip the parts I'm not interested in.
Are we at the point that research has become something that should be so effortless that even the tiniest annoyance is considered bad?
> so content creators cram in as much information as possible
> The same 2 minutes of content gets sped up and cut down to 30s
which is exactly the opposite of good information.
A lightning talk it's not information, it's an hint to something that should sparkle your interest, nobody actively search for lightning talks as a form of research.
At school I studied Roman history for ever, it's not like that Roman history is really that complicated (it is vast, it spans a very long time and there are many names and many battles, but still not complex stuff) it's that persistence of knowledge requires time, repetition and going into details.
You can cram Roman history in two paragraphs, but that's not information, that's trivia.
But mostly, good information requires reputation: you can't just take a 2 minute video crammed into 30 seconds chipmunk high pitch voice and call it "information". That's just someone talking about stuff, as far as the use knows, it could be 100% bullshit (and probably is).
Ironically, your comment has the same problem the people you are complaining about are a complaining about ... 8 paragraphs as opposed to the GPs 2.
I'm not learning Roman History from youtube/tiktok, I'm trying to figure out how to factory reset my parents DVR. 10 minutes of rambling is not useful.
I had a small problem with my dishwasher, and wanted to look up how to fix it. Youtube video was ~15 minutes long and in the end somehow contained less relevant information than the 1 minute TikTok.
Youtube shorts is trying to get in the mix, but no matter how I try to curate my feed, there's always around 30% bald men bullshitting mixed in (Joe Rogan, Andrew Tate and a bunch of bad comedians). Their algorithm is strongly geared towards controversy, and I guess it works to increase engagement, but only for people who don't realize how toxic and unhealthy it is to watch stuff like that.
TikTok is a holy grail of distilled information. In two short years of TikTok recipes, my wife has learned how to cook better than almost any restaurant we eat at, and we're serious foodies. Zero to one hundred, just from TikTok.
There's everything from OSint TikTok to finance TikTok to archeologist TikTok... It's crazy, and it's good.
Once you find your niche, the information density approaches that of a black hole. It's really high quality.
Is it information or inspiration, a la Pinterest? I get some cooking youtubers can be long winded like cooking blogs of before, but I feel like you find people you like, and can way easier scrub the video to important parts on YT.
And I get us on HN are a particular cohort, but is there really as much depth of information? Literally had to help a family member fix their jeep over the holidays and "replace fuel pump jeep Cherokee 1998" is just not something I think Tiktok would be good at. Idk I should try and install it sometime i guess.
And then also, at least i've noticed on Instagram (and occasionally FB), that like sometimes I see something. Forget about it, click elsewhere, and then cant go back to find it again? Vs /feed/history and even browser history on Youtube?
Edit: Is this normal? I cant even search for videos on tiktok.com without an account?
it's just simply that cooking is a very basic skill.
it only requires that you do it.
you don't need to study hard to learn to cook.
The average person can learn to cook from someone who already can do it (usually it's your parents...) in a week. It usually happens at the age of 15. From then on it's only a matter of practicing and experimenting. It doesn't require a tutor, contrary to what TV shows like master chef wants to sell to you.
I learned how to cook looking at my mom doing it and then tried some recipe from this book series from the '60s that were very popular in many homes when I was a kid.
> So? Millions of people lack basic skills, like 1/3 of the population struggles with digital skills.
You mean people can't use their hands?
Digital skills are not real skills, they are imaginary skills that mostly boil down to "they don't know software products" but they also "don't care about them" and it's a very very very broad field, many people take for granted their knowledge about complex stuff, but basic "digital skills" are easily learned through simply doing it. Just like cooking, but less useful.
Coincidentally, I never used TikTok, I don't know how it works, it's one of the few Chinese stuff that I really don't care about (but it's ironically loved by Americans who also hate China for everything else). Based on this sentence many people would say that I lack basic digital skills, but I am also a professional software engineer since 1996. Many of the things that are basic digital skills for me, are advanced stuff for people who only use a smartphone. Many basic skills, like using a real keyboard, are alien to touchscreen natives. And so on. TikTok is not a skill, but if it was I would lack that skill.
Meanwhile cooking is something that anybody can do, even chimps ca do it
Virtually every animal that is not an insect can be cooked the same way: open the belly, remove internal organs, cook it. Done. .
Fancy recipes are not "cooking", there's the same distance between playing soccer with your friends and being a professional soccer player.
Saying that TikTok helped someone to learn how to cook is misleading, the merit is of the person that started doing it and learned how to do it by doing it.
Replace TikTok with "grandma book of recipe" and the result is the same.
TikTok has no real value in this story, it just happened that someone used it for inspiration because that's what that person knew. Coincidence is not the same thing of correlation.
Have you seen British newbuilt homes? They must be using their feet!
> Digital skills are not real skills, they are imaginary skills
So is filling doing paperwork and navigating beurocracy.
We have an entire proffesion dedicates to doing just that, and every year thousands of people get in trouble because they ticked a wrong box in a form.
They suck because they never took just a little time to try to learn, because they think it's so basic that they can just figure it out while doing it. Or they were wrongly taught by their mothers from past generations when women cooked because of their sex and not because they were any good at it.
You kind of mean cooking as in "cutting and heating food" it seems to me. It's like saying a person can learn "computing" in a week, where they learn how to write a Word document and print it. Sure, it covers a need, and it's a good start. Everybody should learn some cooking and YouTube is a great instructor, but like everything it takes time and effort to become skilled.
What prior knowledge would you need to do computing?
Cooking a simple meal anybody can learn, just as typing a Word document and printing it. More complicated cooking tends to stress people out immensely. Kind of the same as more complicated computer stuff does.
> What prior knowledge would you need to do computing?
Wikipedia to the rescue, as usual
Computing is any goal-oriented activity requiring, benefiting from, or creating computing machinery. It includes the study and experimentation of algorithmic processes, and development of both hardware and software.
now go to the average person, ask them what an algorithm is and be prepared to be disappointed.
Ask them what a pressure cooker or filleting is and you won't be.
> just as typing a Word document and printing it
that's not computing, that's typewriting.
typewriting is easy, as the adage says: monkeys can do it and eventually write Shakespeare.
> More complicated cooking tends to stress people out immensely. Kind of the same as more complicated computer stuff does.
Not really.
More complicated cooking mostly takes more time, but it's not really more difficult. I would argue that many people can make cakes which is some of the more complicated food one can cook, but they amusingly say they can't cook.
Making sushi it's easy, but it needs a very long preparation.
More complicated computer stuff requires a lot of studying and you have to learn a lot of concepts that have no other use outside of computing world.
Sorry for double posting, I can't edit my comments anymore.
Amusingly I just discovered that TikTok is actually a very good educational platform but only for Chinese people in China.
The Chinese version of the popular short video app TikTok, known as Douyin, will force users in China who are under 14 years old to use the so called teenage mode that will limit them to 40 minutes a day between 6 a.m. and 10 p.m. to ensure they get adequate sleep. Endless zombie-like scrolling is interrupted by mandatory 5-second delays. They’re also only shown specially-selected “inspiring” content.
The algorithm is vastly different, promoting science, educational and historical content in China
I don't know for sure if this is some form of Chinese propaganda, but assuming it's true, compared to the content that is more prominent in the rest of the World, it becomes increasingly hard to call ourselves "advanced societies".
I've heard much fuss about 4), but i'm still skeptical. Google makes most their money on commercial searches such as "what is the best TV", or "where to buy football tickets", not "please do my homework". And AI will have a hard time returning superior results on the former, because many people are looking for human reviews rather than an AI output.
In this sense, Amazon ads will continue to a threaten Google, but not some future edition of ChatGPT.
Definitely but would you be able to tell if a review you see is generated or written by a human?
We will have to face a reality where nothing on the internet can be trusted. Ironically traditional news outlets will probably become more relevant again.
Ironically, if they had focused more on delivering a good search experience instead of delivering ads and low-value "AI" features, they might have better prospects looking forward.
Google is still king of the traditional web. There are so many products and services that you cannot sell through Amazon and that you do not want to sell on Amazon. Social media is a joke when it comes to online sales, you have to invest 100 hours into social media to get the same results as investing 1 hour in a normal web site.
The search engine of Google has rapidly deteriorated, but people still go mainly to Google when they want or need to purchase something.
AI can not make contracts with humans and make a sale. People selling online instead of making free content seem to be the most protected against AI right now. An AI can never deal with money responsibilities.
Google's strongest arm right now are maps, where they are superior. Apple is finally catching up, and could compete with Google if they changed some of their truly idiotic maps policies. For what it's worth, Apple could probably easily destroy Google as a search engine, and they have the conservative attitude to make them a good candidate.
I'm not sending my purchase intent to Amazon. In fact I am ensuring I don't give them ads results via SEO (e.g., -site:amazon.com).
I don't want Amazon ads in my results which I know were forcibly generated at runtime by overriding competitors (i.e., breaking/hacking Google Search).
I don't want to purchase an item from Amazon knowing it could contain an empty box and/or defective product (i.e., no quality control), will take 5x as long to arrive, and I may not even receive a refund in the event I try to return the item.
Give me a service better than Amazon. I'm tired of being served subpar everything by them. Especially when they treat their employees and customers like trash. No thanks.
I agree except for "there is no way out" - for a company with Google's bankroll, there's always the option of an acquisition. That's the usual way for monopolists to stay relevant.
Yeah it's still too early for us to know for sure but I'd expect LLMs getting pretty bad pretty quick.
Once ads are added there is, again, a motivation to make replies very long and rambly. Even now I begin getting "annoyed":
Yes it's grammatically correct and "humanly" sounding but all I really want is five dashes with ingredients and instructions for an apple pie.
Given enough time, I'm confident the "Certainly I can help you. Here's what you need to..." will once again turn into a paragraph or two to have more opportunities to sell to advertisers.
The economics still don't seem to favor brief responses.
