Even recently, sites like CNN were using subdomains with affiliate offers managed by third parties(1). These sites weren't being de-ranked algorithmically-- someone at Google would have to apply a manual action to remove them from the SERPs. What incentive would there be to do so if a prior agreement was in place?

Google doesn't really care about discoverability for smaller domains that may have good content. They are either being risk averse (avoiding potential spammers, junk AI content) by favoring trusted domains, favoring brands who are likely to spend on display or search ads, or maybe a combination of these.

1) https://searchengineland.com/google-begins-enforcement-of-si...

Here is what I mean. Photos apps used to let you search through your photos using filters.

The same kinds of things are happening on the web which already happened to apps (desktop and mobile).

In the modern world, some marketing company wants to tell YOU which of YOUR photos you wanted, so they can sell you some prints, harvest your data, or something.

I would like any apps that have to do with collections of files, photos, music, etc to be more of a deterministic DATABASE and less of a nondeterministic algorithm.

You just described what I missed about the older software. Older software gives users control over sorting and show data in a tabular format. Modern software sorts data with an algorithm, with ads mixed in, and shows data in a card format, making it a lot less usable.

(I actually worked for one of such "better off as an .xls file" startup in the past, and its main competitor was an incumbent that sold the same stuff as an Excel extension. Trying to replace that with a React app is not a worthwhile use of life.)

Algorithms are fine. I'll happily apply the most advanced ones I can get. The problem is with who applies them to what - as you and GP said, it's about user control - or, currently, lack of.

Sending sqlite databases to the users which they can interact with using both sql and a viewer is where it's at.

Other options might be SQL Server Express or SQL Server Express LocalDB, the latter of which seems conceptually very much like SQLite within the MS ecosystem, and both of which are usable for production purposes at no cost within the technical limitations that differentiate them from paid editions.

We are not front-end people, so the app is built with the expectation that people will be doing their filtering, searching and using the intelligence we provide, but in their home turf (excel).

Our app also lets users "track" certain events, and we do not use push notifications, rather we respect our user's attention and email them a short summary, and link to a csv that they can use!

I'm old and tend to agree, but I suspect this is similar to "you used to have a knob on the TV that showed the channel it's on".

After the digital switchover, there was now a set-top box, and electronic program guide and three-figure channel numbers thrown into the mix, as well as stateful aspect such as whether the TV was set to AV or still trying to use its now-obsolete tuner.

For someone with poor eyesight, limited feeling in his fingers and limited ability (and admittedly willingness, too) to build a mental model of how the menus worked and how they can be navigated, it spelled the end of his unsupervised access to TV.

The big difference for me between database-query-driven and algorithmically-driven is that the latter makes it very hard to know when you've completed an exhaustive search. Indeed for the likes of meta and tiktok that's a feature, not a bug, since their goal is to keep you engaged and plugged into "their" content forever.

You can avoid this by using the physical power button, which is conveniently located behind the TV. It will still take forever to turn on, but there's no ambiguity over whether you've started the process.

I still have trouble believing the device was allowed to reach customers in this state.

A lot of change is for the better, but quite a lot is a regression.

I have access to around 1000 "channels", if you include live broadcasts and network-like apps. How exactly were old TVs better at helping navigate that?

With digital broadcast TV and cable whenever you switch to a different carrier there is a long delay (at least 0.5 sec) for the radio and the rest of the processing train to sync up. With streaming you have to do multiple network round trips to establish a stream. Either way you don't have the immediacy that old TVs had.

The question of UI in modern TV is interesting. 15 years ago the 500 channel problem looked difficult, my impression was that Comcast Xfinity (2010) was the first really good STB interface for the digital age.

I have a NVIDIA Shield which has an Android TV interface that convincingly makes FAST services like Pluto, Plex and Tubi look like linear TV on an STB. What you find though is that going "back" from one of those channels can put you, disorientingly, in the app for those channels, and also that you can usually navigate better if you start out with the FAST app (and have a more consistent experience watching FAST on a computer, tablet or XBOX) Except for those things which, for some reason, are easy to find in Android TV but hard in the app.

Knowing what was on 500 channels may have been difficult, but that's equally difficult now. The problem of navigating 500 channels was solved more than 25 (not 15) years ago by remote controls that had numpad buttons on them. You navigate to channel 351 by pressing buttons 3, 5, and 1 in sequence.

Look at defunct sites like Nextag that were moderately useful in the space-- they had free and paid placements. They were steadily growing search visibility until Google started pushing their own product (Froogle, free product listings in 2014ish) and Nextag suddenly "violated Google's policies" and lost 90%+ of their traffic rather quickly (probably 1MM daily visits to under 10k basically overnight). Google shopping technically offers "free product listing placement", hidden well below the ads-- likely as a defense to anti-trust on monopolization of that specific space.

Brickseek and CamelCamelCamel are the two most successful/long lived tools in the space-- and they grew their visibility from the now defunct but once huge deal site FatWallet and SlickDeals. Walled garden subreddits frequently disallow posting of specific tools, so it makes organic growth super challenging-- given that pretty much all commercial queries start with Google or Amazon.

There are people out there that will pay. The issue is not that there isn't willing consumers to pay for it, it's that you're undiscoverable until word-of-mouth builds around your product among people(like those in this very thread) know and talk about your product going against the grain.

It’s so annoying that it’s almost impossible to find a legitimate store. Well maybe that’s not the correct way to word it. It’s so frustrating that it’s almost impossible to know whether or not the top shops you get in your search results are stores you want to use or not.

There is a mushroom grower in Shanghai, for instance, which grows very inexpensive but tasty beech mushrooms in a giant vertical farm where workers only touch the mushrooms with a forklift (see https://www.finc-sh.com/en/about.aspx#fincvideo)

There are numerous photography equipment vendors in China that make innovative and value-conscious products (like this inexpensive manual focus lens which takes pictures like you've never seen: https://7artisans.store/products/50mm-f1-05) that excel in customer support. They post real manuals to their web sites where you can easily find them, they correspond to you with email and not a ticket system behind a CAPTCHA, they don't have a huge list of unauthorized vendors for whom they won't support your product if you bought from them, etc. I hear back from them in 24 hours most of the time compared to an Italian vendor that makes great tripods but takes more like four days to respond.

If Chinese vendors are working that hard to get my business I very much want to support them.

https://mastodon.social/@UP8/111077882869934997

(freakin’ at night!) I bought this ring flash

https://godox.com/product-d/MF-R76.html

which requires manual metering to save more than $100 off one which has TTL metering as I am using it for studio work where I am going to set it up once and take 20 shots.

I found countless Web stores pretending to be UK businesses complete with founder stories and convincing copy... All turning out to be Chinese fronts.

They know the tide is against them and see starting to employ some shady tactics to get sales.

At the same time the big money in China is buying westernised historic brands to trade through.

I'm not anti-China for goods and services, but I am against the deceptive practices I've been seeing.

At this point everything you buy is from China in some way or the other. From iPhones to Nikes, from your electronic batteries to garlic. At this point stuff from China isn’t exactly a bad thing, considering how poorly things made elsewhere are doing. I have had so many issues with American made things that I almost prefer items made elsewhere. From cars to refrigerators.

I can’t tell the authentic stores with legitimate quality control apart from the ones which will shut down and reopen with a new name next month.

Either you do deep research, or you find a trusted friend to advise you. The Internet is largely useless at this point.

https://www.nytimes.com/wirecutter/reviews/best-water-bottle...

I think there's an opportunity here for a review platform that only shows you reviews from individuals that you personally trust. "Find a trusted friend" but for the internet.

This will lead to you getting a product that’s good enough, but there may be a superior quality/value option that you don’t know about

Friendship requires regular contact anyway. We don't need somebody to intermediate that.

Yes. Refrigerators, at least, are made by a relatively small number of companies with established brands. They have EnergyStar ratings, and there's some objective evaluation.

For mattresses, the whole industry is a scam. Mattresses actually cost about US$50 to US$80 in bulk. Search Alibaba. Almost all consumer-facing companies are resellers. Markups are huge. Essentially all the mattress review sites are paid promotions.

Sure, I can buy a mattress from a factory in China, but getting it to my door is a whole other thing.

Last time I bought a mattress, admittedly, an overpriced one. I got to test out a sample at the store, and then a truck with two guys showed up, put on special booties to keep my house clean, carted away the old mattress, placed the new one, etc. I even took advantage of their 90 day guarantee to swap to a slightly less firm mattress, and the whole process was repeated for no cost.

Hiring a truck and two men to deliver a large item, and then haul another large item to the dump, and then pay the dump fee for a mattress (a lot more than standard dump fees), is something that would cost a few hundred dollars otherwise.

I'm sure that they made a profit off of me, but I have my doubts that there are riches to be made in the mattress industry given that there seems to be VERY low barriers to entry.

Pillows as well. Mike Lindell (the My Pillows guy who sank himself with "election manipulation claims") didn't get his fortune from nothing. The markup is insane there as well... if you want decent pillows go to Ikea.

It's not about being price insensitive but recommending things that are relatively mainstream and that don't seem risky, especially for major purchases that have to be installed and potentially serviced.

(Did have a service issue on my recent GE Profile refrigerator but it took one phone call and was a no-brainer.)

But you're probably right in general. Wirecutter mostly doesn't recommend unknowns it thinks are potentially bargains. Which I probably wouldn't do in its position either.

You don't want to research and recommend a product from a random seller on Amazon that won't be available six months from now.

Their budget recommendations are, correctly, products that have proven to be reliable and available.

They are a great review site, and normally do categories like "absolute best", "best value", and "best budget".

They are very thorough, and always buy their own stuff, never take sponsorships or freebies.

I try to buy natural materials like latex or cotton - which cannot and are not mass produced (difficult to roll and transport from across the world)

When I was looking for a fridge a year or so ago I heard that Samsung was trying to fix their bad appliance rep and quality of parts had gone up, but I went with a different brand.

There’s been an issue the last few years of fiberglass escaping through the cover on memory foam mattresses. If I was mattress shopping I’d probably still get foam, but look for one without fiberglass or find some kind of allergy cover to at least contain it.

Costco and Samsung are big enough that you can achieve reasonable signal.

When your local car dealer offers you a full drivetrain warranty though (assuming it's a full warranty and not one of the other ways people are often fleeced), will they honor it when the lemon they sold you breaks the first time? the 2nd? the 3rd? Will they, instead, note that most people buying that car don't have much money (or, if you used any form of dealer financing, know for a fact you don't have much money) and require you to retain a lawyer and sue them to recover any damages?

1. Colloquial use of "lemon" differs from the legal definition. In the given example, this might include a 15yr old vehicle (far outside any normal "manufacturer's" warranty) with numerous defects both known to the dealer and lied about to the consumer. The dealer would likely lose any civil complaint, but in Texas, and most states, this doesn't count as a "lemon." You're protected, if at all, by the fact that the salesperson warranted a thing, and perhaps any actual written "warranty" (really insurance, not that it necessarily matters) the dealer might have sold you. You usually waive the warrant of merchantability, so the fact that the car is a dud isn't enough by itself for you to have any damages (all state-specific, consult a lawyer in your jurisdiction).

2. Picking on Texas, since you brought it up, if you only bring the car in 3 times for a major defect covered under the lemon law, it's not a lemon yet. If the dealer refuses to deal with you on the 3rd instance then you'll have to sue with some other justification.

3. In the vast majority of states, you don't have an automated (minus filing fees) hearing process pertaining to lemons. Even in those which do, you're much more likely to succeed with the help of an attorney. In either case, in most states, attorney's fees are not part of the damages you can claim, and when squabbling about a $5k used car it can easily cost more in attorney fees (plus incidentals like renting a car and missing work for the actual hearings -- usually not covered even in states granting damages for incidentals (including rentals and missing work in other contexts) arising from the lemon), often making it not even worth pursuing.

...

Usually, even with moderate legal protections, you don't want to enter into an agreement where you expect to have to rely on those protections. Your best-case scenario is that you waste a bunch of time and still have only as many resources as you started with. You'll usually do even worse. Why take a losing gamble?

Then you just search for those two things online.

That's how I found an amazing natural latex cooling mattress online.

And the best part is that most online mattress retailers have 90 day try out periods. We didn't like our first one, and instead of having us ship it back they told us to donate it and sent us the next to try. So now we have a really nice spare bedroom mattress as well as the perfect mattress in our bedroom.

Gmail is next I predict. They have a monopoly over consumer email, so it’s revenue growth just waiting to be unlocked when times get tough. A higher percentage of your inbox is going to become paid Gmail ads and there’s nothing you’re going to do about it. Nobody wants to go to the hassle of changing their email address (the amount of boomers still on Yahoo mail is staggering).

What's galling is that (ostensibly) they used to care. So much for "organizing the world's information" and "don't be evil".

We all know how that went over.

This is so true. I remember when Demand Media was crushing it on Google in the early 2010s. Seem like they were everywhere, and then one day they weren’t.

Can you post a link to a low-quality wikihow article or two?

Apparently he passed away last year, after "authoring 2,511 articles in sum and accumulating over 174 million page views in just one year, 33 million of which were gained within a single month."

https://www.forbes.com/sites/paulmonckton/2023/10/05/tribute...

Meanwhile, a founder of one of the major 80s-era minicomputer companies that even had a book written about them passed away a few weeks ago and I would have not even known except for my Facebook groups.

That relationship can work in the opposite way sometimes. John McAfee seemed to be getting a gleeful kick out of embarrassing the security company that had invested in the right to use his name.

Usually because he was doing zany and sketchy and potentially criminal, while expertly courting media attention. But he also used that power for good sometimes by criticizing their bad products.

The writers, editors and other business partners who built their reputation by contributing to Forbes previous good reputation are probably very not OK with it

I get the feeling the family doesn't care while they lounge around on their stacks of cash?

I bought a pair of Doc Martens boots a while back. And they're shit. I remember them from the 80's and they were really solid, good leather, well made, etc. The modern ones are crappy leather and fell apart after only a few months. But they still cost a decent amount because they're Doc Martens.

My friend pointed out that Doc Martens are primarily worn by teenage girls these days, and are almost "fast fashion". My expectations based on the brand are not matching with reality, because the brand has moved on from being the de rigeur footwear for the entire 80's alternative scene.

From this, I have come up with the "reverse Vimes" theory of boots. That actually the most cash-efficient approach to footwear is to buy cheap K-mart shoes, expecting them to last for a year, instead of buying expensive branded shoes which are actually made just as badly as the cheap ones and still only last a year.

The point being that Doc Martens, like Forbes, are trading in their reputation for quality. In ten years time they will be known as shitty boots that used to be worn by edgy teenage girls, and the brand will be worthless. But the shareholders will have made significant bank from the destruction of that brand. Late-stage capitalism win, I guess.

- 2003: DM came close to bankruptcy, moved all production from UK to China and Thailand, laid off UK workers

- 10/2013: private equity company Permira acquired R. Griggs Group Limited (owner of DM brand), for £300m. Hired former brand president of Vans as CEO.

- 2019: declining quality reported for previous years

- 1/2021: floated on London Stock Exchange for £3.7 billion.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dr._Martens#History

The problem is, it may be cash efficient in theory for an individual, but for society at large it's a significant cost - animal lives (for the leather), fossil fuel consumption (for the plastic parts and synthetic leather, also transport), human time lost in production and sales...

This is difficult and requires ongoing work. Fashionable young people tend to do it but I certainly don’t blame anyone who decides that it isn’t worth the effort.

I know what high quality looks like; I wore my first Doc Martens for a decade. I trusted the brand when revisiting my youth and buying a new pair.

It seems someone figured out that the price tag goes with the brand, not the quality. So you can charge high prices for cheap boots if you put the DM tag on them. And make bank.

I think this will accelerate, and the "new and upcoming" brands will get shit at exactly the point where people like me discover them. Because, as you say, it's not worth the effort to keep up with this rapid churn.

Hence the Inverse Vimes solution: stop trying to buy quality and instead accept that everything is shit and deal with that reality; buy cheap and often.

You can find smaller brands that have been doing high quality stuff for a while, and they're unlikely to blow up in popularity or to reduce quality.

Docs are not my style so I don't know a good small brand that does boots like that, but I like Buttero, Crown Northhampton and John Elliott for boots/shoes. Beckett Simonon is a good brand for more formal shoes. Morjas is another brand for more formal shoes that looks really good, though I haven't bought anything from them yet.

For example, I like to wear $30 Costco shoes. I can usually get at least a year out of them, but even if not, they’re only $30. I can buy 3 in a year and come out ahead. And I don’t waste time researching shoes.

Doc martin didn't sacrifice the brand. They realized that people would never pay $1000 for doc martins so they just jettisoned the company name by rebranding into fast fashion before they totally disappear. It was probably the only choice by the time it was decided. There were probably some missteps along the way where they may have been able to keep their prices up enough to keep the quality but they missed it.

Even today you can find excellent quality, resoleable boots, for $200-300. Just look at Redwing, Thursday, Wolverine and many, many others.

This is of course a massively opinionated subject about price/quality so no one will ever agree but there are plenty brands north of $1000 now that probably are around as big market as doc martin was in the 80s. I'd consider that to be the more accurate comparison.

And yes, I would be willing to pay that kind of money now for a pair of boots that would last me a decade again.

It was also kinda the point back in the 80's; your Docs were an investment. They cost decent money, but they'd last a decade and became part of your identity. Practically a physical extension of your body; I had a flatmate who regularly fell asleep in his and eventually developed trenchfoot from doing that. The boots were fine, his feet weren't. Most of my friends back in the day had one pair of shoes; their Docs. It was worthwhile investing in them because that was all you needed.

I think you're also right that the brand itself has changed and moved down-market, so they're charging less than they used to for a lower-quality product. But this is kinda my point; the brand is now being cannibalised and turned into a low-quality fast-fashion product marketed with a high-quality brand. This is obviously not going to work long-term, as people realise that Docs are now shite. As I said, in ten year's time the brand won't be worth anything.

What happened is that technology advanced, and now good quality boots don't look like Docs anymore. The market for high quality, vintage construction boots is tiny, because people who only care about quality won't buy them anymore, which is why they are expensive : only a special kind of people who care a lot about quality and looks/nostalgia are going to buy them.

People who need high quality boots just won't be satisfied with heavy, fussy, non-breathable leather and rubber boots.

This isn't well established as the cause and there is reason to expect that it isn't. To start with, the Housing Theory of Everything fits better.

If this was about management practices then in competitive markets things would still be fine, you would only need one company to not do that and everybody would buy from them. But things still kind of suck even there, so what's that about? Housing costs would explain it. People spend more money on rent so they have less money to spend on other things, meanwhile companies have to pay higher rents too, so their customers have less money and simultaneously their business has higher costs. Somehow they have to lower prices while covering higher costs and the somehow is by enshitifying their products, i.e. that is the symptom rather than the cause.

But the Housing Theory of Everything is slightly off, because the real problem is a generalization of the theory. Housing is expensive because supply is artificially constrained, and it's artificial supply constraints -- insufficiently competitive markets -- that are the general underlying cause. Housing is a major example of this, probably the largest and most important, both because it's such a large proportion of personal expenses and because the restrictive zoning that imposes the constraint is so widespread.

But it's the same problem when you need a medical imaging scan and there are Certificate of Need laws that expressly prohibit new competitors from providing the service when the incumbents are charging inflated prices, and then those high costs get incorporated into health insurance premiums and Medicare taxes and reduce real wages by increasing the cost of living.

Regulatory capture has to be undone or it will be our undoing.

But, in general, the magazine and journalism businesses aren't what they were so most of the relatively mass market magazines pretty much cashed in on their brands to the degree their owners decided to keep them around.

Apropos of nothing: NYT's subscriptions transistioned from ~0.5m print to 10m digital. (More or less.)

They've toxified their own markets for short-term gains.

Both Google and Apple. If you go to the App Store all games are ad ridden to the point where you can't play more than a minute without interruption or constant nagging to buy. Where are the apps where you pay a sum agreed from the start and use the damn app without restrictions? Some games will even trick people into buying $20/week subscriptions. I can only trust Apple Arcade for my kid. What a wasteland, probably no more than 1000 decent apps in millions. And they have the nerve to pretend App Store is some curated collection of software we can trust. It's no better than "shareware" before 2000's.

"Free to play" is really awful in general though. But I guess people won't in general pay up-front for a lot of things.

Chrome is amazingly well engineered and the Chromium team seems to have avoided the worst shittification. Having watched other products dive into the cesspit of advertising I'm not quite sure how the team does it. Somehow Chrome seems to add useful features (while being hated for that). Maybe I'm the fool in the room.

And the code is open source. A gift to humanity yet so strongly hated. So open source that most of the competition uses it! There's some magic going on somehow.

I just don't understand how anyone that calls themselves an engineer could hate Chrome that much. Firefox doesn't feel well engineered, and Mozilla has a strong taint of scuzzy executive vampires. Safari has its good points but when I was developing for it, it consistently had major flaws. Safari certainly has some amazing engineering. But Chromium mostly has better engineering from what I could tell as a JavaScript developer.

Engineers are just as vulnerable to branding and anti-branding as everyone else.

Microsoft, Google, Apple. Try to order them by evilness.

Personally, I believe that Google's issues are just a general issue of tech debt and creeping complexity that is common in all organizations.

That said, Amazon was a victim of a strategy similar to your conspiracy theory

In 2019, the WSJ [0] exposed how Walmart, Oracle and Simon Property Group were funding and astroturfing anti-Amazon groups.

[0] - https://www.wsj.com/articles/a-grassroots-campaign-to-take-d...

The key thing is the luck to get shown such ads... about 95% IME are utter garbage, and Google should go and not just mandate that game ads show actual gameplay but also that what the ads show must be the main part in the game, not just some irrelevant side quest.

Like it or not, it's what the people want. The "trashy" movies, books, music, etc. all sell like wildfire, why do most people on hn think that the internet should be any different?

Nor will it ever happen, at least as long as search is a Google monoculture. One effective player in the search space means that everyone sets their sight on the same target. Which naturally leads to SEO being an extremely one-sided arms race not in favor of Google - "good content" is hard to quantify, and whatever proxy (or combinations thereof) Google uses to estimate that quality will be ruthlessly uncovered, reverse engineered and exploited to its last inch by an unyielding, unending horde of "SEO optimizers".

The only way that Google maintains search quality is if it properly accounts for the fact that websites will adopt the path of least resistance, i.e. put in the least amount of effort to optimize only specifically the things that Google measures. Which means that the heuristics and algorithms Google uses to determine search rankings must always be a moving target whose criteria needs to be vigilantly updated and constantly curated by people. Any attempt to fully automate that curation will result in the cyber equivalent of natural selection - SEO-optimizing websites adapting by automating the production of content that hits just the right buttons while still being royally useless to actual visitors.

And if they do, you'll get maybe a decade out of them before they succumb to the same problems as Google have.

This was in response to the millions of SEOs flooding the SERPs with ever increasing amounts of low quality / incorrect / harmful AI generated content. Google didn't know how to keep the SERPs clean except over index on authority. The highly authoritative websites abused that to shill CBD oil, air fryers, mattresses, etc.

Their "collapse listicles" setting is probably one of the best features when trying to search for products, they squeeze all the listicles together in their own list (usually just below the fold). If you want them, they're there, and if you don't, they take up hardly any space.

I just read The Information, now.

Just copy paste this list to UBlacklist (or other tool). Need to sit down and search and add more sites including forbes someday.

I created a marketplace with finely tuned SEO for my employer to advertise (and charge) companies in niche industries. My SEO was better than the SEO of the developers who worked on their sites, and our audience was obviously much larger than theirs, so we ranked higher. Any time you would search for the company name or the product type in a certain geographic area, you'd find links to our pages dominating the search results.

One of the interesting things is the shenanigans some of these companies would pull to show up first in our local results. A whole lot of A1 and AAA names began to spring up as they decided that if the list was going to be alphabetical by default, then they needed to be the first in their category.

This well predates Google, though; it was a common trick for placement in the (physical) phone book.

When google gets split up the whole world will cheer.

It didn't destroy itself, it became one of the largest and most profitable companies ever.

Its tech powering an search and ad monopoly....

Things only change when ctr of ads and amount of ads displayed go down.

I usually search in English and find SEO spam somewhat often, but never from these brands.

I assume all media companies that have a "trusted domain" and are already involved in aggressive SEO are using this as a revenue generator.

The sites that turned exclusively into link farms like about.com could be whacked by Google eventually and everyone was happy. But if they try that with well known media brands there will be cries of censorship--whether it is collateral damage to some genuine journalistic content, or Google "taking away" a revenue stream.

I get Forbes 4th and 5th

Chicago Magazine is 9th

The Independent, Kirkland Reporter and The Observer are 12th, 13th and 14th

The model has proven very successful and these brands are happy to lease their reputation for a cut of the profit and none of the work.

> I wanted to share some insight into our world and get stuff off my chest as it’s been disappointing to watch go down, if not all that unique or surprising.

I guess what benefit do you get out of ratting out the company you work for?

Is it that you don't feel you have enough of a voice to change anything or to help improve things?

I wouldn’t say I’m ratting them out because these partnerships aren’t literally a secret, just that they aren’t widely known and are similarly obfuscated like the relationship with Forbes. Ultimately like I said leadership does everything in a silo and unless you’re high up in the ladder you’re not really getting a say. So probably yeah just felt a bit powerless

do you think the culture shift was just bound to happen as the company got bigger, or were there some key moments where things really started to shift?

I’m on the Editorial team at RV - so know the finance and insurance space well, and we deal with similar dynamics with the sales side, so I get where you’re coming from. I’ve seen stuff like this play out before, but curious to hear how it unfolded on your end.

I think the algorithm change mentioned in the article precipitated a lot of the culture shift. I think it was a failure of leadership to not have planned for something like this, and two rounds of layoff really shattered a lot of the energy that had been cultivated over the years. There isn’t much discussion these days about brand integrity or responsibility, especially from the top down. It’s very clearly coming from leadership to pursue growth and SEO is steering the ship with everyone else on the sidelines, subject to their whims. I hear from my colleagues in edit and data about some truly wild pieces they’re told to write/research. It doesn’t help with leadership being, as mentioned before, basically invisible outside of quarterly town halls (which are hilariously lacking in transparency, they refuse to even show revenue numbers to the employees).

There’s been other aspects too that contributed. They’ve built up a massive operation in India which offshored a lot of company functions. I had colleagues who had their growth paths with the company essentially halted because they decided to hire new people in India to build out teams rather than advance them and have to pay them more. There were headaches last year with hiring where management basically refused to do US hires for most teams because the UK had lower labor costs, even though a significant portion of the existing company was US based. This caused some of the cross-functional breakdown because it made it more difficult for teams to collaborate across the major timezone gaps. The India buildout exacerbated this too so stuff generally began to take longer.

It all ultimately stems from what is Leadership’s stated “growth above all” mindset. I can’t say they’re wrong from a business perspective. Obviously they’re doing extremely well and taking in a ton of revenue (little of which makes it into our paychecks based on our raises last year lol). It definitely wrung whatever joy or spark people had to try and put together something good. It’s an SEO machine at this point.

Despite some of the concerns raised about leadership decisions and outsourcing, the quality of the content hasn’t taken a hit from what I can see.

Are they truly outsourcing everything as cheaply as possible? Or is it more nuanced, with key areas of expertise retained in-house.

It’s interesting that there’s a lot of frustration about revenue numbers being hidden. But let’s be honest, if they did expose the revenue, wouldn’t the first move be to shout it from the rooftops? People love to complain about a lack of transparency, but sometimes those same people are the first to use that info to stir things up even more.

It’s worth noting that Lars Lofgren’s own affiliate site (the person that wrote this article), hradvice.com, was impacted by a Google update in August, so there might be some personal bias and motive here.

But I’m curious—what exactly are the criticisms you have towards platforms like NerdWallet and Bankrate? Would love to better understand.

Who the fuck reads Forbes anymore? You seen the garbage they're shilling on their website these days?

- US News and World Reports

- CBS News

- Forbes

- Motley Fool

The entire web is a shit show.

But yeah, it's still crazy that this site is even allowed in Google, and that they've shown no signs of cracking down on these types of parasite SEO schemes.

The relationship with Forbes has always been a weird one. The understanding I’ve had was the company was spun off from an effort that kind of started in Forbes but they didn’t really want to deal with themselves.

It was always an SEO driven content strategy but for a while we had a pretty sizable content apparatus. Really big editorial teams for each vertical, a bigger cultural emphasis on the quality of the content and more collaboration across teams. The editorial teams had a lot of voice in what got published and tried to respect that we were using the Forbes brand and what that meant when we made recommendations or wrote about something. The only thing I’ll say to our (meagre) defense is there are panels of experts that are consulted for recommendations on a lot of products, and the teams that do research for the actual written content (not the affiliate/partner garbage that often takes up sponsored slots) do try and work hard to provide data to meet the demands of the SEO and BD teams.

A lot of that has changed over the years. The company has grown explosively in the time that I have been here. The company something like tripled its size last year alone. I went from being a newbie on a team of less than ten to a senior member on a team in the mid double digits in the space of a year. The culture has become increasingly bureaucratic and disconnected. We’ve always been a fully remote team but it used to be much more collaborative and cross-functional.

We don’t hear much at all from leadership. It’s always been a fairly insulated operation from one vertical layer to the other. There have been two pretty big layoffs this year which came out of the blue. Editorial teams have been gutted across every vertical and the strategy has pivoted more and more towards shovelware content and partner posts. The latter being especially frustrating because they are handled by a completely separate team from the editorial team but are formatted to look like our written content even though they’re actually sponsored posts. At a team meeting after the last layoffs the CEO answered a question about the company’s plans and said something to the effect of “if we’re not growing we are dead” which I think is obviously seen in how the company is re-shaping itself.

It’s been disappointing to say the least. I don’t think any of us ever operated under the illusion we were doing important journalism or anything, but we all seemed to strive to make something good of the system we were working in. I’ve seen and heard of a lot of things I find commendable of my co-workers. Editorial and mid-level leadership have worked for a long time to ensure a separation of biz dev and edit so that they don’t have influence over the written content. I heard of times when BD really tried to push, however indirectly, for partners to get higher rankings in content. As edit gets increasingly sidelined in the business by the SEO content teams I’m not sure how much this is being maintained but I don’t work in that side of the business so I can’t speak specifically.

All of this is to say. He’s right, we are just ultimately doing our jobs. Unfortunately, I’ve outlasted a lot of people who were hired after me, and up til the layoffs it was very rare for someone to quit. Now more and more of the people who have been here since the early days (even before me) are peeling away. Those of us who stay are seeking more and more checked out. Honestly the benefits are excellent and I think that’s what keeps most of us around but no one is passionate these days.

That was a super rambling post, but I don’t ever see anyone talking about this place I’ve been at for a while. I wanted to share some insight into our world and get stuff off my chest as it’s been disappointing to watch go down, if not all that unique or surprising.

It is interesting that there's a huge rush to grow; the bigger and lower quality you get, the more incentive Google has to change the algorithm. The business could completely evaporate overnight.

We're intentionally ruining our economies and praising the people doing it. If the "Western" world gets economically steamrolled by Asia in the next couple of decades, we've got nobody to blame for it but ourselves.

Implicit in that statement is that only the "Western world" has that "short erm shareholder value" ethos. I'd say that is quite debatable.

My fear is that it is only going to get worse (both in the west and in Asia).

It's exactly news. It spots the issue, dives into it, exposes the source of it, and details the structure of how it came into existence. That's what news is. That you're not surprised by it is not material.

> we've got nobody to blame for it but ourselves.

Ironically you are the one who characterized this article as "not news."

That's wrong. This is very much a Google monopoly issue.

Google has zero incentive to improve search for users since there is no competition. Google has every incentive to maximize the amount of money that search makes them.

Simply busting up companies with monopolies would fix 80%+ of the problems.

Not sure I buy this. People will overwhemingly choose 'cheap' over all other qualities. Anyone providing the sort of competition to Google will have to 1) do it for free, 2) be better enough to displace users, and 3) stay in business long enough to matter. Even if you broke Google up, who would be in a position to compete with their search platform?

You break Google Search out of Google and break Google Search up into two (or more) companies. Now, they have an incentive to compete against one another.

Before Google became a monopoly, SEO optimizations were somewhat restrained because something which was super-optimized for Google would generally hurt your search on Yahoo and vice versa. If the results got too shitty, people would start to switch.

The fact that switching doesn't happen anymore is prima facie evidence that Google is a monopoly.

Being a more expensive premium product can even be more lucrative than being the cheaper majority product. Look at Apple, the only company to even try making a high quality laptop i the last 10-15 years. I'd say the same about smart phones, but the latest Samsung phones are actually high quality.

We're dealing globally and in every industry with almost all shareholders being either retirement funds, elderly individuals, or other organizations controlled by elderly individuals. And the current generation of elderlies want to benefit as much as they possible can from any wealth being created. They haven't much time left to live and they prefer to not leave much of value behind.

Blaming shareholders has no relevance unless you look at what has changed about the shareholders. It's a new generation of elderly who never grew up and never learned to think long term.

There is a line where you really do need to compromise on quality and even reputation to keep costs down, though. If you can't or refuse to do that, you end up stagnant and irrelevant like Japan.

Customers ultimately don't care how much sincerity and effort was infused into a product as long as it's past a certain "good enough" threshold.

This is not universally true. For one thing, it has changed over time as expectations shift. Presumably our expectations have been forced downward by the diminishing quality and increasing costs of consumer goods. There is also cultural variation, with Japan as an example.

I'm not calling for t-shirts that are guaranteed to last 20 years, but it would be nice if clothing didn't fall apart after a wash or two just because they saved 5% on material cost.