The parts of the open web you access from Google/search (most of it) is almost entirely made-for-google' ranking algorithims.

The situation is worse than it is on closed social media, including Google's YouTube.

Professional YouTubers are also making content for rankings above all, but the fact that it's their own face/voice keeps some of the rot at bay.

Google is literally content made by uninterested copywriters exclusively for Google rankings.

I was recently looking for general travel advice on Google. I found it completely impossible. The content is all written by people (or ais) that had never visited. Everything reads like a middle school essay.

I often resort to searches in a smaller language, where economic incentives are 100X smaller than English.

Google created incentives for littering the web with garbage. Then they took away incentives for anyone else to even bother.

Google killed the thing that gave them life. They gave Vince Serf a sinecure and a hows-your-mother for the rest.

Thieves.

Fast forward 20 years later. I think I've spent close to 300k on the website and team to help with it. I don't even want to think about my own labor costs. These days the google results for my niche are entirely dominated by an ugly purple wordpress blog ran by non-native English speakers that gets hacked every few months with a redirect to porn or russian sites. Their information is frequently wrong. It doesn't hurt their rankings at all. Yoast through it bro. Keep up the great work Google.

The entire story was posted on twitter last year by some shocked SEO researcher last year https://twitter.com/paulk139/status/1550532282288508929

>> ran by non-native English speakers

I feel this clause doesn't help promote your grievance. A big promise of the Web was that it was World-Wide. If a site in say Thailand could exceed say a USA site's quality, all the better. I get that your specific competitors didn't excel - except in ranking. But, in principle, good wishes to global competition.

For many users, a foundational element of the quality of a website is that is in English; it’s all they speak.

I imagine that this would be a problem.

What's amusing is they think it's "rival websites" hacking them with redirects to russian purse sites

> A few other people have noticed the quiet success of Kprofiles and have already attempted to copy them.

> Some have better content, site structure, and formatting than Kprofiles.

> But they just compete with Kprofile's massive backlink profile.

So did Kprofiles (a somewhat purple website) come before you (Kpopping) or are you talking about competing for second place with Hallyu Idol (a very purple website)?

https://web.archive.org/web/20170530121529/http://www.kprofi...

We were running a beta for that period and launched publicly in July of 2017

https://web.archive.org/web/20170722070519/https://kpopping....

Personally I think hallyuidol is even worse but that's another matter. (they are just copying kprofiles but whoever designed it has eyeballs so they have a massive advantage on that front)

Right now I have YouTube's API team giving me an audit that is compounding my already overextension on our development. They're telling me I can't do rankings or aggregate data. It's a giant mess and I have another fulltime job so it's not getting the attention it deserves -- still it's miles ahead of its competitors and I don't see how that's even debatable.

If you can't understand that I'm afraid I don't see a point in continuing.

It also has a forum with a community. I really this as you being frustrated by the competition rather than them doing something nefarious.

Boom, it just gave me it, straight at the top, on the quick answer dialog. Same for Kagi, which is a paid but good search engine.

Google is ruined, was so much better 6 years ago.

And Yandex is leagues ahead of Google and Bing in terms of reverse image search.

Google is generally better if you have a more abstract or conceptual query, or if you're not sure what the best term would be.

I’d bet Baidu is decent too but that one really isn’t set up to interface with the Western internet.

But I've personally found that Yandex to give better search results than Google on some topics. But I also don't trust the company and assume that everything they make has FSB backdoors in it.

YouTube's stuck in its own algorithm hellhole. Mostly due to their insistence that creators have to post on a regular basis, creative block or lack of things to cover be damned. So if your niche has nothing to talk about right now, well you'll need to find something, anything to cover to stay relevant. And if your fans/viewers want something that you don't care about anymore, well that sucks even more. Changing to a topic you do care about will probably tank everything for weeks, potentially longer.

It's like a video creating version of a factory production line for those trying to become popular/famous there.

That doesn't mean that you, the youtuber, must create a lot of videos or very long videos or very frequently, but you must create a video that induces the person watching it to watch more videos, yours or others'.

There are different kinds of videos that fits that purpose: a series of videos for a course of some subject, a video that points to another video of the same subject, a video that complements other video that the user might have watched before...

That’s why there are so many collabs now

Most channels these days attract pretty consistent views per vid. The most straightforward way to increase revenue is frequency.

Try Wikivoyage, the Wikipedia Foundation's open travel guide. Listings are a mixed bag, but the general advice is often spot on.

They shouldn't have to site:wikivoyage.org just to find anything useful. You shouldn't need site:reddit.com to make general searches useful. This is broken.

Nowadays they’re cracking down on ad blockers on youtube, because that’s what they care about: ads

The web is not what itwas, so they can't just "revert." They need talent, execution, ideas. IDK if websearch still has that at google. A possibility of big(ish) ideas about how websearch should be.

Innovators' Dilemma, and just general difficulty of changing core things that don't change often. Google are optimizers. Local plateaus are hard to beat.

I avoid companies like Google as much as possible, but is it really their fault that so many people fall for clickbait? If that's what a majority of people click on, shouldn't users share the blame?

We've had the same plot with TV. It was definitely possible to fill countless channels with the many lectures given all over the world. Countless people who though much effort managed to learn and discover useful and interesting things. You would need complimentary programming to allow the viewer to access or understand the different fields - which is entirely doable.

It's not different from watching a lengthy series of seasons and episodes with a modestly complex plot.

Instant gratification [by definition] has very little to offer in the long run.

If you get sucked deep enough into some.. well... useful topic (like most here know enough about programming) development in that area is going to be more interesting than Ow my balls!

Wheel of fortune isn't going to create any kind of scientific/economic/social revolution.

With any product you work on you can ask yourself what kind of people it creates. Who is the audience, what will I make them into?

I'm not saying that Google can't do better. Clearly they have mismatched incentives with their users due to advertising. Moving organic search placements below the fold to increase ad revenue is a major issue, but isn't akin to prioritizing clickbait.

Instead what I'm saying is that due to Google's dominant market position they are under higher scrutiny if they start labeling certain media outlets as frequently generating clickbait and down-weighting them, where smaller search engines like Kagi can get away with that without being labeled a manipulator.

That said, if Google did allow block lists like Kagi, that could go a long way, but likely would still lead to complaints about bias.

You can use the uBlocklist browser extension to add em back, but its not as seamless

exactly this.

I have very extensive knowledge in a certain niche that is profitable (for other people). I really enjoy building sites, so I tried to build a site that explains all the important topics for both short attention span 'TLDR' people, but also have more in-depth articles for people wanting to learn more. I built additional tools, a custom crawler with GPT regularly analysing new incoming data etc... and had a lot of fun building it.

the "organic" users I get (about 30-40) a day, have an average visit time of 3-4 minutes, which is pretty long for text-only sites I think.

but i absolutely loathe "off-page" seo, e.g. buying links.

so now the site will keep rotting away, after all the fun of building it is gone. and I have no incentive to work on it much more apart from the occasional maintenance, as it's not my primary business. And I don't want to sink thousands into buying links.

The only way to get "organic" traffic nowadays in even remotely profitable verticals, is by investing a shitton into backlinks.

the amount of shit low quality articles that have just been written for placing a link to game the google rankings is absolutely insane.

Unfortunately, none of the alternatives capture or even understand the point of reddit. They focus on secondary features like decentralization, when the primary appeal of reddit is the network of communities (that are, furthermore, properly threaded, moderated forums) at the same place, using the same format, accessed with a single user identity.

In fact, precisely this aspect of reddit is what made it accumulate so much genuine information, and the reason it has replaced raw Google search for many kinds of questions. (well, it is definitely not the horrible facebook-post-like-with-no-discussion functionality they have been pushing forever).

It really is one of the most unfortunate things of the modern internet. :(

I think there's a good degree of pseudo-intellectualism on the site. Not necessarily in the conduct, but in claims of knowledge and the certainty they present it with.

There was a period in my life I've been active on Reddit myself. Looking back on that period in my life, I presented many strong and celebrated opinions there without much basis in reality. I'm not beyond blame for this, just stating an observation.

From my perspective, Reddit works as a validation machine, where validation is given somewhat randomly. It's like a self-service bias entrenching device. So perhaps it's natural to see pseudo-intellectual content there written by people such as my younger self.

To me, "good" means quite high quality. Like an expert sharing their thoughts in their niche. If you wish to use these thoughts, they will be very reliable and correct.

If you consider "good" to be anything that is not "bad" or "harmful", then I would be more inclined to agree with you.

My niche of tech is full of hobbyists and enthusiasts who want to participate in it - it's a part of the video games industry. And there is a very large amount of misleading knowledge on Reddit. Of course, even misleading knowledge can push people generally in the right direction, so I don't see the discourse as harmful. But I also don't see it as of particularly high quality. It might be "good" on some terms, or "neutral" on others.

With hockey skates - I'm not an expert. But I would expect that the recommendation on Reddit won't have to do with materials, blade quality, ankle support, footbeds, tongue design, heat moldability, weight distribution, holders and runners, energy transfer, foot health features and similar things that you could find on expert forums. I would expect that the recommendation would be based on entry-level things, like what feels good, or what brand is popular. This is not to say that this advice has no value. There is value. But they might not consider how materials might limit skill growth, how there is a knowledge gap in fit assessment in most new skaters, or how different skates protect the skater's feet from injury.

There is value in some advice, just not enough to consider it "good", in my opinion. Others might have different opinions.

I wonder for how long that's going to work: the cost of translating with LLM are now basically $0 and LLMs are exceptionally good at doing that. So basically: have LLMs generate complete, total and utter crap in english. Then have LLMs decline this crap in all the world's languages.

My searches are now split evenly between TikTok, Google with site:reddit.com, ChatGPT and Google with no filter as a last resort. And I really want to give Kagi another try in the coming weeks.

How bad are things? Bad indeed. I even buy my airline tickets from a traditional brick-and-mortar agent with whom i built a relationship over years and who finds good deals for me and knows the pitfalls better than the internet could suggest.

For example there are plugins like Unhook that let you stop autoplay or suggested videos to show on YT. It's so refreshing to watch YT only for purpose that you initially come for, without garbage distractions...

Beyond that, the way Google now ranks pages based on how well they fit their pretty limited definition of working on mobile and how “fast they load” has done exactly zero to promote quality content. I use quotes because I have worked on ad-ridden super slow SPA’s that manage higher scores than super fast static sites.

I think the only place advertising should be allowed is in a marketplace setting, anywhere else is "public domain" and shouldn't be allowed in my opinion. It is the root to many evils, it is the mechanism that trends towards hacking the user in the loop in a positive feedback system, which also optimizes at the users expense yet depends on the user. Quite parastic.

That's the horrifying beauty of it. Everything has been turned into a marketplace.

* Items are capable of being traded.

* The items being traded are unchanged by the process of assigning a numeric value.

* Abstract concepts such as “risk” and “investment” are best measured in the same numeric values as are used for concrete items.

Adding to that, even if I were to accept the reasoning that following incentives is equivalent to being in a marketplace, your statement that “In all situations, the human being follows incentives .” is simply untrue. It ignores the existence of self-sacrifice (e.g. a soldier sacrificing themself to save comrades), the existence of self-harm (e.g. Jonestown), and the distinction between incentives and perceived incentives (e.g. also Jonestown).

Evidence of deadly human-on-human violence mostly starts showing up with the Neolithic period, before that humans didn't go out of their way to kill each other as much. It looks a lot like you need to be settled and amass possessions to give people a good enough reason to kill each other. That's recent behavior as far as our species is concerned.

Death by homicide seems much worse the further back you go, on balance.

Just because we have a ton of evidence of humans collaborating as far as historical artifacts go back. But then of course with the appropriate perspective almost everything is fairly new. Would you call Göbekli Tepe fairly new for example?

After all 9000 BCE was just yesterday compared to the invention of multicellular life for example. Which is also massively about cooperation.

Can you name a modern monetary theory that does not model supply and demand (production and consumption , if you prefer) and does not devolve quickly into black markets in practice?

At the same time, ads made a lot of the free web possible.

I run services making money with ads: I would not be able to work on them without.

Or maybe the revenue I would make is too little to bother with all the stupid EU regulations around VAT - ads offer a simple solution and you get a single B2B transaction, while providing values to Customers.

If we had easy to use cheap (or free? I'm sure we can work out a model based on profiting off the analytics alone if we streamline the service and don't become as bloated as VISA / Mastercard) microtransactions with low fees and no ***ing bureaucrauts, maybe ads would not be needed as much.

But we don't. And a big chunk of the last 20 years of internet innovations was sponsored with ads money.

What made all the free web possible was free software, not ads. Google and the likes created empires through ads and breaking laws, we owe nothing to them. The sooner they go, the better. Also, they don't own the ads business model, there are healthier ways to sell, buy and deliver ads and that's not what Google and Meta are doing. They need to go.

> And a big chunk of the last 20 years of internet innovations was sponsored with ads money.

and a much bigger chunk was killed with it.

To say nothing of the opportunity costs. They killed a lot of what was, but they’ve also prevented so much of the promise of the internet from coming to fruition. Lost time, lost talent and lives, and a gaping hole in society where a more productive internet might have been. Somehow we let them.

Big tech became too big even for themselves. Infinite growth is impossible and the capital market will punish them heavily when they stop growing. And they will. This big tech recess might never end. The likes of Google and Meta will go into maintenance mode and operate with much smaller engineering teams. I'm betting on the end of an era.

What made the free web possible was first and foremost, access to it.

Then, probably a combination of technological, cultural, and economic factors and the human beings behind the scenes who worked to either create software to give it away or to make money with ads by creating foobar service.

Yes, free software, and yes, because of advertising.

It’s both.

What I do: work a day job to make money and then give my content away for free, or charge what the market will bear. No ads, no SEO. Classic, old-school Internet.

Is there a way to improve the detection of posts like this so they can be deranked? If so, why isn't this done? You would have thought the original PageRank was meant to combat this because useless articles wouldn't get linked to.

For what it's worth, whenever I'm helping with SEO, it's generally only to encourage website owners to use semantic HTML tags properly and structure their content in a way (e.g. titles, headings, sections, new pages with links between them) that's easier for humans with and without screen readers, and for search bots to read. I don't like the practice of writing articles to target profitable keywords that aren't relevant to your site or writing bloated articles.

Unfortunately, all of this in lumped together as "SEO" so it's become a bad word.

> how “fast they load” has done exactly zero to promote quality content. I use quotes because I have worked on ad-ridden super slow SPA’s that manage higher scores than super fast static sites.

I think speed is only a small ranking boost. Maybe this will increase over time. If it was a big boost right now, it would have forced every website to make large immediate changes which would have been very controversial I'd think.

If you are travel agency you create crap content and you create links to said pages. You target specific keywords and since your overall page authority is high then your shitty reasult flood google.

If you have price comparision website you get manually de-ranked because you compete with google shopping.

If you have stackoverflow clone you rank very high because google can serve more ads on your page vs stackoverflow. Even if google do recognize that content was scraped from SO, they choose to make money.

On some keywords olny way to rank in results is to directly pay to google. For some keywords whole page of results is payed advertisments.

Just to highlight few mechanisms.

Yes, there is. But not fixing it makes the user stay longer on Google results then driving ads revenue. Google makes money out of bad results so they won't change this.

Funny enough, LLMs are actually for the very first time challenging Google’s utility as a knowledge engine.

I see more and more Non-techie people asking ChatGPT about receptors or locations instead of Google.

Also, if there’s anything that I need to research and it’s not a general knowledge stuff but something like “How long I can travel with a EU registered car in Turkey” I will use Bing Chat, Perplexity or ChatGPT. I gave up Google already, it’s just too much spam and low quality content that I have enough incentive to break my usual workflow and habits and try LLMs.

I’m sure Google is doing great monetarily with search as if everything is garbage Ads are quality content but the technology to bypass both the ads and garbage is here.

There are many problems with LLMs as knowledge engines,

- as mentioned they can be gamed just like Google

- they hallucinate, adding another possible source of errors to the results

- they kill off the websites they scrap training data from making it unsustainable long term

As for the content providers, maybe they can once again do it without expectations of direct compensation. Maybe a content about Kazakhstan could be created by people who feel patriotic about the country and write about it because they would like foreigners know about their country.

The degradation of quality can be attributed to Google but it's not only Google's part. The content went to the gutter when professionals entered the space and optimised for the business model that puts eyeballs above anything. Lack of such a revenue might actually be therapeutic.

Well, my white list of sites providing good content for my interests actually is incredibly short by now anyway, in total maybe a handfull.

Greedy publishers, Amazon and LLMs are already killing that hope.

Do you mean LLMs will be used to generate more SEO content that is irrelevant?

Doesn't it work both ways? You can use LLMs to filter out irrelevant content better than ever? A lot of the time I use ChatGPT-4 it's as a search engine - and I don't even mean with the Browser plugin, I mean it's quicker to ask ChatGPT-4 for its encoded knowledge than to Google and click on links.

I only ask it questions whose answers I can verify e.g. if I ask it how to do something in F#, a language I'm not very familiar with, I can easily confirm whefher the code does what I need it to or not.

You can pump as much SEO garbage out as you want, it doesn't change the value of LLMs to me in this context.

This was later fixed by updating the tokenizer, but it demonstrates the importance of clean datasets at all stages.

Twelve years ago, this wasn't even a thought in the back of my head, and I bet those in the SEO industry never thought Google would let things deteriorate to such an extreme.

https://techcrunch.com/2011/01/01/why-we-desperately-need-a-...

https://www.anildash.com/2011/01/03/threes_a_trend_the_decli...

For me the biggest cause of that spiral was the shift from most users using desktops to most users using mobile to interact with google.

In the desktop search world, google used to respond with large comprehensive articles on subjects that not just answered peoples questions but also educated them on the subject around their question. This was the golden age so to speak, it answered your question along with 10 others on a subject but also helped you to understand if your question was even the right one in the first place.

With mobile, google shifted to trying to directly answer the question you asked and nothing else, presumably because people were far less willing to read large articles on mobile and just wanted fast answers.

This latter approach is much easier to SEO garbage than the original that took real knowledge and effort to write.

IDK, for me it seems the worst plague are the sites that when you search for something like "how to reverse a pushed commit in git" don't give you a single sentence answer you seek, but you scroll and scroll over, what is git, how it works, why do people use it, how to install it, if you're lucky the answer will be at the very bottom after you clicked through the infuriating cookie consent and you closed two full page video ads. If you're unlucky the answer is hidden somewhere in the "content"...

Oh and comparing mobile with desktop? What is it on the desktop with all the shitty sites that try detecting you're moving to close it(often when you just move your mouse while reading) and they suddenly try to take over the entire window with some full page flashing modal dialogs. Insanity...

My take on why this happened is twofold: 1- Google, yes. 2-the stupid cookie consent law of the EU. Yes, it made launching a huge window obscuring the entire site's content on entry acceptable. It was all downhill from that.

The Cookie Directive was (1) much more limited in its scope, applying only to cookies and not to any other method of tracking, (2) much more limited in its compliance, requiring an explicit notice even for strictly-necessary uses, and (3) much more limited in its consumer-protection, only requiring informing the consumer and not requiring consent.

The GDPR improves on all of these, but there’s a lot of conflation between the two.

https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/HTML/?uri=CEL...

>3. Member States shall ensure that the storing of information, or the gaining of access to information already stored, in the terminal equipment of a subscriber or user is only allowed on condition that the subscriber or user concerned has given his or her consent, having been provided with clear and comprehensive information, in accordance with Directive 95/46/EC, inter alia, about the purposes of the processing. This shall not prevent any technical storage or access for the sole purpose of carrying out the transmission of a communication over an electronic communications network, or as strictly necessary in order for the provider of an information society service explicitly requested by the subscriber or user to provide the service.

The directive:

(1) does not target cookies, but methods to store information, or gain access to information stored;

(2) allows strictly necessary purposes without consent or popups;

(3) requires consent for other purposes.

The directive talks about cookies in recital 25, but only as an example.

The GDPR replaces the Data Protection Directive (Directive 95/46/EC), and along that, references made to it in ePrivacy. But it does not bring anything new about cookies.

Though, I agree with you: the GDPR is well made–apart from the litigation part, but that's going to change with the GDPR Procedural Regulation. ePrivacy is good too, but 5(3) aged poorly, unfortunately.

Many websites becomes huge apps for no reason, e-mails abuse HTML and are usually unreadable in plain/text, etc. It's not even clear to me if that makes those websites more successful or if it is just cargo cult ("we have to look modern like the others").

But users mostly don't give a shit and won't support those who e.g. don't track them and therefore don't show the cookie popup.

I don't see a way to solve this, though...

I think it can still be fixed by stipulating: if the browser sends you an X-Privacy header with some well defined content then you are not allowed to show a popup and you should use the content of that header instead. The exact content of that header needs to be fleshed out but should offer a lot of customisation to keep 90% of the people happy. I'm sure mod builders and browser makers would come up with a convenient way to set that header just once and then the problem would go away.

The only thing that works is having your user-agent mercilessly chop the survelliance shit out of web pages. Don't evaluate it, don't render it. Because thw websites will forever be hostile to your interests while they can enrich themselves by datamining you.

It's also pretty coarse. I may want to allow a site I like to collect analytics to help them out, I may even want a search engine to keep track of my behaviour to give me better results. Just an on/off, where IE has set the default to off, was never going to work.

https://globalprivacycontrol.org/#about

i use chatgpt for those kinds of questions. i don't have time to read an article or select a non-spam site or even look at the stack overflow answer.

  git reset --hard HEAD~2
  git reflog expire --expire-unreachable=now
  git push -f

...

I apologize if my previous response wasn't helpful. I see that you meant "revert" and not "reverse". I apologize that two of your commits are now gone and I understand that you mean "revert", not "reverse"? You could try

  git revert HEAD
  git push

Maybe I'm underestimating GPT-4 here, but when I tried to get it to write my some CLI commands, it failed in often non-obvious ways (I was trying to resize and compress an image using imagemagick).

Seemed like a waste of time to try&error with the responses, compared to looking up the documentation.

But well, man yelling at cloud I guess.

For programming and computer questions, I'm still grateful for StackOverflow and its sister sites. Finding a conprehensive answer with lots of updates and comments describing different aspects of the problem, all for exactly the question I asked, is satisfying and it feels very time-efficient too.

Stupid computer. That does 2 commits.

> git reflog expire --expire-unreachable=now

For the love of god why? The reflog is there to save your bacon. I guess because they are still reachable from the remote's reference so they won't completely vanish just yet.

> git push -f

Now they're gone unless you can find the hashes somewhere else. The objects might still be present.

> I apologize that two of your commits are now gone

Is that you or still GPT?

ChatGPT Plus with a short custom instruction to answer in steps, respond tersely, ask clarifying questions where needed, and make recommendations wherever possible replied to "how to reverse a pushed commit in git" with:

---

To reverse a pushed commit in Git, you can either use git revert or git reset. Each approach has pros and cons.

# Option 1: git revert

Pros: Safe for shared branches, creates a new commit to undo changes.

Cons: Adds noise to history.

Commands:

    git revert [COMMIT_HASH]

    git push origin [BRANCH_NAME]

## Soft Reset

Pros: Keeps changes in your working directory.

Cons: Rewrites history; risky for shared branches.

Commands:

    git reset --soft [COMMIT_HASH]^

    git commit -m "Reverting previous commit"

    git push origin [BRANCH_NAME] --force-with-lease

Pros: Completely removes commit.

Cons: Rewrites history; risky for shared branches; discards changes.

Commands:

    git reset --hard [COMMIT_HASH]^

    git push origin [BRANCH_NAME] --force-with-lease

Use git revert for shared branches to avoid conflicts. Use git reset for local or feature branches where you control all changes. Clarify your specific scenario for a tailored recommendation.

I am sure newer GPT versions will do better, and I think for a tool as ubiquitous as git the answers from ChatGPT would have been perfectly fine too.

Just wanted to illustrate why I wouldn't mske it a habit to ask it factual questions.

The "lost two commits" answer was meant as whimsy joke. More realistic scenarios are more boring of course.

E.g. memorizing wrong explanations for solutions that happen to work, or accepting wrong answers as fact when it's inconsequential for the short term acceptance of the answer.

The same thing easily happens with Google's knowledge snippets they extract from search results.

> git reset --soft [COMMIT_HASH]^

The docs say files are unchanged.

> git reset --soft [COMMIT_HASH]^

Committing the unchanged files so like an amend, a squash, not exactly reversing, reverting, or undoing anything except commit messages.

As replied in the sister thread, I think that the risks of trusting GPT answers can be more subtle.

And app developers are doing everything to keep them inside the app with a crappy in-app browser which also benefits the Apple/Google app store ecosystem.

Apples intention with Safari was inside the name. "Safari - you're in the African jungle, theres lions and tigers, be careful, probably best avoided."

They don't want you using it. Download an app and pay us 30% instead. And that's what people do.

Convenience-seeking users don't really seem to care. Why bother with desktops and even google search when they have apps on their phone to do stuff. Nobody even trusts the web anymore because of all the SEO content spam and potential to be scammed.

If you were Google making billions a year off the app ecosystem because its a superior experience.. wouldn't your incentive be to make web as bad as possible?

As for in-app webviews, they’re not all made equally. Most apps use SFSafariViewController, which is an out-of-process Safari tab with its own app-specific cookies, local storage, etc that’s designed to give the user an opportunity to see if the page is really something they want to access and helps keeps their main browser’s tabs clean while also breaking several types of trackers. Of course though some notoriously nosy players like Facebook and TikTok don’t use this and instead implement their own which is chock full of tracking crap… this is probably an area where Apple could stand to be more heavyhanded (ban custom browser reimplementations except where those add demonstrable value or the app itself is a browser).

Also, web app devs aren’t blameless in user preference for native apps. For every web app done right, there’s three more that are shoddy and frustrating in ways that native apps generally aren’t (think breaking back button, scrolljacking, etc), some that are just plain badly built, and many that are unrepentant resource hogs. Often this applies even to web apps that have no counterpart native apps because their companies chose the web solely because it’s cheap to do so (resulting in cheap bad web apps). Are there crappy native apps too? Sure, but they’re somewhat less common and generally keep the crappiness somewhat bounded.

I thought the name "Safari" was along the lines of the early dominant browsers Netscape Navigator and Internet Explorer.

But today possibly thinking closer to one of those curated tourist zoos that you drive through with your car windows rolled up, or sitting in a small train run by the place?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wildlife_Safari

Nowadays 95-99% of the web is the general public which means that it has turned into what TV was - the happy happy box to keep the dummies occupied.

If we only could. I'd work for free helping to build it. Count on me.

I just think we don't have to build one. We already had it in 1998. It's still there, buried beneath the landfill.

Overall I have a pretty long pipeline for getting new sites indexed, but should improve when I finish migrating to the new server.

It could surf a bit on already established efforts in other domains and the narrative seem to fit with those ideas I think.

Edit: I have not heard of it before this suggestion, but it turns out that this is something that already exists.

https://small-tech.org/

https://web0.small-web.org/

If intelligently produced text content is what is needed then perhaps we need to design a format that excludes, if not automatically diminishes, images and videos

Gemini can also be fun for some mindless browsing, but has only enough content for one or two short visis per week (for better or worse).

https://indieweb.org/POSSE

https://indieweb.org/Homebrew_Website_Club

I agree with you. But I bet people 20 years ago were saying the same about the web, people never going on the real internet just being stuck in some "www.exe"

What will that mean for bona fide quality sites? I don't know but part of me hopes that those detailed sites will flourish to offer more details than can be offered in a single LLM response. Wishful thinking perhaps.

They'll be a huge backlash of course from the click-bait sites - just like with news sites protesting about losing traffic.

And, in the near future, the LLMs will start encoding the 'knowledge' they learn from scraping clickbaity ad-ridden sites _that were written by LLMs_?

Soon, shady SEO firms will be offering a service to get your product placed as the answer to normal questions people ask ChatGPT etc.

The people who were capable of writing those large detailed posts on subjects have most likely already moved to youtube or moved on.

The data that's actually useful to the LLM's will exist in places like Discord, reddit, twitter. It's pretty obvious that twitter and reddit are going to sell their data to the LLM companies for a lot of money.

Which leaves Discord, I would be very suspicious of anyone trying to buy Discord...

It'll be as if Gutenberg filled his books with ads for taverns and merchants and added a bit of a written content somewhere in the middle.

Ultimate hustle culture - submit, grift, or starve.

This will generate "organic" advertisement.

I probably know what you mean by quality, because we’re in the same demography: sites that offer free, unobstructed reading material and software on any subject, technical or prose. Sites maintained mainly by individuals, universities, interest groups, source forges.

There will always be a market for those sites, but they’re a little harder to find via Google lately. There was a time before Google was great, and it was an exciting time, too.

What Google will continue to do great is provide a platform for quickly finding things you can pay money for.

The only time I search Google is when I prefix the query with “buy”. I can be sure that the companies most interested in selling me this have put in ads, and price comparison and review sites have gamed the SEO.

Which IMO is related to the next thing in chain:

- It was really easy to subscribe to an RSS feed in 2000s; if you had a proper meta tag in the website header, the browser UI would show up a prominent RSS logo in the URL bar. Firefox had this built-in. Apparently Chrome too [1]. At some point this was killed. Perhaps due to mobile gaining traction, lack of space on mobile, and Chrome's annoying minimalist approach? Or perhaps because Google wanted to promote its own (R.I.P.) Google Reader, (R.I.P.) Google Wave, (R.I.P.) Google+?

(Having said that, I must admit I have declared RSS bankruptcy at some point, after subscribing to _way_ too many feeds).

- I remember there used to be a lot of blog platforms and discussion boards, people would write a lot of good stuff there, each of those platforms would create a de facto community.

Then, Google managed to make Blogger/Blogspot UX terrible; and most of other platforms died and got replaced with Facebook and Twitter. (I'm still not sure why many of those seemingly thriving platforms have died).

- Facebook and Twitter over years slowly change the algo, to not show you stuff you subscribed to, but random viral crap which optimizes "engangement".

[0] https://www.chromium.org/user-experience/feed-subscriptions/

As late as late 2000, web was still pretty exclusive club. I went to college mid-2000s. Even among students, it was a geeky minority that really "consumed" internet massively.

If the web was real life, we'd have recognised this very easily.

I interviewed at Inflection (his startup), and my interview with him (final stage, founder interview) was the worst interview I've ever had. He did no small talk, he immediately (and awkwardly) asked a question off his question list. It lasted 15 minutes. I was immediately put off by his questions, wondering if I should just hang up now. His co-founder interview was not as bad, but still asked an awkward question. They definitely want you to work very hard, including sacrificing your personal life.

The product itself (Pi, the assistant) doesn't seem to have traction. Has anyone found it useful?

Something's gotta give.

So what was necessary for the web to take off as an application platform was first some scrappy startups that saw the potential, Netscape creating Javascript was the first real opening salvo. And then when Microsoft realized the threat it went into overdrive and invented DHTML and arguably put more resources into the Web than a startup ever could, and then all this stuff started getting standardized and we got to enjoy 20 years of a new application platform where there was competition to control it and things were somewhat standardized and not totally monopolized.

Notably most people just forgot about Win32 and quit building apps with it, which would have been considered unfathomable at the time. Win32 had had its day and faded into something comparatively niche. I don't see why we wouldn't have the same dynamic now if the Web eventually becomes as monopolized and stagnant as Win32 was. Or at least, I think this may be more likely than the Web somehow getting rescued by regulators or anyone else.

And my experience is that I'm an old school technical blogger who writes articles certainly not for the "entertainment" crowd, but for the professional crowd. My readership stays high from Monday to Friday and drops to nearly zero over the weekend.

Over the last 10 years, I have observed that my readers come from referrers like Google.com or Google.de less frequently. I would say that I get about 20 times fewer readers from Google. However, Google still constitutes about 90% of my readership, down from perhaps 97% to 99%. These are the facts, looking at my analytics.

The other 10% come from DuckDuckGo, Bing, Yandex, Bitbucket, MS Teams, ChatGPT, Perplexity.ai, Atlassian, Swarm, Ecosia, topical forums, and company domains. The share of readership from sources other than Google used to be closer to 1% - 3% in the past.

From my experience as a user of Google, I also find it much more difficult to find experts in any given field. About a decade ago, I would find so many more hard-boiled technical blogs. Now, the mid-level college essay-style knowledge is much more promoted. This shift makes sense for Google as an ad company, even if it harms everyone, future Google included.

With all that said, here are my conclusions, based in the reality of my own technical blog and its readership -- Google is worse for the technical crowd, which is now more likely to share technical resources by word of mouth (like Atlassian, Swarm, Teams, topical forums and company domains) or find them with other search engines. Google's effectiveness has not significantly diminished, as it still accounts for 90% of the way people reach my technical blog, so it might still be very functional for this purpose. Challenger search engines appear to have gained a significant stake in the tech crowd, a contrast to the scenario 10 years ago. But it seems like the decline of Google is a bit catastrophized.

These are only thoughts from my perspective, though they are grounded in some objective metrics.

I would say they have risen to a detectable but insignificant stake. The founder of Kagi was up here recently saying they have on the order of thousands of active users, after I suggested some objective evidence indicated only hundreds of active users. Kagi is one of the ones with the biggest memeshare on HN, but it still has an active user base of roughly zero.

Bing/DDG have never respected quotes or verbatim, not that Google does anymore either. None of the majors, including Kagi, are surfacing community forums that I know exist and have a permissive robots.txt.

I've been suspecting orders from on high have been suppressing the discovery of organic content and forums for a while. Ten year old Quora questions and some cherry picked reddit content ranked against a keyword blocklist isn't all there is on the internet. But that's all the Bing/Google based engines show.

The problem is that there is no "entertainment" category of reader. Just different domains and special interests. Nobody likes accessing the internet with a low signal to noise ratio or fighting cut-and-paste "AI" websites that have been engineered to rank on Google.

I want this to not come off as condescending in text, I know that tabloids do not have the best reputation for their content. But I think there is a lot of value in emotional well-being, of which entertainment is a part. So I do not pretend to know whether Google promoting more of this type of content over hard technicals is a change for better or worse, just observing the shift I see from my perspective.

[0] https://danluu.com/cocktail-ideas/

I hide as much as i can, and i never link direct, but please top tracking me?

Hi, I’m Leslie Snark, and I’ve travelled the world eating delicious food to bring you the best recipes.”

Disclaimer: Not a native speaker, I hope I got the annoying structure of those "what to look for when buying X" blog articles right...

My trigger point arrived about 3 years ago when I couldn't find a basic brownie recipe using Google. Just page after page of SEO shit. Google failed at the future.

Although, to be fair, I'm so accustomed to being able to effortlessly access some kinds of information that one forgets there was ever a pain point there in the first place.

At least if you LLM them on your own you know to be dubious and also you're more likely to use a 70B model (or GPT4) which is a little more likely to get them right, vs whatever garbage the spammer used.

It would probably be pretty interesting for someone to make a concerned effort to digitize every recipe in print prior to 2005 or so-- the relevant threshold time isn't when LLMs came on the scene but when google made low effort content farming so profitable.

It wasn't guaranteed that every recipe printed pre-internet had actually been cooked by anyone, but it was a lot more likely.

It does hallucinate sometimes, it writes programs using non existent apis etc, but I've found asking it "is what you said correct" or "is it true?" or "how did you came up with this answer" tend to produce replies like : I'm sorry, this is wrong, this is good instead. On rare occasion it also produces a bad answer and when you ask it will alternate betetwo bad answers, but most of the time it does pretty well.

Here I tried asking it for a recipe for chocolate brownies. I also tried to find out if it gave correct answers. Based on my past use I'd say it's pretty likely the recipe is OK. What do you think? https://chat.openai.com/share/2b36e42c-b6f2-42f3-b67e-f4a5a7...

chat-GPT: 2. Mix melted butter and sugar. Add eggs, one at a time you can see how its a bad idea. Butter melting point is somewhere in 82.4–96.8 °F (28–36 °C). Eggs could be cooked at that temperature. Some of the proteins would harden prematurely. Also, who uses "1 cup of butter" as a measure. Original recipe calls for 1 stick of butter, but google says that 1 cup is 2 sticks. Maybe chat-GPT switched chocolate from original recipe with 1 stick of butter and cocoa powder?

Chat-GPT doesn't mention beating mixture up either. Introducing more air to the mixture would make brownies better.

Based on my experience, this chat-GPT recipe would make you some nice cookies, but not brownies.

The later: a trip to the store, an hour of rising, then 1h in the oven, then all your guests arrive, not worth the gamble.

They found a way to write those SEO-friendly articles but also keep their site usable and even deliver actual value with the article. It’s really impressive.