Re:Money Out of Nowhere: How Internet Marketplaces Unlock Ec...
by ben_w on Friday March 01, 2019 @02:42PM
(#19284525)
> Google, facebook, and amazon are ALL networks that connect users to info. Not a single one of those is a product or is even capable of 'herding' attention.
They connect users to info by herding them.
Google has, what, 25 billion indexed pages? I don’t get those at random when I search. Likewise, I don’t see a random subset of Facebook’s 2.2 billion users or Amazon’s >12 million products. I don’t even see a complete list of my friends’ posts on Facebook; it thinks it knows better and herds me (and everyone else).
I don’t even see the same thing as other users searching for the same keywords: Googling “mouse” in a normal window gives me the computer peripheral, doing the same in an incognito window gives me the animal. Herding people based on what it thinks you want, but easily corruptible if desired.
On Google, some keywords bring up an alert saying some results were hidden because of copyright claims, giving me links to (IIRC) chillingEffect.org, which is a fairly on-the-nose kind of herding.
They connect users to info by herding them.
Google has, what, 25 billion indexed pages? I don’t get those at random when I search. Likewise, I don’t see a random subset of Facebook’s 2.2 billion users or Amazon’s >12 million products. I don’t even see a complete list of my friends’ posts on Facebook; it thinks it knows better and herds me (and everyone else).
I don’t even see the same thing as other users searching for the same keywords: Googling “mouse” in a normal window gives me the computer peripheral, doing the same in an incognito window gives me the animal. Herding people based on what it thinks you want, but easily corruptible if desired.
On Google, some keywords bring up an alert saying some results were hidden because of copyright claims, giving me links to (IIRC) chillingEffect.org, which is a fairly on-the-nose kind of herding.