AI chat things are liquids held in vials, a thumb flick away from pouring into our favorite places online, changing them irrevocably. Will our attention in these places (reddit, here, et al) remain high when most of the people we're talking with are algorithmic?
Media companies create new shows and pull them away more quickly than we can finish consuming them, as realtime engagement metrics quickly show their bosses which must be most profitable, most popular, most attention grabbing.
It makes a good case for going back: watching shows from decades earlier, that have a beginning middle and end. Dropping social media time for books. And the missing analogue, how to give up on google searches because they too, are at a parity of value with their offering and their attention stealing properties.
I'm just an angry person shaking his fist at the sky from an armchair. I love these threads because I always come away with a new perspective.
This seems fantastically counter-productive though. If you want to capture someone's attention, you've got to remove the distractions and clean up your presentation. The effort seems misplaced to focus entirely on drawing attention at the expense of maintaining it.
I'm not saying one is necessarily better than the other, but I think the 2 different UIs are serving 2 different goals. Focus requires commitment at some level, and I don't think most websites are predicated on the notion that the average user is committed, at least initially. Maybe once you make a sale to them and they get access to your product you can safely prioritize focus because you now have that commitment.
I think engineers generally are above average on the skill of summoning focus, as you kind of need it in order to perform math, analysis, and logic.
That's...just not true, though.
You know what's still more valuable than our attention? Our money.
The only reason they want our attention is to get our money.
A big part of the problem is how many people simply don't have enough money, due to the stagnation of real wages and the increase in the cost of housing, health care, and higher education, among other things. If everyone had a reasonable amount of disposable income, as is true in a healthy society/economy, it would be much, much more viable for many websites and apps to charge for their usage, rather than being ad-supported.
Personally, I don't find that the streaming services are good value. I don't complain about it, though. I just don't subscribe to them.
Also, buying services doesn't satisfy the "shopping as a recreational activity" itch. A big part of the recreation is the actual shopping, and coming home with physical stuff.
So, to me, even paying $60-$80 for various streaming services that are all on-demand (which wasn't the case for the cable I used to have) is still an amazing deal.
Oh, and I don't have to sit through ads every 5 minutes.
Any given person is only going to care about some small fraction of the media available for watching, and when that fraction is spread out across 6 different streaming services, the "value" they're getting from any single one of those is fairly small.
Furthermore, similar to what ldhough says, many of us remember when we could get basically all that content on Netflix, and we know perfectly well that a) the content providers could be making reasonable amounts of money through a streaming deal like that, and b) the reason they decided to launch their own service is one part insatiable desire for ever increasing profit, one part unrelenting crusade for absolute control over everything they own. Nowhere in there is "value to the customer".
There's a quote that I've seen go 'round a few times, to the effect of "the streaming services really need to remember that their entire value proposition is being slightly more convenient than piracy."
Sounds like money isn’t valuable as a target if it doesn’t exist.
But fwiw the scarcity of disposable income is why there is such an arms race with advertisers- they’re all chasing the same fleeting dollars across the internet.
The fun thing is that NOT fixing this will kill them long term as well - they're like meth heads seeing how the drug is destroying their body and the short-term optimizing managers, C-suites and, in the end, stock market cannot make a decision to make a bit less money to clean themselves up and wean off the drug that's killing them. Easier to fire people isn't it?
Google needs its product people to not know or care about as revenue. They need to make search as efficient as possible, without regard for whether a good search result reduces ad clicks.
Revenue would go do, but not catastrophically. And they’d have a sustainable business that would be hard to disrupt.
Everyone wants to make a good product, but ads make a product worse. Everyone wants to make a heavily used product but pay-per-use or subscriptions are limiting.
Google Cloud+Workplace, YouTube Premium, Play Store, Nest, ahem Stadia. Google has plenty of attempts at building products that make money without ads. The problem is that they’re expensive and not nearly as profitable.
LLM are bad at search, but people seem to like they. It gives them a clean re-start of search and maybe they’ll use it to do a search subscription where they can retry building their one good product without ads. Probably not though.
Well, most do, but certainly not everyone. What almost everyone wants to make is a profitable product.
I actually think Google and many tech companies have the opposite problem. They forget about monetization until after they made a desirable product, then they have no way to make money unless they shoe-horn ads into it.
Many of us have blunted the worst of G search's ugliness using ad blockers, but the polluting of their results by hiding useful content behind myriad lines of useless SEO detritus still dominates, and this loss of value as a utility inescapably poisons their life blood.
Until G's management realizes that their salvation lies NOT in blithely driving away customers, and instead strike a better balance by employing filters that better reject the more irrelevant and less profitable noise among their results, they will continue their current march toward oblivion -- as smarter competitors serve up more palatable search fare, and eat Google's lunch.
I tried to use Google to see what would be good brand to replace a decade old small electrical appliance that failed a couple of months ago. Absolutely none of the results were helpful until I tried the "append Reddit to the search terms" trick.
Immediately, I found a link someone had shared to a consumer reports style review of different brands at different price points.
The content I wanted was out there, but Google is now optimized for ad revenue, not finding the content I asked for.
If it's a good article that's upvoted a lot, it should also be linked in some places and thus get a higher search score.
I’d posit that Google counts the upvotes and other signals on the thread to calculate EAT or whatever.
Google on the other hand has automated centralized content moderation.
* They'll start by having <5 real comments that seem like a legitimate person wrote them * Account suddenly starts just re-posting very popular older posts, and other bots chime in that also copy the top comments from that post letter-for-letter * Account goes on to shill some product
You can't even tell who they are anymore. How do I know? Because I've been paid to post on reddit. I only do it for products I've actually used and things I like, but I got paid nobody has a clue. Not even you.
Google stopped being a search company, and is an advertisement company now.
1. Web search is useful, both for work/productivity and recreation.
2. Running servers to index the internet is a scale of compute beyond the effort and expense of most or all of home users.
3. Web search has distinct economies of scale when applied.
4. Said economies must be funded in some way.
5. There are two proposed models: ad-supported and subscription.
6. We do not like the effects of ad-support in the context of Google.
So the options are to either choose a different add-supported method (with the understanding that it may well meet Google's fate) or else pay for the product directly (subscription).
Frankly, the only reason I haven't signed up for something like this is that DuckDuckGo has been good enough for me lately. It might not always be, but it has been so far.
So I take the view after step 6 that, for the time being, I'm willing to jump from ad supported platform to ad supported platform, but I say that while admitting I'm a bad search stretch away from switching.
I used kagi for a few months when it was still in beta (and thus free) and had to decide if I wanted to pay for it to keep using it, or go back to ad supported internet search.
After wincing at the price for a bit I realised that my expectations for how much search should cost were all based on free ad supported search engines. The value I derive from a good search engine is enormous, and easily visible if you imagine the internet without it.
This makes paying for kagi a nobrainer. Their search results are really good and they have an incentive to keep it that way. It's a solid product, with a great value proposition (if you recalibrate your expectation) and I am also regularly reminded that this is how to actually vote with your wallet. I feel like we need kagi (or something like it) to succeed. If it turns out that paid search is not a viable business, then what chance do we have left for a search engine that has its intentions aligned with its users?
But it's first and foremost a great experience. Fast, great results, clean layout and a bunch of nice user-centric features on top. The idealism just helps to accept a cost.
It shows you the alternative Internet (ad-free, spam free, SEO-crap listicles not on the results page) that everyone here is constantly carping about missing.
If you want this reality, pay for it to help it exist. Else, put up with ads.
For the record, there are many other possible models. (I realize you may be saying that in this thread there are 2 proposed models, but I want to say this because people here seem to think there are only ever 2 possibilities.)
Some other models include:
1. Patronage ala public radio/TV where you are asked to pay for it, but don't have to. If enough people do, everyone can use it for free. (Wikipedia, one of the top 10 sites on the internet by traffic, works this way.)
2. Donations (probably not viable for most businesses, but sometimes works out)
3. Partially or fully funded by some other business which benefits from people using it. For example, if Apple wanted to start their own search engine without ads, but that only worked with their devices, they could probably figure out a way to do that and they would make money from selling the devices, and not ads on the search engine. (Not that they wouldn't try to have ads, too these days. Ugh.)
4. Pay as you go - instead of a subscription that is recurring even if you don't use the product and that you eventually forget about, you just pay whenever you actually use it and pay for only as much as you use. Not sure it work with a search engine, but nobody's ever tried, so it's hard to say.
5. Government funded. I realize this would rub people the wrong way, but a government search engine funded by tax payer dollars that had no ads could be very useful if done correctly. You just wouldn't want to use it to look up illegal things. (And it doesn't necessarily have to be the Federal government. A state government might benefit from running it, as well.)
Edited to add: For the record, I pay for and use Kagi and love it.
I've been paying for Kagi for 8 months and it's been fine for me. I can live with it in a way I could never live with DDG.
phind.com and new bing do this better.
https://www.phind.com/search?cache=5a93485f-b029-45bf-ade1-b...
I noticed that many teenagers today, despite the abundance of technology around them, are a lot less technological than the previous generation. When I was young, almost everyone in my school knew how to download (pirate) stuff from the internet, burn CDs, copy cracks, modify config files, etc. Nowadays, I see some young people not knowing how to use the maps' functionality on their phones, and only be "proficient" in a few apps like Email, TikTok and Instagram.
I do think that the PC/internet being less accessible before forced people to learn more about computers. Because everything is so fast and easy nowadays and there are so many sources of information, no one really needs to spend that time.
Jaha du, Google pratar svenska med dig.
For example, this is the screen I'm showed when I navigate to www.producthunt.com: https://imgur.com/a/9GgLIBM -- like you can't even tell what website it is, they're covering their own logo with pop overs. This simply can not be good UX, or marketing. It's not a good first impression.
There are healthy websites out there but they're really struggling to punch through all the crap.
It's curious because I feel we've seen this process play out once before. In the late-stage dot com era, there was a moment where you had these websites that were just absolutely plastered in ads and vomited popups at you when you visited them in a way that is very reminiscent of today. It's in part what led to the first popup blockers, and later ad blockers. Search engines were also cracking down on this stuff pretty hard since they just weren't good search results.
I imagine Google is in an awkward spot because, since ads is their bread and butter, they can't meaningfully penalize these websites without eating into their own bottom line. Many of the most intrusive ads are google ads.