Best way to get the word out about a product now is through an influencer in the space.
-- Edit:
Show of hands for anyone using ChatGPT to shop. Be honest.
People don't even use Google to shop. They try to find something either (1) by brand name, eg. "iphone" or (2) generically by category, eg. "best cold weather tent".
In the former case, Google used their enormous, antitrust flaunting power and 90% browser marketshare to turn the URL bar into a competitive trademark bidding dragnet. Apple pays out the nose for the iPhone spot. For every click. And every other major corporation selling to business or consumer does the same. This is the source of Google's enormous wealth. Google is a middle man. You cannot conceivably get to a brand or product without paying the Google tax.
In the latter case, when people try to look up blogs and reviews and Reddit posts to compare products, Google gets in the way and inserts themselves into the flow. If LLMs make this experience even shittier, there won't be upstream content to source as no reward will reach the people providing the value. It will naturally atrophy over time.
As a new sales channel, young people are buying content off of TikTok and Instagram directly now. When they see influencers using products they like, it leads to massive sales volume. New unicorn consumer businesses are being minted regularly from this.
LLMs are not limited to voice interfaces. You absolutely can use ChatGPT as a search engine if you want to: it does give you results you can compare, telling you about pros and cons of various options, and you can discuss with it what your end-goals are and have it turn a vague idea into a shopping list (that may or may not be complete for your project).
I don't have any reason to think these are the best, ChatGPT is not a storefront and OpenAI does not have a long history as a search engine, but it absolutely can be used this way.
I know people who took a photo of their car's driver side mirror cap (the thing that is on the opposite of the drivers side mirror and often colored like the rest of the car) - and asked chatGPT to search for the part. Because they were not able to navigate the respective auto parts portals.
I myself had perplexity generate a comparison report for different electric cars in a specific price range to get a first rough understanding of the used eCar market. Including links to respective models in used car sites.
Using Kagi for the few regular searches I need to do nowadays, Claude Code on the commandline for any other extended research/searches, I actually only use Google nowadays when I use the Google song detection function. Like Shazam - I just find this thing to be on my phone, so no need for an additional app.
I could give you a lot of additional examples from acquaintances and family - esp. from the not so tech people. Google is catching up, though. So - I think, with habits being hard to break, most people find Google good enough for quite a long time to come.
I do that, 10 years already, using Google, on a specific website. Website owners are just so very, very bad at making search working. Haven't even tried using ChatGPT for it.
I use Gemini to help with shopping decisions pretty frequently. It's been very effective and useful for that.
"What is still considered a highly regarded 35mm film camera for under $400 (used)?"
Of course then I go to eBay…
Here's a use case for me last week: I'm re-organizing my bathroom sink/vanity, and I want a few counter top organizers to keep things neat and tidy. I have a low mirror, low medicine cabinets, and generally tight spaces to work with and want to maximize storage.
So, I have a 10" wide space and I can't have anything over 16". I want to find a drawer organizer as close to 16" tall without going over, and as close to 10" without going over. Given a choice between the two, I want to bias for more height.
Go to Google or Amazon and try finding that. You're going to be trying permutations of 10x16 and 9x16 and so on, and digging through pages looking for something approximate.
In theory maybe there's some filter options on Amazon that might work, but they're usually incomplete, wrong, or absent. It's a terrible experience even when it's supported.
ChatGPT (or even Amazon's kind of janky Rufus) immediately finds top near-perfect matches for me to choose from. 15-20 minutes of aggravating digging turned into 90s of letting ChatGPT think and search while I was off grabbing a coffee.
True, LLMs are quite good in things where I have limited knowledge. It shortens exploration phase considerably. Before, I would need to go to web pages, compare parameters (somewhere), think out why this, not that.
There is plenty of evidence that people are increasingly turning to AI chatbots for that too. And it's entirely possible that ChatGPT and others are already being trained to mention some products first or to present them in a more positive light.
Show of hands for anyone still compiling 500 Amazon reviews by hand…
This won’t necessarily work well in a year (month?),
but up through now?
Absolutely I’ve been using assistants for some shopping purposes.
I used it for evaluating air filters. I used to for making shopping lists for food I want to cook.
I recently used ChatGPT to compare headphones before buying them, although the workflow there was a bit manual; I took some headphones that I had in mind off a cursory search off Amazon, had ChatGPT produce a summary of the differences and then picked the "best" one.
I'd assume this happens a lot more, I can easily someone doing, produce a list of [product category X] under < $Y, then use follow-up queries, etc.
> As a new sales channel, young people are buying content off of TikTok and Instagram directly now.
I assume this would only work for the things that influencers can directly sell, e.g. selling makeup to women that way is apparently a thing; for other products that are not impulse-buys, ChatGPT is a perfectly reasonable way to shop.
So Zuckerberg is the ref now?
--WOPR
Human society cannot exist at this scale without this nested social complexity structure given the biological constraints
So something has to give
First you need agriculture so people tend to settle in one place. After ag comes more specialization, farmers need houses, graineries, and as society grows social specialists in which we'd call government.
These things in an area typically cause the area to grow because of their stability. As they grow you get more than one person/business doing the same line of work and you get more people than fit in ones monkeysphere. At that size you may not know a person that knows what you need to know and start looking further. This is why as cities grow advertising itself becomes an emergent property. Just go to a Roman city and look for dick pavers for example. Then someone will think "Hey, I can give some poor kids a board with a message on it and have them cry out to go to the place that people pay me to advertise" and suddenly you have an emergent property of humanity.
That said, there's a petroglyph (circa 1150-1600 CE) of a macaw (among other sign-like petroglyphs)[1] on the walls above the pueblo ruins in Frijoles Canyon in Bandelier National Monument in New Mexico that came to mind when reading your explanation. The pueblo ruins themselves are immediately above an agriculturally developed riverbed floodplain with structures previously used for food storage.
It doesn't seem too far fetched to analogize a macaw above a pueblo in a canyon to, say, a flamingo on a neon sign (Circa 20th century)[2] above a bar along a highway, or an ad on a phone in 2025. Perhaps advertising is emergent (and, dare I say, with an element of pre-destination).
[1] https://www.nps.gov/places/petroglyphs-pueblo-loop-trail-sto...
Lifelong hockey fan, I never understood this complaint. I believe it was FOX that did the 'highlight the puck' thing for a few years in the 1990's.
You can't see the ball in American football, either.
But you don't need to. The guy that's running and everyone is trying to tackle? He has the ball. Just like the guy skating across the ice with his stick on the ground? He's got the puck.
When you CAN see the puck/ball, either someone lost control of it, or they're shooting/throwing/passing it.
It's pretty wild they were able to convince the NHL to use a modified puck with a battery and PCB inside, all so American viewers could better follow the action.
It was not well received in Canada :)
I can't see the puck at all at a game and have to be very close to a television to see whats going on.
As a result most sports are boring.
> [1] Puck and Player Tracking became fully operational in 2021-22, with up to 20 cameras in each arena and infrared emitters in each puck and sweater.
The player tracking is fairly easy to see; there's often an airtag sized bump on a player's jersey.
The puck tracking can be a bit more difficult but sometimes the puck looks like it's melting the ice behind it. That's just them giving it a grey shadow instead of the neon shadow.
[1]: https://www.nhl.com/news/nhl-edge-launches-website-for-puck-...
The average play must be what, like 5 seconds? So if you lose where the ball is you're not going to be confused for long.
Even when the technique is known, everyone remains susceptible (the victim team in the above video is the trickster here): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uSNTfFg4XW0
However, when watching hockey on TV, it’s incredibly difficult to see the damn thing.
So while technically our eyes might not discern individual frames higher than 25 FPS or so, our brain can absolutely process data from a much higher effeice framerate. The motion blur fast thing naturally produce for example, provides critical context clues.
In gaming, sure 240 Hz won't help you see more as such, but it allows your eyes to do what they naturally do and give a much improved experience of fluidity and superior motion prediction.
So yes, in "trick" plays you can't see the ball. But neither can the defense.
Having watched hockey AND US football my entire life, you can't compare the two. Totally different styles of sports and thus comparing your ability to see the 2 doesn't make sense.
to add: There has never been a football in history that had the ball going from one end of the field to the other and back. And yet, this happpens in hockey regularly and within seconds.
Imagine if you couldn't see the players, and just saw the puck. Would that be interesting at all?
Think about tennis. There is the trope of people's eyes going back and forth following the ball, but I don't think they are following the ball directly. They are going back and forth looking at the person who is going to hit the ball.
but really, what you want to look for is how the players are moving. it's sort of a "which one is different from all the others." one person will clearly be moving in a completely unique way, as the others chase them or vie to get open or get in somebodys way. to acomplish this identification, youre looking at their legs, shoulders, hands, feet, and heads.
Honestly, I don't know. Is it really the players people care most about? More than the score? The players come in and out of teams so often that caring about any specific player seems strange. Teams seem more important. I suspect that just seeing colored sticks (with colors signifying the team) and the puck would probably work just as well but then I don't get the appeal of watching sports in the first place.
handegg*
The change in shape from a round ball to the "handegg" eventually derived from the first American innovation in "rugby football" of the forward pass. Even with the forward pass, the game required kicks into goals for a long while with the "touchdown" a further later innovation (though also influenced by reimporting rugby rules, as it relates to the rugby "try"). Kick offs, punts, field goals, and extra point attempts all still vestigially remain from the rugby origins even as most of the play in between them changed drastically.
American Football is called "football" because it evolved from the "football family". It's like using the term "romance language": Spanish and Italian sound very different today, but they both share roots in Latin. They've also both changed a lot since the days when Latin was a living language.
basketball -> handball
hockey -> stickball
volleyball -> handball
rugby -> handegg
baseball -> stickball
cricket -> stickball
golf -> stickball
Hopefully this will finally appease the football literalists and make things simpler for you all to understand :)
football -> tackleball rugby -> tossball cricket -> paddleball golf -> clubball hockey -> icepuck
Tell me you're not from the US without telling me. This is apples and oranges.
Unless it's a trick play, you 100% know where the ball is.
How many times in football does the ball go from one end to the other and back? Never. In hockey that happens regularly, and in seconds. That's why comparing them in this context isn't correct.
People are throwing themselves to feed you personal data. You no longer have to come up with sneaky ways to collect it, or build out their profile from inferred metadata. Less work for you, more accurate profiling, and less risk getting fined by pesky regulation.
Ad campaigns can be much more personal and targeted. You can push them at just the right moment to optimize the chances of conversion. They can be much more persuasive, since chatbots and assistants are deeply trusted. You can dial the sensitivity knob to make them very subtle, or completely blatant, depending on your urgency and client.
If I as someone outside of this hostile industry can think up these scenarios, the world is not ready for what advertising geniuses are cooking up as we speak.
Advertising directed towards AI models, at the very least. If you can get into ChatGPT's weights that McDonalds is the cheapest and tastiest hamburger, how many millions of people would ChatGPT tell that to?
Google searches don't produce good results these days. The enshittification has become too extreme. Google openly admits as much (and further intensifies the enshittification) by placing a huge AI summary above those results.
The answer is self evident. If, before, you were relying on clicks resulting from google searches, today you need to be what an AI recommends when somebody uses an AI like they used to use google. (Users will eventually become more sophisticated though!) Lots of people are using AI like a search engine and getting better results than google gives simply because massive resources are currently being put into training AI, while mere neglect is insufficient to explain how fast Google search results are getting worse.
Is this how AI companies plan to cash in? Accept money from advertisers to promote their products in interactions with their LLM's? Were I an advertiser, I'd be trying to get Anthropic to take my money instead of giving it to Google. AI might be what finally makes it impossible to tell content and ads apart. That's great for advertisers... I guess. Not so great for the rest of us.
I haven't asked Google a question it has failed to provide a more than adequate answer to in ... months? years?
And on all my devices, I run google search with &udm=14, so I am not talking about AI summaries. I also have search personalization disabled.
I see a lot of people complaining about this on HN. It simply doesn't match my experience at all, in any way.
It's easier to add Reddit at the end to get a more accurate question repeated, and skip the sponsored SEO crap.
And a list of links to original sources or close to it is precisely what I do want.
If you want an LLM to generate an answer from its training data, that's fine, but go use a different search engine instead of demanding that the one many of us have relied on for decades has to do that.
And I actually agree with the last point. While there are entire categories of questions that I now prefer an LLM to to any search engine, when I want a search engine, I specifically do not want LLM summaries, which is another thing I like about Kagi: they allow me to choose when I want to see an LLM summary and to turn off summaries altogether.
(this is really not meant to be an ad for Kagi, I presume that most HN users are familiar with it already and don't need yet another random endorsement, but I honestly don't know how to talk about my experiences with search over the past several years and my dissatisfaction with google without talking about it)
firefox: keyword "g" configured as google search plus &udm=14
firefox: keyword "a" configured as google search without &udm=14
works for me!
So, if not that, then what?
The AI summary is not the problem; you could take it away and the experience would be just as poor.
In fact, the AI summary slightly improves the experience for faster readers.
But then, my anecdotal experience may not be representative of most of the world. Most of my friends have money, houses, kids, friends - all of which are, by the numbers, rarities these days.
It's an interesting thought experiment to explore what it means if that actually is the new normal, and people are not consuming media or much of anything, or even if the people who are still addicted to social media are now tapped out and don't have any more disposable income left to spend. Probably economic depression. If everybody bought only what they needed and ignored all the advertisements, our present level of economic activity would plunge.
I'm mostly still on FB at all for the acquaintance-level connections to things like neighbourhood, church, and hobby communities. All the people I actually care about are in private group chats.
I was reflecting recently that Google Plus actually had the right idea back in 2011 with "circles", but at the time we all said it was too hard figuring out which circles we wanted to share a particular message or thought with. Hmm, maybe they were ahead of the game all along?
Now that I look back at that I wonder what kind of theories suggest that abilities like that will result in reduced ad impressions, since I feel like every decision made by social sites makes much more sense when viewed through that lens.
and twitter is a spam site, so you're somewhat right
Mind you, G+ also made some insane and boneheaded decisions. I think at one point they tried to make all Youtube comments also be G+ posts under your real name, or something like that? That was fucking stupid.
Having different apps, chats (Discord servers), accounts (at-a-push) for each privacy circle is much clearer to average users. Migrating a whole group of any size to another platform is hard, hence many of us are stuck with Facebookk in case we get invited to something we don't want to miss on it, but new platforms will continue to emerge and some will succeed.
Orkut’s user base was already degraded through Facebook but it was not inexistent, as some features of Orkut were unique. One was that it allowed people to use alt accounts to participate on anonymous discussion, not much different from Reddit, I’m sure with some creativeness G+ could have benefited from extra users.
killedbygoogle.com says 2004 to 2014 so a decent chunk of the service's run.
Also, as you say, it was populated by many Brazilians, an imbalance like that may discourage non-Brazilians from joining, so not sure if integrating them would have helped or hurt.
Except that they worked for a company that clearly wants all of your data. Privacy and Google are often at odds with each other… and for the folks that understood privacy at the time, it was a hard sell unless they worked at Google.
Privacy to me means that even Google doesn’t get to peek in whenever they feel like it.
https://waxy.org/2011/10/google_kills_its_other_plus/
According to Wikipedia, G+ usage kept growing from about 40M that October to 90M by the end of 2011 and then to hundreds of millions over the next few years, but the reporting methodology seems very inconsistent.
A couple weeks ago, I thought about diving back into demos to reacquaint myself with it. It's possible that it was ahead of its time. Or maybe it was a solution in search of a problem.
it had a lot of good ideas like you said it just needed to make it simpler to use, maybe even make the circles stuff not default though i didn't have much trouble with it
forcing everyone to use something that still had teething issues was the biggest screw up, if they wanted to integrate youtube they should have started with making G+ popular so people would actually want that, and yeah real names so dumb.
blizzard tried that as well lol. then some guy rang up blizzard hq and told one of the higher ups where his kids went to school and they suddenly realised full name is actually too much information
The legendary Andy Hertzfeld played a role in shaping the design of Google Plus.
https://techcrunch.com/2011/06/28/google-plus-design-andy-he...
I was the one to push G+ and Gwave on my friends and it did not take at all.
And frankly it was actually the first place where I truly noticed how big companies are extracting data from us; back then I felt really unpleasant when I tried to fill up profile.
I've got this old screenshot [1] and profile included: about me, "I know this stuff", current occupation, employment history, education path, place of residence with map, home and work addresses, relationship status and what kind of partner you are looking for, gender, other names - maiden name, alternative spelling, nickname, visibility in search results and a section for links to other websites. This may be seen as not much today but back then even facebook wasn't that "curious" - that was about to change.
I also tried to utilize Google Wave for our university group to keep us informed etc., but people wanted just "plain old" emails with attachments.
[1] - https://ibb.co/SDDGG3PJ
Myspace was hilarious because it was such a mess. The people owned it, hacked the css. Every profile page was a messy real person.
(See also: nice how reddit now makes it possible to curate the list of which subs you participate in whose comments and posts appear on your global profile page)
Reddit is the town bar, the popular one.
Some people love the town bar! :)
Some people hate the town bar! :(
I suspect Reddit is intentionally overcounting by doing things like counting multiple devices as different users, multiple accounts as different users, making minimal efforts to remove bots, counting dynamic IPs as distinct users, and so on. You could even count API callers as users, but that is stretching the limits of plausible deniability. The thing is - their content isn't reflective of the popular town bar, it's representative of an insular clubhouse with some small rooms in the backyard for 'normies.'
Around 250,000,000 is monthly user usage, which would be for one or more accounts.
And if course, like every site, a percentage that keep the thing going (around 35,000,000 daily logins).
It's one of the top sites on the internet and has been for a very long time.
From my little experience of using it, it seems that its main audience is the mentally retarded or just children under 11 years old.
The same questions are asked all the time. It wasn't difficult for me to find a search on the site for why they don't use it?
There is a lot of nonsense in the comments/answers, which they state with full confidence.
And there was also a feeling that there are rarely disagreements in discussions, even if there are minor differences, everyone adheres to a single line, often related to the topic/name of the subreddit.
I found several people creating content that I was interested in, but some of the posts on the page were hidden and it was easier to follow them on YouTube or blogs.
In general, searching for valuable posts or comments is like digging through manure to find gold.
And even if you find a clever idea or a good technical hint, it was often easier to find it just by reading the documentation. It's the same with interesting posts. If it's something worthwhile, then it will be on twitter, blog, YouTube, social networks or in some forums.
I'm not talking about advertising every second post, or even among the comments. Disabling ad blocking was a mistake.
> it's representative of an insular clubhouse with some small rooms in the backyard for 'normies.'
A very appropriate definition. It's not even interesting to discuss something on Reddit. If your opinion or thought coincides with the ideology of the subreddit, then you will have a lot of likes. If it don't match, you get dislikes, insults, or worse, no response.
In general, I did not find any benefit for myself on Reddit and I am unlikely to return there, it is a waste of energy and effort.
HN loves to do this. "Platforms are mirrors held up to society". No, not always. Sometimes there really is unnecessary executive top-down control
It's an almost infinite variety. Fractal even with how many subreddits are the results of splits from an older subreddit.
It's kind of like an American grocery store where you have shelf after shelf filled with different brand names and products in all kinds of colors and flavors, but they're all owned by one of three corporations so it really doesn't matter which product you buy, you're still supporting the same assholes who will gladly poison you if it'll increase their profits by a fraction of a cent, so naturally most of your choice comes down to the flavor of the poison.
Your three tech savvy family members should all have redundant copies of the photos of memaw’s wedding and Uncle Jim when he was 2 and looked exactly like your cousin’s second kid. I don’t need to see those. Your stalker ex boyfriend definitely doesn’t need to see those. It’s none of our goddamned business.
Someone, I think WD? Already made a play at this but I think it fell on deaf ears and will have to be tried again after the hype cycle calms tf down.
I do know some non-developer Gen Z folks that would set up minecraft servers on DO droplets, but I don't know of any that actually made their own and hosted it on their own network.
Aside from more exposure to raw tech, the technology making the internet happen was a lot simpler back then, where servers were actually physical servers,and such. I was able to adopt the complexity progressively as it came into existence which is a lot easier with the base knowledge of how the building blocks worked.
In theory, AI should be good at helping building interfaces between cloud backups and home server apps. Because AI should be good at apis.
In theory
Although there has also been a softening of math skills among the weakest students, the best students are still quite capable, so the erosion is mostly in tech skills, not analytical skills.
She recently got a cheap digital camera with no screen and just a shutter button and and plain old viewfinder. The idea is that like the old days you don't know what you took a photo of until (a bit like getting the film developed) you plug the SD card into a computer and have a look.
I think she'd get a kick out of ripping CDs and ditching Spotify. I can teach her all about files and filesystems then haha.
My 19yr old son doesn't follow the same old school stuff, but he kinda shunned social media from the beginning.
Though the term has recently been adopted by a trend in women’s jeans that don’t really resemble their namesake.
The connotation being that they’re outdated, uncool, and dorky.
I'd love for it to also be a backup of my whole Google Photos account (eg https://github.com/JakeWharton/docker-gphotos-sync) but honestly I can't imagine trying to maintain an app on there that would actually be the first class storage/sync/presentation layer for my family.
Immich exists. It really is missing only some editing functionality and some nice-to-have features from GPhotos like automatic panoramas. Other than that, it's superior to Google.
Photo ingestion is via regular samba uploads from my phone.
And the hardware to serve that hard drive is somewhere between free and another hundred.
I'm going through a "Deep, Vast, Trough of Learning" at the moment :>
The way in which any open text box on the internet is guaranteed to turn into a malware vector is new now, and makes casual and marginally technical users trying their own thing much higher stakes and annoying.
Then she said: "I know nobody that comments on online forums. Nobody would ever comment to strangers on the internet. It's too dangerous."
Took me a while to grasp what she meant with that, but I think she's right. Trust has eroded so much over the last two decades that most forums are either full of bots or full of annoyed and toxic people. It's very rare to find welcoming communities to newbies, and most of the ones I have discovered were offline connections.
She also mentioned that all of her friends use private profiles only, because having public profiles is too dangerous because of stalkers.
To me this sounded a bit absurd at first, but maybe that's a different perception on "how to use" the internet from a different younger generation that grew up post-socialmedia? My first contact with the internet was MIT opencourseware, her first contact was receiving dick pics at the age of 10 from assholes on the other side of the planet.
I miss the old phpbb forum days when the most toxic comment was someone being snarky and derailing the discussion into "did you use the search function?"
No idea how to fix the internet, maybe it's time to move to gopher or another protocol :-/
https://bewilderbeast.org/2019/08/16/most-of-what-you-read-o...
Nobody knew you were a dog on the internet[1] until the rise of Facebook and linking your real identity with an online identity.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_the_Internet,_nobody_knows_...
People change over time. People change even a little based on who's around them. Even memories change as people see things in new lights.
The Internet of the late 90s and early 2000s was spectacular in that everyone could be as authentic and deep as they wanted to be, and as shallow and invisible as they wanted to be depending on context.
Firefox? Want to know how to really sell yourself. Be 'For the User', like TRON (but avoid that for copyright reasons and because normal people don't understand). The user should be able to TRUST that Firefox isn't selling them out, spying on them, or doing anything strange. That when Firefox creates identity sandboxes they're firewalled from each other to the maximum extent; including resisting device fingerprinting (just look generic and boring).
Don’t get me wrong, I mostly agree with your comment. I think even more dastardly is the tendency for the internet to market new personalities to you, based on what’s profitable
Primarily more educated, more liberal, more wealthy.
Turns out, when you hook the rest of the planet online, you get mass persuasion campaigns, fake genocide "reporting", and enough of an increase in ambient noise that coherent anonymous discourse becomes impossible.
I mean, look at the comments on Fox News or political YouTube videos. That's the real average level of discussion.
Before you start forming your reply, think about the actual culture back then. If you take slashdot as somewhat representative of the 90s internet culture, it was basically anti-corporate, meritocratic, non-judgmental, irreligious, educated, non-discriminatory, and once 2000 came around tended to be highly critical of the Bush agenda.
4chan at that time and places like it represented more of an edgelord culture, where showing vulnerability or sensitivity was shunned, everything revered by the larger populace was ruthlessly mocked, and distrust of society and government in general was taken as natural. Calling them conservative would have been non-sensical.
- anarchist 60s/70s
- libertarian-meritocracy 80s/90s
- capitalist-meritocracy-liberal 00s
- polarized liberal-globalist vs conservative-reactionary 10s
- polarized liberal-individualist vs conservative-statist 20s
BTW, I don't explicitly disagree with what you're saying, but it would be good to look at actual data instead of anecdata to know for sure, and the people who have the data are not telling ...
Correction, I am posting while pooping. I don't care much about social media these days and I draw the line at the toilet door.
Fido and Usenet are still around. Kind-of. IMO google virtually killed that, too, when they started peddling google groups and did the classic embrace-extend-extinguish on the Usenet.
Trolling had (has) a different character in smaller, more private forums: it tends towards more effort. A low-effort troll just gets banned and loses their platform, so the troll needs to at least ride the line of legitimacy. Drawing the line back to Usenet, the sheer effort that went into some trolling garnered respect if not necessarily acceptance.
Drive-by interactions reward volume since the 'game' isn't repeated. Curated social media feeds like Twitter are even worse; the troll has their own audience predisposed towards acceptance and the victim is just set-dressing.
I analogize this to in-person interactions: ostracization is mutually costly. A small group loses a member who was at least making a 'warm body' contribution, but the ostracized person loses a whole set of social benefits.
To be fair I do miss the "old Internet". Less corporate, money grabbing, more freedom.
I'm an old timer, and I've been there since the beginning. I remember the beginning of the eternal summer, and the gradual decline that came after.
One of my first jobs was actually 3rd shift help desk for a regional dial-up ISP. The people that called were mostly drunk southerner's who, at the time, seemed hopelessly non-technical.
Looking back I now see that any one of them knew much, much more about how the internet actually worked than a the average modern user, and were probably more worldly in general than todays average user.... and there are billions more of them now.
We thought that global access to information would democratize everything and expose people to a higher level of rhetoric and thinking. We just KNEW that the best ideas would rise to the top of discourse naturally and the world would magically become a better place. We were so very wrong. It's turns out that more than cream floats.
Plenty of forums still do exist, but I wonder about their future as we age out. Car forums in particular were absolute godsends for amateur mechanics - not just to look up info but to ask a self-selected group of interested folks who were happy to help for free out of a sense of community for fellow fans of their brand.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-Made_Man_(book)
Still a very valid experiment. I know the source of both sex' strife though: competition. I don't think we'll ever solve that, not while we're still monkeys.
Vincent stated that, after the experiment, she gained more sympathy for the male condition: "Men are suffering. They have different problems than women have, but they don't have it better. They need our sympathy, they need our love, and they need each other more than anything else. They need to be together."
I respect that, compared to the arguments that sex A is having a better time than B, or that one needs more support and focus than the other. We’re all in the same, but different, shit.
How can I agree with this? Material conditions matter: whatever problem you have, being poorer will make it worse. Women have been earning less than men for decades, and most highly paid execs are men, not women. https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2023/03/01/the-end...
Can you elaborate on other cases where the words “different” and “same” are interchangeable?
All the various shades of red are all red. All news is engagement bate (if it bleeds, it leads), but every piece of news is different. You are in a forest in region X and I am in a desert in region Y, both could be dealing with the same problem of keeping warm at night. It's all different, and yet still the same.
It kind of seems like the sentence I quoted was gibberish that’s short enough to seem vaguely profound. Unless somebody could give other examples of when those words are interchangeable (then obviously dogs is eggs), but as it stands it’s a duck pregnancy is optional type situation
You may be the victim right now, and I may be the perpetrator, but over time you'll sometimes be the perpetrator (what, do you think you're perfect?) and I'll sometimes be the victim (you don't think I suffer?), and over time it all averages out.
But just because you're the victim this time, you're getting all the sympathy. Is that fair?
We are not. This is the law of averages and is absolute poison. Sexism is not symmetrical. Men do not suffer from women like women suffer from men.
Norah Vincent killed herself.
r/kpop has 3 million subscribers. Take a look at the most followed accounts on Instagram. How many of them have female-dominated comment sections?
> I am saying this as a guy we really don't understand the world women live in online or offline.
You're saying this as a guy who doesn't understand the world the general population lives in, outside your highly-educated male-dominated tech bubble. You're considering only the spaces you have been visiting for most of your life.
Which makes me sad.
Apparently Y chromosome + enculturation = prerogative to send unsolicited photos of ones genitalia to random internet strangers.
Women == get too much attention, often of the wrong type. How to get the right kind of attention?
Men == not getting any attention, of any type. How to get some attention?
So women either get ‘the wrong kind’ of attention, but plenty of it - or somehow figure out the magic of getting the right kind of attention? Not easy.
And men work hard to get any attention, often overdoing it on the only way they can figure out - which usually has poor (but not zero!) results. Folks good at playing the game get excellent results, however.
Meanwhile, everyone is getting played by the folks in the middle.
Notably, there are plenty of women taking advantage of the attention they get on Tinder. They just have no problem solving for what it works for, which is getting laid with near zero effort.
The way this previously got figured out was a ‘managed market’ - arranged marriages. Religious/social rules, etc.
In my book, it's reductive to sweep unsolicited sexual harassment under "attention", unwanted or otherwise.
It's not rocket science: everyone deserves to be treated in a way that makes them feel comfortable and safe.
It’s also a crime in some places, not (!!!) in others, or called different things in other places depending on the details.
For example, is sending an unsolicited dick pic on a dating app sexual harassment? Is getting felt up at work, with the implication ‘or else’? Is being stalked by members of the opposite gender? Or having career advancements blocked by a lack of ‘playing the game’?
I can give you concrete examples from a number of cultures that each culture will write off as ‘he/she/they were asking for it’, or ‘she/they/he deserved it’, or ‘it’s just boys/girls being girls/boys.’.
I’ve seen it up close and personal, and have lived it.
The underlying ‘attention economy’ dynamic is still the same.
Edit: meant to add - plenty of 80/20 also applies here of course (though more extreme). Top 1-2% men (esp. from earning or traditional looks perspective) deal with the same issues that top 50%-80% of women deal with, bottom 20% of women (from traditional looks perspective) deal with issues that 80-90% of men deal with, etc.
If it's okay, then it's okay for all sexes. And I'm hard-pressed to name a world culture that's equally accepting and promoting of men-sexually-harassing-women and women-sexually-harassing-men.
Can you?
It feels like you're trying to make this an argument about statistics, when it's an argument about ethics and morality.
Reality doesn’t particularly care about one persons idea of right or wrong.
> "I know nobody that comments on online forums. Nobody would ever comment to strangers on the internet. It's too dangerous."
> Most of her friends are probably women
-> "Women don't comment on the internet (especially compared to men) because it's a hostile place".
It's no surprise they often use private and/or moderated spaces instead.
Of course men don't know exactly what it's like to be a woman, just like one person does not know exactly what it is like to be any other person. You can still have an understanding and talk meaningfully about things, in many cases.
The internet is not "dangerous for a woman", like you might say it is for a child. It can be much less dangerous because there is a very low risk of unwanted physical contact. I have never in my life "made an account" with identifiable names that are public on the internet. I don't post my sex, address, age, photos, bank account details, or mother's maiden name on internet forums either. So I have had exactly the same experience as a woman who had done the same thing in anonymous forums. I might even be a woman.
An identifiable woman will obviously attract unsolicited disgusting and horrible comments and content of course, not just sexual but threats of violence too probably more than men do. This is not some high mystery or something so complicated that we're befuddled trying to understand it. Offline is a completely different story, but online? I can see messages people I know get.
Online is about the safest a woman (or man) can be, and still talk and interact and collaborate and share with people. And I have been "stalked" (in an online anonymous account way), sent horrible graphic sexual and violent threatening things, for having differences of opinion. It's not nice, but it's not "dangerous" for me. I got ambushed and beat up walking in public one day -- offline -- that was dangerous.
A woman's online safety relative to other spaces also misses the point about their online spaces being less safe than those of men; the suggestion wasn't that online spaces are the absolute most dangerous spaces for them.
That said I would raise the point of how easy it is to dehumanise people online and how easy it is to quickly gather various data like work addresses etc.
The OP was saying that men generally don't have the awareness of how women have it in the online world. The lack of understanding is because of not knowing about it, not because of a lack of capacity or empathy.
In fact the post suggest that doing an experiment to get such awareness would help in getting the understanding.
It was never the point that it's possible to go online without recieving such ubiquitous abuse, which is what you suggest women should do. You have still not acknowledged that such high level of abuse can be dangerous, not merely for the mental health problems but for the real possibility of being stalked in the real world. That way, you're just reinforcing the point you tried to deny, which is that it's hard for men to understand such abuse without having experienced it first hand.
> I have read the full conversation, and you're still failing to recognize how the original post has a valid point. You have admitted yourself that you create online accounts without gender identification, so your own experience is different from women that do create gendered accounts.
The assertion was that women find posting on the internet too dangerous. Not that they find it too dangerous when using gendered names. See, you haven't even followed the first thing!
Nevermind the fact that the entire idiotic assertion is obviously invalidated by all the countless women who do post on the internet, and with gendered names even. For the ones who don't post or don't use gendered names it's not "danger" that drives the choice. Annoyance, disgust, unsolicited attention, whatever it is. No need to make things up, or make stupid claims like "men can't understand", it doesn't help anybody.
Every single assertion made (without evidence) is trivially false.
And finally, disagreeing and debating something is not "reinforcing" the assertions that it's too dangerous for women to post on the internet, that's just stupid. And by continuing to argue with me you're just reinforcing that you're an angry racist misogynist.
See how stupid that is?
Probably true. This is entirely different from the previous assertion you made though.
> And I think your analytical reaction to an emotional problem proves my point I feel.
It doesn't, and you have not addressed anything I said which might make your point.
All I said was I was 20, was red haired, and open minded. Nothing more, and no photo.
Indeed, within a couple of minutes there were guys asking me if I liked to be whipped while handcuffed to a radiator, and offered to send me dick picks if I sent naked photos first. One of them added later "maybe I'm too direct for you, is that why you're silent?"
I didn't respond to any message, but the offers kept coming. It's insane.
Tumblr is still doing pretty well on that front. I'm there for a fandom, and it's a super positive atmosphere where everyone just wants to make and talk about cool art.
like, it's a running on joke on most social media websites that "i hope no one i know irl finds this account..."
i think your friend is just overestimating her knowledge of her friends' lives
Yet she knows you and you and me are strangers talking to each other on this forum. I think we don't know even close friends what online communities people hang out - the reason she didn't know about you being on HN.
Unfortunately, for common people whose aim is not celebrity, this means handing over your privacy in order to have a voice.
We can do this in our IRL circles of trust, people know you because they have met or interacted with you personally.
Online, this means someone like Zuck creating a digital identity for us after we entrust them with our privacy, or some kind of open source complicated technology identifier like a cryptographically verified signature that is techno bro-free that will only be adopted or understood by tech literate.
It's a dark day for genuine human interaction and trust.
Does that really work, though? I think it doesn't -- think all the anti-vaccine type influencers -- their identities are known and they're ok with it.
> It means creating a trusted identity that can be verified, and that the identity is known to be a real human with a reputation to lose if exposed as being a bot or otherwise untrustworthy.
Surely this won't be used for nefarious reasons or to silence individuals like it's done in the UK or in the cancel culture actions. /s
I am sure there are some dead giveaways, but how can you be sure about that?
What I have experienced is both going into forums/discussions someone said was bots talking to bots, with no real clear indication by any of the many markers I am aware of that it was in fact bots; and also comments calling responses bots seemingly as a manipulative dismissal in response to something that was not the consensus or commonly approved position.
I say that because my impression is that what is happening is a full on breakdown of civic discussion and conversation as a whole. The internet destroyed IRL public forums (pubs/bars, clubs, etc) and the draconian COVID policies took the death knell to many more, and now bots and the seemingly bigger issue of immediate distrust of everything, seems to also be destroying online conversations of all sorts.
Yes, you’ll be able to have small group meetings and maybe even voice/video only conversations, but that brings a whole host of other systems changes with it, especially as mass surveillance long surpassed anything the worst tyrants of history could have ever even dreamed of implementing. It all seems a shift into unhealthy territory as a civilization in general, including since essentially all western governments cannot be trusted by their own people anymore.
When you replied to a thread on a phpbb forum (or when you reply to this HN thread), your reply „lived” in that thread, on that forum, and that was that. The algorithm wouldn’t show that reply to your dad.
I remember liking a comment on Facebook years ago, and being horrified when some of my friends and family got a „John liked this comment, join the discussion!” notification served straight onto their timelines, completely out of context. I felt spied on. I thought I was interacting with a funny stranger, but it turned out that that tiny interaction would be recorded and rebroadcast to whomever, without my knowledge.
Similarly, commenting on a youtube video was a much different experience when your youtube account wasn’t linked to all your personal information.
If you comment on a social media post, what’s going to happen? How sure are you that that comment, however innocuous it may seem now, won’t be dredged up 8 years by a prospective employer? Even if not, your like or comment it’s still a valuable data point that you’re giving to Zuckerberg or similar. Every smallest interaction enriches some of the worst people in the industry, if not in the world.
The way I speak, the tone I use, the mannerisms I employ, they all change depending on the room I’m in and on the people I’m speaking to - but on modern social media, you can never be sure who your audience is. It’s safer to stay quiet and passive.
Now the only thing I would ever consider posting on Facebook is "What a beautiful day! Went for a great hike with my family and enjoyed nature."
Of course that didn’t really pan out, and the social network itself collapsed under its own weight within a couple years without ever reaching widespread adoption. It’s interesting though, because I think it really was ahead of its time - these days I just have multiple different groupchats that I text, and that’s basically the same thing.
I miss phpBB/IPB/etc. forums having a pair of resident "trolls" who were by far the most prolific posters on the entire forum, because they would gravitate to each other and "debate" at length, ostensibly but questionably as bitter rivals
It's occupying the segment that subreddits historically have. However, it's perhaps-intentionally search-opaque. You can't Google to find a message/link/download that's gated by Discord. And it also gives a sense of community, where someone who had more attention and time on a computer than a sense of what to do with those things can go have casual conversation with… someone.
1. Reddit communities tend to get too large
2. Subreddits overflow into each other too much through cross posting and brigading
3. Post history being public meant that you could get banned/brigaded for your comments on a totally different subreddit (i.e. bots autobanning you on one subreddit for posting on another subreddit).
The magic of discord is that everyone in the server I frequent I either know personally or they are known by someone I know personally. It creates a nice fabric of community and trust. Literally zero moderation over the past 10 years as everyone knows each other and behaves like normal adults and we also don’t get all up in arms when someone says something controversial.
By the numbers, Discord is definitely more popular in the US, though it is pretty popular in the UK too.
Most of my online identities were started when I was in college and was happy to have them tied to my real name. (This is also when Facebook was popular, still good, and college-kids-only.) Since then, cancel culture et. al. has made me more wary of having my identity-adjacent usernames show up in hobbies like gaming.
If I want to be myname in some Discord servers and anonoguy in others, is there a safe way to enforce that boundary? What about if I want to work on gaming-related open source projects or 3D prints?
As the internet moves to logged-in-and-social-by-default, it's hard to know which identity to use for which service. Moreover, when things are constantly leaking/being hacked, I don't know that I want any service to know that anonoguy and myname are personas of the same individual.
And as LLMs become the standard, I'm not sure any of this is defensible. I imagine in a decade's time, it will be trivial for an LLM to go "this account and that account have similar interests/references/ways of typing - they must be the same person."
People massively underestimate the scale of whatsapp/facebook/tiktok (billions of MAU)
I use Slack at work, but at least there I have a workable plan: no notifications for most channels, read or at least skim all messages in every channel by EOD, don't read it outside of business hours unless I get a DM. Also, absolutely never join the chatty #random type channels.
But if you include other group msg platforms as the same thing (whatsapp, fb messenger, etc) i imagine most people know.
Moving into things like sports and what we would've called the "general blogosphere" in 2010 quite rapidly too.
I kinda hate it since it's hard to discover, but at least Google can't direct a million bots to it either that easily yet...
My guess would be near half, probably a 60/40 split.
You can make it private now. Personally I think this is a bit of a misfeature since it ends up helping all the low-activity users showing up to post political agitprop in local subreddits, thinly-veiled advertisers, etc., but they changed it.
Having all of your social circle mashed together on the internet is like a family reunion at a convention in the same room as your high school reunion. It’s… a lot.
I know that for me, at least, I like having one server where the comedy is not PC, one server where people seem to be a little more philosophical, one server for my real life friends, one server full of leftoids and one server full of rightards, etc.
In the plastic instrument games genre, there are some Discords where any wisp of using commercial music will be met with a stern reaction and potential ban. There are others that will link you to Drives full of thousands of songs from old games. The same people are in both groups.
Until recently, I think the only way to join a Signal was to be explicitly added by a member. It doesn't have all the channels etc. of something like Discord.
It doesn't have enough mindshare by normies either. In San Francisco, my entire social graph was on Signal. In NYC, I'm the weirdo that uses Signal for everything. Most locals seem to only use it for things that they explicitly want to be private. Among Euro friends, only the ones with ties to the US/tech industry use it.
I really wish something better would come along.
What else would you want?
I always have a notification badge on Discord, and I hate it. Too many servers have channels where I get pinged, even though the channel is muting. I'm presuming someone is doing something like "hey @all, play with me"
I ought to be able to register that I will never ever care about this channel. Please ignore it for me.
It also allows running multiple instances with a single account (to be on multiple vocals at once for example).
The only drawback is the release cycle is more frequent and I need to update every time I boot.
worst part is that it used to :/
There is absolutely zero chance I find something interesting on Discord just by "browsing" Discord. I have to be in a community that already exists elsewhere to get the Discord server link or just accidentally stumble upon the server link somewhere other than Discord.
And If I do find an interesting Discord that is active, forget about seeing what people were talking about before.
All the interesting and or useful stuff posted on Discord is completely walled off and hidden away and might as well not exist after it was posted. I'm never going to find a Discord thread when browsing for something on the internet.
I genuinely think Discord is one of the more terrible things that has happened to the internet and the fact that it is replacing forums is a damn shame.
The good and bad, I guess.
Discord is what it is, and my teenage kids love it. However I'm constantly baffled by it LOL.
My rugby team uses Discord for chat and announcements.
It feels…gross…inappropriate…it feels weird to use a UI covered in green gamer UI slime.
Learn more about Imgur access in the United Kingdom"
God I hate the modern internet.
I wonder if there are any old school protocols out there to create a huge business around by just centralizing them and offering features people have been asking for decades.
Probably not.
React was the first open-source community I knew of that outgrew/got kicked off of Slack and moved to Discord. Now, it seems Slack is only used by companies, and occasionally by smaller groups (apartment buildings, school parents, etc) where someone in the group knows Slack from work and doesn't know it's hostile to non-businesses.
Discord was the opposite. I was working on an open source initiative at Google at the time, and the Discord folks openly welcomed us. They even gave us someone's contact info, in case we had needs they weren't addressing. This was when it was still targeted just for gaming, but they were very welcoming of OSS projects using it too!
As I write this, I realize that Discord is what "Google Apps for your Domain" was and Slack is the "Google Workspace" it became.
I wish you were right. We took our kid to a stage show she really wanted to see. People round us kept checking their phones. They weren’t even really checking them. They held them and would turn the screen on and off, lighting the place up.
They couldn’t be without them for more than 5 minutes. This, after 30 mins of painful selfies before the show. It’s awful.
Mind you, inconsiderate people will be as distracted as ever, and will continue to halfheartedly pretend they're listening to those around them. They'll just need to find a new method to achieve maximal obnoxiousness.
My money is on subvocalization.
But I’ve noticed with my 14 year old son and his friends that they are all about Snap and iMessage. Instagram and TikTok are their public fora.
Social media platform used to be less about passive consumption.
That does sound like a rather charmed life though. Could also be a sign that people are reverting to using the social internet apart from their irl acquaintances as well.
Linking up with all of our irl acquaintances through the public web was a terrible mistake imo. Seeking privacy can mean many different things.
Its essentially an entirely different website now.
Reddit is 99% search only. I go there only on a purpose. [might be replaced by Gemini, eventually]
HN and Alterslash are probably the only source of random info that I still consume.
May be that information containment is a reaction to my 15+ years of addiction to [the good old] Twitter. Or because I have reached age 50.
But the consequence is that I get the news late, and usually because of a search I did. Not because of a proactive algorithm.
Additional thought: in the end I suppose my information un-déluge is the proof that algorithms eventually failed to deliver [i.e point me at things meaningful to me]. The biggest example is Spotify proposals. That is 1% of my music discovery, whereas traditional non-commercial radios and dedicated podcasts are [human curated and] much more diverse.
It's a much less sticky place, now.
Why does that look familiar?
Some web wrappers forFB on Android must use that or similar.
If you're actually doing a census of people and asking about their web usage and social habits, it'd show up. So maybe Google or Facebook has the data if they were to do say cohort analysis on Google Analytics or Chrome History or Facebook beacon logs, counting specifically the number of total unique Internet users that used to visit social media but no longer do. But such an analysis would require SVP-level privacy approval (because it joins together personal, non-anonymized data across multiple products), and why would an executive commission a study that potentially tells them that their job is in danger and their employer is making a mistake by employing them? And if they did, why would they ever publicize the results?
AFAIK, most of the major public-facing analytics platforms work by sampling their users. If their users are voluntarily choosing not to engage with the platform that their sampling runs on, they by definition cannot measure that change. They just become a biased sample that excludes specifically the population they're trying to measure.
I think a decent-sized subset of Millennials have basically aged out of the time-surplus years of the early 20s and are now busy with kids and careers and families. And they aren't being replaced by the new 20-somethings, at least not on social media of the same form. The kids are still on text messages and Whatsapp and Discord and Roblox and Google Docs (!!), but they aren't interested in getting on the public Internet, and if they are, their parents won't let them.
My experience is that consumption is as high as ever, but the median person's non-private sharing is down.
The simple local lifestyle is that which was lived by all of humanity for all of history up until the last ~75 years (give or take).
A percentage of people still traveled, communicated, traded and migrated to other places in the past. Cities were a mix of lots of people, commerce, news. It was just slower and a smaller percentage. Look at the letters of Paul in the bible. He was writing to different communities around the Roman Empire, and traveled to them when he could.
Looking at the big picture, trade, communication and migration are the norm over human history. We colonized the world before the Industrial Revolution, some humans did it thousands of years prior.
If you’re not within a couple standard deviations of boring, local living is isolating. Al Gore gave a mea culpa speech at one point because he thought, as a Senator, that legislating to give everyone the Internet would halt the rural brain drain but it had the opposite effect. People learned that they weren’t alone, they were just surrounded by (my words, not his) idiots and so they moved to where their people were. They voted with their feet in droves.
Ultimately, the Internet is good for support. It lets you find people who have the same obscure cancer your child has. Who are dealing with the same sort of neuroses your mom has. Who are being defrauded by a corporation in the same way. Who have the same feelings that the people around you ridicule you for even the hint of having. It lets these people find the patterns, see other people are feeling the same things they do, stop being gaslit.
Everything else has become about dopamine and money. And for those parts we should definitely unplug. But without forums or chat threads that same feeling of being The Other comes back.
This one is on its way to becoming part of the social media ecosystem. That's what the "Updates" feature is.
To get an idea of what it will look like, check out Instagram users who use it for both 1:1 messaging and social media (1:many) features. Which (again anecdotally) is widely used in younger generations.
Few of my friends use Instagram or TikTok, but I think we're just outliers. I see many (young) users, all the time, whenever I'm on the train.
Individually, many of these shifts make sense: resilience over efficiency, trust over reach, local over global. But collectively they point to a world that is becoming more segmented, less interoperable, and harder to coordinate at scale. If fewer people participate in shared public spaces, economic, cultural, or informational, it’s not just advertising models that break, but the assumptions underpinning growth, politics, and even social cohesion.
That doesn’t necessarily mean collapse, but it does suggest a lower energy equilibrium: slower growth, fewer mass phenomena, more parallel realities. The open question is whether we can rebuild new forms of shared infrastructure and trust at smaller scales—or whether we simply learn to live with a more fragmented, quieter, and less synchronized society.
Now that advantage is completely gone, and I have to build business the way it’s always been done in history: walking the streets while the online "broadcasted" world is a massive distraction.
Shh! One must never question the ponzi scheme.
The loss of faith in institutions takes quite a long time to occur but I think it will be quite a bit of effort to reverse.
Not true. People post their entire lives (OK not entire, but the positive parts) on social media every day for the public to see.
maaaaybe 2% of the people…
I can attest to this based on my circle of friends and acquaintances. Email not so much but yeah WA etc. I think people are done putting content that matters to them on public platforms. So all we see now on FB/Insta is memes, influencers or ads.
Why would it plunge instead of re-focusing on things that are intrinsically important?
Because a lot of the economy is focused on creating and maintaining a surplus[1]: make people buy things that they don't really need, make them discard and replace things that they've been convinced are no longer worth it.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Surplus%3A_Terrorized_into_Bei...
That's a nice narrative, but its simplicity clashes with reality.
Which is actually pretty odd, because improvisational comedy as we know it today is younger than the film industry.
The Return of Content Curation. Peer-to-peer: research, retrieval, review.
Even if they do have disposable income to spend, the lack of working ads means that they're getting their vendors in a different way.
Some speculation follows: If advertisements as the main driver of sales went away, wouldn't that help smaller players gain a foothold against incumbents? Because, while incumbents can use their war chest to push all newcomers to page 2 of the results. If the awareness is coming from somewhere else, being on page 2 of the results doesn't matter anymore, because no one is even seeing page 1 of the results anyway!
At the time it felt to me they were missing out on so many other useful resources. Maybe I was wrong. It's interesting to see things trending in a similar direction now.
Yeah, these are genuinely the only people worth advertising to anymore in a practical sense, if you are selling something non-essential.
Because of the K shaped economy a lot of people in the US are spending whatever they make on bare essentials like rent, food and paying off debt like student loans and consumer debt.
Advertise to those masses all you want, on whatever platforms you want, cant get water from a stone.
One rough heuristic I use is people-watching on the subway. Just a quick glance from a distance at their phones. What are they actually looking at? (Yeah I know it's a bit nosy...)
I see: short-form video, WhatsApp/Messaging, YouTube long-format - in that order.
I have seen a comment about them being terrible for advertising, it looks like a "good" idea but it is not.
The problem is that the attention of people watching these videos drop to almost zero, too much is happening in a too short amount of time, and as a result nothing is remembered, including the ads. It is a very good deal for whoever is monetizing this content, they show a lot of ads, plenty of revenue, but not for those who are paying for the ads. It is like subliminal messages, "good" idea, but not very effective. For ads to work, people need to pay attention.
I don't know how ads in chatbots will turn out and what form it will take, but I think it is inevitable.
But they can also make it more pernicious. For example by having companies pay them so that they can train their AI on their products, with regular updates. Not technically an ad, but the AI will be more aware of their products so that they are more likely to be recommended to the user. In other words, that's paying for the right to advertise to the AI rather than to advertise to consumers directly.
Why would they ever make it obvious? It makes no sense. google just had the luck of political inaction, and eventually enshitified it further to the point where you might not know it was an ad.
To not undermine trust into their product and because ads are lower quality than organic results, and by making them indistinguishable, it will make their product worse.
The chatbot market is still competitive, and while users may tolerate ads alongside their answers, they may not tolerate lower quality answers (that is ads disguised as answers). With Google search, they can get away with it because they are still the best even with the enshitification.
There is another reason why it is in their best interest to make it really obvious there are ads. Chatbots want you to pay directly, sometimes hundreds of dollars a month, they are not getting that kind of money with ads, so obnoxious ads are also a way to say "hey look, if you pay, you won't get ads". It doesn't mean ads won't make a comeback in paid tiers later, but not initially.
So, yes, lots of "probably", but my guess would go towards the first ads being obvious and flashy rather than subtle.
it's something that continually needs to be reenforced again and again. somebody will be made example of.
E.g., around here, "happy holidays" would splash an ad for Jacobs coffee.
It's like advertising and social media are slowly merging together.
I couldn't say how effective it is. Who knows how much they paid that influencer and how much revenue it drives. But it sure is common.
And to add to this, the dark pattern of the time was to register in the Phone Book as “AAA Your Real Business Name” which was exactly what my first job did.
The chill that ran down my spine when I realized that you and TFA think that the part people care about is Google as an ad platform, and not as a way to access websites.
Jesus fucking Christ, things are bleak.
Revenue-wise, video ads have always been the sun to print ads peanut m&m.
Look where the pucks going then:
Implication: ChatGPT as a realtime video avatar will hit the jackpot with ads, but not before. Count on the ChatGPT device having a screen for that reason
Reason I say this is that this guy (Bob Hoffman)
https://www.bing.com/videos/riverview/relatedvideo?q=Ad+Cont...
says people watch ads on TV not the Internet.
Interesting! I thought, they did it because of the stock-item-list order :-D
There is not one single puck in the web search field, and we actively don't want that situation in the first place (want no monopoly or cartel). There should be at least 2 if not a ton more. Everyone focusing their attention and resource on a single thing is the absolute worst case scenario.
I also hope the future of search is not where every existing player is looking at. That means there is no disruption happening, money straight dictates the winner and nothing truly innovative is expected.
Even "skating where the puck will be" is essentially following someone else's play. It can be fine, but I'd prefer to focus on the person actually acting on the puck, where they're trying to lead the game.
(and to some extent, monitors if you account for the amount of time 9-5 people spend on their work laptops or screens. desktop is not dead but that's another matter)
The hot apps are for now, chatbots and vertical shortform platforms. We know advertisers get much better bang for their buck marketing where the influencers are.
Google is "dead" because search advertising is much worse at figuring you out and showing you stuff when you're not necessarily looking for it. But Google can easily advertise where the eyeballs are - your phones.
We must remember that enshittification is an ongoing process and Google has the power to reach billions of people, one shitty update at a time.
From their POV, it definitely feels like a miss that they don't own a successful and dedicated social media platform. Maybe they will make another foray into it.
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[1] Watching them, anyway. I like playing, but I get almost sleepy-coma-like boredom by watching it. Probably a personality deficiency, but meh.
In other words, Google. Google search grows every year despite people are dead sure it's "dead."
[0]: https://sparktoro.com/blog/new-research-google-search-grew-2...
A friend recently explained to me that this trend is awful for newer businesses trying to get into a niche:
* Chatbots give a lot of weight to Wikipedia in their training data.
* Wikipedia demands "notability" for pages being created.
* So non-incumbent businesses have a hard time getting on Wikipedia, and chatbots keep recommending incumbents.
The person kept making the comment that she couldn't see/find the puck and it made it frustrating to watch.
As a goalie, not being able to see the puck is pretty normal (especially with big bodies trying to screen you).
What I told her was that what matters a lot more than where the puck is, is where it's going to be in about two seconds. But the next best thing is to know where the puck is now.
If you can't see the puck then look at the players and as a last resort, look at the ref. 99% of the time they will be looking at the puck. Look where they're looking and soon enough it will appear.
I think this applies very much to this whole Google question.
The puck is gone (or on the way to the other side of the rink) and everyone is confused where it is or where it's going.
Look where everyone is looking and you'll find your answer there. It may not be in the same form as Google adwords, but the game is the same. Leveraging attention.
The tactics were different during the phonebook days (it was having your business start with the letter "A") as opposed to Google and will be different for the next thing as well.
From what I can tell, everyone seems to be looking at chatbots and vertical, shortform video. Not sure how that plays out in terms of advertising, but in terms of the answer to this article's question, that seems like a good place to start.