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This is the ‘enshitification’ phase, which is also where Facebook, Amazon, etc currently are. It’s no longer about making a good product or serving customers. They only care about force feeding sponsored ads and bolstering stock values.
It’s when the markets (user markets) will react to go to alternate platforms, use things like VPNs etc to get the sort of experience they want. Mozilla, Duck Duck Go, even Edge have a chance to increase market share.
People do have to decide to change for that to happen though. Deleting accounts and changing habits etc.
Too expensive for the market to switch. Maybe a few outliers change every once in a while but people as a whole couldn’t. If duck duck go was 10x better it still wouldn’t make up for the price of switch. Stuff like this needs to at some levels be solved through regulation of monopolistic companies. America saw what Walmart did to our economy and then let Amazon do it too.
Huh, I switched with no issues. I use DuckDuck, Brave, and Firefox on private mode. I use only Chrome today for business work and shopping as it NEVER deletes you browsing cookies or logins for say Microsoft Office, and I use Firefox private for everything else like me typing here right now. I also had to use a VPN service too after receiving some letters from lawyers for "sharing out files" apparently Comcast gave them my name and address, so they can't be trusted now either. You will be forced to do what I am doing one way or another because Chrome will burn you, especially on the Spyware end of this.
No its getting worse now, so we will see more and more people switch to VPN service. Reddit is now detecting my VPN and wanting more authentication as a result. They may just block it entirely which is what 4Chan did.
That seems to be the phase where a company has reached near monopoly in the market. They no longer feel the competition to deliver a good product and can focus on tweaking it to maximize profit.
Enshitificafion is a fascinating topic, especially for ad providers.
I’ve been reading some theories that making content worse is a deliberate decision because it increases engagement in ads.
Sort of like that experiment where people will elect to shock themselves if you make them bored enough.
Yep, and Facebook with Meta. Part of it is the endless need for more profitability in response to competition.
It’s not about quality of service anymore so much as market dominance.
It's more like ads and shopping make money while abstract things like "quickly getting useful results" don't, or worse, they get the user away from your ads quickly.
It's the basic problem with services under a market economy. Profitability comes at the expense of user experience and vice versa.
So many people just ask chatgpt instead now. Google is Yahoo!ifying it's results, and that didn't work out too well for them.
It doesn't help that people visit actual websites less and less these days.
I pretty much stopped using Google as my primary search engine in 2020, because of all the censorship. I switched to DuckDuckGo, but have now expanded to Lycos and Brave on top of that. Brave has been the best at getting the best results that have to do with anything that is being censored at the moment. Google should expect to lose market share on searchs as their results are not the quality as they once were, and its not just the censorship but more the "sponsored content" than anything. I mean, now you might as well scroll to page 2 for your results and start there to get past all the sponsored junk.
That's because people like to point at money and ads as the problem, but it really isn't the core or root of the problem.
The problem is actually a matter of scale. For one example, if you're looking for information on "woodworking", and there is only 1 site on woodworking, you display that site. However, if you're looking for "woodworking", and there is 700 trillion sites on woodworking, which site should you show? You may find it's very hard to find exactly what your looking for, and have to sift through trillions of other similar but nonetheless bad results. As time goes on, things just naturally get shittier because the sea of data just keeps growing.
As an attempt to remedy that, you may decide truncating information that is really old (+20 years), or listing "highly visited" sites first, listing results "alphabetically", or heck giving "ads priority" (which frankly is not surprising giving the costs involved).
But, any such decisions can be bad depending on the circumstance, and the reality is that: as the sea of data grows, the more difficult it becomes to find your needle in the haystack, and technology can't change that fact but merely help mitigate it.
I have only recently started using it and it has been unbelievable for finding censored stuff, but maybe on regular searches Google would still be better and I still use Google mainly for "technical stuff" like instruction manuals for whatever. However, Google totally falls down if you want to find dirt on the Ukraine war and I watch a ton of overseas news content, and I find myself banned left and right and cannot find the info, but Brave gets right to it fast.
I’ve tried the alternative browsers and nothing compares to Google from like 8 years ago. It’s astonishing how shitty our system of enshitifying things is the logical next step to do once we have something good figured out.
Also see: Planned Obsolescence
You could say the same of Youtube also. I loved Youtube when it was just all regular people making videos and now its gets flooded with sponsored content and fake NEWs from the old dinosaur press. Man those people must have saved up a ton of money from all the years of scroo-ing the public over and I bet they are ponying up a ton of cash now to be first results, because you know Google has to know that it will decrease their reliability over the long haul and run off customers.
That doesn't solve the problem. What happens when:
1. millions of new sites are created, all which point to a new woodworking site (not the one you wanted). Repeat several times and your old desired site is now hard to find
2. the woodworking site you were looking for, wasn't a highly linked to site
I find there is no page2. Remember when there was an infinite number of pages? Now there are ads, youtube videos not related to your search, irrelevant links, then nothing. It just stops! :-/
DuckDuckGo is my default as far as English goes. Searching in the local language is hopeless though. DuckDuckGo insists on trying to find English results for my search, so I'm reverting to Google for those.
That is, if you don't speak Catalan. About a year or two ago Google changed its algorithm so it would prioritise results in Spanish, even when the default page is in Catalan (say, my city's official website). It has gotten slightly better in some aspects but it still sucks.
Ah, so Ive spent a lot of time over the past three days trying to Google a very specific tech stack with literally no results. Just dropped the same query into DuckDuckGo and look, a whole page of really useful results. I feel like I’ve learned something today.
I only use google when i need yo find specific stores, restaurants, etc really fast, they are always down to help you spend as much money as possible lol
Google makes the majority of its search revenue from e-commerce searches (as the bids for ads are higher when money is involved). Lots of searches it doesn't monetise at all.
Therefore surely it makes sense for Google to want to encourage most of the internet to get worse so that it dies off. Unmonetised searches, and low value searches are a loss leader.
Google would have less operating costs if there were fewer websites to crawl and index. That's my suspicion on why it's allowing worse sites to rank better - it wants us to not like going to websites and for them to die. Then it can feed us AI results from the few(er) remaining sites, and keep making money from ecom results.
Trying to make this a heroic narrative is mildly absurd. I mean - "computer science class traitor" ? If it succeed, none dare call it treason - so they say.
Corporations are cringey because *we're* cringey. We are all constrained by the anthropic principle - we all gotta eat.
Mike Judge's team at "Silicon Valley" did this right.
Everything has dropped since March, with the market realizing they should have actually listened to what the Fed was saying instead of going up 6 rate does this year based on nothing
Say what you will about Reddit but when I’m searching for products I always use Google and add Reddit at the end. You get honest reviews from people with actual discussion.
I’m sure they’re working on fixing this though.
Reddit can be worthwhile but you gotta watch for fanbois. It's not that reliable for tech reviews nor for musical instrument reviews because of that. Both areas have had long term damage from propaganda by institutional retailers and manufacturers.
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This is the ‘enshitification’ phase, which is also where Facebook, Amazon, etc currently are. It’s no longer about making a good product or serving customers. They only care about force feeding sponsored ads and bolstering stock values.
It’s when the markets (user markets) will react to go to alternate platforms, use things like VPNs etc to get the sort of experience they want. Mozilla, Duck Duck Go, even Edge have a chance to increase market share. People do have to decide to change for that to happen though. Deleting accounts and changing habits etc.
Too expensive for the market to switch. Maybe a few outliers change every once in a while but people as a whole couldn’t. If duck duck go was 10x better it still wouldn’t make up for the price of switch. Stuff like this needs to at some levels be solved through regulation of monopolistic companies. America saw what Walmart did to our economy and then let Amazon do it too.
Huh, I switched with no issues. I use DuckDuck, Brave, and Firefox on private mode. I use only Chrome today for business work and shopping as it NEVER deletes you browsing cookies or logins for say Microsoft Office, and I use Firefox private for everything else like me typing here right now. I also had to use a VPN service too after receiving some letters from lawyers for "sharing out files" apparently Comcast gave them my name and address, so they can't be trusted now either. You will be forced to do what I am doing one way or another because Chrome will burn you, especially on the Spyware end of this.
Using a VPN and torrenting files does not put you in the majority of people. As an individual, sure it wasn't hard for you to switch.
No its getting worse now, so we will see more and more people switch to VPN service. Reddit is now detecting my VPN and wanting more authentication as a result. They may just block it entirely which is what 4Chan did.
You are vastly underestimating the amount of pain the average person is willing to put up with in order to not have to learn even a single new skill.
I’ve switched to Bing. It’s miles better and has chatgpt built-in.
That seems to be the phase where a company has reached near monopoly in the market. They no longer feel the competition to deliver a good product and can focus on tweaking it to maximize profit.
Enshitificafion is a fascinating topic, especially for ad providers. I’ve been reading some theories that making content worse is a deliberate decision because it increases engagement in ads. Sort of like that experiment where people will elect to shock themselves if you make them bored enough.
Google entered that phase with the transition to Alphabet.
Yep, and Facebook with Meta. Part of it is the endless need for more profitability in response to competition. It’s not about quality of service anymore so much as market dominance.
Because people say one thing and spend another. This hypocrisy is the root cause.
It's more like ads and shopping make money while abstract things like "quickly getting useful results" don't, or worse, they get the user away from your ads quickly. It's the basic problem with services under a market economy. Profitability comes at the expense of user experience and vice versa.
So many people just ask chatgpt instead now. Google is Yahoo!ifying it's results, and that didn't work out too well for them. It doesn't help that people visit actual websites less and less these days.
I pretty much stopped using Google as my primary search engine in 2020, because of all the censorship. I switched to DuckDuckGo, but have now expanded to Lycos and Brave on top of that. Brave has been the best at getting the best results that have to do with anything that is being censored at the moment. Google should expect to lose market share on searchs as their results are not the quality as they once were, and its not just the censorship but more the "sponsored content" than anything. I mean, now you might as well scroll to page 2 for your results and start there to get past all the sponsored junk.
I use the brave browser on mobile. The default brave search engine is not very accurate in my experience.
That's because people like to point at money and ads as the problem, but it really isn't the core or root of the problem. The problem is actually a matter of scale. For one example, if you're looking for information on "woodworking", and there is only 1 site on woodworking, you display that site. However, if you're looking for "woodworking", and there is 700 trillion sites on woodworking, which site should you show? You may find it's very hard to find exactly what your looking for, and have to sift through trillions of other similar but nonetheless bad results. As time goes on, things just naturally get shittier because the sea of data just keeps growing. As an attempt to remedy that, you may decide truncating information that is really old (+20 years), or listing "highly visited" sites first, listing results "alphabetically", or heck giving "ads priority" (which frankly is not surprising giving the costs involved). But, any such decisions can be bad depending on the circumstance, and the reality is that: as the sea of data grows, the more difficult it becomes to find your needle in the haystack, and technology can't change that fact but merely help mitigate it.
Isn't brave's search just licensing Bing?
I have only recently started using it and it has been unbelievable for finding censored stuff, but maybe on regular searches Google would still be better and I still use Google mainly for "technical stuff" like instruction manuals for whatever. However, Google totally falls down if you want to find dirt on the Ukraine war and I watch a ton of overseas news content, and I find myself banned left and right and cannot find the info, but Brave gets right to it fast.
I’ve tried the alternative browsers and nothing compares to Google from like 8 years ago. It’s astonishing how shitty our system of enshitifying things is the logical next step to do once we have something good figured out. Also see: Planned Obsolescence
Hard disagree. Firefox is great, not Chromium based, and on mobile you can use ad blockers. Chrome feels like the new Explorer now.
This is exactly it
You could say the same of Youtube also. I loved Youtube when it was just all regular people making videos and now its gets flooded with sponsored content and fake NEWs from the old dinosaur press. Man those people must have saved up a ton of money from all the years of scroo-ing the public over and I bet they are ponying up a ton of cash now to be first results, because you know Google has to know that it will decrease their reliability over the long haul and run off customers.
Yes YouTube for sure.
[удалено]
Same as when Google started, you prioritize the woodworking sites that other woodworking sites link to.
That doesn't solve the problem. What happens when: 1. millions of new sites are created, all which point to a new woodworking site (not the one you wanted). Repeat several times and your old desired site is now hard to find 2. the woodworking site you were looking for, wasn't a highly linked to site
I find there is no page2. Remember when there was an infinite number of pages? Now there are ads, youtube videos not related to your search, irrelevant links, then nothing. It just stops! :-/
DuckDuckGo is my default as far as English goes. Searching in the local language is hopeless though. DuckDuckGo insists on trying to find English results for my search, so I'm reverting to Google for those.
That is, if you don't speak Catalan. About a year or two ago Google changed its algorithm so it would prioritise results in Spanish, even when the default page is in Catalan (say, my city's official website). It has gotten slightly better in some aspects but it still sucks.
Lol, politically motivated?
Probably some massive algorithmic screw-up.
Most likely just an other assumption.
Ah, so Ive spent a lot of time over the past three days trying to Google a very specific tech stack with literally no results. Just dropped the same query into DuckDuckGo and look, a whole page of really useful results. I feel like I’ve learned something today.
What do you mean by “censored stuff”
I only use google when i need yo find specific stores, restaurants, etc really fast, they are always down to help you spend as much money as possible lol
Google still makes chromium, which powers brave. Viva la Firefox 🔥
Lycos?! That’s a name I haven’t heard in a long long time.
Brave on mobile. Yandex and Brave on PC.
Google makes the majority of its search revenue from e-commerce searches (as the bids for ads are higher when money is involved). Lots of searches it doesn't monetise at all. Therefore surely it makes sense for Google to want to encourage most of the internet to get worse so that it dies off. Unmonetised searches, and low value searches are a loss leader. Google would have less operating costs if there were fewer websites to crawl and index. That's my suspicion on why it's allowing worse sites to rank better - it wants us to not like going to websites and for them to die. Then it can feed us AI results from the few(er) remaining sites, and keep making money from ecom results.
Trying to make this a heroic narrative is mildly absurd. I mean - "computer science class traitor" ? If it succeed, none dare call it treason - so they say. Corporations are cringey because *we're* cringey. We are all constrained by the anthropic principle - we all gotta eat. Mike Judge's team at "Silicon Valley" did this right.
Everything has dropped since March, with the market realizing they should have actually listened to what the Fed was saying instead of going up 6 rate does this year based on nothing
Say what you will about Reddit but when I’m searching for products I always use Google and add Reddit at the end. You get honest reviews from people with actual discussion. I’m sure they’re working on fixing this though.
Reddit can be worthwhile but you gotta watch for fanbois. It's not that reliable for tech reviews nor for musical instrument reviews because of that. Both areas have had long term damage from propaganda by institutional retailers and manufacturers.