Comment by phyzix5761
6 hours ago
Why would Google need to direct traffic to the website when they've already scraped and trained their models on the data? Content creators and legitimate websites were wham-bammed and thank-you-ma’amed.
6 hours ago
Why would Google need to direct traffic to the website when they've already scraped and trained their models on the data? Content creators and legitimate websites were wham-bammed and thank-you-ma’amed.
Personifying Google in this way is not realistic. The search team alone at Google is made of thousands of people who are all working on different things with an over-arching mission of making the web MORE accessible, not less. Any release from any of those people could have created a side effect of this kind. Is there a chance it was an intentional policy implementation? Sure. But the odds are heavily against it.
This seems akin to saying that humans shouldn't be personified because their brains are made of millions of neurons that are all doing different things. But the actions or motives of individual processing units are hardly relevant, especially at the scale of The Google. We don't need to speculate how non-malevolent individuals cause harmful side effects. It doesn't even matter what The Google "thinks". The system is what it does, and what it does is consistently operate in ways that are not for the mere benefit of users of the Web. The conceptual model that The Google hates (or is callously indifferent to) us makes far better predictions than a model presuming thousands of people make mistakes while trying to make the Web more accessible. It doesn't matter if the former model isn't a technically perfect reflection of reality. We are less likely to be victim to The Google when we act as if it is a hostile force. Diffusing the results of its actions across thousands of nameless humans increases the risk that one finds themself posting on HN or X about how The Google spontaneously locked them out of their entire life.
Someone at Google are ultimately responsible for the overall direction. Saying that a company is made up by thousands of people and they should be judge, perhaps not individually, but at least not as one gigant whole, is asking the employees to absorb moral responsibility, while the corporate is excused of any wrong doing.
No, I think the company has plenty of responsibility. I just think it is more likely as someone who has been part of many engineering orgs that this is a latent bug affecting some people than some intentional change of policy.
Is this irony? Cause there’s no way anyone believes these “we want to make the world a better place” cliches anymore lol
> over-arching mission of making the web MORE accessible, not less
Right, that's why they pushed AMP and upranked AMP pages in their results. That's also why they decided to severely neuter/remove as blocking extensions for Chrome. That's also probably why google search results are getting worse by the month with more and more ads and spam being upranked to the top.
It's because google has a mission of making the web more accessible. Okay bud.
It's laughable to assume good intentions at this point, this predatory monopolist makes every decision against a free and open internet and in favor of monetization, authoritarianism, and enshittification.
The over arching mission is to make profit.
And accessibility was meant for Google so they can collect all the data to make even more profit.
sweet summer child,
> thousands of people who are all working on different things
those thousands of people aren't making the overall decisions
> with an over-arching mission of making the web MORE accessible
google's mission has for a long time now been to deliver value to its shareholders; making the web more accessible is secondary, nice if aligned with increasing revenue
lol.
I thought the same, isn’t a lot of this data stable and static. Why recrawl and continually index stuff that has low value if the corpus is already feature complete.
I was listening to David Bowie's Suffragette City as I read your comment (Apparently Bowie was a popularizer of 'wham bam, tym' usage)
>wham-bammed and thank-you-ma’amed.
So same thing ad-block users have been doing for 20 years now?
Edit: You can downvote, but you can't tell me the difference, can you?
Edit 2: Funny how when you call out ad block users for denying creators revenue, they go on about how the internet was fine in '96, how no one should expect anything for putting content online, or how it's their computer so they can chose what loads on it. Where did those arguments go?
Users take part and improve wikis, it's the whole model. If they don't take the adverts, they still can contribute. Googlebot isn't making edits, not even giving signal to the site about what is useful allowing the owners to hone the site.
Two ways in which issues who have adblock are better than bots.
Users will promote organically, which can win more credence than even a higher listing in SERPs. Depends if your wiki is part of building a community.
Does "users" refer to 100% of users or 0.05%?
Because while your argument sounds nice, if you break out the numbers, it becomes largely meaningless. In fact you find that the average internet user, especially in the tech/gaming space, usually contributes nothing, while watching/loading no ads and self congratulates themselves for doing so while encouraging others to do the same.
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What bizarre and absurd line of reasoning. Users who care about their privacy and opt out of downloading ads and malware are 'denying creators revenue'?
Are you denying creators revenue by not reading reading/observing every ad that comes your way and making purchases based on them? Maybe you should read/comment on HN less and focus on consuming more ads instead?
What at an incredibly stupid thing to say.
When you don't want the ads and privacy invasion, you don't visit the website. There are still honestly free things on the internet one can enjoy.
Like if a video game is too expensive for your liking, you simply don't buy it. Going and pirating it is not a valid response. You get the game and creator gets nothing. You can just stick to playing honestly free games, there are plenty out there.
This idea that digital data is worthless is stupid child logic born from when kids ruled the internet. Obviously it has value, as evidence by the very top level post I responded to.
(Also, as an aside, it's only heavy ad-block/privacy tool users who get malware and scam ads, because they have no profile and only bottom feeders bid on their views. Regular users get Tide and Chevy ads.)
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Users, ad-block users, and scrapers all consume the publicly-available content whether you like it or not.
I expect the difference is that the scrapers are the most likely to regurgitate the content one way or the other.
The difference is that I am not preventing anyone else from finding their content. I whitelist ads on sites that have good ad policies, like limiting ad size, labeling ads, and not allowing animated ads.
Advertisers only care about attention, if you don't impose editorial standards they'll contaminate your entire site.
In the tech space, using youtube as an example, tech youtubers, who are widely lauded, still have about 40-50% of users ad-blocking and <1% donating.
So thank you, but you are one of about 14 people on the internet who actually use a whitelist.
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If there is any model on the internet that has proven you don't need to monetize through ads for a working business model, it's Wikipedia.
Except that it isn't a business.
> So same thing ad-block users have been doing for 20 years now?
Ad-block users didn't mine Pokémon Central for content, then remove them from search listings. Changing the specific criticism made to the generic "denying creators revenue" is a distortion, because they screwed over all people who wanted visitors, not just the people who wanted visitors to milk them for cash.
If I made a forum about trains because I wanted people to come to the forum to talk about trains, Google milked the forum for all of the accumulated information about trains, then made it impossible to attract new users to talk about trains.
well I didn't downvote but there is an obvious difference in thousands of uncoordinated people doing something whenever it benefits vs. a large organization with automated resources doing things at the kinds of speeds and volumes that automation allows.
You can run unblockable ads on your site.
You just have to not use third party integrations that run untrusted code on your visitors computers.
The edits are likely why you’re getting downvoted so much tbh.
Trust me, the downvotes were instant.
People really hate it when you hold up a mirror to illustrate a problem. They tend to reflexively punch the mirror
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