The same is true for database rankings (db-engines).
If entrants are not artificially inflating "organic" signals via fake content spam (Twitter/X), then the criteria themselves are losing their signal strength (StackOverflow/GitHub).
The diffusion makes it increasingly difficult to understand which channels are important and which correlate to strength in the market.
Unfortunately, these can be more than vanity metrics.
Some VCs or financial markets may use these as methods towards valuation.
Happy to answer any questions about deduplication. One thing that's not included in the write-up is that we also address out-of-order indexing alongside deduplication.
i think part of the problem is these kind of messages are alienating exactly because they appear on screen. the meat-space sentiments rarely match the "thoughts and prayers" type online speech-acts, or at least, they are basically never extended as readily.
Nothing personal (I mean, seriously, nothing personal)
Little (probably hard) advice for if/when you're going to say something like that to a zoomer irl (based on personal experience from the receiving end):
The "you aren't as alone as it might seem" gets the "what you're saying is just factually incorrect and what you're trying to do is to bullshit me and maybe possibly yourself" thing going. I have never heard something like that from a person "in the weeds".
Same for "We'll figure it out". How much time have you personally spent "figuring it out" and how much time have you spent playing hot potato with the problem? How important is it compared to your own problems? I guess, not very, so there is no "us" figuring it out.
Basically, don't be a disingenuous dense motherfucker and don't bullshit other people and yourself. Not saying you personally are doing it, but there are definitely more people that do, than that don't.
> Whatever precipitating causes led to such suffering, know that we're _here_, _now_, together.
The article comments on this though:
"All the things that have traditionally made life worth living — love, community, country, faith, work, and family — have been “debunked.”
This is absolutely true and no wonder young folks are feeling down. I think the counter-culture types starting 50+ years ago wanted to tear down the old, but forgot to put something constructive in its place. (Well the leftist/Marxist types tried, but then the USSR imploded)
Danny is clearly upset, and I would be too. We all love the Internet. Imagine being fingered in an article as some mad SEO guy who is among "the people who ruined the Internet". The Verge is a big platform...
Also, SEO is of the more voodoo & charlatan filled branches of technical esoterica. Very little of it is falsifiable or clear. And there is quackery as far as the eye can see.
Transparency into search algos would be better for us all. But the cost of algo transparency is transparency into adtech. And that's a hill Google will die on, and why we need alternatives.
> SEO is of the more voodoo & charlatan filled branches of technical esoterica.
It's very, very hard for me to avoid thinking of the entire SEO industry in the same light as I think of the adtech industry: a plague that is helping to destroy everything that makes the internet good.
Adtech is at least trying to be a non-zero-sum game. They bring dollars to the Internet to try to get your attention off the Internet, to buy a real-world product (even that product is itself delivered online). That allows the Internet to provide a lot of creativity for "free".
SEO is purely zero-sum, or negative-sum. There's a fixed amount of attention and they want to drag it from wherever it would naturally be to some place you don't really want it to be.
Advertising also does a ton of privacy violation and other shenanigans, because wherever there is money there is evil. But at least there's a baby somewhere in all that bathwater. SEO makes the Internet worse without improving anything at all.
> There's a fixed amount of attention and they want to drag it from wherever it would naturally be to some place you don't really want it to be.
That is exactly what ads are trying to do. It is the very essence of advertising: get your attention. This is ingrained to the extent that everyone knows "there's no such thing as bad publicity".
And it's just as much if not more 0-sum as SEO. The stated purpose of advertising is to make you spend your money on something that you otherwise wouldn't have. That's sometimes about spending your money on product A instead of A's competitors, and sometimes just to spend your money on X instead of saving/investing it.
Even worse, advertising is trying to convince you to spend irrationally: instead of doing your own cost/benefit analysis, advertising's purpose is to convince you to act out of emotion, or to outright lie about the cost and benefit of the product.
I'm exactly the opposite, actually. I have to actively and constantly defend against the attacks of adtech stuff. SEO only really affects how web pages are designed.
You can install an adblocker to filter out adtech.
What kind of blocker should we install to filter out the thousand enshittifications publishers would add to win the SEO game?
Worth noting in this conversation: there's a philosophy that these two techs go hand-in-glove because adtech is the alternative to spending money on SEO. Instead of trying to game the machine, just pay to show up in the "People who thought they were so important, they paid money to get your attention" slot. Much like the notion that in the absence of copyright and patents, you don't get free information but guilds and hitmen... In the absence of adtech you don't get a bright, attention-optimized, clean web but an enshittified web where companies like Proctor & Gamble are trying to SEO their way into showing up above Unilever in searches for 'toilet paper'.
>What kind of blocker should we install to filter out the thousand enshittifications publishers would add to win the SEO game?
well that's what Kagi is trying to do for you. But you can definitely spend a lot of time homespinning some unholy middleware filter on google results to try and cull down the most frequent offenders.
> Transparency into search algos would be better for us all
I think that the jury's out on that topic. Danny's absolutely right in asserting that if the full algo were known, people would write to optimize against the algo, which would defeat the purpose of the algo.
Goodhart's Law is in full effect: “When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure."
So then the algorithm is crap and that is why they don’t want to show it. If the “full algo” actually prioritizes high quality content we would certainly want everyone to optimize against it!
In general, these models are approximations of an ideal, or some kind of statistical summary across systems that are too complex to completely model.
There's a wide gap between "this algorithm is crap" and "this algorithm stops working if we publish the whole thing publicly and people can explicitly tune data to make number-go-up." That's like claiming a machine learning algorithm is crap because it's possible to build bespoke counter-inputs that maximize badness in the output; that's possible with most ML algorithms, but when someone's not trying to break the machine on purpose, those algorithms often work great.
>but when someone's not trying to break the machine on purpose, those algorithms often work great.
To be fair, that's the exact thing that's wrong here. Creative tools for professionals can assume good faith; no one is trying to break an IDE unless their job is QA for said IDE.
Tools for advertising almost always have bad faith actors, or those actors are the largest presence. The problem becomes untenable when the tool creator has a symbiotic relation with the bad actor.
How about sites that are shown to use SEO or game the algorithm simply cease to exist on Google after a warning period? Change the incentive structure entirely.
Anecdotes on top of anecdotes, but this post captures the Canadian mentality well in my opinion. Though his name is _verboten_, Jordan Peterson goes off in this direction. His common words are that Canadians are suspicious of success.
I don't quite know why the culture is like this, and I'm not sure it's a problem. Useful to take a step back and realize that Canada is a very different culture than the US, and there simply is a different value system.
Summed up in:
> A lot of this is simply that Canadians do not desire to be rich and prioritize not being poor.
I imagine selection bias is a lot of it. Lots of immigrants for both, but the USA is where you go to seek fame and fortune. Canada is the nice and stable answer.
Canada is arguably also socially neutral on wealth. In the USA, wealth earns you respect, influence, straightforward political influence, etc. In Canada, wealth is just wealth. If anything, we are a bit suspicious of how you earned it and who you hurt to do that.
It's not surprising as Canada is self selected as the people who did not want to take the risk of founding a new country based on enlightenment ideals and democracy.
I mean... People fled to beCanada to not be part of the us.
Now we reap the rewards. America is a resounding success, and Canada is a success because it is next to America.
These posts pop up every now and then. Too much rationalism in this approach for sense. But I get it, it's difficult to sell letters when you're warning people against reading letters.
As a lay student of Buddhism, there's a much more simple and effective route.
Meditate.
A clean, crisp, quiet break into your own internal fortress of solitude. Curating as a means of establishing a creative sandbox makes sense to me, when the creative process opens. But concentration and focus is a skill and it can be developed. Trying to develop it through consumption is very difficult and counter-intuitive.
Your own internal world can surpass any notebook. Have you heard of the Method of Loci? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Method_of_loci It's applied meditational creative construction, it's been used by Grand Master memory champions, and it's all inside. Even if you do not apply the projector in your mind to such purposes, simply meditating can make much of this process subconscious. You do less, think less and yet remember and "receive" more.
Meditating is much easier if you do it before opening your browser to find out about hospitals being bombed 4000km from your place, though. I'd still advocate for limiting consumption first...
Their data did not look for cause, it looked to measure the current.
It's refreshing to get non-sensationalized reporting. We can draw our own - very obvious - conclusion. And no, it isn't so that the 'WEF will take away your freedoms'.
> It invalidates not just managers, but therapy, virtually any social function.
It doesn't, because it can't replace authenticity. That is, unless you never realize you're talking with an AI.
But if the human connection doesn't matter for you in a given context, then yes, GPT-4 can already compete with therapy, as well as with many social functions.
If entrants are not artificially inflating "organic" signals via fake content spam (Twitter/X), then the criteria themselves are losing their signal strength (StackOverflow/GitHub).
The diffusion makes it increasingly difficult to understand which channels are important and which correlate to strength in the market.
Unfortunately, these can be more than vanity metrics.
Some VCs or financial markets may use these as methods towards valuation.