Much as I rail against the overly pedantic nature of many, many comments here, this place is a veritable treasure trove compared to Reddit.
On Reddit, every single fucking thread gets derailed by shitty puns, basement-tier humour or a one-liner with all the nuance of a tweet. Doesn't matter how sombre a topic, some dickhead is going to make an oh-so-clever quip and legions of fellow dickheads will line up to suck his dick and upvote it to the top.
Even when there are substantive comments, the replies to those comments rarely make for useful reading.
"Take my upvote and fuck off"
"Nice"
"Mom's spaghetti"
"/r/Suicidebywords" on a comment about dick sizes
... and on and on
Not to mention the fact that Reddit's recent algorithms upvote the shittiest content to the front page to begin with. I mean, /r/dankmemes? /r/memeeconomy? /r/wholesome memes? Fuck outta here with that shit.
There are exceptions, of course. /r/financialindependence comes to mind. But overall, it's become an out of control shitshow that I visit ever less frequently.
reddit is what you make of it. That's the whole point of different subreddits and the ability to customize what you see.
Once you get rid of the default subscriptions, the experience becomes way more enjoyable. Smaller subreddits generate less garbage and tend to be moderated better. Even better, you're less likely to see ads-disguised-as-content like you do on /r/pics and /r/aww. No one posts in /r/woodworking or /r/PrintSF because they want to whore some karma. /r/asoiaf has some wonderfully nuanced (if not repetitive due to the lack of new source material) discussions. And so on.
Overall, though, I think the state of /r/AskReddit gives the best summary of reddit's downfall. When I started going on reddit in 2009, the threads there were often interesting, and you didn't have to tag something "serious" to get serious replies. Several years ago, it began to be the case that if you didn't tag something serious, then, well, you would get thousands of comments of _literally_ the same joke. And that's default reddit -- thousands of comments of literally the same joke.
Reddit is way more enjoyable than HN. On reddit you can have serious discussions and you can have fun.
HN is trying too hard to be serious. It may be interesting, but rarely it is fun.
Couldn't disagree more. If I want fun, I'd watch some comedian on YouTube, way higher quality. If I wanted serious discussion, Reddit has too much noise for the signal that it does offer.
The Reddit of today is about posting the "funniest" screenshots from Twitter, things like blackpeopletwitter, whitepeopletwitter, murderedbywords and so on.
>The Reddit of today is about posting the "funniest" screenshots from Twitter, things like blackpeopletwitter, whitepeopletwitter, murderedbywords and so on.
It's easy to say that Reddit has no discussions of merit when only using examples of subreddits which have no intent to have discussions of merit, and focus primarily on memes and light-hearted content. But it's purposely disingenuous to do so. That's usually what people seem to do.
But compare the quality of discussion between Hacker News and the programming subreddits from which stories are usually reposted, or the heavily moderated expert subs like /r/askahistorian, and see if HN really still stands head and shoulders above the rest in terms of quality. In my experience, with the minor exception that HN is allergic to any sort of humor, the experience is about the same.
Yeah I know. People bring up r/science and the history subreddits all the time. And you're right, they do stick to the topic. The trouble is that they're both very siloed. If you don't like those topics all the time, you have to go elsewhere. Hence my comment on signal to noise.
Totally agree about the no humour thing on HN though.
I have no experience with what this guy is talking about.
Maybe "They" are tracking me just as assiduously as him, and desperately trying to get their ads projected onto my retinas, but I never see any online ads at all. Hence, I never see targeted ads.
If I were ever to turn off UMatrix, I probably would be shocked. But why would I do that?
So my main complaint about The Web These Days is that everything works badly, when it works at all. Amazon search can never bring up what I want to buy, even when I know it exactly. Ebay, likewise. Google cannot find anything that might be vaguely connected to a Product they would rather I were searching for instead.
Google Maps was going all to hell until recently, but appears to have recovered, some, and arrested the slide.
There's one big difference here, I'd bet. Do you have children? Or a spouse? Because as assiduously as you can corral your own content for pesky ads there will be devices, services, and platforms that your children or your spouse use that will leak into your life.
The day your child asks you why youtube keeps giving him ads for diabetes medication and you have to face your still unresolved feelings about your mother's death and explain that he'll probably one day have to have daily injections and a few toes amputated and maybe deal with kidney failure is the day you'll probably feel the same as the author of this article.
What surprises me is that for all their tracking, Google is surprisingly bad at telling what I'm interested in. They keep suggesting me Youtube videos about Minecraft, and it wouldn't surprise me if they showed my son Stephen Colbert and Trevor Noah, despite the fact that we use individual accounts. Their ads are just noise; rarely relevant to what I'm interested in.
Google is not in the business of satisfying your content needs, though: they are in the business of making money by getting people to look at screens. This may occasionally overlap with giving you what you’re looking for, but is by no means strictly linked.
I was under the impression that they were in the business of targeted advertising. They want to know everything I do specifically to understand which ads are most effective to show to me. And effective here means: most likely to get me to click on them and buy something. So yes, showing me stuff I'm interested in should be pretty important to me. Knowing the difference between me and my son too. You can't effectively target ads if you're confused about who you're dealing with.
It’s entirely possible that they make most of their money off of the top few percent of online spenders, who probably don’t need to be targeted that well to make most of the money that’s made online, hence not justifying an especially-honed targeting system. Plus, we’re in the beginning of the era where the data has far more lucrative and powerful uses than direct ad-matching, so again it may not be to their profit to invest heavily in that area. I don’t know Google’s economics obviously, but that’s my guess.
soothing tone oh, just enable that sweet tracking and we'll know enough to give you exactly what you're looking for. Poor you, you didn't realize you were making it impossible to help you. /soothing tone
I only read part of the article but as far as I got the author seemed to feel he would not be able to resist the blandishments of the advertiser/spies.
Seriously? Amazon has more filters and categories than I know what to do with, it would be very hard not to find exactly what you're looking for. How would you improve the experience?
> "If people like me can't be sure our home life won't leak onto the sidebars of corporate presentation, or the recommendations of software our kids are using, we'll stop using it entirely."
What a fucking joke. You and I both know there's no escape, here; we're trapped here forever, and things will always only get worse and they will never get better, and there isn't a god-damned thing we can do about it.
The web isn't as much fun in many ways but seeing the jacket I looked at four years ago and rejected, appear over and over and over again since then, actually gives me much more of a chuckle than today's grim headlines.
The listening part is what is really the most mind-blowing. I routinely get mobile ads about things I only talked about with others and never typed anywhere. Google can deny as much as they want: They listen to every single word
I still don't believe that. Not even a little bit.
It's just that advertisers are absolutely fantastic at guessing what you might want, even if you have never ever actually looked at a product yourself. Maybe you were talking to your friends about something, and sure, you never searched for it, but your friend did while connected to your wifi - now your ip address is forever associated with that search, even if you yourself have never searched for it. Then when you suddenly get an ad for this product it feels like google must be listening to you.
I had this conversation with my mum few weeks ago - she was absolutely adamant that Google must be spying on her, because she spoke to me about getting a roomba on the phone, she has never searched for it, and yet she's getting ads for a roomba everywhere. They MUST be listening to her. Except that I reminded her that a week earlier I sent her an amazon link to a roomba, which she clicked and therefore is forever branded as someone who is looking for roombas. No conspiracy required, she simply forgot she has actually looked at a roomba-related website.
It's just...if they were really listening, it would have implications in both power and data usage, there would be a smoking gun somewhere - and there just isn't. Advertisers can figure out what you want even without listening to what you say.
I know the usual reasoning. It's often very specific topics like a certain kitchen item or even joke discussions about cars. These things pop up with 100% accuracy and with mentioning them in a single discussion. it happens so often that it's become an inside joke.
They probably showed the same ad to thousands of other people who didn't talk about it privately, and thus never noticed any connection. Coincidence.
No, I don't trust Google either, but it's probably just chance. If I called a million people and said, "you should take that trip to Estonia, can I help you book a flight?" most people would just hang up on me but one person would think I read their mind from across the country.
Not really. And I can't say that I have formed an opinion either way yet. It's more of an experiment than anything else. I tend to not really browse much on my mobile anyway.
It is an app, and it does work to some degree (eg. Shazam doesn't work with it activated). I don't see why the OS couldn't override it. I'm under no illusions that it couldn't be done.
The internet used to be a paradise of sorts. Sure, there was the occasional troll, affiliate link or Viagra ad in your inbox; but that was the spice of the 'net. Today it's all spice, no curry.
Y'all been to Newgrounds recently? It's still incredibly fresh and creative, just like it was back in the day. In fact, you yourself can contribute to it with tools that make it easier than ever!
I'm beginning to think people just never liked the old web to begin with because they had to put real thought into contributing.
I think of the Internet today as being in the “gathering” stage. All our data is just being slurped up, hanging around on the servers of a few dozen companies. It’s alarming, to be sure, but just you wait! A few years from now - when computers are faster and storage is cheaper - we’ll enter the “disseminating” stage.
That’s the stage we’ll enter as soon as an entire internet’s worth of content becomes easily transferable.
That’s when all your private information from 2019 (your medical history, gmail messages, bank details, your search and browsing and shopping history, your private photos, etc) will leak to the public.
It’s just a question of time because any morsel of data only needs to leak once to be henceforth online forever. It will be a complete nightmare.
I used to dream of switching out roots and making a new internet, but that seems like it'd never work. What about a TLD instead, with the simple tenent that no advertising or tracking was allowed, ever? Doing so would get your domain sinkholed. Something like that done right, with some free or ultra cheap tier for honest users, I could see attracting users. And more users maybe more companies would want to join in. I don't know, I'm just thinking out loud. I share the sentiments of the author, and find the modern web gross. Outside of maybe 4 or 5 websites(this one included), I don't use it much anymore. And this isn't just an old man hating change, it's objectively much different, and all worse.
Is there any party out there trusted to wield this much power to decide what's "advertising" or "tracking"? Given that modern technology is all about running programs on the Internet. And assuming this could grow into something big, and won't just wither or die like myriad of networks that were out there.
.nojs/.nocookie TLDs could be a fun idea, though. Doesn't need any trusted third party to govern, just a bit of browser vendors cooperation (so, a slim chance).
Why not? The web of late '90s (as I remember it) worked just fine without those. Ability to serve only documents but not programs, and inability to persist any identifiers would mean that both website developers and visitors would know that website cannot be disruptive, and would serve content (or nothing of substance at all).
I expect that advertisers won't go there because it contradicts modern beliefs in targeted advertising and how behavioral data obtained by tracking is worth everything.
And it's virtually impossible to distinguish between paid-for "native" advertising and honest product recommendation.
I know you jest, but you know who it did work for, in a way? AOL. AOL used to have its own content, its own email, own groups, own chat, and own keywords. People made fun of AOL as 'newbie' at the time, but I think given proper governance the idea wasn't all terrible.
There's a difference between publishing to the Web and consuming published content on the Web. These complaints are about the state of the latter, as effected by less-than-benign actors doing the former. One can do the former without doing the latter (see also: Richard Stallman, who last I checked still doesn't use a web browser of any sort, yet somehow still maintains his own blog).
There's no Stallman-compatible internet for him to use it on[0]. He goes through great pains to avoid identifying himself by accessing the internet directly, and to avoid interacting in any way with non-free content.
"...I generally do not connect to web sites from my own machine,
aside from a few sites I have some special relationship with.
I usually fetch web pages from other sites by sending mail to a
program (see https://git.savannah.gnu.org/git/womb/hacks.git)
that fetches them, much like wget, and then mails them back to me.
Then I look at them using a web browser, unless it is easy to see
the text in the HTML page directly. I usually try lynx first,
then a graphical browser if the page needs it (using konqueror,
which won't fetch from other sites in such a situation)."
Fair enough, he "uses" a web browser, for very limited definitions of use.
His beliefs about the inherently non-free nature of the web and his fears about surveillance still make it infeasible for him to consume the web directly, unless it's with someone else's browser.
I'm pretty much boycotting Facebook/Twitter(/Discord), and seriously thinking about boycotting YouTube/Reddit - am I not using the Web (or the Internet - those are not the same...) ?
In an internet filled with advertising, tracking, toxicity and trolls, HN is a relief.
The design is simple, fast and functional. The community does a tremendous job of legislating itself. The content is incredibly valuable.
Hacker News reminds me of the internet I grew up loving, not the thing it has become.