Tell me a story of when a service introduced ads and that ended up being a great thing for users ? Because I don't know any.
Instead I know many stories where ads poisoned and destroyed the service and turned the Internet into a shit show.
Oh, but in this case, dystopia is highly unlikely, right ?
In the old torrent days I was only watching classical masterpieces and top level world directors. In the streaming era I only watch mediocre straight-to-streaming movies, few popular TV series and too much reality TV that I'm not proud to watch.
Realistically you don't absolutely need a VPS to run your own tunnel through for bittorrent. You can do something like install a virtualbox machine that mounts your local samba file share across the LAN (to store downloaded stuff), and otherwise has a default route outbound to the world through a $5/mo VPN that exits to the Internet in like, Chișinău Moldova. Or similar.
The main thing to worry about is using a bittorrent client that knows to 'stop' immediately if it's no longer on the VPN.
Interestingly how everyone is talking about 'Google', this faceless entity.. but in essence there are humans who work there, employees not doing their job properly. Lazy, detached, disinterested .. with no consequences for coasting.. Or are badly organized/managed, have the wrong incentives, are burned out, going through a divorce, performance review, whatever..
People are people, life happens, job happens, but unfortunately some of these roles have real external impacts on other people. One demotivated employee at a Google* can radiate their unhappiness onto great number of others because of the circumstantial power they have at their disposal.
At the very least they could copy & paste the exact reason for the ban, but no, they'll drag people through mud and automated replies, etc.
More likely, overworked and underpaid. Some employee in $farOffLand working 10 hour shifts for $4/hr with a quota^W target of appeals-per-hour to meet.
A true full-time Google employee is like three layers of outsourcing removed from touching these operations. The people doing the work have been given zero latitude to actually help someone.
And then the design and implementation of the process itself is split across access silos mediated by lawyers and program managers. It's deliberately physically impossible for a motivated employee to improve the system for users.
Why have we let X (et al) have total control over the content posted by the users ?
Why do the users agree to the limits imposed by them and let the platform decide who gets to see the content they posted ?
Because they're offering the infrastructure. The tech for such a network is now within reach of many, but these apps are heavily dominated by network effects and that makes it impossible for competing apps to take hold.
This is negative for society.
Firefighters who deal with forest fires, police, governments, rescue services (here in Spain) are all posting their updates on X - because, like the users, they have no choice, because no alternative exists.
People who don't have an account are not getting vital information because the company decided to restrict access to the entire network.
This needs to be regulated somehow. At least for public services and major news outlets - as a tax for the network effect these apps benefit from.
Because open protocols were abandoned, because they generally lacked security, discoverability, and perhaps most significantly of all, moderation.
Even FINGER had .plan files, where you could get status updates from people.
But how are you going to query whose plans you want to read, and who is going to moderate without centralisation?
It's the moderation in particular that dooms most federalised efforts. The web itself is only really moderated through the relative lack of discoverability, with Google and hosting providers having become a form of gatekeeper to remove the very worst of the web.
Twitter in the early days took off because it did solve a technological problem of the time. You only had your SMS enabled phone, no WAP or smartphone, and wanted to provide updates. They gave you a number you could text, which would post updates. Hence the character limit ( less than the SMS limit, to leave space for your credentials ).
Plenty of alternatives exist for getting information out, people just don't know where to look for it.
That technical problem disappeared, but it had by then grown to provide a service to rapidly get updates from people, one that had a sense of authority and the moderating effect and discoverability of centralisation is impossible to ignore.
The requirement for strong moderation only exists *because* of centralization. If I'm looking at a linear feed of content, it has to be curated by someone. In the old days, content on the internet was mostly links between webpages -- the "web" if you will. If i like the content on a page, it'll link to other pages i may like, and I'm free to follow those links at will, and no third party moderation is required.
Contrast with modern social media, where everything is condensed into a single list of algorithmically curated content, and we've implicitly eroded a lot of freedom (and handed control to Big Tech)
You’re right to a point. The Internet is much older than the Web. Content on the Internet was largely FTP sites, Gopher sites, and Usenet long before the Web existed. We also had MUDs, MUSHes, MOOs, talkers, chat rooms, BBSes, and more over Telnet well before the web was widespread.
Telnet 1969, standardized 1983
FTP 1971
UUCP 1979
SMTP 1981
RSH 1983
TCP/IP v4 1984
NNTP 1986 (the successor to UUCP for newsgroups)
IRC 1988
Archie 1990 (search engine for ftp sites)
Gopher 1991
WWW 1989 first published 1991
Veronica 1992 (search engine for Gopher sites)
SSH 1995
Many BBSes in the later dial-up BBS days had gateways between the BBS itself or Fidonet echoes and parts of the Internet, too. Some of them had Internet email for their BBS users. Some kept a copy of parts of Usenet, or had a reader on the board that was a gateway to a full feed somewhere. Some would mirror popular FTP sites to the board’s downloads section. It was a magical time.
There is a strong demand for censorship coming from not just governments and corporations but most regular people. It's not only big tech.
In the old days, most of the world wasn't online. The average internet user was a male Westerner in a tiny ideological bubble that represented not even 5% of the world's population. I fully agree with you that the old open web was better but the internet is more mainstream and monitored now and the average human isn't libertarian, to put it mildly. Corporations like X actually censor less than user moderated platforms such as Mastodon instances or most Reddit subs. Go on there to voice opinions that are unpopular with the moderators and you'll be banned in no time.
To be fair here, X also engages in moderation: I had my account on X suspended multiple times, for supposedly “posting spam”—something which never has happened with any other social media account I ever have had (and I have had them since the days of MySpace).
As far as I can tell, it’s because I posted evidence refuting the misogynistic lie widely spread on Twitter/X that 80% of the women sleep with only 20% of the men.[1] This would anger the kinds of Incel/RedPill men who were determined to believe this lie, facts be damned, and they would report my account.
True, that's definitely an issue. As far as I can tell X/Twitter has less political censorship these days (as Musk promised), but they fired most of the human censors and largely replaced them with an automated system that makes a lot of mistakes. So in the end perfectly harmless users still get censored unfairly, for simply expressing opinions that trigger others into abusing the report button. The X leadership has done nothing to address this so far.
I mentioned on r/technology that watermarks on AI content were bad and would lead to pervasive content tracking. Coupled with attestation and ID requirements in the US and EU, and we'll find ourselves in a 1984-type scenario where only images and video from approved software and devices (with deep tracking claws) will be allowed to be posted.
I got 2,000 downvotes ranging from "AI slop" to "typical AI bro". Because somehow it's only used to "filter out AI garbage". As if the AI companies with distribution platforms and intents and government contracts weren't the ones designing it.
The next day I was banned from r/technology and found out my posts were shadow banned in several popular subreddits. I log out, open threads I posted in, and my posts have "disappeared". Shadow banned.
To be fair, they also didn't like when I spoke out a year ago against Meta glasses and said that not only could surveillance be used to control us, but it puts a damper on real human authenticity when we're being recorded 24/7 in every single human interaction. No one will ever be silly or afraid to make mistakes again if it can be rebroadcast for the internet to laugh at.
I hate this internet. It was cooler when it was anti-censorship hackers who wanted to embrace libertarianism and freedom. There were pockets of hate, but there was far more acceptance and positivity.
I want everyone in the world online and connected. But I blame the algorithm for encouraging people to act so mean to each other. And addictive teenage social media for getting the next generation used to being surveilled and having no expectation or appreciation of privacy.
I can't fully understand this mindset. If you despise AI watermarks, why not rent your own inference hardware and use open-weight models without watermarks? Or LORAs that remove them?
AI steganography exists because all customers are a liability. These AI companies don't really care if you get uncensored or use un-watermarked models, they just want to limit their personal liability when you use their service. If a criminal's chatbot logs get entered into a case as evidence, being able to exonerate your service could save hundreds of millions in legal fees. It's like Apple/Google/Microsoft's CSAM scanner on their cloud services, it's a measure that exists for the benefit of the court and the company.
The problem isn't the government, or the corporate relationship with the justice system; you can't change either of those without overriding Rule of Law. The problem is exactly what people said upthread; centralization. If you refuse to use anything but the most mainstream smartphone, mainstream social media and mainstream AI provider, you're probably opting in to a panopticon no different from Xkeyscore 20-odd years ago.
If you really hate AI surveillance, just host it all yourself. OpenAI and Anthropic were never going to be your savior, it's exhausting going through the motions of "oh no, they're a federal honeypot in disguise!" every time basic retention infrastructure is discovered. The writing has been on the wall for so long that I can't empathize with people that think this is the straw that will break the camel's back.
> If you really hate AI surveillance, just host it all yourself.
If you think this is a solution for 99.999% of the world, I've got a Linux on Desktop fantasy to sell you.
The world will never have distributed Facebook or Matrix or whatever pipe dream nerds think will work.
The only way to defend ourselves is to protest and legislate against this madness. And unfortunately the political willpower is on the side of surveillance.
Well yeah, those first two lines have been true for the past 25 years and AI doesn't really change the shape of the problem.
> The only way to defend ourselves is to protest and legislate against this
You can protest and legislate against it, only to have the ruling reversed in a sealed court decision or reactionary "Patriot Act"-style legislation. It doesn't really defend anyone.
The only surefire solution is to stop using remote services. You will never be able to control what a server serves you, so there is an inherent mistrust in demanding certain features be added or removed. When people make these sorts of high-and-mighty demands, that's when we see security theater, theoretical whitepapers and dishonest threat modelling from these businesses. For all of the effort they go through to ensure that you can trust them, you'll never get a copy of the program they run on their server. And that's by design.
Well, replies to a post also require moderation. In general, if you want people to ever see something created by people outside of their explicitly chosen friends: moderation.
(Plenty of people don't want that, or would at least prefer interacting only with their explicitly chosen friends if they were forced to choose between that and unmoderated public access. For them, group chats on Signal/WhatsApp/Telegram suffice.)
> In general, if you want people to ever see something created by people outside of their explicitly chosen friends: moderation.
I saw plenty of things pre-social-media that was created by complete strangers. These were mostly things found via search or via recommendations from people I know. Having strangers moderate (and snoop, and have AI train on) the communication I have with people I already know (or people who i meet through them...) is the problem here.
Most of the forums I participated in, in the past, ended up dying because of a very persistent troll or two. Some of them I knew in person. They were just so arrogant and thought they were doing the right thing. The communities died. A healthy community gives everyone the chance to speak. In person, that's often done subtly by moderators.
Fair enough, my claim about ever seeing something by someone you don't know is well countered by your search example. (I think recommendations from people you know is technically another example of that, but not in the sense I intended.)
But I think the case of replies stands. How can replies on a post be handled without moderation, without either showing arbitrarily horrible things to people or restricting to showing replies from explicitly designated friends?
"Because open protocols were abandoned, because they generally lacked security, discoverability, and perhaps most significantly of all, moderation."
Does centralization actually result in moderation
How do we define "moderation" (cf. "curation", e.g., filtering out anything that does not draw sufficiently large audiences for advertising)
Is optimizing information retrieval for data collection, surveillance and advertising "moderation"
Section 230 was supposed to promote moderation
It did not
Instead it allowed a select few websites to grow to sizes where moderation is impractical and, ultimately, bad for "business"
Their "business" is data collection, surveillance and advertising services, not information services. Section 230 did not anticipate this "business model"
They don't work for internet users. They work for advertisers
Having used the internet prior to their existence I am not convinced that the internet is useless without them
Anyone who has made a fortune catering to internet advertisers will of course disagree
That's fine but we have to account for bias
Given what has happened to "search" perhaps more internet users will come to understand that "discoverability" is not a "solved problem" when the "solution" is a middleman that works for advertisers not end users, an easy target for governments that wish to work around limits on their ability to legally conduct data collection and surveillance
Open protocols always end up with a "backend engineer doing frontend" situation. Which is okay if end users are other engineers, but not okay when end user is my mom.
>Firefighters who deal with forest fires, police, governments, rescue services (here in Spain) are all posting their updates on X - because, like the users, they have no choice, because no alternative exists.
RSS. Website. Both have been around for a long time. We don't need to reinvent the wheel.
Did websites and RSS stop working and I missed it? With more people doing AI searches a website is even more viable now, it's better for AI scraping than x.com.
I'm still honestly surprised that government entities didn't already solve this problem for themselves. We have means to mail, call, and even email our representatives, but technology seemingly stalled out 20 years ago and didn't keep up with the idea of having a digital forum. There are even multiple channels of verification to integrate, so such governmental forums could verify who is a constituent.
But that's not the end results. Senators have youtube channels, representative posts tweets and even tiktoks to update people, and emergency broadcasts post on Facebook. I'm not opposed to the expanded reach, but when that's their only official channel, it feels like something failed.
Recent years have only now made some non-US entities be pushed to start building away from this dependency, but it's a shame it had to get this far ingrained to begin with.
"The average user has never used a website"? Really? The average user has never once, ever, opened their browser and gone to a website? Never read a newspaper online? Gone to LinkedIn or Facebook, done banking, made a doctor's appointment, found an AC repair shop on the web rather than through an app? Because I don't know what your definition of "average user" is, but I know a bunch of non-technical folks in ages ranging from thirty-something to eighty-something who do that all the time.
(Also, they sign up for mailing lists all the time, often whether they want to or not because everybody wants you to be on their damn mailing list. Email is absolutely still a viable broadcast medium, despite all the pundits declaring "email is dead" before they go back to, you know, checking their email.)
The average user has never once, ever, opened their browser and gone to a website? Never read a newspaper online? Gone to LinkedIn or Facebook, done banking, made a doctor's appointment, found an AC repair shop on the web rather than through an app?
Yes exactly. The difference is that you live in the us where you grew up with the concept of an information superhighway in the 90s. In most of the world the internet as websites never existed, it arrived with smartphones and thus social media apps and by extension some other apps. The things you mention were all done in person or via messaging apps until other apps were introduced. Actually most of the world still does those things in person or via WhatsApp. Well of course not Facebook, LinkedIn or online banking because they arrived with smartphones too.
It's 100% the endorsement I think it is, someone searching for "is there a fire near me" wants an answer. The main issue with websites (and why Twitter grew) is it became easier to colocate information and get real(ish) time updates. For sites that don't care about actual traffic being able to surface that data to AI bots is perfect. If it reinforces a loop of "oh [site] is the actual source of information" even better.
Why not? I'd much prefer if I can just send my agent to gather info among these sites than have to sign up for some Twitter clone, enable Javascript, then click around through a sea of algorithm bait.
Bluesky attracted socialist progressives, furries, and kink-positive folks early on.
I'm not making any value statements, and there's nothing wrong with the userbase, but this is what dominates the feed for new users.
A lot of people are turned off by that when they see it as their first experience with the platform. Or they're actively turned away upon interaction. That's not how you build a big social network.
Mastodon is the exact same.
These platforms are also not winning people over by calling them "toots" and "skeets".
It's like Gimp refusing to adopt a Photoshop style UI for years and not changing their name.
Despite stated intentions, I think these platforms want to stay small and niche and non mainstream. If they wanted to grow big, they'd behave much differently. They'd try to get the Kardashians and would welcome posts about handbags and guns and sports.
Mastondon/the fediverse feels even worse. Super lefty, super kinky, furry etc. Super weird. Fine that people have their bubbles, but as a normal person you feel totally alienated. X became a nazi dumpsterfire.
> Despite stated intentions, I think these platforms want to stay small and niche and non mainstream.
I think that's essentially it, whether they are doing it intentionally or not.
Running a social network is like curating a party or conference. Who you do and don't let participate, and who you do and don't promote above others, is essentially the product. And that is a lot of work.
Open protocols don't solve any of these problems, and people who care about open protocols don't tend to be the same people interested in curating giant parties and conferences for a mass audience.
> Bluesky attracted socialist progressives, furries, and kink-positive folks early on.
> I'm not making any value statements, and there's nothing wrong with the userbase, but this is what dominates the feed for new users.
As someone who's never joined Twitter, Bluesky, Mastodon, etc., I find it weird that this would be the case. If I join as a new user, why would my feed not be empty, until I choose who to follow? If I don't want to see furries and kink, I'll never follow such users, so I'd expect that content will never show up the first place. But if these services pre-populate new users' feeds with random people's posts, well, that's just bizarre to me.
They don't pre-populate the feed, no. I believe they suggest users to follow (on Mastodon that's a per-instance choice based on the administrator), and have sort of generic popular feeds. If you want to see what that looks like on Bluesky, just open up "bsky.app" when you're not logged in. You absolutely do not see a parade of kinky socialist furries.
Firefighters who deal with forest fires, police, governments, rescue services (here in Spain) are all posting their updates on X - because, like the users, they have no choice, because no alternative exists.
It simply does not matter how big Bluesky is relative to X. You put messages somewhere and tell your population about this, that's that.
Number of users? Google play story says "10M+", same as the Bluesky app.
90% of an app like this (broadcast, one-way, no comments, no need for moderation system because only governments get to push content) was already for the most part a piece of piss to write before LLMs came along. The 10% part that's hard is going to be backup infrastructure that X also won't help much with, because the first two items in the list of hazards icons is "Attack on IT systems" then "Attack with nuclear weapons". (4 is "IT system outage", 6 is "Telephone line outage").
I found this post from Nostr. I find it a saner alternative to fediverse, particularly because the identity is just a server-free public-private key pair
But I don't know when if ever we will have a significant mass there.
>Why have we let X (et al) have total control over the content posted by the users ?
Because it is a private enterprise that you signed up for. You don't have a right to Twitter. You don't have a right to Facebook. If you don't like it, leave. The entitlement is massive here. These sites are poison in so many ways. Stop feeding the beast.
Regulation over communication channels is not only common through the ages, but expected and needed. There may not be literal landlines to worry about in the modern age, but the general idea of communication being an important medium that shouldn't be squandered by competition remains.
I prefer everyone to simply leave Twitter and to let it crash and burn, but I see the arguments to have stronger regulations on channels central enough for governmental entities to be using it as a communication hub.
Multiple government agencies have a gap in capability. Larger government body chooses to leverage a popular (private) company Z solution over trying to develop an internal system. This is often because it's already been done in smaller jurisdictions. Z becomes head of agency/regulatory capture cartel. Z abuses the position to curtail the government actions/enable further corruption/abuse.
But I do have the right to the public information posted by people who intend it to be public information.
They're not posting 'on X', they're posting to the public and the only reason they do it on X is because there are no alternatives due to the network effect intrinsic for such services.
The 'network effect' part needs to be defined and taken into account by regulators and then regulate the companies such that they make the information available to the public if the poster intends so.
It's not public. It's on Twitters private servers. And the people who posted it agreed to the terms. You have no right to any of this and you know it. You just want to have a right to it.
You’re talking to the wrong person. You need to be explaining this to the government officials who use Twitter/X to post important updates, so that said officials use something more open than Twitter, such as, I don’t know, Mastodon.
I believe that sentiment started to die out around the time people realized a Nazi gained control over the world's centralized communication hub. Whether that says more about the communication, the nazi, or the people is a question for the ages.
> Firefighters who deal with forest fires, police, governments, rescue services (here in Spain) are all posting their updates on X - because, like the users, they have no choice, because no alternative exists.
Government agencies have communicated to their citizens long before twitter has existed. There's a myriad of ways they can use today: websites (with or without RSS), email newsletters, text updates, other social networks (bluesky, threads, etc).
Choosing to give critical updates only on Twitter is definitely a choice and they are deliberately ignoring a very large segment of their population that doesn't have a twitter account.
> Firefighters who deal with forest fires, police, governments, rescue services (here in Spain) are all posting their updates on X - because, like the users, they have no choice, because no alternative exists.
This what a healthy society shouldn’t be accepting. But we both need to create laws about this and build the alternative.
I do not use this garbage product made only to make your day miserable because it's ragebaiting algorithm. It's not essentiall by any means, it's only designed so you feel that way.
Mine rarely shows rage bait and when it does I just block everyone involved or add words to mute list. I think people who see this a lot are in fact baited and it creates a cycle. Which isn't to say it's a good system, more that it's easily avoided
Most complaints about Twitter look quite lazy once you understand you choose your followers, can block accounts, and mute words. It's not like these are hidden features that are hard to use even.
Except for the fact that this doesn't work. This platform always trying to nudge you to engage in any way possible. These "not hidden features" are not working properly, it always spawn back after some time.
Never had any significant issues with these features, I tend to suspect a skill issue when people say things like this. Muting is the most effective option, but it does require you use it with some careful thought.
That's why I call it trash. It's a mine field, you can probably learn to walk in a minefield too when you are extra careful while only occasionally stepping on one but it is still designed to cause you harm. Not really something I would call useful, it can probably be engaging for some but that's it.
Well, by contrast HN doesn't allow user blocking or muting, or keyword muting, nor do most other social media sites. So I tend to see Twitter as offering the user far more curation and control than most, even if it is imperfect.
I understand it's me but I always pause when I see some ridiculous russian propaganda or idiotic politic commentaries. Weird thing is, that I always everytime click on I'm not interested but it rarely works. Instead of stopping showing me any propaganda or politics at all it usually just switches to the opposite pole of same theme. I would gladly be using it if it be basically be hn with pictures.
I recently came to conclusion that x is deliberately used for psyops. After I made a couple of posts questioning the benefits of data centers on X, account was suspended for "inauthentic behaviors", restored, then suspended again, restored, and now X won't let me access it until I install an app on my phone and jump through hoops. In other words, doxx myself, it will not work with app on throwaway phone. X is clearly not a beacon of free speech it pretends to be
The Facebook of 20 years ago is very different from the Facebook of today. 20 years ago, one’s Facebook timeline was filled with whatever your friends were posting. These days—and I think this started about a year ago when AI made it really easy for “influencers” to post AI Slop—one’s Facebook feed is filled by random AI Slop accounts posting nonsense like, as just one of many examples, 80% of the women sleeping with 20% of the men. [1]
I am now using a project called Facebook Clean My Feeds [2] which cleans out all of this AI Slop, so that my timeline is like the timeline I had, say, five years ago, with only posts from friends, accounts I follow, and ads. The only problem I see with this plugin is that it is a Greasemonkey script, so I have to trust it to not do anything nefarious.
I don't believe updates on X is an exclusive channel for vital alerts in Spain.
This just doesn't make any sense, maybe what they are posting on X is just some typical SMM slop.
To send nation-wide or localised alerts for forest fires, floods or natural disasters, Spain seems to be using an entirely different system called ES-Alert via cellular broadcast technology which makes a lot of sense.
The competing app is e-mail. You can subscribe to important information by e-mail and send out important information to mailing lists.
> This needs to be regulated somehow.
Of course, this is HN so regulation is always the solution to all problems. Instead of making the people who are responsible for doing stuff and are getting paid for it get off their asses. They can easily post updates on government alert websites, on e-mail lists, and on social media and everywhere else to get the attention of the public.
This has been true for years on Amazon and is true for most big services now.
Over time the concept of search has mutated from 'locate the exact item I'm looking for' to 'show me a list of semantic search results'.
Somehow nobody noticed.
Oh and of course those are not random results - you can literally feel how the platform is trying to nudge you into buying what IT wants, not what you wanted.
The search is just purchase intent, the platform will choose what you'll buy.
Powerful algorithms, subliminal design - I feel like a lamb in a dark forest full of wolves when I search on amazon, netflix, prime video ..
There are no '0 search results' anywhere.. each search yields thousands of results.
I remember what a revelation Google search was when it came out in 1999 - it would actually find the exact thing you were looking for ! You no longer had to sift through directories of links, you could just filter it..
We're back to pre-google, but it's a lot worse now, since this is by design, not by lack of technical knowledge of how to make search work.
Searched for jeans a few days ago. I got about 3.3% each, scattered through several dozen pages, of two American brands; 1.65% each another couple of brands; a smattering of one or two results for another couple of brands; the remaining approximately 90% were the almost exact same jeans (maybe the same), under several names... pages and pages of them. It is almost impossible to shop for clothes on Amazon now. It used to be just selecting for 1 or 2 day delivery only would trim down the chaff, although now those products are also serviced through the warehouses (and there are less options for one day or same day delivery than years ago, Prime or not).
Some of the products aren't that bad (most are at least better than these sorts of results would spit out when it first started, years ago), but the prices are also at the same not-too-cheap, not pricey moderate price-point as the (of course I know many of those brands are not American but I know how they fit) known brands. Whoever is coding language parsing at Amazon.com must be really challenged by the brands; I get that; but there has to be a way to make it less stressful to shop. Maybe Bezos is just secretly trying to get us all to
buy clothes where we don't buy food and books. Ha.
But yes, the language and sorting models being used by Amazon suck.
It’s not just clothes. Unless the item is a very specific name brand thing, I find Amazon nearly useless for discovery. It’s effectively Ali Express with much higher markup and much faster shipping. I suppose there’s a market for that.
Unfortunately for them, I’d rather buy cheep Chinese crap from a local retailer where there is still a human buyer in the loop choosing something that’s not the lowest bottom of the barrel junk.
When I worked there a long time ago I spoke to the search team about moving more towards a New Egg style filtering model. When I’m looking for something there’s often very specific features I want. Now they’ve decided to go in the complete opposite direction and it doesn’t matter what type, they’ll show me the items they think I want. I’ve bought more than a few wrong things due to this. Returns must not factor into whatever fees they’re making off everything else.
I guess for things like clothes or generic homegoods, I've seen this deluge of random China goods. But shopping for other things, like electronics, it does a really good job of surfacing what I'm actually looking for, whether that be name brand or generic.
If I'm buying a curtain rod, the MUDLRHK brand is effectively indistinguishable from a "name brand" or house brand. They're basically all coming from the same factories in China anyways - a outside of maybe Costco, there's not a human buyer exercising that much oversight at Walmart, Macys, or Kohls.
Surprisingly, their "Alexa for Shopping" feature has been quite good for finding products that contain a specific set of desired features.
I was looking for a device that plugs into my car's 12V cigarette lighter outlet, connects with my phone's Bluetooth, outputs the audio to 3.5mm aux (my car has aux input but no Bluetooth), has no battery, automatically turns on with my car, has next and previous track buttons, and outputs USB-C with at least 30W.
Amazon's search filters were useless for this, but their LLM was able to read through reviews and suggest products that come very close. Unfortunately, no exact product exists that fulfills all the requirements.
Their LLM tells me that it can't perform searches and can't read reviews, and then does both things anyway. It consistently takes me at least 4 interactions before it begins to produce useful results.
It may be better than the uselessness of the Amazon search box, but that's a very low bar.
I went through that same search a couple times. I felt that this was such an obvious thing that I was amazed that it didn't exist on Amazon, Aliexpress, or anything else.
> Now they’ve decided to go in the complete opposite direction and it doesn’t matter what type, they’ll show me the items they think I want.
Not exactly, they'll show you the items they want you to buy/are paid to promote. They don't actually think you want the crap their search surfaces, at most they think they can con you into buying that stuff anyway as long as they make it difficult or impossible for you to find what you're actually looking for.
Yeah, the pity is that Amazon almost went this direction. They have a set of filters! They just don’t work. Not only do they clearly not want you to use them (the filters prematurely reset if you do virtually anything), but their coverage is weird and again, they don’t even work. You’d think Amazon themselves would have basic, valid data but they just don’t care.
As an example of how this stacks up, in the app, I filter air fryers to be red. Easy, right? One option, two sponsored, three more options, an autoplay video ad for a non-red one, then another sponsored link, “customers frequently viewed carousel with more sponsored links, one of which is not red, (so this is a full phone screen and a half with zero real results), one more result, two sponsored links, three more results, and then a non-red deep fryer, which is not even an air fryer to begin with. How does a silver deep fryer end up in these results at all?
The shittiness continues. A sponsored link to a toaster oven (not an air fryer either), another sponsored link, a real result, a used air fryer, silicone liners (not air fryers), a carousel of “trending now” including four of five items that are not air fryers either (and a low-rated red air fryer I haven’t seen yet… which makes me think they are outright lying about it being a ‘trending’ item), another carousel with “brands related to your search”, ALSO sponsored, two more results, another near full screen autopay video ad, three sponsored links for air fryer accessories, two real results for more accessories, then two more real red air fryer results, though one is only available used.
I’m exhausted just typing that out. It’s soul-crushing. A good two-thirds of total screen real estate in any given session is just pure ads. And I typed “red air fryer”, so don’t show me a red air fryer silicone liner! That’s not what I asked for. If you must, label it in a carousel that says “matching accessories, that’s both user friendly and appropriate!
Most of the stuff Amazon search spits out by default now is identical to what you find on temu, just at 5 times the price.
You can make it slightly more useful by changing the sort order to average rating or best selling, but for many "normie" things the bestselling will just be the crap amazon shows people by default.
The dark pattern I've noticed a few times is the exact match I type into Amazon search doesn't even return the item I entered but 2 or 3 entire pages of alternatives.
I know the item is there because Google returns it, either as a search response or in their "shopping" widget. I can click through Google to Amazon and see the item, sometimes even from the certified seller. But if I enter the exact search term in Amazon's search bar it doesn't show up in their own results.
Search is just there to show amazon what you want so that they can show you what they want you to buy instead. Companies want everything to be push instead of pull. They don't want you to be able to choose what you buy, they want to push whatever they want (or are paid to push) at you to buy, and you're just expected to take what little you're offered, thank them for it, and be grateful.
> Companies want everything to be push instead of pull.
This reminds me of Instagram's search page, which is full of animated videos jumping at you to dissuade you from completing the search you wanted and just click on what they want you to see.
Social media sites are full of this. They want to decide what you see or don't see instead of just showing you what your friends post in chronological order. Streaming services are another good example. They don't want to give you an A-Z listing of what's on offer. They want to show you a small selection of titles, repeated over and over across a bunch of vague/meaningless categories.
The last big redesign netflix made was pretty much universally hated, but they were mostly upfront about the fact that it was intended to take choice away from users and highlight the shows they wanted to promote. For a company that got where they are because people wanted "on demand" over cable TV it seems strange to hear them now saying "Choosing for yourself is so hard! Just let us tell you what to watch!" but that's the attitude every company seems to be taking.
Or every social media (especially Instagram)'s home page which shows the most engagement-baiting videos of this week and nothing from the people you follow
Yes, this is a horrible practice. Not just Amazon… most major e-commerce platforms set up fake pages for products they don’t offer to try to get you to the products they actually do.
Google needs to ban this practice because it makes their results garbage.
Google doesn't care about you. If you have to close one website that is infested with Google's ads/tracking because it doesn't actually have the product what you want and you're forced to search for another website that's also infested with Google's ads/tracking that's much better for Google's bottom line. That's what Google cares about.
Until you stop using google search, which I and many other people I know have done.
Losses and gains on the order of 0.5% market share may not sound like much, but at this scale it’s a vast amount of money. So being slightly more hostile needs to be offset by meaningful increases in revenue.
Most people wont. Even those that do will probably switch to something that does the same (or worse). Alternatives are scarce. Most other search engines are using Google's search results (at least in part) behind the scenes. AI probably wont save you (Gemini sure wont). Advertisers can't wait to infest the chatbots. AI companies are expected to accept money to promote certain products or to refuse to mention a competitor's products.
It's always going to come down to manipulation that prioritizes their profit over your interests. You can't afford to pay more than corporations are willing to spend to degrade the usefulness of your searches. The best you can hope for is to spend a bunch of effort to find some tiny niche alternative to google that almost no one uses and ride it out for as long as you can until enshittification sets in and you're forced to start all over again.
Google beat out the competition by being better in a market with near zero switching costs. It can coast a long time without being the best option, but once the fall starts it’s always harder to gain back reputation.
Today I told someone to google “school name student handbook 2026.” Only to realize I wasn’t using Google so my #1 wouldn’t be in the same place, doubled checked it showed up on Google and eventually found their link to the handbook way down the page.
“Ops, sorry Google sucks now” isn’t going to kill a company quickly but market share is a lagging indicator. Of course some enshitificstion is simply companies responding to what the largest market segment wants so they may actually be doing the correct thing even if it doesn’t seem like it to me.
> Of course some enshitificstion is simply companies responding to what the largest market segment wants
Not the largest market segment, just the segment with the most control/cash to throw around. That segment will only grow smaller and smaller as they gain more power and money. That's the whole plan. The vast majority gets screwed while a shrinking minority gets whatever they want. Making everything worse for everyone who isn't you is probably not doing the correct thing, but it can be the most profitable one. At least for a while anyway.
Many products get worse so they are cheaper to manufacture, more shelf stable, etc and can therefore be profitably sold to more people. Sometimes the opposite happens, but in general when a company optimizes for people with less disposable income than you the product gets worse from your perspective.
I'm sure they know that. Cycling enshittification on and off seems to make more money overall than not enshittifying, even though it can make less during the downcycle.
Burning reputation looks great on quarterly reports until the death spiral begins.
There’s a great number of products that I used to like that have been replaced and that’s fine as a consumer but stock holders are generally better off when the stock is still valuable in 10 years vs a slightly higher dividend today.
Why worry about how a stock will look in a decade when you can buy and sell in microseconds based on AI, tweets, and vibes. Screwing over users makes people money today. Long before the consequences kick in investors can jump ship to the next corporation victimizing their userbase. Google's probably too big to fail at this point though. If they push away users and the AI bubble bursts taxpayers will be footing the bill.
Becoming wealthy and maintaining wealth are very different mindsets.
Constantly jumping from unstable stock to unstable stock is a great way to suddenly be down a great deal of money. Offsetting a 50% drop takes doubling your money afterwards and in that period you haven’t made anything so the next 50% drop puts you into a deeper hole.
As to too big to fail, the top of the market has a surprising amount of churn with many companies falling very far very quickly.
What spiral? You just start another brand, producing extremely similar but unenshittified products. When that one takes over the market, you enshittify that one too. It doesn't matter that one brand died, because you keep making more. That's the cycle.
It’s hard for a large company to survive on something with a vastly smaller market share. You can make a living buying a portfolio from other people making it slightly worse over time and repeat, but the pipeline gets expensive and the market is fickle.
Instead the model that actually works is to buy companies, load up on debt, pay yourself from that, and then let the zombie crash and burn. Part of that process is goosing quarterly returns with deferred maintenance etc but the model depends on a sucker lending money rather than the market.
Google used to explicitly ban this and the very similar practise of keyword stuffing - they even delisted some high profile company sites (BMW is one that I remember) over those practices. They stopped caring about that sort of thing quite some time ago, and right now as they are in danger of losing what little most they have as people move to AI solutions where they are not the leader that they have historically been in the more traditional search space, I doubt it'll be any sort of priority for them in the foreseeable future.
Is that the "Amazon Tax"? I thought the Amazon tax was their goofiness practice of taking a very large % of all sales in their site, and banning companies from selling their same goods for less on any competitor site.
Meaning if Amazon takes 30% of the sale and Walmart online can only take 15% with those savings being passed on to the customer, the company is not allowed for that lower price to be on Walmart.
Amazon's AI search doesn't do that, however. For that reason, 90% of my searches are now prompts to the AI, instead of regular searches. But it occassionally freezes the app.
Interesting. I always click through to the regular search instead of waiting for the AI results to load, under the assumption that they'll be even worse (somehow) than normal search. Maybe I should give it a try.
This "dark forest" feeling is what has recently driven me back to brick-and-mortar stores. Of course they can and do manipulate me via ads, store layout etc. but at least the store looks the same for me as for the person before or after me. They can't algorithmically optimize the store around my behavior in particular.
Has that actually happened in retail stores? All I can find on the topic is about online purchases (or ordering/paying online and picking it up at the store).
To do this in brick-and-mortar, you'd have to use remotely programmable price tags and detect who is looking at what, which seems doable, but then you still run into all kinds of tough questions with no good answers. If I happen to see the price tag change from $3.49 (perhaps set for the person in front of me) to $4.49 and I put that item in my cart, which price am I getting charged at the register? And did a legal sale even occur if I wasn't aware what I would be paying? I don't think it's going to work.
As of now, my local supermarkets still have price tags on the shelves. And if there's a higher price at the register when the item is scanned, they will honor the shelf price if you call it to their attention. The biggest supermarket now has e-ink shelf tags so I assume those are synced with their item database so that doesn't happen anymore.
it's the other way around, the shelf prices can be stable and they decide which discounts you can get based on your shopping profile which they built using surveillance
The local supermarket chain near me has more or less done away with normal low prices on the shelves. If you want anything resembling a deal, you get to deal with their shit-tier quality app plus other friction inducting time wasting crap like "clipping" digital coupons. Plus opting in to all the associated tracking the app does in order to use it.
They effective raised prices 10-20% for the entire store and then the only way to get a deal is use the app. This is only currently slight hyperbole - every month it rolls out more and more in this direction.
This way they can tell regulators "we only give discounts in a discriminatory manner! We don't raise prices!" when the time comes.
With any luck a judge will see right through that unmitigated bullshit, but I'm not going to hold my breath.
This predates the 'Apps' by a good margin. Safeway used to do this a decade (or more?) ago. All the prices in shelves are artificially jacked up. Only if you use their 'card' you got real prices at checkout.
I refused to get their card and stopped shopping there.
Requiring the app also disadvantages the elderly, particularly with dementia, who can't operate a smartphone. In theory, the cashier is supposed to allow anyone to access the discount on request but, in practice, I've seen them get rather unfriendly, even to the elderly, when they have to go through the process of manually punching in the discount.
I never get coupons for what I actually buy, I only get coupons for things I don't buy. Those things are sometimes related, but if I wanted the other brand, I'd already be buying the other brand.
Depending on the retailer, they may have little say in what goes on sale. I work for a retailer and 98% of our promotions are based on what our distributors and producers offer us, whether it directly says manufacturer coupon or whether we handle the discount after the fact as a scan-back/credit.
> If I buy a lot of Scott toilet tissue, I'm happy to get a discount on Scott toilet tissue.
Don't expect discounts on what you buy often. They know they have you hooked on those already and they'll drive up the price on those items (for you) the minute they can. They'll give discounts on brands you don't buy to entice you to switch (if those other brands pay them enough to do it). These surveillance pricing systems are not for your benefit. They aren't there to save you money. They only exist to take more of your money away from you.
is that still ok when you're paying more because you don't shop as much as the people who live in the wealthier part of town? or what if you get fewer discounts for being male?
Yes, it's happening in brick-and-mortar. They've been conditioning people to accept the idea that prices will differ depending on who is doing the buying through the use of apps and loyalty cards (https://web.archive.org/web/20201111164410/http://www.nytime...)
They've known for a long time now that their profits will go through the roof if they can get away with it, but the fact that consumers find the practice offensive has held them back along with the cost of initial investments in things like digital price tags and facial recognition systems (https://link.springer.com/content/pdf/10.1057/s41272-019-002...) but all of it is coming. The big chains have already started. By the end of this year Walmart should have digital price tags in every store. Facial recognition is spreading too (often using loss prevention as an excuse). The grocery chain Kroger announced they'll be using facial recognition to offer different prices to different people. Their digital price tags scan faces, and your track appearance and behaviors, like how long you spend looking at various products.
It'll be simple for stores to do things like charge people more when their cameras see them wearing expensive clothes, or when the data collected from their app shows that they live in rich neighborhoods or when they can use the data they collect on you in combination with information from data brokers to learn what your income level is. I fully expect things to get even weirder like stores setting higher prices for people with the wrong opinions or political views. Algorithms will be caught "accidentally" discriminating on things like skin color and gender.
There's a little bit of pushing back against that kind of things in some places, but with the massive amounts of money on the table I expect that politicians will be bribed to allow it.
> If I happen to see the price tag change from $3.49 (perhaps set for the person in front of me) to $4.49 and I put that item in my cart, which price am I getting charged at the register?
The store shelves have cameras in them. You won't see your price until the system detects you. They can even display your photo/avatar next to the price so you know that it's for you. Facial ID at the register tells them who you are when it's time to pay up. That's just for now though. Eventually it'll likely all happen in a cell phone app and you won't be able to as easily look over someone else's shoulder to see what price they're paying.
Somehow this doesn't scare me at all. Fast food restaurants have been doing this for like 8 years. Almost any order you could make normally, you could get a buck or two off of it if you order through their incredibly sluggish, bloated cross-platform-framework "app" and redeem a "deal." And they tell you this with giant ads.
The function is to get incremental sales (and hopefully establish a pattern of repeat business) by discounting selectively to people who might not buy at all otherwise.
If you're thinking "But they should give that discount to everybody!" that's not a thing. There's not enough margin in the first place, especially at a supermarket or Walmart, that everyone could just have lower prices on everything.
My grocery store already sends me individualized paper coupons every month.
All of this is promotions. It's all just trying to get some incremental sales, and hoping that if you get an offer for free hot dog buns you'll also buy the hotdogs.
I've always figured the dream would be to be able to advertise a low price without ever having to deliver it.
Some particularly skeevy car dealers were skewered many years ago for saying "Advertised price is less tax, title, and additional $2,000".
But they CAN get away with saying "The $8.99 burger is $11.99 unless you:
- possess one of a range of sanctioned devices
- have access to data services
- are able to create and manage an account
- are willing to opt in to whatever tracking/marketing gimmickry
- can claim the "deal" in advance
Each of those steps is a funnel that opts out at least some potential customers from the deal. The 12-year-old who doesn't own a phone can't get the deal. The 85-year-old who can't operate Android can't. The person making impulse purchases and not pre-researching their meal selection misses the offer.
I feel like there's a argument for a precedent akin to "no purchase necessary to enter" for sweepstakes-- no additional purchase, software install, or commitment should be required to claim any advertised offer.
Agree. I see it also as, and maybe it's just the kinda wealthy area that I live in (though I'm myself a lifelong cheapskate)... I assume that the upper 50%, by income, of the people who walk into these places value their time too much to spend it dicking around to get the promos, so it's a convenient way to maximize the revenue from the people who don't mind wasting money.
> There's not enough margin in the first place, especially at a supermarket or Walmart, that everyone could just have lower prices on everything.
Strange how this totally worked until a few years ago. I never cut coupons or any other time wasting shenanigans, but was able to stop up on deals on the commonly used shelf-stable items I buy without even needing to signup to a loyalty program.
I understand price segmentation is a thing. But it's gotten pretty exhausting and only increasingly so.
Fast food you can simply opt out of. My health improved due to them shifting all the "deals" to the app, and doubling menu prices. Groceries are a different thing.
I don't really care about fast food. That's strictly an optional luxury. If the experience sucks too badly, skip it. Grocery would be another matter.
I also think this hypothetical "scan to see your price" scenario is a lot worse. As things stand now, there's still a baseline price. If the shelf says $8.99 then you know that you may be able to get a better price through their loyalty program or with a coupon, but it will never be more than $8.99. In a fully dynamic pricing world where you have to scan scan to get a number at all, which is what a lot of businesses would really love to have, you'd lose that baseline. That item might ring up at $20 if the system decides I'm desperate or inattentive or just don't care. This is already possible online, of course. If it spreads to grocery stores, though, I'm going to start channelling Ned Ludd and it won't be pretty.
_every_ chain store does this- from 7/11, to Hermes, to Aldi.
It's just not usually that blatent.
Offhand- things I expect they do:
1) as many impulse items as possible by moving freqently bought together items to opposite sides of the store.
2) overpriced items are seen first, then whatever version they want to sell (eg, Overpriced boutique chips then regular lays)
3) Send somebody over if you dwell somewhere too long so they can foist the expensive version on you.
They'll use every method they can, and they have more methods than you can imagine. Every time I look theres a new one. And don't forget a ton of Stores are the same company and can share the data.
That's why the mantra in running restaurants has been "location, location, location".
Location was a proxy for marketing and attention, based on foot traffic. So yes it does need to be updated to be the 2026 version for what gets peoples' attention on trying your new thing.
I think almost all good restaurateurs know that. The rest, who hyper focus on food quality, are tragically doomed.
source: my parents were in the restaurant business
Location makes them try it once. Quality makes them come back every week. Which is useless if they never tried it once. On the other hand if you set up in a place where each person only comes by once or twice in a lifetime, like an airport, you don't have to make them come back and you just have to make sure the food is tolerable.
To be fair, restaurants have always had very high failure rates (something like 75% close within the first year.)
Keeping a restaurant open is more about managing costs than having good food; many die because of not great inventory and supply chain handling, for example.
As someone who notices a lot of things, I was talking recently with someone who notices almost nothing. When I spoke about my desire to seek out the truth, they simply replied, "I just want to live a happy life."
There’s a perception that those who seek knowledge and truth are somehow less happy. Ignorance, and the willingness to take the path of least resistance, can be seen as an advantage for those who would rather not look too closely. Fundamentally, perhaps the difference comes down to red pill versus blue pill, and the illusions we’re willing to accept.
There's nothing wrong with being a curious or attentive person who likes to notice things.
What I often see, especially in the social media era, is people who are selectively curious and like to notice negative things. So they'll share lots of articles with titles like "The Amazon Tax", which I agree was interesting and informative, but they're not at all interested in e.g. "How Amazon Is Bringing Fast Delivery to Rural America" (https://www.wsj.com/business/logistics/how-amazon-is-bringin...). That's more of a problem, and I think it's what drives the idea that truth-seekers are less happy.
A lot of knowledge and truth can be quite disappointing. I do think shielding oneself from truths and knowledge probably would make someone more happy. Think about it - do you think you would be more happy knowing the darkest thoughts and actions of those around you? Of those close to you? What if your spouse was having thoughts of leaving you? Would that make you more happy or less happy? I suppose you could say that if you were privy to their thoughts, you might discover that they love you and think about you more than you imagined, so that may be a net benefit, but I think we humans have a tendency to focus on the negative, and so an abundance of information leads us to focus on the negative things within the information, which makes us less happy.
Except that this holds true for everything. For example, I only just today found out about this https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r8yo7_Inikg&t=1157s, ie, Oracle's apparent complicity in genocide. Now that I know this, I now have to rethink things: what am I using that depends on Oracle that I need to migrate away from? This wasn't something I was concerned about just 24 hours ago. This is not to say it's not a valid concern: we should divest from companies and organisations complicit in genocide, but this is demonstrably a case where I have given myself more work, more worry, from gaining knowledge.
Conscientiousness is incompatible with monotonicity of capability. That is:
1. We tend to believe "more power/knowledge/choices" is universally a good thing; that we are rational creatures in some sort of game theoretic landscape where we are free to optimize for our own outcomes, and extra options or information can only be to our optimization benefit.
2. We tend to believe that as moral agents, we have obligations to Good. More specifically, knowingly choosing against Good should in proportion produce Guilt.
The bind that results from (1)+(2) is distinctly Christian to me, obsessed as Christianity is with the notion of shame as a moral whip. It is an exercise in religionmaking how to structure one's psychological incentives so that solipsism is avoided while not sacrificing (1).
You’re aware IBM was not just complicit but essentially made the Holocaust possible with their counting machines? Had technicians permanently staffed in the fucking camps? The the numbers on people’s arms corresponded to IBM punch cards?
I wasn't aware of that, no. I can say that it wasn't a feature of our history lessons in school, nor in various Holocaust documentaries I have watched, nor something that came up in conversation with friends and colleagues, nor have I personally seen it when it's been posted to HackerNews (if this is anything to go by: https://hn.algolia.com/?query=IBM%20holocaust&sort=byDate&ty...). I only learned about Oracle's complicity because it has resurfaced in coverage regarding the current ongoing genocide. But you are proving my point: what do I do now with this information?
Perhaps like Oracle you reconsider the use of all their products? You don’t need Red Hat linux right?
But perhaps too, consider that the information you receive in history lessons, documentaries, hell even conversations are steered by forces who would conceal the truth from us at any cost. Consider that the entire system is broken and not worth fixing because of the evil it perpetuates.
I don’t know what to do with this information either. What it has done is forced me to recede from life in out society. I no longer wish to participate.
> But you are proving my point: what do I do now with this information?
I would use it to question the premise
> we should divest from companies and organisations complicit in genocide
which in reality I decided was obviously wrong the first time I heard it, many years ago. In fact, I don't think this concept of "complicity" is morally valid at all.
They were, and still are - multiple times a year. But THE german holocaust was the most effective by orders of magnitude. And they have technology to thank for that. Computing machines (primitive as they were) made it possible to track the status of each Jew. Railways made it possible to move them. Chemical plants produced the gas in the needed quantities. Industrial incinerators made it possible to dispose of the remains. They didn't just go down to Home Depot and buy a bottle of poison gas. They had a system end-to-end as efficient as any factory.
Certainly this world comprises many other things than the Holocaust and IBM's support of it. Perhaps your awareness is lacking if you think that is the main thing to be aware of in this world.
Maybe say what you think they were saying? What is it with these maximally ambiguous comments?
To me "Are you aware of the world you live in?" suggests "If you don't even know this, you don't know anything. This is the first thing anyone should know". I'm willing to learng if they meant something else, but I guess that's asking a lot.
The point is that Oracle's actions are unremarkable in the context of the existing state of the world, and that corporations are generally not concerned with the morality of their customers.
This was, to my thinking, such a straightforward interpretation that it didn't bear making explicit; and your interpretation genuinely didn't even occur to me.
It doesn't surprise me that corporations [whose primary, if not sole concern is the profit motive] don't care about the morality of their customers. What I don't understand is why you're objecting to me voting with my wallet, something that's been a popular retort against progressive and humanitarian movements for at least the past two decades.
> I simply said that I disagree with your stated motivations for your vote.
That's a semantic distinction without a difference.
> The way that you discuss your plan makes it sound as if you consider it morally incumbent upon others to follow suit. I do object to that.
That's more or less true: I do believe that people should BDS corporations that knowingly and willingly harm humanity (eg: aid and abet genocide); that it's not within our interests to let such things slide. And while I am biased, this doesn't feel like a particularly controversial take: it feels like I'm just spelling out basic civics. But.. this is also just like my opinion, man. You do you.
To me its a bigger problem. The concept of Brand was highly diminished during the manufacturing outsource phase to cheap countries. You could pay $10 for the brand name of a simple product or get the 100% equivalent for $1 from a Chinese Knock off. So people felt ripped off and abandoned brands. (reasonable since the brands were keeping prices high artificially)
However that has lead to a massive drop off in quality and price/value ratio of all products. Now the brands and the knock offs are in a race to the bottom for the lowest quality product/profit ratio so there truly is no difference and no quality products below "luxury" tier exist anymore.
Even some high'ish tier brands shoes like Hoka/Ons shoes have major quality issues even though they exist at just below the "premium" price point. I had two pairs of the same Ons last year, one lasted 3 months and started falling apart the other pair is still going 1y later. I wore them roughly the same amount switching between them. I looked up online and it turns out both brands avoid long term production contracts to bank profits from the lowest bidder at expense of their own brand they built.
> The concept of Brand was highly diminished during the manufacturing outsource phase
Ironically I'd say that this was what firmly cemented the concept. Brands truly gained their power when they separated themselves from what they produce and the name providing it. Previously, brands were tied to the quality of their items. When they separated the idea, it enabled brands to become lifestyles and cultural signifiers, which skyrocketed the profitability of being a brand rather than a producer of a good.
Market for lemons, it's called. When it's impossible for the buyer to know the quality before buying, the buyer has no choice but to price the item as if it's always low quality. Otherwise scammers will just sell low quality items at high quality prices and it'll work. But if the buyer is only paying low quality prices, high quality products can only be sold at a loss, and only low-quality products remain in production because they can make a profit.
How do you even know something is authentic on Amazon, and not a counterfeit? What with the return scams and whatnot. That's why I avoid Amazon for most things are aren't close to disposable. I feel like there could a niche for a site that only sells as authorized distributor. To cut down on things like counterfeit and made-with-toxic materials items, etc. So no fly-by-night "marketplace" sellers. But what do I know.
That was basically my point. You don't even know anymore even with a brand name. The second any brand gains traction they sell out quietly behind the scenes and rug pull the quality.
Yes, exactly—the concept of Brand means hardly anything anymore. Certainly due partly to outsourcing like you say, but I think even more generally due to financialization. In a financialized world, brands become purely assets, which can be swiftly created and destroyed on (digital) paper, or packaged and sold to the highest bidder. The brand’s products aren’t the product any longer—it’s the brand itself.
> We're back to pre-google, but it's a lot worse now
a lot is worse now, but not shopping. on amazon some very specific items may be hard to find, and the search will throw a lot of crap at you, but you're still free to refine, compare and explore. finding exactly what you need and making an informed purchase has never been easier, and you get next day delivery (most of the time) plus exceptional return/refund policy and process. not sure about picking a, b or c? order all three, keep one, return the rest. i ofc don't (usually) do that, but i could. don't know how shopping could get any better/easier?
i don't like amazon as a company, it is evil and there is a lot to criticise, but the service and the value to the customer they provided has completely transformed shopping, for the better.
ofc long gone are the times where you could walk into a shop and talk to someone who actually had a clue about what they were selling and most likely was even an expert on the matter. that isn't coming back but that happened long before amazon.
I went to a camera store in-person yesterday for work. We needed a lens for a camera already purchased by our company, and we were able to shoot the shit with a super knowledgeable employee absolutely surrounded by lenses, frames, accessories, etc.
We ended up not purchasing anything due to some unknowns, but when my PM told me we'd just order what we need I told him if the price is remotely the same we should go back to the store a few blocks away because had I not spent 15 minutes chatting I would have wasted hours reading blogs/ads trying to figure out what I needed.
Frank and earnest question about using a company when you think they aren't a net benefit to society, especially when there are other options. I too have my reasons for thinking Goog, Amzn, and others are not good. I just don't use them. The other options seem great to me - I never long for what I'm missing. Momentum, habit, peer pressure, or something else going on?
>ofc long gone are the times where you could walk into a shop and talk to someone who actually had a clue about what they were selling and most likely was even an expert on the matter. that isn't coming back but that happened long before amazon.
Dude, nearly everytime I'm at a shop that's what happens. Not all are top top experts, but generally they have a very good idea about their subject and perform their jobs as if they liked them.
But that's Norway, not everyone is so lucky to live here.
Amazon and a lot of other big companies feel like the corporate embodiment of the "This job would be great if it wasn't for the fucking customers" line from Clerks. We are not valued customers whose business forms the foundation of their success. We are obstacles that sit between them and the money in our bank accounts. They'd prefer to cut us out of the equation entirely, but failing that, they will do whatever it takes to overcome. The fact that they don't actually want us in the equation oozes through every bit of the process.
> There are no '0 search results' anywhere.. each search yields thousands of results.
Urgh... kills me.
I have some ebay alerts for items for one of my hobbies (nothing at all to do with cars). Sometimes if ebay has nothing that matches my alert, I still get an email with spare car parts that I can buy.
And today I was looking for specific brand of wine for a friend on a bottle shop's website. I got 108 results, none of which were for the brand I was searching for, many of which weren't even wine either.
> Over time the concept of search has mutated from 'locate the exact item I'm looking for' to 'show me a list of semantic search results'. Somehow nobody noticed.
It's been noticed, just not put into words very often. And it's not as if anyone felt like they could do anything about it.
Yeah, like for another example, I'd stumbled across some (probably somewhat obscure) blog/podcast series about Bob Dylan songs some time ago, but had forgotten to bookmark it. A few month later, I tried to find it again using the same search terms, but nothing turned up anymore (only dozens of various song lyrics pages, but not the blog I was interested in). Luckily I eventually managed to retrieve it from some older backup of my browser history…
> search has mutated from 'locate the exact item I'm looking for' to 'show me a list of semantic search results'.
Years ago Amazon intentionally nerfed their own on-site search into complete uselessness. A step at a time they removed the ability to exclude a term by prefixing a '-', then they removed grouping terms into a phrase either with quote marks or plus+signs. For years these all worked well. It's no longer plausible that the reason is to serve semantic search results, they could still include synonyms lower in results while respecting exclusion and phrases but that would make what's really going on too obvious.
The real reason they nerfed their search so bad I often have to use Google with "site:amazon.com" is simply so they can serve up whatever results are most profitable which vaguely semantically match any term. This is a big profit center due to all the 'marketing programs' they push on third-party sellers. Paying for these is virtually required to get on the first page of any popular search. Amazon has a huge inventory of such listings and selling you one of those listing is more profitable for Amazon, but assuming the price is the same, less profitable for the reseller due to giving Amazon even more of their slim margin. Since playing this game has become required, it raises the ASP of all products - another Amazon tax.
Through the Bezos era and up until around ten years ago, Amazon was "good", meaning their broad strategies and policies were generally a net gain for most buyers. Things Like allowing negative reviews and no-questions returns made me a fan and allowed Amazon to destroy all its competition. Since then they've gradually A/B tested their way into, IMHO, pure evil.
For consumers, the only real net gains Amazon still provides is massive inventory and faster delivery for Prime items (although you may have noticed they are now also strategically degrading Prime delivery consistency). Everything else about Amazon is objectively worse. Products are more expensive, search is intentionally broken, the site is rife with paid placements and dark patterns. And no one can compete because as soon as a new upstart offers search that works or lower prices by not forcing all sellers into high-margin programs, Amazon will un-nerf that specific enshittification just enough until the new threat is exterminated.
In the past year, I ended my Amazon Prime membership and started shopping at Target again for this reason. A few items I do still purchase on Amazon, and that has been eye-opening: Checkout is now a minefield of dark patterns, filled with buttons that would reactivate my Prime membership in one click. Is their goal to drive me away from the service?
As bad as Google's searches have become, they still do a better job finding the book on Amazon when Amazon's search can't find a book when I put in the title and author's last name. It is common for "sponsored results" to include trousers when I am searching for a book.
One of the best Userscripts I ever made was for Amazon: It adds an explicit "results must include these search terms" input box as well as one to exclude results for particular terms.
Saves me SO much time when I have to find something on Amazon.
Have you considered making that into your own shopping website?
You don't need warehouses or delivery drivers - you can make it place an Amazon order to the customer's address through the customer's Amazon account. (All you have to do is ignore the fact that Amazon doesn't want you to ask for other people's Amazon passwords.)
> I remember what a revelation Google search was when it came out in 1999
Maybe I just learned it’s ways, but I feel like I was ~satisfied with AltaVista… I think Google came to eat their lunch in part because they took search way more seriously than DEC did.
Yesterday I tried to buy a light bulb for my kitchen hood on Amazon. I searched for 130V 40W light bulb. I ended up buying a 120V one because I gave up trying to find the one I wanted. I think I'll run over to the hardware store next time.
Is there a difference between a 120V bulb and a 130V bulb?
I thought we basically had 110-130V North American voltage and 220-240V Euro and others voltage as the actual voltage you get from the grid varies within a range.
Yes, but that isn't a thing that is actually manufactured, due to the lightbulb cartel. And if it was manufactured, they'd label it as 120V, long-lasting, because no country uses 130V power.
You can't just will arbitrary part specifications into existence. You can't declare that you need a 67.53 ohm resistor and then search for that. They only make certain values.
Oh no a reranker which optimizes for pclick (bias to cheaper items) and profit (bid and margin)
I don’t think the forest is dark (obvious financial incentives) and I don’t think we’re pre-Google (as you said, you can literally still find what you want, USING GOOGLE, even)
> Over time the concept of search has mutated from 'locate the exact item I'm looking for' to 'show me a list of semantic search results'. Somehow nobody noticed.
I think many people noticed the change. However, when semantic search first came about, it was useful and not the only option. Being able to see items similar to my search term on Amazon was analogous to browsing products in the same aisle in a physical store, which was helpful when you wanted an item from a category but haven't decided on the exact one.
The enshittifying and infuriating difference now is that the choice of using semantic search have been taken away. It is often the only option, and the definition of things that are "semantic similar" is a mile wide. I appreciate semantic search when I have good use cases for it, but please give me the option to turn it off when I don't need it.
> There are no '0 search results' anywhere.. each search yields thousands of results.
I’ve encountered “no results” on DuckDuckGo at least half a dozen times in the last couple of months when I know there should be relevant results, and Google gives me relevant results (sigh; I think I had gone for more than a year without using !g). Most of these have been exact keyword matches.
When I came to Canada almost 30 years ago, IT-job immigrants, let alone people who've grew up in this system were already doing 'buy real estate, rent it out, profit' and their day job was just a means to finance becoming a permanent rent seeker.
Pikachu surprise face that a culture that thinks rent seeking is great ends up doing it everywhere, all of the time, including Amazon.
Assuming they were any good at it. They can’t even figure out basic product design.
You cannot have the purchase funnels you describe without better UI/UX. Amazon’s is abysmal.
Very often people leave Amazon and boycott them entirely (like I do) because the experience is so awful across the board.
I don’t believe they are “guiding” anyone to anything. Amazon only became profitable after COVID when they forced everyone to shut down so we had to use Amazon. Everyone noticed that and remembers.
You put them on a pedestal.
Ever tried to login to AWS? Login. A regular login form. They can’t do it.
You might want to read some of their quarterly earning reports and research papers their teams submit. Your experience is not commensurate with financial reality.
My only practical contribution to fixing this issue is to upvote this article.. and write a message on HN.
I'm in Spain.
I really hope that after this summer, people of Europe will wake up and make fixing the climate their highest priority - at home, at work, in politics. We have very little time left, maybe a few years.
I can still see news articles everywhere blaming 'climate change' and 'CO2 emissions', pointing the finger at the oil companies and the likes.
But those 'bad' guys are not operating in a void - they supply the products which are in high demand from me and you and our families - our entire lifestyle is built around them. So what needs to change is our life styles, philosophy, economic order .. drastic changes.
Consumerism needs to go, tourism needs to go, advertising needs to go, travel and logistics needs to be reinvented, industrial production needs to drop by orders of magnitude, everything replaced with healthy and efficient alternatives.
How can this be done peacefully is beyond me, it probably can't.
We've had precedent during covid, when the whole world stopped because everyone was scared that they're going to die. It's not so different now.
Much of what you suggest is a drop in the ocean and requires people's habits to change in ways people are not happy to listen to - and - again - it's a drop in the ocean. Go vegetarian, it helps the environment - but don't expect anyone to follow, and don't expect it to mean anything.
Massive electrification - production (solar+wind+storage) and usage (EVs, as people won't stop driving no matter what, and heat pump heating and cooling) can be successfully driven with incentives and would have meaningful impact. People love to save money without losing comfort, incentives are ultimately budget neutral on a timescale, and for Europe this also ties into strategic energy sovereignty which is a nice added driver. Vote out and call out politicians not prioritizing this.
Bonus, you get to call them unpatriotic as they reinforce dependence on people who we're no longer on friendly terms with (no matter whether you look west or east)
What you're proposing (ending consumerism, tourism) is nothing short of revolutionary. I don't imagine that the future is going to be bloodless with or without a revolution.
I’m convinced one of the best ways is to make the right choices financially easier, and make the wrong ones (much) more expensive.
Fully subsidise trains and tax the crap out of flying.
Do the same for cars running on fossil fuels
Tax carbon heavy foods like meat.
Repeat until this starts changing consumer behaviour
I agree that this is a reasonable place to start. Unfortunately, I don't think that politicians will be able to implement reforms like this without severe backlash from the public. So the ones that do might just get voted out in the next election. But it's what we need to do at a minimum.
I suspect consumerism and tourism would mostly evaporate bloodlessly if advertising were successfully banned.
I'm not sure a successful ban is even possible, given e.g. influencers. However, ending social media may inherently solve this pathway?
Reworking an economy so that wasteful overproduction on gadgets and (specifically: over-engineered) hobby equipment* ceases, without also breaking the supply of industrial capacity that allows a military to ramp up fast in a hot war, is I think completely unsolved?
* see Mrwhosetheboss videos about, well, a lot; but specifically all the things he goes back to after a while and reveals were over-rated and didn't really solve problems despite being shiny at first glance
The biggest issue that keeps accelerating climate change is that people buy too much stuff, travel too much, and more importantly eat in a way that is bound to destroy the climate.
Now go tell people to buy less crap, use more public transport and stop filling their mouths with beef and fish every day, good luck.
And even that would merely slow the progress, not stop or revert climate change.
Sincerely this is a disaster, each generation just keeps doing worse than others, gen z may actually be the firsts to really give 2 damns, or pretend better.
I think the biggest issue is actually even further that these ones: it's the population itself. Overpopulation has been a huge driver, and it's a problem without a solution ; but it's still too absent from the conversation, especially because the system and the economy rely a lot on the population growing.
But i agree, in absence of a good solution for this part, the next best thing is a change of habits for the people.
> Overpopulation has been a huge driver, and it's a problem without a solution
Population is predicted to reach a peak and then start declining according to all the modelling I have seen so overpopulation is not a problem without a solution.
And the vast majority of that population is not consuming most of the energy. India's per capita consumption is less than one tenth of that of the US [1]. Even though they have three times the population they still consume less than one third of what the US does.
that's all nice, now tell it to Americans, Chinese, Indians and most of the developing world, EU residents won't fix a thing besides ruining their economy
people are not going to die over hotter weather, at least not if they won't resist adapting to it instead of trying to change it, I would say it's easier to different climate/weather than trying to change it
Roads were not paved because people had bought cars and now were complaining that they only had cobblestone roads—crowded with meatbags—and dirt to drive them on. Look at the US. A “car-centric” culture. What, but how? Because making huge roads, bulldozing communities to make ugly and inefficient highways right through cities, giant parking lots—it was policy. Infrastructure. Top-down, with politicians and the Car Lobby.
Then continue to look at the the US. Huge, dangerous, and not at all used for “sport utility” SUVs. Yeah, people were blameworthy for starting to buy them. But the drive to make them dominate the whole car market was driven by the industry; much lower safety standards meant less cost and much fatter profits. But they were just meeting consumer demand...?
The global economy, very integrated, fucking giant container ships shipping raw products across the world to be slightly refined to then be shipped back again. Was that designed by anyone. Or just meeting consumer demand? That must have been some giant mass delusion of post hoc agentic reasoning; economists taking the credit for a globalized economy, every corner specialized and competing at what they can do best, exporting that and importing the rest. But I guess they are wrong? Just meeting consumer demand?
Consumer Capitalism. Curious name. It’s not Capitalism with a consumerist culture. It is Capitalism predicated on the mass of workers to “consume”. But I guess it is really optional after all? This economy of ours, the forever-servant of the collective us—it will just metamorphize itself organically to adjust to the realities of your fantasy of mass and uncoordinated consumer behavior change?
> My only practical contribution to
The only practical input you have is in the service of obfuscation. Of division. Of cheap reasoning. I saw someone litter once; that must be at the heart of the problem. I saw someone drive a sport car once; that must be at the heart of the issue. Of scapegoating.
You know your practical input is worthless. And still you will feel vindicated in ten years time when your practical input has yielded fucking nothing.
There's this magnetic appeal to use a visual graph editor as the UI paradigm for your app.. it seems to fit so many problems well.
Yet if you complicate the problem just a notch, the graph becomes big fast and that renders like complex spaghetti you're afraid to touch in the UI.
The other problem is that the UI paradigm becomes the driver - you try to think of the problem in terms of fitting it into the UI graph editor, which is often not a natural way of thinking about said problem.
All of this to say is that I've always thought that graph/flow editors looked cool, except I've never found good use for them in practice except for very simple and predictable graphs.
Just writing the flow as a data structure in text is often a lot simpler and practical..
I was expecting to learn something new from this article, instead I got a bunch of numbers and a careful number of deaths from smoke 'by the end of the century' prediction.
What end of the century ? The way things are going, these cities (in Europe) are going to be unlivable by the end of this decade. They already are. And the fires..
Numbers, percentages, increases, excess, estimated.. We've constructed this abstract parallel universe in which we comfortably live in front of the screens.. and then wonder why the world around us is burning.
Climate change.. Such a comfortable word behind which we can all hide and dispel the responsibility for a life of copious comfort and pleasure.
It's the avocado toasts, the leather jackets, the 1-click-checkouts, the weekend flight to Barcelona, the CL=F price, the bonuses, the 'natural resources' there for us to use and exploit in infinite amounts..
The whole fucking system. That's why the world is burning.
Yeah, I'm guilty of all of the above too. And I have no solution. Just blowing out the smoke from those fires.
I'm looking at this situation strictly as 'What's possible today'. If a 1M lines code rewrite from one language to another goes into production in 1 month, that's a very strong signal that the models are now insanely capable.
My anxiety before merging a 2K lines PR is greatly reduced after 3 frontier models (Fable, 5.6 and kimi K3) finds no issues in it.
Just 6 months ago (Opus 4.6) this was not true, a big PR would have countless number of issues.
Aside from the human drama, the message to all of us is - these things are ready for whatever your imagination can throw at them.
I think that's exactly what Anthropic wanted to communicate.
Tell me a story of when a service introduced ads and that ended up being a great thing for users ? Because I don't know any. Instead I know many stories where ads poisoned and destroyed the service and turned the Internet into a shit show.
Oh, but in this case, dystopia is highly unlikely, right ?
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