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Comment by moksly | Hacker News Reader

I’m not on Instagram, but I don’t think this issue is really confined to social media. I’ve become quite concerned about is how advertising is drowning out useful information everywhere else as well.

We recently had a baby girl, our first, and this has lead to quite a lot of internet searching. I’ve been completely unable to find anything resembling an authentic answer on google. It’s all commercial content trying to push products rather than give any form of useful information. The government sites, to their credit, work really well, but what happened to the actual people on the internet? People sharing their stories without getting paid to push a product?

In the end we ended up subscribing to a national NGO that does consumer testing and has an excellent decade long track record, but what good is the internet if you can’t find honest information?

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Try https://millionshort.com

Search without the top 1m (or 100k) sites. Far from perfect, but it tunes out an awful lot of the commerce that Google prioritise. You start finding the old school forums and info sites that are mostly invisible to Google.

Great suggestion! I'd not heard of the site before. Just searched for smoothie recipes and was shown lots of small blogs/food sites instead of the usual suspects with heavy advertising.

I try to use this as much as I can, especially if I'm looking for content from "real people" sites, i.e. blogs set up by individuals to share their thoughts.

Those are a breath of fresh air in this day and age, when 90% of blogs appearing on search are SEO-optimized solopreneur websites that hit you with cookie warnings and "free ebook" email lead gen popups the second you arrive on the page.

I’ve been looking for something like this for over a year. Thank you.

Same situation, we just had our first child, and the amount of ads and branding we were (and are) exposed to now is just staggering. We've been given a bunch of "helpful" boxes that contained some content-marketing bullshit booklets for parents + samples of commercial care products + a lot of ads for said products. Hell, even the health book for our child that we were given has several full-page ads of baby care products (that last made me feel sick in my stomach a bit, advertisers jumped the shark here IMO). And that's all off-line.

On-line, I didn't expect much. Any topic that's highly relevant to regular people is already gamed by advertisers to the extent there's nothing useful to be found on the mainstream Internet. It's all content marketing garbage. For good information, you have to visit places like official government sites, or niche subreddits & web forums.

Do you think mainstream search engines someday will provide a “commercial search” and “non-commercial search” buttons side-by-side? SEO/ad gamed and non SEO/ad-gamed?

I dream of the day, but unless the government makes it a requirement I don’t see them doing it as it could undermine their business model to some extent (although I think people who want to buy will make use of the “commercial search”)

I wouldn't expect non-commercial search to be a free option.

>Do you think mainstream search engines someday will provide a “commercial search” and “non-commercial search” buttons side-by-side? SEO/ad gamed and non SEO/ad-gamed?

If we put on our computer science hats on to attempt an algorithm to classify the "commercial" from "non-commercial", what would that look like?

Distinguishing ads that are disguised as innocent posts vs authentically innocent posts is a very hard problem. What would the AI machine learning rules be?

Let's take one example thread that's currently on the HN front page: "Ask HN: What do you do with your Raspberry Pi?"

(screenshot of HN: https://imgur.com/a/zK5IZ4E)

Was that post submitted for discussion to spur sales of the new Raspberry Pi 4? Or was it a genuine question free of any hidden commercial intent? How would a computer algorithm know? Likewise, how would we, as humans, be able to truly know? To me, the thread doesn't seem like it's advertising-motivated. But do you trust my judgement on this?

Let's take that post's indeterminate status one step further and look at the Google search results: https://www.google.com/search?q=what+do+you+do+with+a+"raspb...

(screenshot of Google: https://imgur.com/a/YGShV9r)

Notice that Google includes that very HN thread in its results. Should the hypothetical "non-commercial" search button include that HN thread or not?

Here's an example of the opposite effect where people misclassify something as commercial when it isn't: A HN user accuses me of selling something[1] even though I actually wasn't! I just happen to view hundreds of videos about entrepreneurship and I keep copious notes. It was easy to share my notes with HN readers. I have no commercial or even personal affiliation with any VC.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12507716 -- "There's so much selling in this post I get tired just by reading it."

I guess I’m wondering if we could see a return to a more no frills SERPS like we used to see with Page-rank or Altavista

I don’t mind the ads, but I do mind the content farms and useless fluff that ends up on the first SERP of a query. Or links to pages with no substantive content related to a query except SEO.

Yeah it is really horrible: Years ago you could google specific products or product categorizes to find meaningfully reviews to choose the „best“ product. Nowadays google is filled with shop listings (for specific products) and listings of some products with amazon referral links. The review part is completely gone.

Agreed. Unfortunately, as useful as it used to be I tend to not use Search Engines at all anymore. I've had to return to the days of old where SE's didn't exist in any useful capacity, and bookmark everything of value. It's filtered out all of the crap I used to have to wade through though. My only regret is that I don't see much outside of the regular websites I visit anymore, but Google was becoming less of a useful place to find new content anyway and I'm more receptive to finding new quality websites via Reddit or HN now.

One interesting thing I have seen is when I search for a product review, google suggests I add "reddit" to the end of my search. And this conststantly gives me better results but its not long until reddit is completely full of shills which it partly already is.

That's interesting because I frequently add Reddit to the end of my searches. Particularly when it's a niche topic and increasingly for regular topics. Apparently a lot of other people who are fed up with search engines had the same idea. It's a very unfortunate development but nowadays Google search is almost unusable for some topics.

Music reviews on Amazon were a dream back in 2008 or so. Far from the pretentious babble on Pitchfork and sites of that ilk, you could get concise, single paragraph reviews from regular people trying to explain what they liked/didn't like on the record.

Those days are long gone, since everybody streams now, and genuine user reviews have dried up. Last.fm was another great site, but it's a ghost town now, and the band comments sections are full of spam.

At least rateyourmusic.com is still chugging along.

I didn't notice this problem until recently. Whenever I found myself looking for an opinion, I would search: "{phrase} site:reddit.com".

Far from perfect, but it's been a habit I've been taking more and more in order to avoid all the garbage SEO / Lead Gen / Promotional content out there that's diluting searches.

Reddit is not quite as compromised as amazon reviews but is fast approaching it.

It's always helpful to check how old a user is and his karma.

>It's always helpful to check how old a user is and his karma.

It's fine to consider it as an extra signal but many people do not realize that reddit accounts can be gamed by marketers for stealth advertising:

https://www.google.com/search?q=sell+old+reddit+accounts+to+...

This is not that helpful. We marketers have aged accounts to post from. Reddit is highly manipulated but in a fashion that looks like genuine curiosity and being helpful.

A lot of marketers buy accounts with decent karma.

Just yesterday, I was searching for inspiration to spruce up my small apartment. Did a search for "studio apartments Reddit", and got back search results from non-Reddit interior design blogs that had "Reddit" in the post title.

Caught me slippin'. Reminded me to always use "site:reddit.com" after the search query.

> what happened to the actual people on the internet? People sharing their stories without getting paid to push a product?

Good old webforums. They are alive and well.

Sort of. Unfortunately most of them moved to unsearchable Facebook groups.

I think these are mostly the more loose groups, the "real" communities are still in the forums. The more niche / dedicated it gets the more likely is it to have a forum.

To be fair I only have experience with old car restoration groups but there may be some FB groups where people post selling / buying things but the real discussion is still in old-school vbulletin style forums.

Marketers haven't overrun those like they have on reddit?

Are they, though?

I got back into a video game the other day that was released 15 years ago (also when I first played it). There were plenty of dedicated websites around the game, most of them with forums that contained guides, little details and secrets and whatnot (matter of fact, I ran one of them for a while).

All of those are long gone, with all associated content - which I suppose is not surprising, given its age. However, the issue remains - as interest in a topic dwindles, fewer and fewer people see the point in spending the money and effort to maintain these sites containing (mostly) unbiased information and the information, alongside potentially thousands of user-generated posts/content in the forum, gets lost in the void. If you happen to look something up you saw a decade ago, you might find it on the wayback machine, but certainly not via a search engine.

Do share what game that was, and if it was a DOS game, how did you make it run on Win7-8-10 :)

DOSBox is for you

I feel like reddit.com has taken up a lot of this slack. Now with millions of "micro-communities" about sharing the specifics or appreciation posts for specific games and topics. Replacing the traditional PHBB forums we used to have for each community.

It would be nice if there was a whole segment of the internet that people used that was completely ad-free. Something that a network of blogs, forums, etc could be on. Server costs could be carried by donations.

How would you enforce that? How would you find and ban AstroTurf? (Thank you, Google GBoard, for the marketing autocorrect built-in)

>It would be nice if there was a whole segment of the internet that people used that was completely ad-free.

Well, it would be nice but it's not possible to implement a truly ad-free community at (large) internet scale.

The issue is that a supposed "ad-free zone" of the internet will become an attractive magnet for stealth ads that don't look like obvious ads.

Ad-free zones can work if the community is small and everybody knows each other -- such as an Amish community in a small town. Members can interact without ulterior motives of selling something.

But we can't scale that ad-free ideal all the way up to millions of anonymous and pseudonymous bloggers, webforum members, and website owners. When a community becomes too large, it exceeds the ability of its regular members to trace the money trail of everybody else that's participating in the commercial-free internet zone.

In the end, if you're interacting outside a small circle of trusted friends, you just have to keep your wits about you to hopefully detect hidden agendas of advertising.

I've contemplated with the idea of building a plug-in that would disable all affiliate links on a page. What's holding me from doing it is that I find it unethical because some people are making a living out of promoting stuff. From the other hand, native advertising has become a scourge for modern web. It's not enough that every site has a dozen of visible ads, now we have to fight through promoted content everywhere.

look no further, Clean links for firefox:

https://addons.mozilla.org/es/firefox/addon/clean-links-webe...

I'd be happy to have them highlighted so I can tell where they're being used

I think that's where all that SEO stuff has lead us, only the one with stuffs to sell do it (or pay someone to do it) and so end up on top of the rankings.

A while before the social media platforms emerged were bulletin boards which morphed into web based forums. You know, the one you sign-up and post to, that are usually focussed on some defined topic.

Web forums are still great places to engage with real people and real opinions. I'm expecting that web forums will remain after the social media giants are privacy-legislated out of existence.

> I don’t think this issue is really confined to social media

This isn't new. Social Media is just another channel. http://paulgraham.com/submarine.html

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