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Comment by wombatmobile | Hacker News Reader

One difference in the fate of Yahoo vis a vis Google, is that Yahoo didn't spy on its users and exploit the knowledge gained from spying to make gazillions from advertising.

Take from that what you will. Google made money, and then Facebook learned how to make money by trumping Google - by harvesting the "digital surplus" of its users to power an advertising juggernaut.

The rise of advertising everywhere, and the loss of privacy, and the glut of trivia, hatred, and anti-science in the form of Facebook content, have resulted in a world that employs less than half the number of journalists than 20 years ago, and is governed by incompetent personalities.

The return of del.icio.us might just be one small step back in the right direction.

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Yahoo spied on users the same as the rest of them, they were just incompetent and bled users for years. They were never especially well managed, but Verizon was the worst and basically took a company on the road to destruction and stomped on the accelerator.

> resulted in a world that employs less than half the number of journalists than 20 years ago

This is a direct result of the internet in general. With lower publication costs you get more publishers which means more supply of ad space which means ad spend that used to go to journalism now goes to Instagram "influencers" and lolcats. Which would be just as true without any of the tracking.

> but Verizon was the worst and basically took a company on the road to destruction and stomped on the accelerator.

Verizon was and still is very scary. Whether or not they are incompetent, companies that came from the mother bell, att, Verizon, CenturyLink, ... And all major ISPs are scary.

Verizon's supercookie thing was revealed shortly before it's acquisition of Yahoo! And Aol. If Oath/Verizon Media succeeds as a major online destination, they could have more data than Google, no? I mean it is a data hoarders dream. Own the pipe end to end?

» This is a direct result of the internet in general. With lower publication costs you get more publishers which means more supply of ad space which means ad spend that used to go to journalism now goes to Instagram "influencers" and lolcats. Which would be just as true without any of the tracking.

I read something either published by Google or about Google that basically said that publishers in average can expect to see twice the revenue with targeting than without which made me think if that's all then we should get rid of tracking and figure out how to live on half the money.

https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2016/03/veriz...

Back when it was called NYNEX it certainly was incompetent.

> I read something either published by Google or about Google that basically said that publishers in average can expect to see twice the revenue with targeting than without which made me think if that's all then we should get rid of tracking and figure out how to live on half the money.

I have an apparently minority ("conspiracy") view on telecommunication systems and security services (regardless of the country). Advertising is a convenient pretext: for both state surveillance and advertising, we need to track users, read their email, and end privacy as we know it.

quote:

“The technotronic era involves the gradual appearance of a more controlled society. Such a society would be dominated by an elite, unrestrained by traditional values. Soon it will be possible to assert almost continuous surveillance over every citizen and maintain up-to-date complete files containing even the most personal information about the citizen. These files will be subject to instantaneous retrieval by the authorities.”

― Zbigniew Brzezinski, Between Two Ages: America's Role in the Technetronic Era

https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/162691-the-technotronic-era...

In case you don't know who this person is, I suggest reviewing his career. He is, as Donald Rumsfeld would have it, a known known.

> Whether or not they are incompetent, companies that came from the mother bell, att, Verizon, CenturyLink, ... And all major ISPs are scary.

In fact, in some ways, the incompetence makes them less scary. Imagine the reach that Verizon would have with content delivery that was better than Netflix and webmail that was better than Gmail; and the resulting potential privacy concerns.

For internet, in my town, you choose between Verizon and Comcast. The Devil and the Deep Blue Sea.

Verizon FiOS is excellent as far as connectivity, but as a corporation, they suck.

It seems to be a pattern with mega communications companies which have always tended towards natural monopolies or at least duopolies etc. Ma Bell and Western Union weren't exactly warm and cuddly. Lots of international examples too.

I don't know how Yahoo spied on their users, privacy wasn't that big a thing in the early 2000s.

But just look at the difference between the Google homepage and that of Yahoo from 1999. Google was a simple "search" box, Yahoo was cluttered with tons of stuff, including ads.

What made Google successful, besides being very effective as a search engine, is that it didn't have annoying ads, trivia and dubious content. Times have changed, but while you may want 1999 Google back, you probably don't want 1999 Yahoo back.

Privacy was always a thing and a concern, just not for kids jumping into the internet that don't know better, and that's still a problem today.

I should have mentioned privacy on the internet.

Privacy has always been a concern, but it used to be something more physical that involved sealed packages, curtains and cash payment. Privacy-minded people simply didn't share sensitive information on the internet, they treated everything on the internet as public.

Privacy on the internet wasn't that much of a thing not because privacy has changed, but because the internet has changed. It is now everywhere and used for things that used to be unthinkable back then: banking, official documents,... An internet connected coffee pot (not a teapot) used to be a joke, they are now in every (online!) shop.

Agreed. I remember when someone first showed me Google's search page. It was so uncluttered it was shocking. I didn't notice anything about the quality of search results, or how they compared with Yahoo, Altavista, Lycos or the rest. Just that it was so clean and uncluttered.

Yes, Google's search page was a work of art that would make Edward Tufte proud.

What we didn't know then is that Google would achieve exponential growth to reach trillion dollar status by surreptitiously harvesting each user's search queery history, tracking their browsing histories by IP address, scanning their gmail, surveilling their movements via android, and putting it all together to achieve an advertising monopoly the likes of which Hearst, Pulitzer, Beaverbrook, Ogilvie and Murdoch could only ever dream about.

All without the cost of employing a single journalist.

"This is being conducted at a layer that is not accessible to us." -- Professor Shoshana Zubuff

Shoshana Zuboff on surveillance capitalism | VPRO Documentary https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hIXhnWUmMvw

> privacy wasn't that big a thing in the early 2000s.

I mean, it was. But encryption was a joke (and still is, to great degree) and we all just lived with plaintext over TCP everywhere. IRC, email, web, etc. In fact, during '93-97 the thing I remember most about the internet was just how paranoid everyone really was at the time. It was still a mostly technical user base and there was this general intuition that the potential for this to all go sideways is right there. But we were all on local BBSes and local ISPs and looking at personal web pages and logging on our friend's IRC server. It was sharing bootlegs with Grateful Dead fans, with a cautious eye towards the Feds and the AT&T and IBMs of the world. After 2003 or so, this world ceased to exist. Tracking, spam, privacy invasion became normalized.

> Google was a simple "search" box, Yahoo was cluttered with tons of stuff

I remember people on Slashdot begging Google to not clutter their front page. There were a few times that I believe Google introduced new features and there was a serious backlash. I want to say Google was paying attention (Slashdot was huge at the time), but who knows.

> while you may want 1999 Google back

What strikes me nowadays is just how much Google has always sucked. I don't mean the company (they suck too). I mean PageRank. The thing we always held in unquestioned high regard. This thing we used to think is really clever turns out to just be a thing people could game to improve their visibility. Then Google realized this and now it's a tool Google uses to control the internet. I've spent a good portion of my career on this cargo cult nonsense we call "Search Engine Optimization." The rules change all the time, and only Google knows what those changes are. The biases are ever-shifting, in order to keep people on their toes and to reinforce Google's control.

But the part of PageRank that sucks is that if you do any sort of search that isn't a Wikipedia page, a Stackoverflow or Quora question, or a Pinterest image, you will quickly land into the mire of shady Russian Twitter/Instagram rehosting sites and scam pages. And this is all within the first page or at best the 2nd page of results. That is godawful results if you really stop to think about it. Google can't tell you anything that Wikipedia doesn't already know.

I'm pretty sure that in 1999 Yahoo Mail had persistent XSS exploits. But then, most of the web did.

Google succeeded by making keyword-targeted advertising available to the masses, didn't even need any spying for that at first because search provides the keywords quite naturally.

Yahoo failed by trying to be Where Everyone Comes For Everything and monetize that through traditional big buck ad campaigns.

I’m guessing you never promoted ypn ads or chitika. Yahoo wanted to compete, but had poor execution. To give them credit though, there was a time when they had great tech. I remember when they shutdown yahoo pipes, at the time there wasn’t anything else like it. Yahoo mail was much bigger than gmail for a time as well.

All that talk but forgot to say what Yahoo didn't do - show you what you wanted on the first page. You can run circles around it they just weren't good enough. But sure nostalgia is great and bringing delicious back will be amazinggggg

Who shows you what you want on the first page? Facebook shows you what they want. If you don't have an ad blocker Google shows you what they are paid most to show. Amazon the same.

If you do a search from the browser search/url bar, my experience is that with Google as the default search engine, the first page will still show me what I want, on the first page, better than any past tools.

There's a ton I don't like about Google, and whether true or not it feels like they were 'better' in the past. A huge step up from the multiple AltaVista searches or the clicking around on Yahoo that I had to do pre-google.

Maybe there are better alternatives these days, but DDG still isn't fully there for most of my searches, and I use Bing for very specific types of searches that I wouldn't bring up in polite society...

My experience with DDG as default search, with clever use of the !bang syntax you actually will get what you want on the first page (and sometimes that page will be !g Google, but maybe only 10% of my searches)

Duck Duck Go

What a disingenuous comment. Google gets what you want often in a box even before the search results.

>a world that employs less than half the number of journalists than 20 years ago

This may come as a shock to some, but it's quite logical when you think about it.

With print advertising, it makes sense. You pay for the space you take up. How do you calculate that? Well, at minimum, the cost of a classified ad for similar space, plus additional fees for processing, graphics, and color.

Online, advertising pricing really doesn't make much sense. The space you have is freely available, there are no printing costs, no special processing requirements, and the readers aren't even likely to be local, unlike the limited distribution networks of most newspapers. It should come as no surprise that online advertising revenue for newspapers is nowhere near its peak of print advertising revenue [1]. Even when a newspaper stops printing and can cut out all the expenses that come with it, there simply isn't enough money to support their existing levels of operation.

[1] https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2013/03/this-is...

You left out the worst of them: Twitter.

Slot-machine of the internet. rage, outrage, xenophobia, name-calling, name-dropping, celebrity, manufactured 140 chars at a time. It's a culture killer.

Which is also the US media ...just about all for profit outlets...they are fear/ outrage inducers, stereotype/hate fuelers and sensationalized trash!

For me I avoid Twitter and ignore all news media(minus some local news).

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