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Comment by voisin | Hacker News Reader

Sounds a lot like Google Search results. It’s almost as if advertising dollars are an addictive drug that ultimately kills the company.

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I'm not sure it's the advertising dollars that are addictive as much as it is "growth". To keep the stock price up you have sustain a PE that reflects revenue growth, and once you are done signing up new users... Well... Something's got to give.

I see the ads as a lot like cutting timber out of a finite forest - it's profitable, but potentially harmful to the ecosystem in a way that can make it unsustainable. As long as you don't cut too much, replant aggressively, then you can make a sustainable business out of it - but it doesn't scale past the point where your harm to the ecosystem causes collapse. Once people exit FB because it's all ads, then the network benefits begin to evaporate, a little bit at first, then all at once...

Then again I don't run a social media company, so what do I know. ;-)

>Then again I don't run a social media company, so what do I know. ;-)

Maybe not a little as you think. Just because the social media companies are "runing", running into the ground is still running. They just have so much momentum that the ship is going to keep moving along.

Amazon seems to have taken a different route.

Keep margins low and don’t make too much money in order to starve any potential competitors of capital.

Of course - you still need to grow revenue for this to work - just not profits.

Doesn't help that their recommendations are always "Oh, you bought an air conditioner? Come look at this wide variety of other air conditioners we have!" rather than, say, adapters for connecting air conditioners to different window types or home electricity usage monitoring or something.

This is a common complaint. The reason they do it is because... it works!

It can be counter-intuitive but this is often seen in recommendation systems. In music for example, the song most likely to be played after a song is... that same song again.

It may work in the general case.

However, it is painfully clear that there are very obvious categories of products that it does not work on. 99% of the time, if someone buys a refrigerator, they will not be interested in buying another refrigerator.

It would not be that difficult for Amazon to detect these product types and give other kinds of recommendations for them. Unless their algorithms and the data that drive them are much, much less comprehensive than they want us to believe.

Nope, even with items like fridges it's intentional.

Most people have not bought a fridge in the last month. Most people will not buy one in the next month. Taking your estimated 99%, that leaves 1% who just bought a fridge but it doesn't work, or didn't fit their room, or for whatever other reason they've sent it for a refund... and are about to want a fridge again!

1% might sound low, but if you look at the group of people who haven't just bought a fridge... maybe only 0.1% of them will buy one in the next year, vs. that suddenly huge-seeming 1% of recent fridge buyers. Suddenly, not such a bad idea to advertise to them :)

But if I've bought a fridge from Amazon, and it doesn't work, surely the first thing I'm going to do is try to return it to Amazon?

Most people, after all, don't really have the spare money to buy two fridges at once, so they're going to want their money back from the first one before they buy the second.

Once they've started the return process, then Amazon can start recommending new fridges to them.

Again: this is all data Amazon totally has access to. Whether they are failing to gather it, failing to recognize its value, or simply choosing not to use it when they know it's creating a lot of bad recommendations, is unclear.

>Again: this is all data Amazon totally has access to. Whether they are failing to gather it, failing to recognize its value, or simply choosing not to use it when they know it's creating a lot of bad recommendations, is unclear.

I'm not sure as to their reasoning. But maybe this decision is in fact based on their data? They're a pretty data driven company

I'd guess fridges are annoying enough to be without one that many people who can afford, either through having cash or access to a credit card, would indeed be willing to pay for the second fridge while waiting a few days for the first fridge to ship back and be processed before they get the refund.

Or maybe by the time they've fully made up their mind to return the fridge, it's often after they've first decided there is indeed a better fridge out there, and already chosen where to buy it in the day or two before they start a return. In which case the time to advertise to them would be the window after purchase and before initiating a return.

Maybe... etc.

I don't know for sure, having neither worked at Amazon nor tried to market fridges. But I have seen many examples of this sort of retargeting of people who've just bought something with ads of the same type of thing, where general intuition, even that of experienced marketers yet alone normal shoppers, made it seem like a dumb idea and yet the data actually did prove it was a great use of advertising.

So maybe your gut instinct is better than the ad conversion predictions Amazon's code is making, with all their data. But I'd be surprised.

Or the random notifications I get on my phone from Amazon: "We thought you'd like a new air fryer." I bought one 6 months ago from you, I don't need a new one.

Somehow it's always about some big appliance that lasts years and I just bought. It's never about "you might be running out of toilet paper."

It seems to me that Amazon has the same problem, but with their physical products instead of ads. Cheap junk, fakes, and scams pushed up sales for a while, but then people give up on the site and go to other sources that are perceived to be more reputable.

This is most of why I stopped using Amazon entirely.

If our profit-uber-alles capitalist model has nothing to restrain it... it raises the question - is the growth benign or malignant?

If the logging analogy holds, then I don't think this is purely an issue of profits above all - it's more an issue of short-termism. If you are Facebook, you could reasonably stay relevant, focus on content quality, and shift to a profit model that looks a lot more like Morton Salt's - steady as she goes. In the long run, sans other goals, that might be the rational thing to do.

On the other hand, if you are looking to preserve stock price in the short-term you need to at least create the illusion of sustainable revenue growth. And there is a lot to be said for this later strategy if you don't really want to run Facebook in maintenance phase. Seems that Mark and Co. might not be all that concerned about "deforesting" Facebook with ads because the end game here is the Metaverse...?...

> To keep the stock price up you have sustain a PE that reflects revenue growth, and once you are done signing up new users... Well... Something's got to give.

Facebook need to just settle back and offer dividends. It's over.

Exactly. By adding more and more ads, their own widgets, and pushing down smaller sites in the search results to favor brands, Google made it very hard for smaller sites with user-generated content to grow and profit organically. And then fewer people searched for them or expected to find them.

I’m kind of enjoying the fact that newer sites and apps like Discord don’t let Google index them after Google killed off a large part of the independent Internet. We’re missing out on a lot of good content that would be put up in an alternate universe with a less greedy and shortsighted Google.

Users click more on big brands. The average internet user doesn’t want to browse hobby websites, they use the top 10 sites and never leave them. Accept it. Some of them never leave only Reddit or TikTok.

Cynical proclamations tend to sound authoritative, but that’s not the same as being true. Sources?

I was interested as well, but couldn't find anything specifically answering the question. According to the link below social media, email and watching videos counts for about three-quarters of most people's internet usage, which could easily mean they spend most time on just three or four sites. The two smallest categories - searching and shopping - could also just mean Google and Amazon for the most part, so it's the "Surfing content (19%)" that's ambiguous... although even then I assume that Google is a big part of that, and otherwise surfing for content is pretty much the opposite of visiting a site regularly, although I guess it probably includes news websites, which probably are a regular visit.

I'd guess that it is possible most people visit a dozen or fewer websites regularly, of which half a dozen or so are in the Top 10, and the rest include things like news/media sites that are most likely to be popular (if only nationally). Seems likely the older the person the narrower range of things they do online, apparently the most common activities for the over-60s are email and checking the weather lol.

https://www.creditloan.com/blog/how-the-world-spends-its-tim...

Never thought I’d see the day, but I actually use Yandex for image search now because they basically deliver the google image search experience of a decade ago. While Google Images has had no one with Vision in charge and been tweaked, buffed and downgraded to the point of uselessness. And you can tell no one on the team actually uses it.

Google Search could honestly be dethroned if someone really wanted to. The usage at this point is habit, not because it’s still a good search engine.

I've noticed recently Google image search has gotten surprisingly terrible for some things. I use Bing image search when the Google image search lets me down. Haven't tried Yandex.

Yandex in particular is good with reverse image search is the main thing that won me over. It uses the same system Google used before they replaced it with machine learning and made it useless.

Google Image search these days seems to be "Oh that image you sent me is an Apple, here are pictures of other Apples" rather than showing me other sizes of the same image, and other images that are very similar looking.

I still weekly make the mistake to try to find something that I know to exist. Sometimes I know there are hundreds of pages on the topic. I type query after query, again and again, nothing shows up. It's like in the 90's, I tell stories about.. I forget his name and the place, when it happened but it was something like this and that. pfft!

edit: I just attempted to look up what kind of taxes on has to pay if one receives donations. I cant carve out a query that gives me anything other than tax deductible donations. The "receiving" part is completely ignored.

I find it very fascinating: I'm in Switzerland, and the 4th result to [what kind of taxes on has to pay if one receives donations] links me to a good result: https://www.irs.gov/newsroom/money-received-through-crowdfun....

But when I connect to Google on VPN "from the US", I can't find it in the first 3 pages. Very strange.

I agree. More generally, any business model where your users and your customers are disjoint sets will cause a misalignment of interests that generates an ever-increasing negative feedback loop. It seems like it can take a long time to play out though.

Except Search volume and MAUs are still growing like a weed, whereas FB's growth has slowed dramatically.

Search is not perfect, for sure. It has different problems.

For those annyoyed with ads on Google search, Kagi [1] is worth trying. It's not free, but does not show ads and uses the Google index behind the scenes. I've been using it on desktop for few months and have no complaints.

[1] https://kagi.com/

> uses the Google index behind the scenes

Does it give better results than Google? I find Google's results to be pretty horrible, and worry that if Kagi is using Google's index, then I wouldn't get better results with them.

It does give better results. The filters can also be quite powerful.

The problem is paying a steep fee to proxy Google's index... It benefits you and Kagi in the short term, but strengthens the Google/Bing/Yandex index oligopoly [0] long term. Bad search results are the symptom - scarcity and opaqueness of viable indices is the root cause

https://seirdy.one/posts/2021/03/10/search-engines-with-own-...

> but strengthens the Google/Bing/Yandex index oligopoly

The way we look at it as that it gives Google a non-ad based source of revenue, which is a good thing for the future of the web. If one day that revenue could displace all ad-based revenue, by Google selling data to providers like Kagi, we would reverse the current state of the web.

--that coupled with inability to realize that blasting ads at people doesnt make your product look better, it makes your product a source of frustration, and a daily/hourly annoyance, your product is associated with bad, and is avoided.

the answer to the problem includes the concept of less is more.

Not really since no one’s cares about the annoyances-if they did no company would run ads but the exact opposite is true

>no one cares about the annoyances

Then why is adblocking so popular?

But at least now a few MBAs can put "increased revenue at Meta by X%" on their resume!

It actively makes the product worse. E.g. from yesterday, if I search for "high tc record," I'm not looking for the set of bedsheets with the greatest number of threads.

In fairness, reading your search term, I had no idea what you were talking about so it's not entirely surprising the organic content producers don't match those terms well. Looks like the SEO folks do though.

Google is supposed to be able to understand this given how much data they collect on individuals and the web.

Perhaps there are multiple groups searching with the same terms, but expecting completely different results. Google takes its best guess at which group you're in. To get better at that they have to gather more info about you personally. I'd prefer to change my search query than give lots of extra personal data to Google.

Works fine in DDG: https://duckduckgo.com/?q=%22high+tc%22+record

Edit: and also Google: https://www.google.com/search?q=%22high%20tc%22%20record

What are we looking for here? The results seem equally as confusing as the query

The other commenter was obviously interested in the record for high-temperature superconductors. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-temperature_superconducti...

Or perhaps more generally for materials with a high Curie temperature, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curie_temperature

Disclaimer: I know absolutely nothing about this field.

Then again, Tc means different things in different fields. E.g. critical temperatures for all kinds of critical phase transitions. Note that the google search you posted above gives results for various phase transitions many of which are not superconducting phase transitions. I also was lost when I saw the original query.

Tc is the high temperature for superconductivity. I noticed this about google a long time ago - they started "dumbing" down their search results. Don't blame them because that's where the money is, but it is annoying when you're searching for something and the results are full of celebrities because someone famous happened to say something like your search term.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-temperature_superconducti...

> Looks like the SEO folks do though.

Pretty sure at least 80% (probably 95%+) of low-quality SEO content is generated by computers, or at least by very low-skill outsourced labor in a machine-assisted way.

It then makes sense that the mature Internet can probably match any search query in a manner that leads to a site that sells something vaguely matching the query, through sheer quantity of available content.

In other words - there is enough SEO content generated and indexed that most queries will be able to be monetized by a search engine like Google.

I have no idea what you are expecting from "high tc record"

I'm getting links about the highest temperature on earth and it is listing it in Fahrenheit so if the "tc" means "temperature celsius" it is failing for me.

All the other links are about high temperature superconductors.

https://wikipedia.org/wiki/Curie_temperature

These are the top 2 links I get

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Highest_temperature_recorded_o...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-temperature_superconducti...

"High-temperature superconductors (abbreviated high-Tc"

Seems like google search is working quite well if the second link is what the person wanted.

if I search for "high tc record," I'm not looking for the set of bedsheets with the greatest number of threads.

FWIW, I would also have no idea what that search is supposed to return.

But you don't have a 20-year dossier of almost every web site he's visited; a list of 90% of his credit card purchases; an AI scrutinizing every photo he's ever been in that's been in, or in the background of, on the internet; a list of his previous searches; and a list of the places he's brought his cell phone.

To improve user experience.

Ken Liu's "The Perfect Match" is a sci-fi short story about this topic.

https://gizmodo.com/lightspeed-presents-the-perfect-match-by...

Google says it spends about 0.3Wh per search, of which roughly one third is for scraping and two thirds for the search. I think you may be overestimating how much processing they could do with that budget (assuming they want to do that significant user-based tweaking, which is IMO not a given).

You know you spend/have spent too much time on Blind when you immediately think "TC" means "total compensation."

> high tc record

I don't know what you are trying to search for. A record for total compensation? Something related to Tesla coils? Turing Complete? Thread Count is a totally valid interpretation.

My next single, High TC, doesn't come out for another month. You'll be able to search for it then.

It’s the resource curse in corporate form

Which companies were killed by ads?

Yahoo comes to mind.

Digg?

Tumblr - banned 18+ content in 2018(?) in an attempt to make their site more advertiser-friendly and lost most of their userbase within a couple of months. Site was thriving before that.

This is a dishonest answer. Tumblr died because it’s niche was adult content. Banning your niche is choosing to fail.

It doesn't seem dishonest to me; chasing those ad dollars are what led to the supremely stupid decision of banning one of their core niches.

We are talking about platforms where the ads themselves caused users to leave. This is not what happened with Tumblr and it is not a good faith view to say so.

I only see you attempting to constrain the topic that far, rather than just the ways that advertising based models in general can pervert a company's incentives by turning away their core user base. Sometimes it's just changing the UX until your userbase no longer wants to show up. Sometimes it's literally just banning a huge chunk of your userbase for some reason.

it's a good thing Marissa Mayer came in to buy Tumblr as a strategic acquisition for Yahoo! for 1 Billion dollars (after Tumblr imploded).

Or maybe profit is an addictive drug that kills the company

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