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Comment by Workaccount2 | Hacker News Reader

Also annoying is how any research about any product you are interested is mostly spent wading through a thick swamp of websites that are just affiliate marketing generators, which it seems every single brand has now signed on to. Who knew that CNN reviewed e-bikes, or that Parade Magazine was now in the business of evaluating keyboards? Here's Popular Science telling me what the 10 best floor mops of 2024 are.

Every product is amazing and a great value, click here to buy it.

View on HN

But for every trash Popular Science review there is an LTT deep dive video that is worth your time. For every CNN there is a BBC. If one's gateway to "the internet" is the first dozen google results, the internet is a shallow place. But if you know your way around its back roads, the internet still grants access to very useful information.

(I would describe HN as a borderline back road of the internet, somewhere between reddit and a private-access forum.)

You nention ltt but theyve had their own issues woth fake stuff, and linus famously considers ad- blocking to be theft I've no trust left in damn near anything anymore.

I hear this so often and while the guy has plenty of bad takes he only seems to be saying who pays for the content you enjoy if you’re blocking a significant form of revenue for the people making it.

I see 32K subscribers here https://www.floatplane.com/channel/linustechtips/ are they all paying $50/yr+ ?

Do you think they should be paying for the videos you watch?

I don't watch LTT videos, I'm curious what their income from donations/subscriptions/physical sales is like compared to that from adverts.

Stuff like this says a lot about the current state of Google search.

I have similar frustrations with health and baby queries. The results are all cookie cutter generic BS from a handful of big names. Useful resources and forums maintained by actual practitioners and patients get buried on page 21 or something.

I’m so jaded by the web and I blame Google for ruining it. It’s search algorithm ensures that the incentives are completely misaligned for content creators.

Are the incentives not coming from the people paying the creators, rather than Google?

its bc google is an effective monopoly on search. if we had to optimize for multiple engines, chances are it’d be a better world

mind you, i guess you can blame google for the monopoly..

You’ll get that a lot less if you ditch Google. Happy Kagi customer here.

Would love it more if they offered more searches for their basic $5 per month plan. 300 searches in a month is just too low. Now triple that and I would sign up in a heartbeat.

I've been selling floor mops for the past 35 years. Here are the mops I choose to buy for my family. Click HERE now (for minimal useful information and a bunch more ads, and popup videos, and please PLEASE don't forget to sign up for our newsletter.

What frustrates me is that all of the tracking that permeates everything should make it easy to tell if you are a return user and only then prompt for the newsletter/survey/etc after a few visits.

If information is valuable, you usually have to pay for it. Consumer reports, The Economist, Bloomberg terminal, many newsletters. That's not the same as saying that if you pay for it, you get valuable information.

There is still lots of free and reliable sources of data. Like national statistics, Pew research, apnews.com, even Wikipedia most days, ...

You get trapped to shit because you want to be entertained and feel emotions, not to be informed. That's most of us at some time, but if that's all you consume, you get trapped.

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The first comment to my argument is usually nihilism. Let's point out that one of the sources I mentioned, failed or skewered up badly, everything people do has bias, and thus nothing matters and everything is trash. -- typically from someone who posts links really shitty sources.

One regret I have about HN is that I can't tap the brainpower here when I need a product recommendation. Best I can do is to search for threads and ask if/when appropriate.

Of course, if it became a place for routine Q&A, it would stop being HN!

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