The person kept making the comment that she couldn't see/find the puck and it made it frustrating to watch.
As a goalie, not being able to see the puck is pretty normal (especially with big bodies trying to screen you).
What I told her was that what matters a lot more than where the puck is, is where it's going to be in about two seconds. But the next best thing is to know where the puck is now.
If you can't see the puck then look at the players and as a last resort, look at the ref. 99% of the time they will be looking at the puck. Look where they're looking and soon enough it will appear.
I think this applies very much to this whole Google question.
The puck is gone (or on the way to the other side of the rink) and everyone is confused where it is or where it's going.
Look where everyone is looking and you'll find your answer there. It may not be in the same form as Google adwords, but the game is the same. Leveraging attention.
The tactics were different during the phonebook days (it was having your business start with the letter "A") as opposed to Google and will be different for the next thing as well.
From what I can tell, everyone seems to be looking at chatbots and vertical, shortform video. Not sure how that plays out in terms of advertising, but in terms of the answer to this article's question, that seems like a good place to start.
But then, my anecdotal experience may not be representative of most of the world. Most of my friends have money, houses, kids, friends - all of which are, by the numbers, rarities these days.
It's an interesting thought experiment to explore what it means if that actually is the new normal, and people are not consuming media or much of anything, or even if the people who are still addicted to social media are now tapped out and don't have any more disposable income left to spend. Probably economic depression. If everybody bought only what they needed and ignored all the advertisements, our present level of economic activity would plunge.
Then she said: "I know nobody that comments on online forums. Nobody would ever comment to strangers on the internet. It's too dangerous."
Took me a while to grasp what she meant with that, but I think she's right. Trust has eroded so much over the last two decades that most forums are either full of bots or full of annoyed and toxic people. It's very rare to find welcoming communities to newbies, and most of the ones I have discovered were offline connections.
She also mentioned that all of her friends use private profiles only, because having public profiles is too dangerous because of stalkers.
To me this sounded a bit absurd at first, but maybe that's a different perception on "how to use" the internet from a different younger generation that grew up post-socialmedia? My first contact with the internet was MIT opencourseware, her first contact was receiving dick pics at the age of 10 from assholes on the other side of the planet.
I miss the old phpbb forum days when the most toxic comment was someone being snarky and derailing the discussion into "did you use the search function?"
No idea how to fix the internet, maybe it's time to move to gopher or another protocol :-/
All I said was I was 20, was red haired, and open minded. Nothing more, and no photo.
Indeed, within a couple of minutes there were guys asking me if I liked to be whipped while handcuffed to a radiator, and offered to send me dick picks if I sent naked photos first. One of them added later "maybe I'm too direct for you, is that why you're silent?"
I didn't respond to any message, but the offers kept coming. It's insane.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-Made_Man_(book)
Still a very valid experiment. I know the source of both sex' strife though: competition. I don't think we'll ever solve that, not while we're still monkeys.
Vincent stated that, after the experiment, she gained more sympathy for the male condition: "Men are suffering. They have different problems than women have, but they don't have it better. They need our sympathy, they need our love, and they need each other more than anything else. They need to be together."
I respect that, compared to the arguments that sex A is having a better time than B, or that one needs more support and focus than the other. We’re all in the same, but different, shit.
Can you elaborate on other cases where the words “different” and “same” are interchangeable?
All the various shades of red are all red. All news is engagement bate (if it bleeds, it leads), but every piece of news is different. You are in a forest in region X and I am in a desert in region Y, both could be dealing with the same problem of keeping warm at night. It's all different, and yet still the same.
How can I agree with this? Material conditions matter: whatever problem you have, being poorer will make it worse. Women have been earning less than men for decades, and most highly paid execs are men, not women. https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2023/03/01/the-end...
r/kpop has 3 million subscribers. Take a look at the most followed accounts on Instagram. How many of them have female-dominated comment sections?
> I am saying this as a guy we really don't understand the world women live in online or offline.
You're saying this as a guy who doesn't understand the world the general population lives in, outside your highly-educated male-dominated tech bubble. You're considering only the spaces you have been visiting for most of your life.
Which makes me sad.
Apparently Y chromosome + enculturation = prerogative to send unsolicited photos of ones genitalia to random internet strangers.
> "I know nobody that comments on online forums. Nobody would ever comment to strangers on the internet. It's too dangerous."
> Most of her friends are probably women
-> "Women don't comment on the internet (especially compared to men) because it's a hostile place".
Women == get too much attention, often of the wrong type. How to get the right kind of attention?
Men == not getting any attention, of any type. How to get some attention?
So women either get ‘the wrong kind’ of attention, but plenty of it - or somehow figure out the magic of getting the right kind of attention? Not easy.
And men work hard to get any attention, often overdoing it on the only way they can figure out - which usually has poor (but not zero!) results. Folks good at playing the game get excellent results, however.
Meanwhile, everyone is getting played by the folks in the middle.
Notably, there are plenty of women taking advantage of the attention they get on Tinder. They just have no problem solving for what it works for, which is getting laid with near zero effort.
The way this previously got figured out was a ‘managed market’ - arranged marriages. Religious/social rules, etc.
In my book, it's reductive to sweep unsolicited sexual harassment under "attention", unwanted or otherwise.
It's not rocket science: everyone deserves to be treated in a way that makes them feel comfortable and safe.
It’s also a crime in some places, not (!!!) in others, or called different things in other places depending on the details.
For example, is sending an unsolicited dick pic on a dating app sexual harassment? Is getting felt up at work, with the implication ‘or else’? Is being stalked by members of the opposite gender? Or having career advancements blocked by a lack of ‘playing the game’?
I can give you concrete examples from a number of cultures that each culture will write off as ‘he/she/they were asking for it’, or ‘she/they/he deserved it’, or ‘it’s just boys/girls being girls/boys.’.
I’ve seen it up close and personal, and have lived it.
The underlying ‘attention economy’ dynamic is still the same.
Edit: meant to add - plenty of 80/20 also applies here of course (though more extreme). Top 1-2% men (esp. from earning or traditional looks perspective) deal with the same issues that top 50%-80% of women deal with, bottom 20% of women (from traditional looks perspective) deal with issues that 80-90% of men deal with, etc.
Of course men don't know exactly what it's like to be a woman, just like one person does not know exactly what it is like to be any other person. You can still have an understanding and talk meaningfully about things, in many cases.
The internet is not "dangerous for a woman", like you might say it is for a child. It can be much less dangerous because there is a very low risk of unwanted physical contact. I have never in my life "made an account" with identifiable names that are public on the internet. I don't post my sex, address, age, photos, bank account details, or mother's maiden name on internet forums either. So I have had exactly the same experience as a woman who had done the same thing in anonymous forums. I might even be a woman.
An identifiable woman will obviously attract unsolicited disgusting and horrible comments and content of course, not just sexual but threats of violence too probably more than men do. This is not some high mystery or something so complicated that we're befuddled trying to understand it. Offline is a completely different story, but online? I can see messages people I know get.
Online is about the safest a woman (or man) can be, and still talk and interact and collaborate and share with people. And I have been "stalked" (in an online anonymous account way), sent horrible graphic sexual and violent threatening things, for having differences of opinion. It's not nice, but it's not "dangerous" for me. I got ambushed and beat up walking in public one day -- offline -- that was dangerous.
A woman's online safety relative to other spaces also misses the point about their online spaces being less safe than those of men; the suggestion wasn't that online spaces are the absolute most dangerous spaces for them.
That said I would raise the point of how easy it is to dehumanise people online and how easy it is to quickly gather various data like work addresses etc.
The OP was saying that men generally don't have the awareness of how women have it in the online world. The lack of understanding is because of not knowing about it, not because of a lack of capacity or empathy.
In fact the post suggest that doing an experiment to get such awareness would help in getting the understanding.
Nobody knew you were a dog on the internet[1] until the rise of Facebook and linking your real identity with an online identity.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_the_Internet,_nobody_knows_...
People change over time. People change even a little based on who's around them. Even memories change as people see things in new lights.
The Internet of the late 90s and early 2000s was spectacular in that everyone could be as authentic and deep as they wanted to be, and as shallow and invisible as they wanted to be depending on context.
Firefox? Want to know how to really sell yourself. Be 'For the User', like TRON (but avoid that for copyright reasons and because normal people don't understand). The user should be able to TRUST that Firefox isn't selling them out, spying on them, or doing anything strange. That when Firefox creates identity sandboxes they're firewalled from each other to the maximum extent; including resisting device fingerprinting (just look generic and boring).
Don’t get me wrong, I mostly agree with your comment. I think even more dastardly is the tendency for the internet to market new personalities to you, based on what’s profitable
Primarily more educated, more liberal, more wealthy.
Turns out, when you hook the rest of the planet online, you get mass persuasion campaigns, fake genocide "reporting", and enough of an increase in ambient noise that coherent anonymous discourse becomes impossible.
I mean, look at the comments on Fox News or political YouTube videos. That's the real average level of discussion.
Before you start forming your reply, think about the actual culture back then. If you take slashdot as somewhat representative of the 90s internet culture, it was basically anti-corporate, meritocratic, non-judgmental, irreligious, educated, non-discriminatory, and once 2000 came around tended to be highly critical of the Bush agenda.
4chan at that time and places like it represented more of an edgelord culture, where showing vulnerability or sensitivity was shunned, everything revered by the larger populace was ruthlessly mocked, and distrust of society and government in general was taken as natural. Calling them conservative would have been non-sensical.
https://bewilderbeast.org/2019/08/16/most-of-what-you-read-o...
Fido and Usenet are still around. Kind-of. IMO google virtually killed that, too, when they started peddling google groups and did the classic embrace-extend-extinguish on the Usenet.
Trolling had (has) a different character in smaller, more private forums: it tends towards more effort. A low-effort troll just gets banned and loses their platform, so the troll needs to at least ride the line of legitimacy. Drawing the line back to Usenet, the sheer effort that went into some trolling garnered respect if not necessarily acceptance.
Drive-by interactions reward volume since the 'game' isn't repeated. Curated social media feeds like Twitter are even worse; the troll has their own audience predisposed towards acceptance and the victim is just set-dressing.
I analogize this to in-person interactions: ostracization is mutually costly. A small group loses a member who was at least making a 'warm body' contribution, but the ostracized person loses a whole set of social benefits.
To be fair I do miss the "old Internet". Less corporate, money grabbing, more freedom.
I'm an old timer, and I've been there since the beginning. I remember the beginning of the eternal summer, and the gradual decline that came after.
One of my first jobs was actually 3rd shift help desk for a regional dial-up ISP. The people that called were mostly drunk southerner's who, at the time, seemed hopelessly non-technical.
Looking back I now see that any one of them knew much, much more about how the internet actually worked than a the average modern user, and were probably more worldly in general than todays average user.... and there are billions more of them now.
We thought that global access to information would democratize everything and expose people to a higher level of rhetoric and thinking. We just KNEW that the best ideas would rise to the top of discourse naturally and the world would magically become a better place. We were so very wrong. It's turns out that more than cream floats.
Yet she knows you and you and me are strangers talking to each other on this forum. I think we don't know even close friends what online communities people hang out - the reason she didn't know about you being on HN.
I am sure there are some dead giveaways, but how can you be sure about that?
What I have experienced is both going into forums/discussions someone said was bots talking to bots, with no real clear indication by any of the many markers I am aware of that it was in fact bots; and also comments calling responses bots seemingly as a manipulative dismissal in response to something that was not the consensus or commonly approved position.
I say that because my impression is that what is happening is a full on breakdown of civic discussion and conversation as a whole. The internet destroyed IRL public forums (pubs/bars, clubs, etc) and the draconian COVID policies took the death knell to many more, and now bots and the seemingly bigger issue of immediate distrust of everything, seems to also be destroying online conversations of all sorts.
Yes, you’ll be able to have small group meetings and maybe even voice/video only conversations, but that brings a whole host of other systems changes with it, especially as mass surveillance long surpassed anything the worst tyrants of history could have ever even dreamed of implementing. It all seems a shift into unhealthy territory as a civilization in general, including since essentially all western governments cannot be trusted by their own people anymore.
like, it's a running on joke on most social media websites that "i hope no one i know irl finds this account..."
i think your friend is just overestimating her knowledge of her friends' lives
BTW, I don't explicitly disagree with what you're saying, but it would be good to look at actual data instead of anecdata to know for sure, and the people who have the data are not telling ...
Correction, I am posting while pooping. I don't care much about social media these days and I draw the line at the toilet door.
Tumblr is still doing pretty well on that front. I'm there for a fandom, and it's a super positive atmosphere where everyone just wants to make and talk about cool art.
Unfortunately, for common people whose aim is not celebrity, this means handing over your privacy in order to have a voice.
We can do this in our IRL circles of trust, people know you because they have met or interacted with you personally.
Online, this means someone like Zuck creating a digital identity for us after we entrust them with our privacy, or some kind of open source complicated technology identifier like a cryptographically verified signature that is techno bro-free that will only be adopted or understood by tech literate.
It's a dark day for genuine human interaction and trust.
I'm mostly still on FB at all for the acquaintance-level connections to things like neighbourhood, church, and hobby communities. All the people I actually care about are in private group chats.
I was reflecting recently that Google Plus actually had the right idea back in 2011 with "circles", but at the time we all said it was too hard figuring out which circles we wanted to share a particular message or thought with. Hmm, maybe they were ahead of the game all along?
Now that I look back at that I wonder what kind of theories suggest that abilities like that will result in reduced ad impressions, since I feel like every decision made by social sites makes much more sense when viewed through that lens.
and twitter is a spam site, so you're somewhat right
Mind you, G+ also made some insane and boneheaded decisions. I think at one point they tried to make all Youtube comments also be G+ posts under your real name, or something like that? That was fucking stupid.
Having different apps, chats (Discord servers), accounts (at-a-push) for each privacy circle is much clearer to average users. Migrating a whole group of any size to another platform is hard, hence many of us are stuck with Facebookk in case we get invited to something we don't want to miss on it, but new platforms will continue to emerge and some will succeed.
Except that they worked for a company that clearly wants all of your data. Privacy and Google are often at odds with each other… and for the folks that understood privacy at the time, it was a hard sell unless they worked at Google.
Privacy to me means that even Google doesn’t get to peek in whenever they feel like it.
Orkut’s user base was already degraded through Facebook but it was not inexistent, as some features of Orkut were unique. One was that it allowed people to use alt accounts to participate on anonymous discussion, not much different from Reddit, I’m sure with some creativeness G+ could have benefited from extra users.
Also, as you say, it was populated by many Brazilians, an imbalance like that may discourage non-Brazilians from joining, so not sure if integrating them would have helped or hurt.
killedbygoogle.com says 2004 to 2014 so a decent chunk of the service's run.
The legendary Andy Hertzfeld played a role in shaping the design of Google Plus.
https://techcrunch.com/2011/06/28/google-plus-design-andy-he...
https://waxy.org/2011/10/google_kills_its_other_plus/
According to Wikipedia, G+ usage kept growing from about 40M that October to 90M by the end of 2011 and then to hundreds of millions over the next few years, but the reporting methodology seems very inconsistent.
And frankly it was actually the first place where I truly noticed how big companies are extracting data from us; back then I felt really unpleasant when I tried to fill up profile.
I've got this old screenshot [1] and profile included: about me, "I know this stuff", current occupation, employment history, education path, place of residence with map, home and work addresses, relationship status and what kind of partner you are looking for, gender, other names - maiden name, alternative spelling, nickname, visibility in search results and a section for links to other websites. This may be seen as not much today but back then even facebook wasn't that "curious" - that was about to change.
I also tried to utilize Google Wave for our university group to keep us informed etc., but people wanted just "plain old" emails with attachments.
[1] - https://ibb.co/SDDGG3PJ
Myspace was hilarious because it was such a mess. The people owned it, hacked the css. Every profile page was a messy real person.
I was the one to push G+ and Gwave on my friends and it did not take at all.
it had a lot of good ideas like you said it just needed to make it simpler to use, maybe even make the circles stuff not default though i didn't have much trouble with it
forcing everyone to use something that still had teething issues was the biggest screw up, if they wanted to integrate youtube they should have started with making G+ popular so people would actually want that, and yeah real names so dumb.
blizzard tried that as well lol. then some guy rang up blizzard hq and told one of the higher ups where his kids went to school and they suddenly realised full name is actually too much information
(See also: nice how reddit now makes it possible to curate the list of which subs you participate in whose comments and posts appear on your global profile page)
Reddit is the town bar, the popular one.
Some people love the town bar! :)
Some people hate the town bar! :(
I suspect Reddit is intentionally overcounting by doing things like counting multiple devices as different users, multiple accounts as different users, making minimal efforts to remove bots, counting dynamic IPs as distinct users, and so on. You could even count API callers as users, but that is stretching the limits of plausible deniability. The thing is - their content isn't reflective of the popular town bar, it's representative of an insular clubhouse with some small rooms in the backyard for 'normies.'
From my little experience of using it, it seems that its main audience is the mentally retarded or just children under 11 years old.
The same questions are asked all the time. It wasn't difficult for me to find a search on the site for why they don't use it?
There is a lot of nonsense in the comments/answers, which they state with full confidence.
And there was also a feeling that there are rarely disagreements in discussions, even if there are minor differences, everyone adheres to a single line, often related to the topic/name of the subreddit.
I found several people creating content that I was interested in, but some of the posts on the page were hidden and it was easier to follow them on YouTube or blogs.
In general, searching for valuable posts or comments is like digging through manure to find gold.
And even if you find a clever idea or a good technical hint, it was often easier to find it just by reading the documentation. It's the same with interesting posts. If it's something worthwhile, then it will be on twitter, blog, YouTube, social networks or in some forums.
I'm not talking about advertising every second post, or even among the comments. Disabling ad blocking was a mistake.
> it's representative of an insular clubhouse with some small rooms in the backyard for 'normies.'
A very appropriate definition. It's not even interesting to discuss something on Reddit. If your opinion or thought coincides with the ideology of the subreddit, then you will have a lot of likes. If it don't match, you get dislikes, insults, or worse, no response.
In general, I did not find any benefit for myself on Reddit and I am unlikely to return there, it is a waste of energy and effort.
Around 250,000,000 is monthly user usage, which would be for one or more accounts.
And if course, like every site, a percentage that keep the thing going (around 35,000,000 daily logins).
It's one of the top sites on the internet and has been for a very long time.
It's an almost infinite variety. Fractal even with how many subreddits are the results of splits from an older subreddit.
HN loves to do this. "Platforms are mirrors held up to society". No, not always. Sometimes there really is unnecessary executive top-down control
Your three tech savvy family members should all have redundant copies of the photos of memaw’s wedding and Uncle Jim when he was 2 and looked exactly like your cousin’s second kid. I don’t need to see those. Your stalker ex boyfriend definitely doesn’t need to see those. It’s none of our goddamned business.
Someone, I think WD? Already made a play at this but I think it fell on deaf ears and will have to be tried again after the hype cycle calms tf down.
I do know some non-developer Gen Z folks that would set up minecraft servers on DO droplets, but I don't know of any that actually made their own and hosted it on their own network.
Aside from more exposure to raw tech, the technology making the internet happen was a lot simpler back then, where servers were actually physical servers,and such. I was able to adopt the complexity progressively as it came into existence which is a lot easier with the base knowledge of how the building blocks worked.
Although there has also been a softening of math skills among the weakest students, the best students are still quite capable, so the erosion is mostly in tech skills, not analytical skills.
In theory, AI should be good at helping building interfaces between cloud backups and home server apps. Because AI should be good at apis.
In theory
I'd love for it to also be a backup of my whole Google Photos account (eg https://github.com/JakeWharton/docker-gphotos-sync) but honestly I can't imagine trying to maintain an app on there that would actually be the first class storage/sync/presentation layer for my family.
Immich exists. It really is missing only some editing functionality and some nice-to-have features from GPhotos like automatic panoramas. Other than that, it's superior to Google.
Photo ingestion is via regular samba uploads from my phone.
And the hardware to serve that hard drive is somewhere between free and another hundred.
The way in which any open text box on the internet is guaranteed to turn into a malware vector is new now, and makes casual and marginally technical users trying their own thing much higher stakes and annoying.
It's occupying the segment that subreddits historically have. However, it's perhaps-intentionally search-opaque. You can't Google to find a message/link/download that's gated by Discord. And it also gives a sense of community, where someone who had more attention and time on a computer than a sense of what to do with those things can go have casual conversation with… someone.
1. Reddit communities tend to get too large
2. Subreddits overflow into each other too much through cross posting and brigading
3. Post history being public meant that you could get banned/brigaded for your comments on a totally different subreddit (i.e. bots autobanning you on one subreddit for posting on another subreddit).
The magic of discord is that everyone in the server I frequent I either know personally or they are known by someone I know personally. It creates a nice fabric of community and trust. Literally zero moderation over the past 10 years as everyone knows each other and behaves like normal adults and we also don’t get all up in arms when someone says something controversial.
I really wish something better would come along.
worst part is that it used to :/
It also allows running multiple instances with a single account (to be on multiple vocals at once for example).
The only drawback is the release cycle is more frequent and I need to update every time I boot.
What else would you want?
There is absolutely zero chance I find something interesting on Discord just by "browsing" Discord. I have to be in a community that already exists elsewhere to get the Discord server link or just accidentally stumble upon the server link somewhere other than Discord.
And If I do find an interesting Discord that is active, forget about seeing what people were talking about before.
All the interesting and or useful stuff posted on Discord is completely walled off and hidden away and might as well not exist after it was posted. I'm never going to find a Discord thread when browsing for something on the internet.
I genuinely think Discord is one of the more terrible things that has happened to the internet and the fact that it is replacing forums is a damn shame.
Most of my online identities were started when I was in college and was happy to have them tied to my real name. (This is also when Facebook was popular, still good, and college-kids-only.) Since then, cancel culture et. al. has made me more wary of having my identity-adjacent usernames show up in hobbies like gaming.
If I want to be myname in some Discord servers and anonoguy in others, is there a safe way to enforce that boundary? What about if I want to work on gaming-related open source projects or 3D prints?
As the internet moves to logged-in-and-social-by-default, it's hard to know which identity to use for which service. Moreover, when things are constantly leaking/being hacked, I don't know that I want any service to know that anonoguy and myname are personas of the same individual.
And as LLMs become the standard, I'm not sure any of this is defensible. I imagine in a decade's time, it will be trivial for an LLM to go "this account and that account have similar interests/references/ways of typing - they must be the same person."
I use Slack at work, but at least there I have a workable plan: no notifications for most channels, read or at least skim all messages in every channel by EOD, don't read it outside of business hours unless I get a DM. Also, absolutely never join the chatty #random type channels.
People massively underestimate the scale of whatsapp/facebook/tiktok (billions of MAU)
By the numbers, Discord is definitely more popular in the US, though it is pretty popular in the UK too.
But if you include other group msg platforms as the same thing (whatsapp, fb messenger, etc) i imagine most people know.
Moving into things like sports and what we would've called the "general blogosphere" in 2010 quite rapidly too.
I kinda hate it since it's hard to discover, but at least Google can't direct a million bots to it either that easily yet...
My guess would be near half, probably a 60/40 split.
You can make it private now. Personally I think this is a bit of a misfeature since it ends up helping all the low-activity users showing up to post political agitprop in local subreddits, thinly-veiled advertisers, etc., but they changed it.
Having all of your social circle mashed together on the internet is like a family reunion at a convention in the same room as your high school reunion. It’s… a lot.
I know that for me, at least, I like having one server where the comedy is not PC, one server where people seem to be a little more philosophical, one server for my real life friends, one server full of leftoids and one server full of rightards, etc.
In the plastic instrument games genre, there are some Discords where any wisp of using commercial music will be met with a stern reaction and potential ban. There are others that will link you to Drives full of thousands of songs from old games. The same people are in both groups.
Until recently, I think the only way to join a Signal was to be explicitly added by a member. It doesn't have all the channels etc. of something like Discord.
It doesn't have enough mindshare by normies either. In San Francisco, my entire social graph was on Signal. In NYC, I'm the weirdo that uses Signal for everything. Most locals seem to only use it for things that they explicitly want to be private. Among Euro friends, only the ones with ties to the US/tech industry use it.
My rugby team uses Discord for chat and announcements.
It feels…gross…inappropriate…it feels weird to use a UI covered in green gamer UI slime.
Learn more about Imgur access in the United Kingdom"
God I hate the modern internet.
Discord is what it is, and my teenage kids love it. However I'm constantly baffled by it LOL.
I wonder if there are any old school protocols out there to create a huge business around by just centralizing them and offering features people have been asking for decades.
Probably not.
React was the first open-source community I knew of that outgrew/got kicked off of Slack and moved to Discord. Now, it seems Slack is only used by companies, and occasionally by smaller groups (apartment buildings, school parents, etc) where someone in the group knows Slack from work and doesn't know it's hostile to non-businesses.
Discord was the opposite. I was working on an open source initiative at Google at the time, and the Discord folks openly welcomed us. They even gave us someone's contact info, in case we had needs they weren't addressing. This was when it was still targeted just for gaming, but they were very welcoming of OSS projects using it too!
As I write this, I realize that Discord is what "Google Apps for your Domain" was and Slack is the "Google Workspace" it became.
That does sound like a rather charmed life though. Could also be a sign that people are reverting to using the social internet apart from their irl acquaintances as well.
Linking up with all of our irl acquaintances through the public web was a terrible mistake imo. Seeking privacy can mean many different things.
Its essentially an entirely different website now.
Reddit is 99% search only. I go there only on a purpose. [might be replaced by Gemini, eventually]
HN and Alterslash are probably the only source of random info that I still consume.
May be that information containment is a reaction to my 15+ years of addiction to [the good old] Twitter. Or because I have reached age 50.
But the consequence is that I get the news late, and usually because of a search I did. Not because of a proactive algorithm.
Additional thought: in the end I suppose my information un-déluge is the proof that algorithms eventually failed to deliver [i.e point me at things meaningful to me]. The biggest example is Spotify proposals. That is 1% of my music discovery, whereas traditional non-commercial radios and dedicated podcasts are [human curated and] much more diverse.
It's a much less sticky place, now.
Why does that look familiar?
Some web wrappers forFB on Android must use that or similar.
If you're actually doing a census of people and asking about their web usage and social habits, it'd show up. So maybe Google or Facebook has the data if they were to do say cohort analysis on Google Analytics or Chrome History or Facebook beacon logs, counting specifically the number of total unique Internet users that used to visit social media but no longer do. But such an analysis would require SVP-level privacy approval (because it joins together personal, non-anonymized data across multiple products), and why would an executive commission a study that potentially tells them that their job is in danger and their employer is making a mistake by employing them? And if they did, why would they ever publicize the results?
AFAIK, most of the major public-facing analytics platforms work by sampling their users. If their users are voluntarily choosing not to engage with the platform that their sampling runs on, they by definition cannot measure that change. They just become a biased sample that excludes specifically the population they're trying to measure.
I think a decent-sized subset of Millennials have basically aged out of the time-surplus years of the early 20s and are now busy with kids and careers and families. And they aren't being replaced by the new 20-somethings, at least not on social media of the same form. The kids are still on text messages and Whatsapp and Discord and Roblox and Google Docs (!!), but they aren't interested in getting on the public Internet, and if they are, their parents won't let them.
My experience is that consumption is as high as ever, but the median person's non-private sharing is down.
I wish you were right. We took our kid to a stage show she really wanted to see. People round us kept checking their phones. They weren’t even really checking them. They held them and would turn the screen on and off, lighting the place up.
They couldn’t be without them for more than 5 minutes. This, after 30 mins of painful selfies before the show. It’s awful.
Mind you, inconsiderate people will be as distracted as ever, and will continue to halfheartedly pretend they're listening to those around them. They'll just need to find a new method to achieve maximal obnoxiousness.
My money is on subvocalization.
But I’ve noticed with my 14 year old son and his friends that they are all about Snap and iMessage. Instagram and TikTok are their public fora.
Social media platform used to be less about passive consumption.
Even if they do have disposable income to spend, the lack of working ads means that they're getting their vendors in a different way.
Some speculation follows: If advertisements as the main driver of sales went away, wouldn't that help smaller players gain a foothold against incumbents? Because, while incumbents can use their war chest to push all newcomers to page 2 of the results. If the awareness is coming from somewhere else, being on page 2 of the results doesn't matter anymore, because no one is even seeing page 1 of the results anyway!
The simple local lifestyle is that which was lived by all of humanity for all of history up until the last ~75 years (give or take).
A percentage of people still traveled, communicated, traded and migrated to other places in the past. Cities were a mix of lots of people, commerce, news. It was just slower and a smaller percentage. Look at the letters of Paul in the bible. He was writing to different communities around the Roman Empire, and traveled to them when he could.
Looking at the big picture, trade, communication and migration are the norm over human history. We colonized the world before the Industrial Revolution, some humans did it thousands of years prior.
Not true. People post their entire lives (OK not entire, but the positive parts) on social media every day for the public to see.
If you’re not within a couple standard deviations of boring, local living is isolating. Al Gore gave a mea culpa speech at one point because he thought, as a Senator, that legislating to give everyone the Internet would halt the rural brain drain but it had the opposite effect. People learned that they weren’t alone, they were just surrounded by (my words, not his) idiots and so they moved to where their people were. They voted with their feet in droves.
Ultimately, the Internet is good for support. It lets you find people who have the same obscure cancer your child has. Who are dealing with the same sort of neuroses your mom has. Who are being defrauded by a corporation in the same way. Who have the same feelings that the people around you ridicule you for even the hint of having. It lets these people find the patterns, see other people are feeling the same things they do, stop being gaslit.
Everything else has become about dopamine and money. And for those parts we should definitely unplug. But without forums or chat threads that same feeling of being The Other comes back.
This one is on its way to becoming part of the social media ecosystem. That's what the "Updates" feature is.
To get an idea of what it will look like, check out Instagram users who use it for both 1:1 messaging and social media (1:many) features. Which (again anecdotally) is widely used in younger generations.
Few of my friends use Instagram or TikTok, but I think we're just outliers. I see many (young) users, all the time, whenever I'm on the train.
That's a nice narrative, but its simplicity clashes with reality.
Which is actually pretty odd, because improvisational comedy as we know it today is younger than the film industry.
I can attest to this based on my circle of friends and acquaintances. Email not so much but yeah WA etc. I think people are done putting content that matters to them on public platforms. So all we see now on FB/Insta is memes, influencers or ads.
The Return of Content Curation. Peer-to-peer: research, retrieval, review.
Why would it plunge instead of re-focusing on things that are intrinsically important?
Because a lot of the economy is focused on creating and maintaining a surplus[1]: make people buy things that they don't really need, make them discard and replace things that they've been convinced are no longer worth it.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Surplus%3A_Terrorized_into_Bei...
Individually, many of these shifts make sense: resilience over efficiency, trust over reach, local over global. But collectively they point to a world that is becoming more segmented, less interoperable, and harder to coordinate at scale. If fewer people participate in shared public spaces, economic, cultural, or informational, it’s not just advertising models that break, but the assumptions underpinning growth, politics, and even social cohesion.
That doesn’t necessarily mean collapse, but it does suggest a lower energy equilibrium: slower growth, fewer mass phenomena, more parallel realities. The open question is whether we can rebuild new forms of shared infrastructure and trust at smaller scales—or whether we simply learn to live with a more fragmented, quieter, and less synchronized society.
maaaaybe 2% of the people…
The loss of faith in institutions takes quite a long time to occur but I think it will be quite a bit of effort to reverse.
Now that advantage is completely gone, and I have to build business the way it’s always been done in history: walking the streets while the online "broadcasted" world is a massive distraction.
Shh! One must never question the ponzi scheme.
In other words, Google. Google search grows every year despite people are dead sure it's "dead."
[0]: https://sparktoro.com/blog/new-research-google-search-grew-2...
Lifelong hockey fan, I never understood this complaint. I believe it was FOX that did the 'highlight the puck' thing for a few years in the 1990's.
You can't see the ball in American football, either.
But you don't need to. The guy that's running and everyone is trying to tackle? He has the ball. Just like the guy skating across the ice with his stick on the ground? He's got the puck.
When you CAN see the puck/ball, either someone lost control of it, or they're shooting/throwing/passing it.
It's pretty wild they were able to convince the NHL to use a modified puck with a battery and PCB inside, all so American viewers could better follow the action.
It was not well received in Canada :)
> [1] Puck and Player Tracking became fully operational in 2021-22, with up to 20 cameras in each arena and infrared emitters in each puck and sweater.
The player tracking is fairly easy to see; there's often an airtag sized bump on a player's jersey.
The puck tracking can be a bit more difficult but sometimes the puck looks like it's melting the ice behind it. That's just them giving it a grey shadow instead of the neon shadow.
[1]: https://www.nhl.com/news/nhl-edge-launches-website-for-puck-...
I can't see the puck at all at a game and have to be very close to a television to see whats going on.
As a result most sports are boring.
The average play must be what, like 5 seconds? So if you lose where the ball is you're not going to be confused for long.
However, when watching hockey on TV, it’s incredibly difficult to see the damn thing.
So while technically our eyes might not discern individual frames higher than 25 FPS or so, our brain can absolutely process data from a much higher effeice framerate. The motion blur fast thing naturally produce for example, provides critical context clues.
In gaming, sure 240 Hz won't help you see more as such, but it allows your eyes to do what they naturally do and give a much improved experience of fluidity and superior motion prediction.
Even when the technique is known, everyone remains susceptible (the victim team in the above video is the trickster here): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uSNTfFg4XW0
handegg*
basketball -> handball
hockey -> stickball
volleyball -> handball
rugby -> handegg
baseball -> stickball
cricket -> stickball
golf -> stickball
Hopefully this will finally appease the football literalists and make things simpler for you all to understand :)
football -> tackleball rugby -> tossball cricket -> paddleball golf -> clubball hockey -> icepuck
So yes, in "trick" plays you can't see the ball. But neither can the defense.
Having watched hockey AND US football my entire life, you can't compare the two. Totally different styles of sports and thus comparing your ability to see the 2 doesn't make sense.
to add: There has never been a football in history that had the ball going from one end of the field to the other and back. And yet, this happpens in hockey regularly and within seconds.
Tell me you're not from the US without telling me. This is apples and oranges.
Unless it's a trick play, you 100% know where the ball is.
How many times in football does the ball go from one end to the other and back? Never. In hockey that happens regularly, and in seconds. That's why comparing them in this context isn't correct.
Imagine if you couldn't see the players, and just saw the puck. Would that be interesting at all?
Think about tennis. There is the trope of people's eyes going back and forth following the ball, but I don't think they are following the ball directly. They are going back and forth looking at the person who is going to hit the ball.
but really, what you want to look for is how the players are moving. it's sort of a "which one is different from all the others." one person will clearly be moving in a completely unique way, as the others chase them or vie to get open or get in somebodys way. to acomplish this identification, youre looking at their legs, shoulders, hands, feet, and heads.
I have seen a comment about them being terrible for advertising, it looks like a "good" idea but it is not.
The problem is that the attention of people watching these videos drop to almost zero, too much is happening in a too short amount of time, and as a result nothing is remembered, including the ads. It is a very good deal for whoever is monetizing this content, they show a lot of ads, plenty of revenue, but not for those who are paying for the ads. It is like subliminal messages, "good" idea, but not very effective. For ads to work, people need to pay attention.
I don't know how ads in chatbots will turn out and what form it will take, but I think it is inevitable.
It's like advertising and social media are slowly merging together.
I couldn't say how effective it is. Who knows how much they paid that influencer and how much revenue it drives. But it sure is common.
E.g., around here, "happy holidays" would splash an ad for Jacobs coffee.
But they can also make it more pernicious. For example by having companies pay them so that they can train their AI on their products, with regular updates. Not technically an ad, but the AI will be more aware of their products so that they are more likely to be recommended to the user. In other words, that's paying for the right to advertise to the AI rather than to advertise to consumers directly.
Why would they ever make it obvious? It makes no sense. google just had the luck of political inaction, and eventually enshitified it further to the point where you might not know it was an ad.
To not undermine trust into their product and because ads are lower quality than organic results, and by making them indistinguishable, it will make their product worse.
The chatbot market is still competitive, and while users may tolerate ads alongside their answers, they may not tolerate lower quality answers (that is ads disguised as answers). With Google search, they can get away with it because they are still the best even with the enshitification.
There is another reason why it is in their best interest to make it really obvious there are ads. Chatbots want you to pay directly, sometimes hundreds of dollars a month, they are not getting that kind of money with ads, so obnoxious ads are also a way to say "hey look, if you pay, you won't get ads". It doesn't mean ads won't make a comeback in paid tiers later, but not initially.
So, yes, lots of "probably", but my guess would go towards the first ads being obvious and flashy rather than subtle.
it's something that continually needs to be reenforced again and again. somebody will be made example of.
One rough heuristic I use is people-watching on the subway. Just a quick glance from a distance at their phones. What are they actually looking at? (Yeah I know it's a bit nosy...)
I see: short-form video, WhatsApp/Messaging, YouTube long-format - in that order.
There is not one single puck in the web search field, and we actively don't want that situation in the first place (want no monopoly or cartel). There should be at least 2 if not a ton more. Everyone focusing their attention and resource on a single thing is the absolute worst case scenario.
I also hope the future of search is not where every existing player is looking at. That means there is no disruption happening, money straight dictates the winner and nothing truly innovative is expected.
Even "skating where the puck will be" is essentially following someone else's play. It can be fine, but I'd prefer to focus on the person actually acting on the puck, where they're trying to lead the game.
So Zuckerberg is the ref now?
And to add to this, the dark pattern of the time was to register in the Phone Book as “AAA Your Real Business Name” which was exactly what my first job did.
Google searches don't produce good results these days. The enshittification has become too extreme. Google openly admits as much (and further intensifies the enshittification) by placing a huge AI summary above those results.
The answer is self evident. If, before, you were relying on clicks resulting from google searches, today you need to be what an AI recommends when somebody uses an AI like they used to use google. (Users will eventually become more sophisticated though!) Lots of people are using AI like a search engine and getting better results than google gives simply because massive resources are currently being put into training AI, while mere neglect is insufficient to explain how fast Google search results are getting worse.
Is this how AI companies plan to cash in? Accept money from advertisers to promote their products in interactions with their LLM's? Were I an advertiser, I'd be trying to get Anthropic to take my money instead of giving it to Google. AI might be what finally makes it impossible to tell content and ads apart. That's great for advertisers... I guess. Not so great for the rest of us.
I haven't asked Google a question it has failed to provide a more than adequate answer to in ... months? years?
And on all my devices, I run google search with &udm=14, so I am not talking about AI summaries. I also have search personalization disabled.
I see a lot of people complaining about this on HN. It simply doesn't match my experience at all, in any way.
It's easier to add Reddit at the end to get a more accurate question repeated, and skip the sponsored SEO crap.
And a list of links to original sources or close to it is precisely what I do want.
If you want an LLM to generate an answer from its training data, that's fine, but go use a different search engine instead of demanding that the one many of us have relied on for decades has to do that.
And I actually agree with the last point. While there are entire categories of questions that I now prefer an LLM to to any search engine, when I want a search engine, I specifically do not want LLM summaries, which is another thing I like about Kagi: they allow me to choose when I want to see an LLM summary and to turn off summaries altogether.
(this is really not meant to be an ad for Kagi, I presume that most HN users are familiar with it already and don't need yet another random endorsement, but I honestly don't know how to talk about my experiences with search over the past several years and my dissatisfaction with google without talking about it)
firefox: keyword "g" configured as google search plus &udm=14
firefox: keyword "a" configured as google search without &udm=14
works for me!
So, if not that, then what?
The AI summary is not the problem; you could take it away and the experience would be just as poor.
In fact, the AI summary slightly improves the experience for faster readers.
Interesting! I thought, they did it because of the stock-item-list order :-D
Reason I say this is that this guy (Bob Hoffman)
https://www.bing.com/videos/riverview/relatedvideo?q=Ad+Cont...
says people watch ads on TV not the Internet.
Best way to get the word out about a product now is through an influencer in the space.
-- Edit:
Show of hands for anyone using ChatGPT to shop. Be honest.
People don't even use Google to shop. They try to find something either (1) by brand name, eg. "iphone" or (2) generically by category, eg. "best cold weather tent".
In the former case, Google used their enormous, antitrust flaunting power and 90% browser marketshare to turn the URL bar into a competitive trademark bidding dragnet. Apple pays out the nose for the iPhone spot. For every click. And every other major corporation selling to business or consumer does the same. This is the source of Google's enormous wealth. Google is a middle man. You cannot conceivably get to a brand or product without paying the Google tax.
In the latter case, when people try to look up blogs and reviews and Reddit posts to compare products, Google gets in the way and inserts themselves into the flow. If LLMs make this experience even shittier, there won't be upstream content to source as no reward will reach the people providing the value. It will naturally atrophy over time.
As a new sales channel, young people are buying content off of TikTok and Instagram directly now. When they see influencers using products they like, it leads to massive sales volume. New unicorn consumer businesses are being minted regularly from this.
LLMs are not limited to voice interfaces. You absolutely can use ChatGPT as a search engine if you want to: it does give you results you can compare, telling you about pros and cons of various options, and you can discuss with it what your end-goals are and have it turn a vague idea into a shopping list (that may or may not be complete for your project).
I don't have any reason to think these are the best, ChatGPT is not a storefront and OpenAI does not have a long history as a search engine, but it absolutely can be used this way.
I know people who took a photo of their car's driver side mirror cap (the thing that is on the opposite of the drivers side mirror and often colored like the rest of the car) - and asked chatGPT to search for the part. Because they were not able to navigate the respective auto parts portals.
I myself had perplexity generate a comparison report for different electric cars in a specific price range to get a first rough understanding of the used eCar market. Including links to respective models in used car sites.
Using Kagi for the few regular searches I need to do nowadays, Claude Code on the commandline for any other extended research/searches, I actually only use Google nowadays when I use the Google song detection function. Like Shazam - I just find this thing to be on my phone, so no need for an additional app.
I could give you a lot of additional examples from acquaintances and family - esp. from the not so tech people. Google is catching up, though. So - I think, with habits being hard to break, most people find Google good enough for quite a long time to come.
I do that, 10 years already, using Google, on a specific website. Website owners are just so very, very bad at making search working. Haven't even tried using ChatGPT for it.
I recently used ChatGPT to compare headphones before buying them, although the workflow there was a bit manual; I took some headphones that I had in mind off a cursory search off Amazon, had ChatGPT produce a summary of the differences and then picked the "best" one.
I'd assume this happens a lot more, I can easily someone doing, produce a list of [product category X] under < $Y, then use follow-up queries, etc.
> As a new sales channel, young people are buying content off of TikTok and Instagram directly now.
I assume this would only work for the things that influencers can directly sell, e.g. selling makeup to women that way is apparently a thing; for other products that are not impulse-buys, ChatGPT is a perfectly reasonable way to shop.
"What is still considered a highly regarded 35mm film camera for under $400 (used)?"
Of course then I go to eBay…
I use Gemini to help with shopping decisions pretty frequently. It's been very effective and useful for that.
I used it for evaluating air filters. I used to for making shopping lists for food I want to cook.
Here's a use case for me last week: I'm re-organizing my bathroom sink/vanity, and I want a few counter top organizers to keep things neat and tidy. I have a low mirror, low medicine cabinets, and generally tight spaces to work with and want to maximize storage.
So, I have a 10" wide space and I can't have anything over 16". I want to find a drawer organizer as close to 16" tall without going over, and as close to 10" without going over. Given a choice between the two, I want to bias for more height.
Go to Google or Amazon and try finding that. You're going to be trying permutations of 10x16 and 9x16 and so on, and digging through pages looking for something approximate.
In theory maybe there's some filter options on Amazon that might work, but they're usually incomplete, wrong, or absent. It's a terrible experience even when it's supported.
ChatGPT (or even Amazon's kind of janky Rufus) immediately finds top near-perfect matches for me to choose from. 15-20 minutes of aggravating digging turned into 90s of letting ChatGPT think and search while I was off grabbing a coffee.
True, LLMs are quite good in things where I have limited knowledge. It shortens exploration phase considerably. Before, I would need to go to web pages, compare parameters (somewhere), think out why this, not that.
There is plenty of evidence that people are increasingly turning to AI chatbots for that too. And it's entirely possible that ChatGPT and others are already being trained to mention some products first or to present them in a more positive light.
Show of hands for anyone still compiling 500 Amazon reviews by hand…
This won’t necessarily work well in a year (month?),
but up through now?
Absolutely I’ve been using assistants for some shopping purposes.
(and to some extent, monitors if you account for the amount of time 9-5 people spend on their work laptops or screens. desktop is not dead but that's another matter)
The hot apps are for now, chatbots and vertical shortform platforms. We know advertisers get much better bang for their buck marketing where the influencers are.
Google is "dead" because search advertising is much worse at figuring you out and showing you stuff when you're not necessarily looking for it. But Google can easily advertise where the eyeballs are - your phones.
We must remember that enshittification is an ongoing process and Google has the power to reach billions of people, one shitty update at a time.
From their POV, it definitely feels like a miss that they don't own a successful and dedicated social media platform. Maybe they will make another foray into it.
-----------------------------
[1] Watching them, anyway. I like playing, but I get almost sleepy-coma-like boredom by watching it. Probably a personality deficiency, but meh.
--WOPR
Human society cannot exist at this scale without this nested social complexity structure given the biological constraints
So something has to give
First you need agriculture so people tend to settle in one place. After ag comes more specialization, farmers need houses, graineries, and as society grows social specialists in which we'd call government.
These things in an area typically cause the area to grow because of their stability. As they grow you get more than one person/business doing the same line of work and you get more people than fit in ones monkeysphere. At that size you may not know a person that knows what you need to know and start looking further. This is why as cities grow advertising itself becomes an emergent property. Just go to a Roman city and look for dick pavers for example. Then someone will think "Hey, I can give some poor kids a board with a message on it and have them cry out to go to the place that people pay me to advertise" and suddenly you have an emergent property of humanity.
That said, there's a petroglyph (circa 1150-1600 CE) of a macaw (among other sign-like petroglyphs)[1] on the walls above the pueblo ruins in Frijoles Canyon in Bandelier National Monument in New Mexico that came to mind when reading your explanation. The pueblo ruins themselves are immediately above an agriculturally developed riverbed floodplain with structures previously used for food storage.
It doesn't seem too far fetched to analogize a macaw above a pueblo in a canyon to, say, a flamingo on a neon sign (Circa 20th century)[2] above a bar along a highway, or an ad on a phone in 2025. Perhaps advertising is emergent (and, dare I say, with an element of pre-destination).
[1] https://www.nps.gov/places/petroglyphs-pueblo-loop-trail-sto...
Revenue-wise, video ads have always been the sun to print ads peanut m&m.
Look where the pucks going then:
Implication: ChatGPT as a realtime video avatar will hit the jackpot with ads, but not before. Count on the ChatGPT device having a screen for that reason
The chill that ran down my spine when I realized that you and TFA think that the part people care about is Google as an ad platform, and not as a way to access websites.
Jesus fucking Christ, things are bleak.
People are throwing themselves to feed you personal data. You no longer have to come up with sneaky ways to collect it, or build out their profile from inferred metadata. Less work for you, more accurate profiling, and less risk getting fined by pesky regulation.
Ad campaigns can be much more personal and targeted. You can push them at just the right moment to optimize the chances of conversion. They can be much more persuasive, since chatbots and assistants are deeply trusted. You can dial the sensitivity knob to make them very subtle, or completely blatant, depending on your urgency and client.
If I as someone outside of this hostile industry can think up these scenarios, the world is not ready for what advertising geniuses are cooking up as we speak.
Advertising directed towards AI models, at the very least. If you can get into ChatGPT's weights that McDonalds is the cheapest and tastiest hamburger, how many millions of people would ChatGPT tell that to?
"Google Ads is dead, Where do I promote my business now?"
When I hear "Google" I assume search, oof (sigh of relief).
They mention running ads on tiktok or instagram but no mention of youtube ads...
Also, In my own experience for my business ( also entertainment) I have found reddit ads to be useful.
So my next steps would be,
Reddit Ads
Youtube Ads
Instagram Ads
Increase AI Visiblity
-- Yogi Berra
Everyone can make up some complex theories but I see it in the numbers every day. Spend distribution is now k shaped and SMBs simply can’t compete at top end performance levels.
And it is always a choice - we choose platforms and regulations and spending priorities. If “we” choose a different set of tech regulations the K shaped economy can be put back in its box.
For me the problem was most clearly outlined by Cory Doctorow “developers did not unionise or rebel in time because they thought of themselves as temporarily embarrassed entrepreneurs”.
This combined with SMBs targeting everyday joes with increasing less demand availability for anything it leaves them crushed on both sides.
Do you think there’s any hope for SMB? Eg I’ve seen some companies tout AI advertising optimization for SMB but when I looked into one for investment the numbers weren’t very compelling.
And the fact they price smbs out should be unsurprising: they're better at making money from a user; users are worth more to them; so they pay more.
it's bots creating too high noise-to-ratio for feedback loop
Reddit is very hit or miss depending on your target audience.
Depending on your Reddit target audience, a lot of people could have adblock installed. They might be loyal to communities that have approved vendor lists where everyone parrots the same vendor recommendations back and forth in every thread, so not being part of that game means you're left out. In some niches, the subreddit moderators have a financial relationship with vendors and they'll put their weight into swaying every conversation away from competitors.
For other niches, none of this applies and Reddit can be a good ad destination. It really depends
We don’t find Reddit ads valuable.
https://successfulsoftware.net/2025/08/11/what-i-learned-spe...
I tried to load his website. It took a full minute to come up. Maybe that's the HN hug of death or something, but this is surely issue #1 to resolve.
Beyond that I would ask whether targeting the "young'uns" directly is the correct strategy. His business is party entertainment, kids' birthday parties could be the biggest slice of that, but the kid isn't the purchasing decisionmaker, and there are all these other opportunities (like corporate events) too.
And then I would consider whether paying for ads in shorts is the right or only way to approach the world of video. The thing about video is it's huge, lucrative, and eating up more of people's time every year. People are moving from the text Internet, to watching videos. I would think given the nature of the business this guy has raw footage which can be turned into entertaining videos, or can produce it pretty quickly. I'm increasingly surprised by how much some people can earn on Youtube, by creating videos that also function as marketing collateral for their business. He will ultimately need to geotarget to get customers, so yeah that's probably paid ads, but a good YouTube channel would build authority, making sales easier to close, and might also make him more money than you'd expect via ad revenue.
My content is best live and in person but you are right, will be concentrating more on video content for yt and others going forward
Perhaps there was a CDN issue (I am in a country that is definitely not material to his business)
For you perhaps. I work with a huge amount of businesses whose profits are still driven almost entirely by them, who have seen not even a blip and make money hand over fist.
I do occasionally post (free) on Reddit, it's not that big here though
I’m permabanned on Reddit so I only consume via the default not logged in feed and I run into some comments in what I assume is Hindi(might be marathi or one of the multiple other languages on the continent) or posts from subreddits explicitly about some aspect of india
[1] https://www.thehindubusinessline.com/catalyst/inside-reddits...
(Reddit has two forms of bans, shadowbans and permabans, both have essentially the same effect)
I assume, with no evidence, that they just used the same data tracking for ads, to enforce the ban. I think Meta turned on the real banning tech during a panic in Covid iirc
1: my true beliefs 2: directly quoting the president
I laugh at any current supporters of this admin who complain about censorship while this is happening and we’re doing shit like having multiple media companies being sued by the king left and right.
for personal, I'm on lemmy now
I am not sure what might work better, sponsorships or Ads. Of course some are definitely icky sponsorships but if one were to align with small youtubers who develop their own things and you enjoy their content and there might be an overlap etc.
I personally have an ad blocker so I don't really know what might work for. I guess organic marketing? But how does one achieve it?
Any good books / ideas on more sustainable forms of marketing aside from paying the large corporations a sort of land tax basically?
If Google Ads is dead/dying the search is soon to follow...
You might want to let Google know that, because the number of searches on Google appears to continue to be growing massively:
https://searchengineland.com/google-5-trillion-searches-per-...
Those numbers look like the exact opposite of dead or dying to me. As does Google's growing stock price over the same time period.
From a user perspective, google search results are awful and almost always a complete waste of time.
If search results are such a waste of time, why do people keep using Google? In ever-increasing numbers? What's the explanation there?
It does not follow that people making more searches means people are having more successful searches. If google found the exact thing you were looking for and put it top centre in the results, would the number of human searchers stay the same but the number of human searches drop?
Google search results are a wasteland of ads and content farms, with vanishingly small value for humans
I don't really see how "dead internet theory" explains that. If it were as bad as you claim, surely usage would be plummeting? But it's just the opposite.
Dead internet theory means real users are declining while bot users are skyrocketing.
For example google search is such a terrible experience these days that I’ll often ask an LLM instead.
That LLM may do multiple google and other searches on my behalf, combine, collate and present me with just the information I am looking for, bypassing the search experience entirely.
This is a fundamentally different use case from human traffic.
Most likely - yes. If Google has been dead for years people wouldn't pour hundreds of billions of dollars into ads there. The Search revenue keeps increasing, even since ChatGPT showed up. It might stagnate soon or even decrease a bit - but "death" ? The numbers don't back this up. One blog saying he stops paying for Google ads conflicts with the reality of around 200 billion yearly revenue from Search.
That hasn't happened. Google continues to grow with real users.
It's over. Sorry.
If I have an idea of what I want, Google search works great. On the rare occasion I don't know the specific thing I'm looking for, Gemini points the way.
It had never ever been easier for me to find what I'm looking for on the internet, since 1993-1994.
I do wonder how much browser, location, and language plays into this.
I agree that paradigm is over and using Google search feels antiquated. It’s not a good outcome for website owners, but I want info retrieval.
Ever since Google bought double click, their ads business has been their search business. They are the same product.
Do we have any evidence search volume is down?
Don't get me wrong, I'm an avid Kagi user. But I'm sceptical anyone outside tech is using anything other than Google.
Google isn't search. It's a crutch for people with too much time and money.
p.s. not google labs, not tpu's, but specifically search.
…wouldn’t this make it an advertiser’s dream?
Now this may not be great for Google Ads (dunno about that) but Google search now works better than it ever did.
As someone who spends seven figures every month on Google ads, what’s much more likely to be happening here is that the individual advertiser is either getting outcompeted or they’re executing ads poorly.
Google ads revenue in the US continues to grow every quarter. And, since advertisers will generally invest in ads until the last dollar is break even, it’s likely that the total value advertisers unlock through Google ads is growing as well. Whether that’s true or not, the notion that value generated for advertisers is “dead” is absurd.
Doesn't seem like the issue is he's being outbid by international conglomerates with million dollar budgets. Maybe the kids magic show market has cooled in South Africa? Or users have left Google? Curious what we are to conclude here.
Not quite, the equilibrium is when marginal ad spend results in no change to profit. The ad spend at equilibrium should result in increased profit compared to no ad spend.
Ultimately I relied more on returning customer and mouth to mouth recommendations, kept lowering the Google ads budget.
I expected them to start seeing a hit or significant decline by now, and even told them as such but in what I honestly find surprising, it’s not come to pass.
Outcompeted by who??? He's a performer offering local entertainment. I highly doubt that people searching for "entertainer in durban" are getting ads for Cirque du Soleile.
His ad is probably on the first page for that search term; the problem is more likely that no one is looking at that first page anymore.
The author admits as much.
It contains zero useful information. Just somebody struggling with AdWords and they don't know why. Not helpful.
I have to assume the vast majority of upvotes are based on the title alone, assuming it's about Search? A large proportion of top level comments are about Search too. Depressing.
I happen to in fact think we have reached an inflection point. Whether "Google is dead" depends probably a good deal on where they go now.
> We find that most users do not read the article that they vote on, and that, in total, 73% of posts were rated (i.e., upvoted or downvoted) without first viewing the content. [0]
In this case, my guess is that people are noticing less and less utility from Google search, and that was why they voted like they did.
This same phenomenon is what gives newspaper editors far more power than the journalists, as it is the editors who not only decide the stories to be covered, but even more importantly, they decide the headline. Most people just scan the headlines while subconsciously looking for confirmation of their own biases.
I tried to find that paper via google search first, and I failed after 3 different searches. I then opened my not-important-stuff LLM, chatgpt.com, and found it in 3 interactions, where in the 3rd I made it use search. Chatbots with search are just so good at "on the tip of my tongue" type things.
Google is in such a weird position because of their bread and butter legacy UX * scale. This has to be the biggest case of innovators dilemma of all time?
Google.com has "AI mode," and it tries to intelligently decide when to suggest that based on a search query. I could have likely clicke AI Mode on google.com once it gave me a crap SERP response, and used that to find the same thing. But, I instinctively just went to chatgpt.com instead. I am not a total moron, I use gemini, claude, and gpt APIs in the 2 LLM enabled products that I am working on...
However, just last week I noticed that the AI mode default reply for some queries was giving me just horrible AI mode replies. Like gpt-3.5 quality wrong assumptions. For the first time I saw google.com as the worst option. I cannot be the only one.
I think that I might understand the problem. Google has the tech, but as a public company they cannot start to lose money on every search query, right? The quarterly would look bad, bonuses would go down. Same reason ULA can't build Starship, even if they could and wanted to. However, OpenAI can lose money on every query. SOTA inference is not cheap.
What are you advertising?
It used to be possible to get by with "organic" search traffic and some SEO... but google search looked completely different back then. Now when you look for something it's an AI box, products (google merchant) ad box, ad (promoted results) box, ... then there's a couple of (like two) results that are "organic" (whatever that means these days) and that's it. And we all know that when you want to hide something, you put it on the second page of google search results. So the space for doing online business "ad free" has been squeezed out over time.
And the K shaped economy is totally true in this ecomm space. These days say 15% of your revenue gets eaten by ads, but you also have say 50% higher revenue overall. At some point it becomes a margin game and the bigger players will start squeezing out the smaller ones because the biggers ones can operate on tighter margins (making up the difference with volume) which the smaller ones simply can't afford. The difference in operating costs of an eshop that sells 10000 items a month is not that different than that of an eshop selling 100000 items a month (i.e. not 10x, more like 2-3x). But selling 10x items gives you the volume you need to be able to lower your margins and put the difference into ads.
BTW all of this is handled by professional online marketing people with increasingly widespread use of AI so there's no room for the small players to make it big while not being optimized to the gills. This is why most small advertisers are seeing small or negative returns while Google and Meta are making tens if not hundreds of billions in ad revenue... The ads work, but the amounts you need to spend and the optimization level you need to have is in a completely different galaxy than it was 10 years ago.
It's just as likely that people are simply spending less on entertainment due to high cost of living.
It's the standard actually. Hot takes get more votes and hot takes are usually wrong. Experts have non-controversial opinions, which are boring (so no impulse to upvote), and there are 1000x more non-experts with blogs. Add to that HN culture which values contrarian-ness. So HN front page blog posts are almost entirely incorrect, but spicy
"Google results are just AI and sponsored content anymore." We've all seen it.
My anecdotal evidence is the smarter normies are increasingly allergic to screens. They only use them to watch stuff they hear about by some other means, but parents, for example, look for any excuse to keep their kids off the Internet, and largely they're better for it.
- most SMBs I ever work with.
If you've been around longer than internet advertising you realize the basics of demand have changed pretty considerably.
Let's go back to 1980 and say that you have widget X that person A would absolutely buy if they saw/heard it advertised. They live in Podunk Minnesota that had coverage by 3 radio stations, 3 TV stations, and 2 newspapers. But you have no idea what media they actually consumed to target the right one.
Right now you're at the point you would have to contact at least 8 different media companies for ad spend if you wanted coverage. Most likely you'd cut it down to one of each, and maybe a billboard. This said, the cost for just this little area is going to be wildly expensive! Ads were huge money, and this is just for one little town.
These costs were slightly lower for large corporate buyers, but not that much because as you go back farther and farther you were typically dealing with more companies before consolidation. Being an SMB was great in this market in a local area because you weren't competing with the world.
Fast forward to now and you compete with the entire world at any given moment. In the West we've forgotten about competition and allowed a huge portion of our economic product to consolidate to a small number of companies. This is very apparent in advertising as the old media entities are dead or far more expensive than you'll ever recoup with the competition out there. Instead you're looking at Google/Reddit/Facebook style ads, but with that kind of ad you again, complete with the entire world. If your ad actually does good and drive business, then Google metrics will feedback to players watching the market and they will advertise products in the same space driving up competition and the base costs for ads. The supply from your competitors is practically unlimited which will drive your profits to almost zero unless you happen to have something very special.
Welcome to the K shaped economy, where the big get bigger and the small die.
I remember my brother loving to do channel surfing in the 80s when we were young. I've always hated it! maybe that's why I cannot stand the current Tiktok media format (so sad that Youtube is pushing more and more the same format).
Also, remember when telephones started and people who took vertical video where seen as sinners? How times change!
But at least, we could experience first hand that laziness beats thoughtfulness, when people are allowed to.
on youtube most of what i see is hyped hyperbolic content, polarized podcasts, shorts.. the way and reason why "content" is produced has changed
I run a local makerspace. It is not quite the same thing as a local entertainment business, but there are certainly some similarities. We are local, and we are very event-based.
For the last 10 years, the way we would get new members was to host Meetups. Meetups are slowly bringing in fewer members. When I ask tour guests how they found out about us, they recently started saying that they found us on ChatGPT. They did not know what a makerspace was but they explained their problem and ChatGPT presented our space as a local solution. This has been good for us because we offer something useful to the community but struggle to explain it. In the old days of search, this was a problem because many people were not using the correct phrase to describe what we are. That doesn’t matter anymore.
How does a local business optimize for this though? I am not sure.
One of two ways. Yes, by scraping, even it it requires users to 'sell' their own browsing data to the AI companies because places like Discord lock them out.
Or, the other way is for particular event organizers to pay directly for their services to be advertised/incorporated into the LLM itself. Those that don't pay get more and more of their data erased from the LLM maybe?
Sadly I don't know any better platform but it seems ripe for a new entry.
And looking at their site… Hacky creative coding. Mate, AI replaced you like 2 years ago.
Imagine a protocol to publish commercial offers for any given fragment of content addressable by URI. It would describe the details of some product or service and a set of proposed terms. We could surf the web looking for relevant content and publishing related offers. Various repositories would subscribe or not.
A browser (extension or native) would optionally pull offers from selected repositories and have UI for the user to solicit/pull offers for any given piece of content styled to signal their existence, and to filter and sort them. To make it sustainable there needs to be revenue sharing with the content source(s).
Are there existing projects like this?
The same protocol could be used for independent commentary and other annotation.
- I try not to think about ads
- I think about ads because I aggressively block them
I'm sure somebody out there represents a middle ground, but I think it's a pretty small demographic.
As others said, most users don't care or don't want to see them.
This leaves the people that care being the ones who are providing the ads, and they will game the system with bots and other methods of bad acting that will make the system useless.
Your return customers know what a great show you do and it becomes tradition and they obviously love it.
But the difficulty finding new clients (something we all face) may be partially due the world moving on.
I’m using ChatCPT or equivalent for 60% of my searches. The remaining 40% is just muscle memory. Of that 40% about half the time I regret using Google search due to the difficulty of finding the relevant result.
I can see search users moving to ChatGPT or such and Googles Ad business suffering as a result and a general downward spiral of Google search.
The same will happen here. It's not like OpenAI has built a search engine; every time they need a live search they hit Bing (please correct me if I'm wrong) and get the results from there. No matter how you slice it, search companies who actually supply the data are going to get reimbursed, and since most users don't pay $20 / month, that likely means ads everywhere.
Also, Google's AI overviews are getting very good. Initially it was pretty inaccurate, but now it's basically 95% as good as ChatGPT, and faster. Most normies I talk to think it's good enough.
I've never understood the "AI is eating search! Google is dead!" theory. The specific mechanism (whether that be keyword search, LLM conversation or something else) by which users describe their needs to a company doesn't matter, all that matters is that (a) the company makes that mechanism available for free, (b) it does a good job of satisfying the user's need and (c) ads can be smuggled into it.
What do you think the mandatory youtube link in every conversation is, if not a link to an ad?
They have successfully monetised chatbot AI, while no one else has.
Google profits directly from the fraud. It has no incentive to reduce it and is embarrassed by its extent.
Google is essentially overseeing a huge criminal enterprise which funds its other activities. It’s been well documented for over a decade and no one seems to care.
The traffic is faked, the publishers are faked, the clicks are faked and the ad rates are manipulated.
It’s an incredibly lucrative way to steal money with extremely low risk and trivial penalties. The victims are the advertisers. Google has no interest in rocking the boat while they get paid.
The effective ads via Google platforms are like the percentage of real drugs in what’s bought off the street. Coincidental and ever being shaved.
lol
I don't know what comes next, I just know it will be worse.
What killed the open web was Facebook, Twitter, and their ilk replacing that whole mess with social media profiles, networking connections, and templated, pre-fabricated organization home pages. When social networks became dominant enough that businesses could use it to get their info out there without having to author a webpage, the balance tipped (at least for business-motivated web content).
Plus to be honest alternatives aren't much better. I use duckduckgo but the results are still a deluge of spam (content mills).
There are other networks as well: X, Meta, YouTube, LinkedIn, Amazon ads. It depends what’s your target group. But all networks have targeting tools so you can test them with minimum budget just to see what works and what doesn’t.
For sure, you have some personalized landing pages with CTA (Posthog script included so you can see what works).
AI should equal the playing field and promote businesses based on merit and capacity not how much they can spend.
I give it maybe 12-18 months before AI results are polluted by advertising.
If you're shopping around, an LLM you control can work for stuff like summarizing customer reviews or compiling a list of products with specific features (if you don't mind them being randomly wrong). But for general shopping advice / "plan my vacation" kind of queries, it's already firmly in the land of SEO-garbage-in-SEO-garbage-out.
Have you been on amazon lately? We're already there. :-/
the product promotion text will be integrated into the responses
'your prompt is insightful and refreshing. reminds me of the refreshing taste of organic coconut-cinnamon water. here's a QR code coupon for $1 off a 48-ct pack you can use at your local HoleFoods.'
"Fantastic! It's great that you care about what you should feed your children. A bowl of Cinnamon Toast Crunch is a great way to start your kids' day with the energy they need, and it's something they're sure to love! It's also fortified with vitamins to give them the nutrition they need! If you don't have any, I can start a DoorDash order right now."
Or "It's great that you want to find a way to earn some extra money for holiday presents for your family when you don't have anything left over after paying your bills. You're so thoughtful. You're an avid sports fan, so you've got the knowledge to have an edge in sports betting. DraftKings has a $10 credit when you bet your first $15 on tomorrow's game. You're automatically a winner!"
One mustn't forget that propagandists are frequently just straight malicious.
I'm pretty certain that the ChatAI providers want to show ads, but until they can bill for it, they aren't going to.
At some point the billing will work, and then they will.
Wasn't that pretty much also the promise of Google as a search engine originally? For the longest time Google actively fought SEO, while running a minimal set of ads, then they bought DoubleClick and everything went to to shit.
AI should equal the playing field, but it won't. The current generation have our bias built in and it's not in a good place financially. It's only a matter of time because it becomes infested with ads. You think OpenAI aren't going to promote shitty products or companies, because the algorithm says they shouldn't? No, they might charge that customer more, but they aren't saying no.
This is a multi facet problem. There's a generation of advertisers who believe that advertising is clicking around in the AdWords interface, maybe sprinkle in a little ad spend on Meta and boom, you're done. The reality is that they can't advertising anything, they don't have the skills required to sell a product.
If they can't rely on Google, where can they go? Social media, AI? Nope, because many of us have been burnt by the major online platforms and won't trust any of them. I'm never signing up for another social media platform, hell, I'm reluctant to sign up for ANYTHING. The current generation of marketing has sacrificed the future for a quick profit now. Many aren't on social media, we use adblockers, we pay for services to ensure no ads, we don't watch TV, newspapers are dead, we don't go out much, so where are you going to advertise exactly? Even if you find a venue, many see so few ads that your attempt at marketing is going to feel like an assault, because you're so desperate that you don't dare tone it down enough.
Advertisement needs to reinvent itself, and it needs to stop funding the entire online services industry, because it can't, not without cannibalizing its own future.
I sometimes think people really don't understand the value-add of AI (and I say this as someone on the less hyperbolic end of the "AI-hype" spectrum). If your service to me can be accomplished by AI "very fast"... I don't need you anymore. AI provides a generic problem solving interface where non-experts can leverage the power of the AI to solve a task they previously couldn't have so long as they can describe it well.
I've had multiple cases at work or other places where I've been presented with something as the stakeholder and been told "I used AI to make this!" Great! Next time I'll use AI to make it and save myself the overhead/cost of having work with someone else. I don't see a lot of value in explaining a problem to you so that you can then re-explain it to an LLM.
When people show me they've used AI to complete a task I used to have to do I'm delighted, and, more often then not, proven my value when they come back weeks later asking for help untangling the mess they've made. But, I'm equally delighted in the cases where they are successful using AI to replace things I used to be tasked with. Despite the AI hype, I find myself busier than ever.
Everyone i talk to is quoting the same time line, this started in September and it hasn’t returned to normal.
Winter is coming.
Spring has sprung.
There’s been a lot of debate about whether Google’s AI Overviews and tools like ChatGPT are actually harming publishers. One publicly traded company’s timeline is worth looking at: Chegg.
What happened (with sources):
2021: Chegg launched Uversity, a platform for educators to share academic content. (Wikipedia)
2023: ChatGPT emerged as a serious competitor in homework help. Chegg responded by launching CheggMate, its own AI product built on OpenAI’s models. (Wikipedia)
Late 2024: Chegg reported accelerating subscriber declines, widely attributed to users shifting to free AI tools instead of paid study platforms. (WSJ, company filings)
Feb 2025: Chegg sued Google, alleging that AI Overviews reduced traffic to Chegg by answering questions directly in search results, harming acquisition and revenue. (Search Engine Land, Reuters)
May 2025: Chegg laid off ~22% of its workforce (≈248 employees), citing competitive pressure from AI and changes in search behavior. (Reuters)
Oct 2025: Chegg announced another round of layoffs (~45%, ≈388 employees), explicitly referencing “the new realities of AI” and reduced traffic from Google to content publishers. (Reuters / SF Chronicle)
What the data suggests (more broadly):
Independent studies show that when Google AI Overviews appear, users are significantly less likely to click through to external sites.
“Zero-click” searches (where users get answers directly on the results page) have increased, especially for informational and educational queries.
The impact isn’t uniform — some publishers report minimal effects — but content that answers how-to, homework, or factual queries appears most exposed.
Why this matters:
Chegg isn’t a small blog or SEO-driven site. It’s a public company with audited financials, legal disclosures, and incentives not to exaggerate under scrutiny. Its filings and lawsuit don’t claim AI is “bad” — they claim that traffic flows are structurally changing.
This doesn’t prove AI search is “killing the web,” but it does show:
AI answers are substituting clicks, not just competing for them.
Entire business models built on informational content are under pressure.
“Build better content” may not be sufficient when answers are synthesized upstream.
Curious how others here see it:
Is this a temporary transition problem?
Or are we watching the unbundling of the open web’s traffic economy in real time?
For ChatGPT (and similar) you need to have a strong FAQ page and lots of content marketing to increase the likelihood of being the suggested answer when a user asks ChatGPT a relevant question (it's a highly probabilistic system, look up AEO/GEO).
CloudFlare for example offers an option to block AI scraping bots by default. If you are in the services business, this is the opposite of what you want because having AI crawlers scrape your site would drive traffic down the road when users ask a related question.
I would also suggest having accounts with major chatbot companies and enabling the "allow training on my conversations" option and then talk to it about your services. Ultimately you just want to get your brand into the training data corpus, and the rest is just basic machine learning statistics.
We were marketing a product that many people were happy to know existed. The dashboard gave us tools to really delve into demographics. Of all the ridiculous personal data Facebook collected, the best demographic filter was allowing me to narrow in on pages someone liked or interacted with. We were selling things related to cruising sailboats, and we could target an audience within 30 miles of Fort Lauderdale who also liked Sailing Magazine. Moreover, we could use a pixel so that only people who had also visited our website saw the ads.
Facebook had a policy of rewarding high-quality ad content. If people clicked the ad, or better yet left positive comments and discussion or shared, the price drastically decreased to fractions of a cent per impression and click-through. We were able to get ads shared a lot with people tagging other people about the product suggesting they might be interested in it. That was the holy grail for copy that we always strived for.
Of course, they got rid of all that. But at the time, it was a great way to target an audience based on third-party pages they liked, giving them ad content about products they were generally interested in—and products they were happy to know they could purchase because they had value.
Ads configuration is like gambling in Las Vegas, in that the easier the game, the worse the odds—like slot machines—and the more the player has to interact, like Blackjack, the better the payout. When done well with good configuration, we were getting 1000s of click-throughs for dollars. It was amazing.
The point is that Facebook rewarded ads that people positively interacted with, as it meant the quality of the news feed wasn't hurt by the ad.
There was a time when ads benefitted everyone, the buyer, the seller, and Facebook.
As others have stated in this thread, it's called the acquisition phase. Get people hooked, build the network, make it be the place that people have to be at.
After that comes the exploit phase where said network effects make it hard to leave. You can rake in billions (trillion?) of dollars this way. Who cares if it eventually kills the company, you've made more money than god at this point.
1. You can target a specific part of the funnel (informational -> purchase intent) in search ads. Targeting on social networks is more about overall user profiles rather than their immediate state of mind.
2. People going to a search engine expect to leave that search engine to go to another website. Whereas people on a social network expect to stay in that portal. So clicking on an ad then doing something after is a more natural flow (and better value for advertisers).
That does seem like a very good fit for a good video that can spread on TikTok etc on its own if some performers upload videos.
I rather would try to get an entry on google maps. Meaning when people browse the area, they see your thing. I certainly like to discover new stuff like this in new areas and some things I find are clearly there because of ads, but other got there by other ways. Making a entry by hand, publishing a picture there with further info ..
Instagram has apparently got hyper specific location targeting, so we are doing an ad on there now.
Mostly we do kids entertainment though, so that's not really going to convice moms to hire my magic show for Bobby's birthday
The platforms I use are very NOT local so it'd be pointless. Mainstream platforms are invasive with their data collection that would allow his ads to be specifically targeted and do well there, getting put in front of people who might actual use his service.
When you find a working marketing solution, it's just a matter of time when it dries out, because of competitors and overall saturation.
Not happy with google.
And it's become clear to me how little of the open web, and top 100k sites they've fully indexed, I used to have a lot more faith in them.
For the first time since 1995 my default method to research information on the web does not involve any traditional search engine anymore.
If you need a payoff, click the Patreon link banner on top and go support development of my Open Source LED Poi!
I'm not sure much can be done about this. At least the physical world is still the same.
You mean the physical world where businesses are signing up with companies to put AI enabled cameras all over their properties and sell your data? Why not some nice dynamic pricing on their digital price bars next (oops, we are already there).
Where I live, the trend has been to make spaces more walkable and with more nature and green spaces.
[1] https://x.com/firstadopter/status/1993464859376468102/photo/...
They are a circus for hire (events) https://web.archive.org/web/20250424004511/https://bigtop.co...
Located in Durban, South Africa. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Durban
He got too much exposure by stating Adworks no longer works?
This gives me warm fuzzy feelings. It's nowhere near good, but this is better than it was.
Ads will ingress deeper into what were trusted layers -- embedded in text and video in a seemingly organic way. GenAI tools make this possible -- to splice a 20 second mention of something into a stream, or rewrite a paragraph injecting a subtle product placement.
We will develop new mental antibodies for this, we always do. Silver lining of sorts -- while short-form video content is making people illiterate, perhaps literacy will become a calm refuge once again.
We should be resisting any ad injection into ChatGPT, Claude, etc maintaining a firewall between what's acceptable in a paid product and what's not, and as long as open source Chinese models roughly keep parity, the big US labs can't pivot hard into exploiting users for ad revenues. Private hosting and bots are almost as good as ChatGPT with UI and UX, within a few percentage points as good in capabilities, and the pressure to go elsewhere is minimal. If they drive off a whole lot of independence minded users, they risk creating a community of people who'll create a very slick, workable alternative, while paying only a tenth or less what the frontier labs charge. As long as that dynamic cripples the efforts of big labs to enshittify, there's a good shot that the entire ecosystem fundamentally evolves to something better. I hope, anyway - it could just explode into a grotesque mess of user exploitation and yet more of the same.
I think at some point you'll be able to have good-enough AI on your phone to carry everywhere you go, and it'll do all the ad filtering and opsec and digital hygiene for you - everyone will have a high quality competent tech nerd in their pocket looking out for their best interests, and it won't just be a niche rebel nerd thing anymore.
Eh, if Google/Apple allows you to put it on your phone, which is highly doubtful at this point. Google would outright directly ban that kind of competition in the name of security. Apple would just ban an AI like that in the name of security even though it doesn't actually compete with them.
I'm seeing the start of this already, AFAICT. There have been a couple of YouTube videos with embedded ads that YouTube flipped over to a YouTube ad at exactly the point the sponsor part started.
Google is almost certainly getting ready to use AI to splice out in stream ads and replace them with Google ads.
ChatGPT, etc. right now is the early web where everything was free and everyone wondered how it would make money.
Soak it up because it won’t last long.
When discovery is mediated by LLMs, ranking a page is no longer sufficient because the system is not choosing a single best document. It is assembling an answer from spans that fit its internal representation of the problem, which quietly invalidates many of the assumptions SEO and ads were built on.
You can see this shift in the kinds of services being offered now. Instead of focusing on links, keywords, or bid optimization, teams are spending time on structured content that breaks cleanly into answerable fragments, on entity relationships and schema that make concepts legible to models, and on persona driven content that anticipates how questions will be interpreted rather than how pages will rank.
Measurement is shifting as well. Instead of impressions and clicks, people are running prompt level tests, checking whether their content shows up across different models, and tracking inclusion and citation patterns rather than traffic. In many cases, strong traditional pages disappear entirely from answers while smaller, better structured sources surface.
From the outside this looks like traffic declining. Internally it feels more like a loss of observability, where you cannot tell whether you were excluded, partially used, or summarized away into latent knowledge.
Google will likely face the same issue as AI Mode expands. Generating answers is not the hard part. Defining what visibility means when the retrieval layer is no longer exposed is.
‘Pic or it didn’t happen’ has now been replaced by ‘TikTok or it didn’t happen.’ Is it possible to enjoy something without there being video evidence of it? According to my gf and her female friends the answer appears to be no.
They can spare their ad income falling for a while, but making the first move is always risky. Should they let openAI go first and fail?
Where do you go now? You go make sure LLMs know about your site, you welcome the herds of bot crawlers and pray someone breaks the standstill before your business falters.
I'm not sure what impact this would be having on Adwords, but another commenter mentions that Google isn't hurting in the ad revenue department.
This suggests adword revenue is up, conversion to adword 'dollar' balances is inflating those balances, so both return per dollar in is down and even more down is return per adword balance dollar.
It's a leading indicator that quarterly-return focused Google must be scrambling to fix right now - they inflated themselves out of Q4 2025 but 2026 is a question mark, or to parle some Boxton Matrix, is the cash cow dying and if so is the extension strategy ad injection in AI responses, product placement in your AI videos, background changes in your family snaps, etc.
Search Ads and Partner Revenue = 230bn Youtube = 36bn Cloud = 40bn
Say they drop 100bn on search revenue. How well are they positioned to convert their user platform and search crawling infrastructure onto Gemini, and introduce an advertising platform into LLMs to replace what they had? I imagine they are as well positioned as OpenAI.
I would lose a lot of sleep if I paid out for puts on them.
There's Kagi, Brave Search, even DDG would be better.
But now people Google search: “my boyfriend is coming to town for the holidays and we are going to Chinatown and I want to have delicious dumplings with him because it was what we had on our first date, where should we go?”
So he now works to sell AdWords properly in that environment. I am wondering how or if OP took that into account with their new spend. What are other people doing?
I’ve also heard (probably via post+comments here on HN) that the new SEO is making tons of AI slop info pages on the site, not for humans but for AI crawlers to slurp, and then refer from prompts.
They're having a laugh if they think we'll keep paying that for no actual leads.
How long before we see sponsored ads placed alongside prompt answers?
For example, with video games I can go to sites like www.rockpapershotgun.com or others, or forums related to games, to see what the new products coming out. That's perfect in my world. No ads in my search, no ads in my email, no ads in youtube or whatever. But when I'm interested in seeing what's new, I can, on my terms, go and check out the new products.
This feels like one of the most surreal things I have read in a while, believing that the blog is authentically written by a real person. I can't put my finger on why.
I do feel like it's maybe time to rewatch BSG.
Google is far from dead. It still has the majority of the world’s online ad revenue, with Microsoft coming in second, then Meta at a far third. People assume that TikTok and Insta _must_ have the most since they assume that’s what all of their friends use, but even though they’re growing, they’re still not there yet.
Video ads on YouTube and others have a lot of play also, and everyone thinks of the TV commercials played during the Super Bowl.
But Google is still f-ing everywhere.
It’s fine to call them dying, but are they really when they are best positioned for ads in AI? OpenAI or Anthropic don’t have the data about users that Google has. There’s a reason that Buffett invested in Alphabet recently.
Sorry, couldn't resist! The correct word here is lose, when something is loose it means that it's not fastened or constrained, like a loose knot
I pivoted away from google search (duckduckgo instead primarily) but even then, the majority of "information" I'm looking for goes instead to chatgpt.
Also, a lot of ads now have QR codes so you can tell which physical ads are driving versus traffic versus those that aren't.
e.g. the "half of my advertising is a waste but I don't know which half" is not true anymore if you are using specific QR codes per location/advertisement.
[1]not an employee, sponsor, or autonomous agent of the above company
I wish it would actually die so that all those talented engineers could move on to solving non-ad problems.
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2020/03/google-says-it-doesnt-...
Looking at instagram where I don't block anything, most of what it suggests to me are soft porn or soft scams (generic chinese dropships marketed as a unique innovation).
The thing is the world of ads is far larger and more complicated than that. Just think of product placement in movies? That is an ad, have you stopped watching most movies?
What about content that is a thinly veiled ad? What about a set of bots that follows everything you post on line, and when it's little AI core figures out you are looking for something makes a suggestion under a post where you're asking questions?
Buying access to web search indices is not the same as having one.
(I love them but this is the hard truth)
With their current pricing they are out of their league of having any full-blown index, crawlers, people, what have you.
I would say year ago I was amazed how they are alive at all (unless I am missing something in their funding).
A competitive, general-purpose web search engine with its own full index is _brutally_ hard and expensive.
This is the reason there are only a few world-class like russian yandex, chinese baidu (to not state the obvious names like google).
What do you think a site like Google is giving you these days? They are explicitly bad at indexing the small web. Their search technology is not better than Kagi, and made worse by ads and LLM ad bias. So what is this big "world class" thing they do that can't be replicated?
The web is not the same place it was years ago. Indexing all the slop and scams and ads is not useful to me as a consumer.
Also, incentives are super high for businesses to create quality content for the open web to drive business. For example a car tire manufacturer could publish reliable restaurant reviews in order to encourage driving.
AI. I thought he was referring to how fast Google is improving their AI.
Search though?
It also made me wonder if this reflects conditions for individuals / SMEs rather than large corporate accounts. And I didn’t expect the story to come out of Durban - I would’ve guessed the US.
I haven't been to Durban lately, but my understanding is that the broader SA economy has been under pressure (high unemployment, etc.), and that can hit smaller/local businesses first. So it could simply be a rough patch for your market right now.
That said, if you’re seeing campaigns picking up on other platforms, you might be onto something, at least for your niche.
Looking at your website/content: you’re selling an experience, and this seems like a product that really benefits from strong visual marketing. Make it easy for someone new to "get it" in the first 10 seconds.
Three ideas: 1) Ride local trends: build demos around what’s currently hot in SA/Durban and showcase that with the Magicpods in short, punchy videos. 2) Consider adjacent use cases: beyond magic shows, this could be compelling for advertising, especially at conventions (e.g., ICC). That might be a natural expansion path if event bookings are slowing. 3) Try Airbnb Experiences, or local platforms, like daddysdeals.co.za :-)
Seemingly you don't want to target children directly. If they ask their parents for specific entertainment at a party, they're going to ask for entertainers they know, not companies acting as brokers and middlemen. They might want a particular clown (but probably not) but will never want a particular local vendor of clowns. You need to target the parents for that. If it were me doing the buying, I'd probably prioritize word of mouth recommendations if anyone had such, and otherwise for a large enough event like a wedding or graduation party, I'd look to professional planners. Assuming that's any kind of widespread pattern, you'd want to target strong relationships with planners rather than trying to advertise directly to consumers.
Did people really ever search Google to find party entertainment, and then ignore the search results and use the ads instead? Let alone Tik Tok videos? I guess I'm out of touch enough that the answer can be yes and I'm just that clueless about how small businesses work, but all the comments talking about LLM chatbot services are tripping me out. Y'all would ask ChatGPT who to hire for your kid's party?
Oh wow, this author is tone deaf to the entire situation that is occurring in the world right now. I just had a conversation with my 70 year old Aunt (no tech skills) about AI and its impact on the labor market and I used the example of how for the first time ever I actually believe she could build her own iPhone app by just talking to her computer. This is an hypothetical app that would have cost her $10k-100k or more in the very recent past. I really think the market for the very services this author is selling is evaporating or at least on hold while everyone is at least trying to diy it with AI.
Its more likely their your ranking dropped. Or a competitor got ahead of you. Google is still main source of leads for service businesses.
If you are old & previously ranked well the LLM's will also mention you similar to how Google did.
- Google, the company, is doing pretty well in the stock market.
- Google, the advertising company, isn't generating good ROI for its advertising customers.
From Google's point of view, they've been very gunshy about having ads be their only revenue stream for years; I wouldn't be surprised that the consequence is the value there is drying up.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/266249/advertising-reven...
Not saying ads don't work at all, they definitely increase awareness.
It all depends on how big you are, what you sell, and how people can or will find you. I sell something that some people REALLY want, but they will never think to Google if it exists, they just think it's not available anymore/end of story, and I rank #1 unpaid, it's frustrating.
Now I only have one ad platform I can get to work at this point and I've wasted so much money on others, trying again every few months, but they all seem to suck or I don't have the patience and pockets to try and figure them out compared to how I've figured out the one that works enough to make a living off of.
Is there any new powerful platform/aggregator in your market?
The first step you might take is to check that you are not advertising with AdWords partner networks, as they might be the reason for the clicks on your ads.
Second, you can check your server logs and verify clicks from Google Ads, especially the geolocation of those clicks. If they are not from your region and the visitors perform no action after viewing the first page, this is most probably click fraud.
I use our own open-source security platform (I'm a co-founder) for this purpose (1), as it's server-side and works even if bots aren't running JS. However, your website analytics might also be useful if they can collect events without JS.
I've been dealing a lot with click fraud on Google Ads, and it's usually hard to detect it without special tools.
Off the shelf click fraud software (for search) has never been ROI-positive for me when I run in A/B tests.
Fou analytics is a fun tool though for social/native etc
Page loading + no image loading = blacklist API.
PS. Seriously.
Not that I ever used it much (in fact, after all these years, I still didn't wrap my mind around anything but simple posts), but now, I basically only go there to do a post about a group I have (and that I had to remove from Meetup because Meetup is equal shares of terribly bad and terribly expensive) and answer some messages.
There's a generation (in fact several) of people that still want to meet in person, and the platforms that allowed us to create and join groups for it (Meetup was great for that during a golden period of 3-4 years) are all turning into garbage.
And by the way announced the world they are the source of evil!!
1. Check your search volume. Use Google Trends or the method I will share below. 2. Check how you spent in December vs how you spent during a previously great time. Understand if it's a volume issue or a conversion issue 3. See if anyone new entered your auction. If they did, find out what they're saying
-- 1a) Search Volume
Checking search volume: In the era of broad match, this is one of the most underrated approaches to diagnosing issues. Take a look at your `search exact match impression share` relative to your impressions on a few of your top keywords. Then measure out if search volume for your business is actually decreasing. Then, use the following rubric to diagnose futher:
1. Not decreasing. Move on to the next item 2. 5-10% decrease and competitive auction. If you have a decrease AND a competitive auction, a 20% drop in efficiency could be explained. 3. 5-10% decrease and a not-so-competitive auction. If this is the case, the drop in volume may not be what's causing your issues.
-- 1b) Click volume
Check your exact match impression > click rate. Similar to the last approach, this helps diagnose if there are SERP feature changes which could decrease the amount of clicks you're receiving despite demand remaining flat.
If this is the case, take a look at the SERP and find the new winners.
-- 2) Segment comparison
Compare December YOY and see what changed. Are you serving to a different age range? Different search term mix? Increased spend to search partners? Are the headline combinations which are serving different?
-- 3) Auction changes
Have you checked your auction insights? Are new competitors being more or less aggressive? If so, what are their headlines? Are they offering an easier booking experience than you are?
And... if Google is actually dead, you might try:
1. Meta ads. Turn off audience network, make sure you've got the conversions API set up, and see what happens. Expect leads to be lower intent. Make your creative dead simple. "If you're looking for kid party entertainment in Northdene..." Start with $20/day optimizing for leads.
2. Improve your form. I see typeform-style-forms do better than the long one you have.
3. (Maybe) If you don't already track `closed (won)` conversions into your google ads account, that could help. I find when I start tracking which searches turn into deals, I can restructure my account to de-prioritize the junk leads.
4. (Maybe) Add a soft form to each of your service pages. Basically an embedded form which starts by asking people softball questions like "How Old Are The Kids At Your Party." Once people start a form they're much more likely to complete it, even if the questions are very basic.
5. (Maybe) Add a way to give a phone call. Phone call leads convert 30-50% better in my experience. But, this isn't an option for every
The jump from the op's "i screwed up my google ads campaigns" to "Research shows that many young people are getting their information from short video platforms like TikTok"....
i mean, c'mon
I remember the rise and the fall of AltaVista search engine.
I remember the rise of Google that was able to circumvent all the "old days" SEO efforts by spamming keywords in the HTML headers. Then everyone was trying to guess how to game Google page rank algo.
Finally people learned how to cheat Google, searches on many topics are returning endless pages of spam, marketing content that is supposed to earn AdSenens money (Google's "disruption" of online ads, better than all those cringe banners, that, eventually, destroyed Google search).
Right now Bing is working better for me (Bing! WTF?), for some stuff I use Yandex (shrug), but most of the stuff goes through AI, if you ask them to provide source of the information and you check it, this seems to be working fine...
For the time being, until people learn how to feed AI bots with the manipulated content they want. This will be probably more complicated, but it will happen (gaming page rank was also harder than adding "right" words to HTML keywords), unless AI providers will be careful with what they give as a food for their hungry Nvidia GPUs.
But this will be more expensive than blindly scanning the internet. That's why I see here a proper place where governments should step in, finance curation of the content for AI, as this will benefit society in a big way.
I see here an opportunity for smaller players, like Mistral, who can get some gov/EU funding and provide more quality than others who will devour whatever they find.
The big underlying problem is that Google has no real incentive to change the way how it operates. Its search engine, which they crippled, is not really that important to Google anymore compared to the ad-revenue and other business ventures here. AI is the current insanity rage and Google went for it too. When you cripple the search engine, you can sell more bullshit to people, fake-generate and hallucinate a world wide web that is controlled by these walled garden corporations (Facebook is probably the best example of a walled garden, but there are many similar; twitter run by a crazy oligarch too, "bla bla bla log in to read news bla bla bla" - never going to do that, so they cut off my access to an open world wide web here).
I do not think Google can be fixed with the current setup though. It will just continue to steal money by taking our data and interconnecting this with other greedy private interests, now represented by lobbyists running the USA (and also other places, of course; just the USA being bigger than the other places, economically).
Google has to be split up and removed. There is no other way to fix it anymore. They want down a path from which they can not change anymore, because any change means less revenue, and no corporation wants to do so on its own.
> Research shows that many young people are getting their information from short video platforms like TikTok and Instagram. We are trying ads on there.
Well - circusscientist adds to this problem. They depend on ads, so they contribute to the overall problem. The issue is not just Google here; it is also commercial interests who think they have a right to pester-harass people via irrelevant crap (aka ads). Google killed ublock origin. Google controls the web virtually via chrome. We have a conflict of interests here. Google has no reason to change this, and many companies think they need to use ads. This is a problem. I believe in an ad-free world. I don't want to see any ads. Many years of commercial interests confused people into thinking ads are the way to go. I disagree. I think ads are evil and must die. And companies that have no alternative business model, who rely on ads, also have to go. Google is just sitting on top of it all, acting as a greedy parasite.
> We have an email newsletter
They still think anyone cares about email spam. I never subscribe to any "newsletter". A better model is to read up on things WHEN YOU VISIT THE WEBSITE. This works on many private websites too such as github. I can read when I want to, not when some bot spams me down with this irrelevant stuff (and admittedly I would not read ads anyway, but my point is about DELIVERY versus VISITING something here).
> We also plan to do some actual physical advertising
So he chose confrontation.
> I am AI assisted, very fast!
Why would I want to give my money to anyone using ads or wanting to lower the overall quality via AI? That makes no sense. Some people are beyond hope.
Franchises die. It's still cool to say "The originals were really cool", and always will be, but now we're talking about now. Star Wars is uncool. There are people who sort of automatically praise it and subtly put down those who don't like they're aligned with a magnetic field, sure, but they're in their own world. Indiana Jones and Ghostbusters are uncool now. Star Trek is almost there. AI is not cool and never will be. Tiktok is cool, but soon everything that is uncool will descend upon it.
Sorry. Bananas blacken and apples get spots. Time moves on.
Downvoting isn't cool. Reply instead.
I grew up before Google, I remember when it was just a useful search tool. Then an industry grew up around exploiting it in various ways and ads became a major revenue source for Google, completely changing the platform. I witnessed this entire online marketing/ad industry come into existence.
I have friends who worked in SEO for years. Very talented, smart people. But that industry is gone now. Likewise Google ads is clearly not long for this world as Google will probably get a lot more money leveraging their AI for product recommendations/sales etc.
People used creative thinking to create this industry, so the answer to "where do we go now?" is find the next one. It won't just be the same thing repeated, just like SEO and ad optimization where fairly major departures from the previous world of advertising and marketing they came from.
There you go.
There nothing about nostalgia, no real concern for Google as a company, or how the web used to work, etc. Just a small business trying to stay afloat.
let's take back the interwebs and have a single account where all apps store their data about you, which you can move around and also swap out clients for any data without companies blocking you
That said, I don’t ever want to see ads for it either. If I lived in Durban and wanted a juggling act, I’d like to be able to find it, as I’m sure all their clients would. I wonder if the market is just very competitive, or if they don’t show up on regulular searches for some reason.
Off-topic reply but I don't want to start another comment:
The problem about Google and AI has deeper layers: AI answers has trained users to not look into the source information (a.k.a websites), and websites are combating it by making themselves harder to crawl (for example, by enabling Cloudflare protection/verification), which in turn makes creating new search engine harder.
This down circle is currently unbreakable, which is a hellish situation for new comers, but great for established players such as Reddit, Facebook etc since they have internal search engine as well as mountains amount of content to provide.
If one day the big platforms (there are only handful of them) completely blocked Google from crawling them, that will be the true death of Google.
It's not the neatest but it feels real, like these guys are into entertainment for parties, not web design.
And if they’re unable to invest in their site or they’re simply shut out of the modern world, I’d assume the same applies to other aspects of their business as well.