The Golden age of Internet comes to a close?

Users of adblock, duckduckgo, etc. are a self-selecting population (people motivated to try to avoid advertising and savvy enough to do it in a non-stupid way). Which means advertising will be aimed more and more at reaching and motivating stupid people / nontechnical people.

Thanks a lot savvy jerks.

the thing that's always confused me about the entire modern web economy being based on advertising is...who the hell are these people clicking on ads and spending money based on them? obviously they exist, but it's hard to relate to.

advertising all content will be aimed more and more at reaching and motivating stupid people / nontechnical people.

that sure is a hardworking slash

cat-walking-across-desk clicks, all of them

all content will be slash

the thing that's always confused me about the entire modern web economy being based on advertising is...who the hell are these people clicking on ads and spending money based on them? obviously they exist, but it's hard to relate to.

― lil urbane (Jordan), Friday, July 17, 2015 10:09 PM (16 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

you don't have to click on it. a lot of times all it has to do is load in the browser.

you don't have to search far for an example, because this forum uses (used?) ads to pay for the servers this site is hosted on, isn't it?

i always have ad blocker on, so i don't know if they're still going the ad route.

i recall there was a fundraiser, so that might've been enough to remove ads for the next year or so on the site?

anyway, if you use an ad blocker, those sites you may like kind of suffer. then again, you can just give them some money, which i think works better.

aside from the harbingers of what's to come...

in some ways, the last few years have been kind of a golden age surely? there has never been such a breadth of information available. don't like 2.0 social media stuff? you don't have to use it (yet). the gated walls have started to appear but they certainly haven't closed in.

i mean this is an obvious point, but surely the ennui is simply a matter of having too much of a good thing. along with faster (broadband) and unrelenting (smartphones, spending more time at a computer for work etc.) access to it. roman-emperor-after-an-orgy vibes.

people still haven't quite adjusted from the scarcity mentality that has characterised anything good prior to the industrial revolution.

sure, i just mean that advertisers must see enough return on their investment that they keep paying for ad space, and that in itself boggles my mind. i have an irrational fear that one day they'll realize that no one pays attention to the garbage white noise pop-ups and sidebars, and it'll all come crashing down.

xp

They have an advertising budget to spend.

lots of unscientific ad spending happens on pretty much every medium

yeah, it's kind of hilarious how much companies spend on ads just for the hell of it.

anyway, relevant article regarding safari on mobile being able to block ads, as a refresher: http://www.niemanlab.org/2015/06/a-blow-for-mobile-advertising-the-next-version-of-safari-will-let-users-block-ads-on-iphones-and-ipads/

The potential impact of “Content Blocking Safari Extensions” even goes beyond blocked ads. Apple is explicitly allowing the blocking of cookies on a site-by-site basis. For example, you could build an extension that blocked the cookies that allow a newspaper paywall to work. The Yourtown Times allows you 10 stories free a month? It’s probably using a cookie to keep track of that count. Block that cookie and the paywall comes tumbling down — you’re a fresh visitor every time. Imagine being able to download an extension that blocked paywall cookies on the top 50 paid news sites. It wouldn’t even be particularly hard to code; unless Apple chooses to prevent it, someone will do it. News sites would be able to build workarounds — changing cookie IDs regularly, requiring user login from article 1 — but winning that sort of cat-and-mouse game is something publishers are unlikely to be good at.

lots of unscientific ad spending happens on pretty much every medium

"Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don't know which half." - John Wanamaker.

Market leaders don't need to be able to track ROI for every dollar of ad spending, though, to think they're still justified in doing the spending.

Cf. Tracy Flick in "Election": "Coca-Cola is by far the world's number one soft drink and they spend more money than anybody on advertising. I guess that's how come they stay number one."

The idea is that if you see the brand "Coke" frequently enough, there's a greater chance that when you would otherwise think "I want a soda" you instead think "I want a Coke." So they want it blinking at you from every purchasable surface, as often as possible. You don't need to click on an ad and then make a conscious purchasing decision based on your affection for (or agreement with) those ads.

^^^

advertising is such a shell-game it's a sad miracle so much of our economy is funded by it

like THAT'S the mysterious blackhole our capitalistic overlords are happiest about throwing money into

labor, r&d, long-term investments eh not so much

you don't have to search far for an example, because this forum uses (used?) ads to pay for the servers this site is hosted on, isn't it?

for un-logged-in users only iirc, although maybe the funding was an issue as to whether ads would have to be shown to all?

Personally, I'd endure the possibility of seeing an ad if that were the price to pay for ilx. Probably better than assuming it's all magical and free and there's no friction or gravity at work in the world.

Maybe I'd draw the line at "jjusten (brought to you by Electro-Harmonix)"

What if we have to make sponsored posts sometimes. "sorry, had to take a break to refresh with a glass of water and some vyvanse (ask your doctor!) anyway that gawker, tsk tsk"

the golden of the internet has yet to come

adblock isn't about capitalism. it's about security. allowing ads on your browser is putting your computer at severe and immediate risk. effectively monetizing content is the least of our concerns right now.

It think it's fairly clearly about convenience? These ads distract me - this product will remove them.

my computer is fuckin aged, it can't take the hit of loading unnecessary bullshit

at this point adblock has moved to a security issue because of the constant bugs where someone can insert malicious content onto a page with an ad, and then inject malware.

for me the more pressing matter is whether carles is right that ultra-optimized, contentless posts in volume for a general audience will always beat quality posts on a particular subject. like if you are an investor in a middling sized media company, which would you want to see more of? it's a rephrasing of a very old question, obvs - these tensions have always existed - but has the clear runaway success of the content farm model tilted the answer decisively (for the present moment at least?) i hear stories about websites where writers are told to produce 4 articles every... hour

That doesn't surprise me. I went over to the dark side but sometimes we would joke about web stories among ourselves like how dumb is this I bet it will do 20k hits in an hour... It was almost predictable like the worse it was the better it would do

last summer when i was really desperate for money i tried to make some doing true content-farm writing, mocking up phony blog posts on set 'topics', the whole job seemed to involved appropriating content from elsewhere and casting it into their format to look 'original', but i was terrible at it, maybe i should have plagiarized a little in college so i would have learned a useful life skill

Truth. A friend of mine, currently funemployed, recently found that some work done for $15/hour via elance was being repackaged and sold again on Fiverr, presumably for $5. It is a ridiculous and mostly bottom-feeding economy.

Some American English-major types, who live in gleaming cities with high costs-of-living, have approached this economy with the expectation of a white-collar income. They are in competition with subcontinental labor that will do just-good-enough work for far less.

So, woe unto my fellow English-major types who live in gleaming cities with high costs-of-living. They would be better off seeking salaried PR, advertising, or technical writing jobs - for which the competition is still fierce, but it has the potential of allowing them to continue to live in their tiny apartments in said gleaming cities, and occasionally getting kick-ass ethnic takeout.

ars technica just posted something on content farms:

http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2015/07/inside-an-online-content-mill-or-writing-4156-words-a-day-just-to-earn-lunch-money/

my feeling is that content farms, like email spam, are an internet problem of the past. the people who came up with these brilliant ideas no longer want your clicks; they just want to control your computer and extort you for money to decrypt your files.

well there are actual content farms like that and then there is viralnova, playbuzz etc which i guess are the "highbrow" alternative :/

that's a good report from inside the beast though. i could read those all day.

The internet has merely centralized and streamlined the cacophony.

In the end, I submitted such fine platitudes as “In the end, a corn maze is a sight to see.”

If there's one thing about the golden age of Internet, it's that it's always been gone.

i did that for a couple years. six "articles" a day, five days a week. my politics changed.

i wrote a really good one once explaining what a computer file was. that was my happiest moment. i still think of it.

The golden age of *everything* has always been gone.

http://bitterempire.com/on-social-media-culture-and-the-hellscape-of-writing-in-the-era-of-new-media/

the hardest part was finding writable articles in their giant dump of seo-bomb topics, most of which were garbage (based on searches that had had no successful results, or had been misconstrued by the wretched peons who converted them to topic sentences) and many of the rest of which required actual research and care and couldn't be written quickly enough to be worth it. sometimes i would write the same article again and again, changing the words each time. eventually the topics slowed to a drip and then dried up completely, sending the forums that had until then mostly just been where people posted the depressingly awful premises of their uncompleted novels into horrifying lamentation.

The golden age of *everything* has always been gone.

Going back a bit:

i don't understand why people would want to nationalise a company that produces rigged results. obviously google has rigged search. so that page with no links/backlinks and no seo/optimization will never appear in your search, or, if it does, it'll be close to dead last. and even with all of that, if it's a popular keyword, you have to pay your way to the top. which is why search results are dominated by large companies/entities

search is one of the biggest things in tech that is prime for disruption, sorry to use garbage biz slang

Is there some objective idea of 'searchability' that you reckon should drive up a page with no links and no links to it? Google are fairly clear that "stuff you find via a lot of links" is one of the main ingredients of it's magic spice.

Beyond that there are a few things that you can do, which is why SEO is an industry. But SEO is like advertising in that you're paying for some, and some is visibly better than none, but beyond that it gets a little unclear. Obviously Google is never going to say "these guys here appear to have figured out our algorithm", not least because the algorithm's always changing.

Unless you are going full conspiracy, and you reckon there's a line of code that goes "if $seocheckhascleared", which would be suicide - it couldn't stay secret, and people would abandon Google - no-one would use a pay-to-play* search engine.

It would also be stupid suicide, because beyond "no-one has paid for this", all people really want is the most popular results, and nobody's that bothered that this is kind of a cyclical definition.

*I'm assuming you're not actually freaking out about people being able to buy denoted ads for certain keywords, right?

there is a human-social-behavior premise behind the use of the algorithm, too, which is that people will link to things that are of value to people. if there's something really that valuable that no one at all links to then… welp… maybe they need to be getting the word out themselves?

yeah... but... the value of a search engine is also to find things that people AREN'T linking to. like if i'm searching some obscure subject, i would be very happy to find the obsessive loner's deep but utterly overlooked site rich with information and old scanned documents or whatever, even though it is a musty, unloved site linked to by no one. like this was a lot of the promise of the "old internet" - whatever you search, someone out there is working hard on it! - and why it's always so delightful to find a 1998-era site of that type. i dunno. it's sorta like how these days, searching for a band and their lyrics will turn up a hundred bad auto-generated lyrics database sites and bury the site where someone has been analyzing their lyrics in response-poems for the last ten years or whatever. be nice to find the latter once in a while. i'm just an old crank though.

Maybe what Dr. Casino needs is a search engine that automatically filters out anything Google's algorithms would have boosted, on the presumption that anything Google boosts is either too obvious to bother with, or is probably being gamed/rigged. An ungoogle, an Elgoog.

The metaphor could be the way the Dead's old sound system worked (two microphones run out of phase; any signal common to both is removed by summing the equal and opposite waveforms).

http://www.theawl.com/2014/10/cash-and-anxiety-on-the-weird-new-internet

like this was a lot of the promise of the "old internet" - whatever you search, someone out there is working hard on it! - and why it's always so delightful to find a 1998-era site of that type.

finally clicked the about page a couple weeks ago on a website i've used daily for years and discovered an unexpected memoir of time spent on this web

Sure, and the old internet would have had a gopher site which would have these troves of information, and maybe just written down on a post-it note somewhere by People Who Know, but the web is based on links. If it's on the web, someone somewhere will have linked to it (if they don't, it is effectively not on the web, you dig?), you just need to figure out the correct collection of search terms - an interesting game in itself.

Enjoyed that unexpected memoir. Thanks, dlh.

the old internet still exists. on a whim i was trying to find out more information on commercial 8mm films, and i found a labor-of-love site. you could tell it was a "labor-of-love" site because in the middle of all of this extremely useful information on old film there was a lot of crap about how we should all immediately turn to jesus christ and how plurality is killing this country (by which i can only assume he means america, because really, who else would say that sort of shit?)

be careful what you wish for, people.

http://www.theguardian.com/media/2015/jul/19/ad-tech-online-experience-facebook-apple-news

the bandwidth argument against microtargeted ad bloat