I had a very interesting discussion with a friend today, where I was talking to her about the /r/golang thread about Rob Pike's comments to OpenAI and how the thread was full of bots talking with other bots. No idea why the density of bots was so high in that thread, it was kind of absurd to see.

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 :-/

Absolutely this. I recently got a nice photo taken with my kids and for the first time I... didn't post it on Facebook. I sent it to my family group chat. Yesterday I posted on Facebook for the first time in months and it was about the power being out for an hour in the ice storm. I haven't posted travel photos to FB in years.

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?

From my own experience as one grows over their 30's, or probably much older, to get to what you mentioned "money, houses, kids, friends", these ads pretty much don't target u very effectively any ways because one's priorities are shifted and you care more about other things than what the attention economy is all about. IOW these ads all about the people who have attention to spare.

It's interesting to see how much of a behemoth Discord has become. Seems like there's a Discord for everything - from open source projects to hobbies and games to individual groups of friends/family.

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.

> Our 30-year bender of putting our lives online and blurring the public and the private has finally ended: people don't want to be online, don't trust social media, don't really trust any media, and are living simple local lives with a small circle of friends that they get together with regularly in person.

That's a nice narrative, but its simplicity clashes with reality.

My two kids absolutely do not trust open social media (thankfully). My 16 year old has a IMessage group with his friends as well as a discord and that’s it. My 13 year old just uses iMessage with his friend group. My wife and I have taught them the risks of social media but never to the degree of their current distrust. They seem to have picked it ip on their own and want no part of X, insta, TikTok or anything else. They just want to talk to the friends they know.

> Our 30-year bender of putting our lives online and blurring the public and the private has finally ended

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.

None of the numbers I've seen on web usage, platform usage, etc. indicate people are significantly pulling away from online lives. Though, there has been a slight dip in daily social media browsing time in the last couple of years (of course, it also follows the end of the pandemic, and it hasn't ceded back to where it was prior).

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.

People didn’t leave social media, social media left them. Instagram used to show your friends, not it shows algorithmic content. Same for the other networks. People are still there but it’s now the new tv.

> people don't want to be online, don't trust social media, don't really trust any media, and are living simple local lives with a small circle of friends that they get together with regularly in person.

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 everybody bought only what they needed and ignored all the advertisements, our present level of economic activity would plunge.

Why would it plunge instead of re-focusing on things that are intrinsically important?

I'd say it was much shorter than 30 years. Facebook opened to the public in 2006, and I was surprised to learn Myspace (the first "normie" space on the Web) isn't much older. And before that your digital persona was separate from your offline persona, unless you were one of the grognards with a faculty .edu address.

It's the people with money, houses, and kids that departed the 'simple local' lifestyle when the Internet and social media become large. It's them that are re-discovering the joys of the simple local lifestyle.

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).

I’ve known a lot of neurodivergent and LGBT people, and I was in my late teens when The Internet happened and a young adult when the Web happened.

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.

> my anecdotal experience, it's moved to private, trust-based channels: iMessage, WhatsApp, email, face-to-face interactions

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 brief period where I could check Facebook and reliably find someone's name I forgot or figure out how to contact people or invite them to a gathering was pretty nice. Now everyone's on fifty apps I don't use, or installed but never remember to check. Oh well. Sorry, too stimulating for me to join your Discord and get hundreds of notifications, most of which don't concern me at all.

> WhatsApp

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.

I am a gen-z and most of my peers look at me weird when I express the same. It was once cool to have social media and presence -- I was only 8 when I made a facebook account. But now, things are different. I actively avoid social media and don't like to show myself online anywhere other than my personal website.

Meta appears to believe this, and so is pushing chatbot integration into private chats on Messenger and WhatsApp; presumably that will be the vector by which they push product advertisements.

> people don't want to be online, don't trust social media, don't really trust any media, and are living simple local lives with a small circle of friends that they get together with regularly in person.

maaaaybe 2% of the people…

What’s really interesting to me is how this coincides with a larger push to break up more and more ties that kept our society going for the last 30–50 years. Look at what’s happening to globalization and the push to near-shore. Look at the fragmentation of media into private channels and closed groups, the erosion of shared narratives, and the growing skepticism toward institutions that used to act as connective tissue.

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.

I think you're correct to a degree. Instututions like social media and google ads were given a very generous chance, we gave them our money and attention, they gave us scams (especially facebook) and enshittification.

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.

This is 100% what I see too.

100% this. I remember when I took advantage of being online and not really competing in SEO, it was simply a matter of being real. At the time, I didn’t realize it was just arbitrage: I was naturally in a space with fewer participants and most organizations didn’t even know the rules yet.

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.

> If everybody bought only what they needed and ignored all the advertisements, our present level of economic activity would plunge.

Shh! One must never question the ponzi scheme.

You're right - it was called FoxTrax, it's a fairly interesting piece of engineering.

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 :)

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

> You can't see the ball in American football, either.

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.

What I’ve always found fascinating is that I could always clearly see the puck in any stadium, no matter how high up I sat. It was impossible to miss.

However, when watching hockey on TV, it’s incredibly difficult to see the damn thing.

The effect is so powerful, it fools professionals and the camera-operator: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8fioVbt7eF8

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

pretty common with my crowd of fans to even get a little giddy when the play is so deceptive that it fakes out the camera man and they dont realize theyre focused on the wrong player until a second or two passes

I'd go a step further and say the ball/puck is not the interesting thing to watch.

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.

It's kinda interesting to see how advertising is evolving. I'll mindlessly scroll Instagram reels once in a while and every other reel is an ad with the sponsored tag, with an obvious thing being sold and advertised. A fair amount of non-"ads" are influencers or celebrities promoting a product on their personal IGs with the #ad.

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.

For sure, I've been hesitantly awaiting ChatGPT's first "sponsored" reply, or at least, one that features a "sponsored" product or link.

> 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.

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.

Better to stop playing the game.

--WOPR

I don't know why people are down-voting it. You might not like it, you may not think it's good. But this is absolutely happening and there's a lot of data out there about it.

It's unnatural to search an LLM for a product. It's why Alexa never became a shopping portal.

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.

> 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?

He had presumably used it for 10 years successfully. Surely he gained some expertise over that time period.

Nobody goes there any more. It's too crowded.

-- Yogi Berra

I have a feeling that it is mostly unsophisticated advertisers bidding up the price of AdWords.

100%. My business is in the smart home space. I peruse various smart home subreddit communities, and they all have a few brands that are aggressively celebrated on Reddit. Market research, financial disclosures, and other public data largely indicates that these brands are not all that popular, especially in the biggest-spend markets.

We don’t find Reddit ads valuable.

Let's be honest, most "Reddit marketing" isn't about on-site ads, it's about posting UGC that promotes your product in some way.

It loaded in far less than a second for me, almost immediate.

A surgeon in our family got basically all his (private) clients from Google. Spend was multiple k per month. If you consider that one surgery brings in 7k in revenue, then those numbers actually make sense. He's retired now but did this up to 2y ago.

> Really, Google ads have been dead for a long time.

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.

By "here" I think you mean SA. Reddit is big in the U.S.

Occasionally post reddit content or occasionally post reddit ads?

Search died ages ago [1]. Ads dying is a direct consequence of that.

[1] https://www.wheresyoured.at/the-men-who-killed-google/

Google search died years ago already.

Gemini is the new search.

> their search product is dead

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 search ain't dead at all: it became so good something silly like 99% of all the queries have to be answered by the Google AI before the very first "result". And for those who want more, there's the "continue this discussion with Gemini".

Now this may not be great for Google Ads (dunno about that) but Google search now works better than it ever did.

> The natural equilibrium for a perfect ad market is for the ad spend to be exactly equal to increase in revenue

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.

Agree, ran a business for years and I’ve seen the slow but steady decline of Google ads.

Ultimately I relied more on returning customer and mouth to mouth recommendations, kept lowering the Google ads budget.

And equally I know many people running non software businesses whose experience is the complete opposite of yours and Google ads has and continues to drive the majority of their revenue.

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.

The question is, why has this post been massively upvoted?

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.

Basically any online shop with decent volume / revenue is going to be spending 100s of thousands if not millions of dollars a month on Google ads. (Not just Google Ads, also Facebook ads etc.)

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.

Either Claude or OpenAI, going by all the ads I see.

> the basics of demand

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.

>By scraping TikTok and Discords?

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?

Business directory for most of the telephone era was simply known as "the yellow pages". About once a quarter we get a color mailer with all the local plumbers, fencing companies, electricians etc. for homeowners who want a company that is actually licensed and insured.

I anticipate a cottage industry of “AI optimization” types similar to the current SEO crowd. I have not seen too much of it yet, though.

instead of hosting a website you host... SERVICE.md, BUSINESS.md, .... or maybe a MCP server describing what you provide /s

There is a meetup-like platform called Spontacts here in Germany. I suspect that for the moment it is only available for meetups in Germany, but who knows, maybe it'll expand internationally if it's successful.

I meant both, and you are correct 100% that meet up has entirely gone to shit.

Any state sponsored actor can pay to play.

It's how we got our internet before the internet.

It's what Americans call non free to air television. You're probably being downvoted because it's intrensic there and they assume you must know about it.

It's like TikTok but you hit buttons instead of swiping.

Cloudflare seems to be sorting it out (mostly).

It wasn't really AI. Fundamentally, building a website the "traditional" way (hosting agreement, apache install, your favorite way to convert data formats that don't hate you into HTML, CSS, and JavaScript) was always a learned and quite technical skill; most people weren't doing it for fun, they were doing it because it was the only way to be on the web.

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).

No, google search has stopped being useful years before "AI".