Google Shattered Human Connection | Hacker News Reader

Google Shattered Human Connection

staltz.com

21 pointsfeross16 comments

> In fact, this criticism extends to all search engines, including the one I use, DuckDuckGo. But since Google is still the dominant one, this article is focused on them.

Oh ok so clickbait title.

The whole premise of the article is quite silly. No thanks, I don't want a human connection and asking someone for help when looking up information.

There is plenty to be criticized about Google and modern web but this ain't it.

> No thanks, I don't want a human connection and asking someone for help when looking up information.

Ironically, at the rate the quality of Google results is current diminishing, you may need a human connection in order to have any sense that the information you are getting is accurate in the very near future.

I think it won't be the worst thing if curation is seen as valuable again.

Even that's not really a thing anymore thought right?

You just ask ChatGPT because Google is just churn SEO results now that blabber on about anything but what you are after.

Can't even get a cooking recipe without reading a poem about it.

Are the SEO people not busily trying to game ChatGPT? It may be harder, and the cycle times longer, but I wouldn't expect LLMs to be any more immune than Google's algorithm. The algorithm, at least, has human intervention, while LLMs black boxes.

It's great if ChatGPT is temporarily better, but I don't expect it to last. We still have an attention economy and a lot of people want a piece of it. They'll put a lot of money and effort to get it.

I would have thought they have different enough inputs. ChatGPT would get fed curated literature vs Google just crawling everything.

I’d actually read the article if it was poems, especially funny ones. Instead it’s 10 paragraphs of SEO’d “history” of food, how much their dead great-grandma’s 2nd cousin loved this recipe, shameless self promotion, and some vague thing about how this’ll fix your marriage and keep the kids happy.

All that for a 3-step recipe to make baked potatoes, and all you needed out of it was the time & temp because you already had it prepped beforehand.

I still trust google results over the lying robot.

Which is why we need an open source robot than can run locally and we know what it was trained on.

This is a phenomenon more generally true with regard to the internet, automation, and especially AI.

Of course, you can say that books, encyclopedias, and the like have taken away some need for human connection, but Google and AI takes that to the next level, a level which is qualitatively different than simply looking in an encyclopedia.

Google of course does this specifically with its FAQ-style result, but that is only the beginning.

One of the ultimate ends of AI is a society in which a human beings can function anonymously and it will lead to a weird level of narcissism in which people don't much care about others because they never see their faces.

In short, the author of this blog is completely, 100% right. Sadly, many people here and in other articles have commented that they like this idea, but for those people: take a moment to realize the societal effects when it is taken to the extreme. Of course, for those who are inclined to avoid human interaction for some reason (perhaps they were nerds in grade school), this may initially seem good (and I understand that, I was a nerd in grade school), but this new level of anonymity and lack of connection when it comes to getting information is NOT good for us.

> but this new level of anonymity and lack of connection when it comes to getting information is NOT good for us

I really think this is the kind of existential risk that people don’t think about when they think about AI existential risk.

The whole thing either rules the world or comes down when humans no longer know how to cooperate.

Most people think about Terminator-style scenarios when it comes to AI, but in reality the dangers it poses will be like the proverbial frog boiling to death. It will come slowly but surely and be on the level of societal problems that eventually make society collapse rather than a killer robot from the future.

> less weaponized and polarized.

stopped right there. this guy clearly wasn't on Usenet

Least Usenet wasn't pretending to be something else.

Good write up.

This site and 4channel are one of the few anti-pattern places to what Google created.

The other tragedy from the old Internet - Social networking is well and truly dead replaced by Social Advertising/Political Media.

There's still a few good old forums around at least. No, not Reddit.

On HN we are basically farmed for content. A good post leans more towards an informative article but the real kicker is that this "forum" will never cultivate any project. You cant start a topic that aims to write any code, build any hardware or cultivate a data set. Of course people use to blabber randomly in the old days the same way I'm doing here but then you would buy a boat or an old shed and blabber while painting and raking leavs.

In general, since the beginning, you cant ask people on the internet to do jack shit for you besides throwing small nuggets of information. It use to be that you could ask people to do real work.

Barn raising is the superior technology. You show up, enjoy the process and contribute to the social fabric.

Google's war against people interacting goes quite a bit further. Nr 1 was probably killing yt video replies.

What world dictator decided it was a good idea to slap rel=nofollow on links in comments? The level of insult where a payment that tiny is still to much to ask for the effort of making a contribution. Then some how, now that it became 100% a waste of time, the quality of comments declined amazingly. 100% a waste of time as in: You cant spend time on it if you have productive things to do.

This whole judging people (their homepage) by drive by, zero click thought visitors that google send to the website.

Google sends Insane Jack to your homepage, Insane Jack writes a comment that is Insane with a few links that are Insane too. No one did anything wrong here. Insane Jack is just being himself. But then Google judges you by having Insane Jack as a visitor and punishes you permanently for allowing Insane Jack to post links.

It's like you had a house guest 10 years ago who said something wrong. You threw him out and told him not to come back but hey! We should continue to blame you for it. Specially the guy who brought the guest to your house should really blame you.

The nuking of threaded comments on youtube was also one of those dictatorial acts. If you still thought you had to disagree with something in the video you could press the thumbs down button...

What if someone is wrong on the internet but you are not allowed to talk back, is he still wrong?

Overall, in hindsight, the world wide web was a pretty bad idea. If you now want to interact with people you call them or send them a message. I'm jokingly doing this while they are in the same room. That way they look up from their screen.

> Google popularized the habit of taking things out of context.

Maybe?

It's easy to blame X; but more challenging to show that X did Y in some objective way.

My response is that Google--and tech in general--is mechanism; people are the real challenge.

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