Author Topic: OPINION >>> Content no longer maters  (Read 1957 times)

Mackin USA

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OPINION >>> Content no longer maters
« on: August 25, 2018, 11:46:35 AM »
It's the filtering and the ordering of the content that matters today.

The "Tech Giants" have control over that.

The average user is being fed what the Giants want you to see.
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Brad

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Re: OPINION >>> Content no longer maters
« Reply #1 on: August 25, 2018, 12:32:00 PM »
Can you elaborate?

I definitely think that our current system favors big brands and that the mainstream media is now owned by those big brands so they get special treatment which is dangerous.

Mackin USA

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Re: OPINION >>> Content no longer maters
« Reply #2 on: August 25, 2018, 12:43:39 PM »
Brad

I'm not referring to products.
I mean https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ideology

BIG Tech can use its power to influence the uneducated masses.
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BoL

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Re: OPINION >>> Content no longer maters
« Reply #3 on: August 25, 2018, 12:52:52 PM »
At G, they just decided to use Wiki as a seed list and ranked things accordingly. Searching and sorting the world's info in an egalitarian way was just too much hassle ;)

Kidding aside, I'd agree. Things are fairly centralised right now and the major platforms have a major role in deciding what gets heard and what doesn't.

gm66

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Re: OPINION >>> Content no longer maters
« Reply #4 on: August 25, 2018, 01:26:56 PM »
With my amazon site i found that long content got some of my queries into the top 30 right off  the bat with no link-building, ~6K word pages.

But ideologically, yes Mr Mackin.
Civilisation is a race between disaster and education ...

Mackin USA

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Mr. Mackin

ergophobe

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Re: OPINION >>> Content no longer maters
« Reply #6 on: August 26, 2018, 06:45:42 PM »
BIG Tech can use its power to influence the uneducated masses.

And we are all uneducated in many important areas of life. That is the key thing to remember.

At G, they just decided to use Wiki as a seed list and ranked things accordingly. Searching and sorting the world's info in an egalitarian way was just too much hassle ;)

I don't think it's quite right to say it was too much hassle. I would say that with existing tech and the resources available, the only other way to create a seed list is to hire a team of bona fide experts at huge expense. In sixteenth-century history (one of the few areas that I could call myself an expert), I have to say that Wikipedia has gone from being a joke to being my most common starting point.

Basically, getting your seed list would require vastly more effort than creating a new edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica. I don't see a source other than Wikipedia that could fit the bill for diversity of content and quality of content. You not only need all the info that's in the EB, you need a hundred times that breadth and you need it in 100 languages. And the additional languages are not translations, it's new, non-overlapping content that is in typically created from scratch. If you read a few languages, it can be enlightening to read the "same" article in multiple languages.

What do you think of Neil De Grasse Tyson? Should we use Cosmos reboot show notes as a seed? He's a brilliant guy, right?

In fact, if Neil De Grasse Tyson had taken an hour to read the Wikipedia article on Giordano Bruno, the first episode of the Cosmos reboot would not have been a complete abomination to historians. Tyson was literally 100 years out of date on his historiography of Bruno, while Wikipedia did a fine job of summarizing scholarship.

For most topics, I think Wikipedia is actually the best choice among a set of inherently flawed choices of seed lists. What if they had used the Cosmos show notes?
« Last Edit: August 26, 2018, 06:48:31 PM by ergophobe »

BoL

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Re: OPINION >>> Content no longer maters
« Reply #7 on: August 26, 2018, 08:06:11 PM »
Ergo, my G comments was very much tongue in cheek as I see their algo as a black box, they could perhaps have some weighting towards authorities or 'well curated human resources' outside G, I di not know. Of course, they did invest in freebase which is very much similar to wiki.

Being the arbiters of information is ultimately subjective, the issue is G, FB et al pretty much being black boxes. Wiki is great in the sense that their whole decision making process is transparent. The talk pages apparently reach a consensus for more important topics. People reporting stuff or being blackballed on social networks seems more like a black box.

>Neil De Grasse Tyson

Comes across as immensely smart and sociable, but for me Seth Lloyd is very much more eloquent in sharing his wisdom, purely IMO.

As I said in the previous post, it seems things are too centralised, there's a bottleneck at these huge portals. The ideas of consensus, personalisation, AI, filter bubbles surely all play a part- I very much like the idea of information availability being a transparent process. Nightmare for potential spamming mind you.

ergophobe

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Re: OPINION >>> Content no longer maters
« Reply #8 on: August 26, 2018, 09:38:21 PM »
Ergo, my G comments was very much tongue in cheek

Oh, I understood that. But I also thought it was an interesting question - what *should* the seed pages be? I could not come up with anything better than Wikipedia.

Quote
things are too centralised, there's a bottleneck at these huge portals.

It's scary. No question about that. It's interesting. When the Soviet Union fell, it felt like the trend in the political world was toward decreasing centralization after roughly 1000 years of increasing centralization (and it's why I suspected back then that ultimately the EU was going to step back from some of the integrations). But in the commercial world, it is more and more of a winner take all world.

My general preference is for entities (govts, companies, etc) to be less centralized, but for the means of intercommunication to be better... and now it seems that the owners of the means of intercommunication have managed to create a nexus that frightens most of us here.
« Last Edit: August 26, 2018, 09:42:27 PM by ergophobe »

Brad

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Re: OPINION >>> Content no longer maters
« Reply #9 on: August 26, 2018, 10:52:14 PM »
>seed

I would use Wikipedia and Curlie.org both as a starting crawl and as a ranking indicator of some sort. Curlie editors seem to be working to clear dead wood and adding some modern links as well.  It's not perfect but Wikipedia and Curlie are the two biggest indexes of human reviewed links left.

>centralized

Most of the complaints about "silos" are aimed at the big social networks (eg. Facebook, Twitter).  What the younger crowd don't gronk is that if FB and Twitter implode tomorrow we are left with Google again as the sole gatekeeper and we will be almost back to where we were 10 years ago.  The last Silo.  Granted Google's monopoly is not quite as solid as it was before the social networks drove some big wedges in it, but they still have the lion's share of search.  I mean, right now when I blog I syndicate out to many social networks and I get instant traffic without G.  But, one by one the social networks are starting to shut off syndication from the outside and when they finally cut us off we are left with Google and a smidge of Bing and that's it. There are almost no alternative search platforms left.

That's a long way of getting to, I'm glad you guys have not lost sight of the Google-Silo.  I never thought you would.

ergophobe

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Re: OPINION >>> Content no longer maters
« Reply #10 on: August 27, 2018, 12:41:01 AM »
That's a long way of getting to, I'm glad you guys have not lost sight of the Google-Silo.  I never thought you would.

Way back on WMW, someone said (maybe quoting someone else): "If you have a business plan that depends on Google, you don't have a business plan." That always stuck with me. I think it's exaggerated, but it's a good quip to keep in mind.

Mackin USA

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Re: OPINION >>> Content no longer maters
« Reply #11 on: August 27, 2018, 10:38:44 AM »
"If you have a business plan that depends on Google, you don't have a business plan." That always stuck with me. I think it's exaggerated, but it's a good quip to keep in mind.

I'm not so sure that it is exaggerated...

If you run your business, your website as if Google didn’t exist and concentrate on value given to your customers Google will most likely give you some well deserved traffic anyway. We cannot get caught up and be worried too much about the never ending algorithm changes that Google puts out every year.
https://effortless.marketing/success-without-google-traffic/
Mr. Mackin

ergophobe

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Re: OPINION >>> Content no longer maters
« Reply #12 on: August 27, 2018, 02:26:51 PM »
I say it's exaggerated in the sense that I see people as farmers or miners.

Farmers, in theory, have a resource that, if they work their field right, increases in value over time. Miners extract what value is there and then the land is worthless.

If you have a "farmer" business that depends on building long-term value and that long-term value is completely dependent on Google, you're in trouble.

So you might have a plugin like Streak that plugs into GMail. For them, that's a great way into a market. If they're farmers, they are figuring out what they will do if Google decides they don't want plugins anymore. If they are miners, they'll make as much money as they can and hope to cash out before that day comes. It's not my job to say Option 2 is wrong or stupid until I know the goals and finances of the company.

Mackin USA

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Re: OPINION >>> Content no longer maters
« Reply #13 on: August 28, 2018, 11:47:14 AM »
:-)
« Last Edit: August 28, 2018, 02:03:21 PM by Mackin USA »
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