We had to hire a full time person to monitor and block click-trick "Continue" / "Download" scam ads on Google Ad Manager. With the amount of human training we did blocking these ads, google could absolutely solve this problem instantly. The ad creatives are nearly identical. We were seeing new ad accounts targeting our specific domain daily (ad account names like {sitename}339, {sitename}340, etc)
When we asked our reps, they dance around the question by saying they would "escalate to engineering" or some bs like that.
Google just makes far too much money to stop. My guess is that its >40% of AdX display revenue, based on the % of scam ads that come through ad manager.
Context: our site did ~$5m AdX revenue annually, mostly US audience. High CPM niche. This was ~7 years ago till 2 years ago when we sold the business, I would guess it's still happening based on ads I see browsing the internet.
Marketplace. It's horrible, but the area I live in has mostly abandoned craigslist and if you want to buy/sell used stuff, marketplace is where you have to be.
I feel like Craigslist squandered its effective monopoly with online classifieds.
While I do not think that the company needed to modernize the site’s UI, it baffles me that their anti-spam tools are so rudimentary. Most searches yield irrelevant keyword-bombed results, and, such results tend to be nearly identical listings.
I had yearned for a viable Craigslist alternative for years. Sadly, Facebook Marketplace won. I don’t feel comfortable searching for anything due to the fact that Facebook will inevitably use my queries to further profile me.
It wouldn't have helped. In Australia we have Gumtree which has a UI that is just as modern as Facebook but it was still crushed. No one can compete in a space that lives on network effect.
I recently perused Marketplace, and it appears to be so thoroughly infested with barely disguised scams, bogus prices and other garbage as to be usable by only the most intrepid and determined shoppers.
Marketplace aggressively curates to your searches and interactions. So much so you have to be careful with your browsing otherwise your recommendations get off.
My guess is that the default state is the scam garbage. It quickly learns your preferences. Which I hate. I miss having my 5 sections of craigslist I could browse over my morning coffee and not feel like I'm missing a deal.
Github is claiming that a usage spike in 2026 is the cause of availability issues in 2025, so their explanation is clearly incomplete at best. The usage spike may be why things have failed to get better despite them putting effort into improving things, but it isn't the root cause of problems.
But the outages have been getting worse and worse even before anything related to AI took off.
The issue is that they're not a scrappy startup anymore, they are defacto running the internets development infrastructure and are owned by a trillion dollar company.
So the bar they're measured by has changed and they haven't even tried to keep up, paying lip service to reliability when you are critical infrastructure is not going to go well.
There were reliability issues in 2010 for sure, but it feels worse now; the period before acquisition was the most stable (2014-2017).
Funny how windows updates are never postponed for lack of "scaling". I know, I know, completely different stuff here - but arent test vms and ci vms being updated constantly?
Im old enough to remember the hotmail migration to win2k (then 2k3) and the postmortem. I was also old enough to look at the rotor source code. Yah, that one, running managed code in freebsd.
Their own greed is causing their issues. They could be doing a million different things to reduce demand, but they don't want to dampen their current growth and have opted to continue scaling up at the cost of quality.
Coupled with this (unsubstantiated but thorough) discussion on the internals of Azure, if even a fraction of this below-linked post is true, Github's abnormally-filesystem-intensive workflows would have wildly unpredictable performance and reliability forced onto Azure.
Azure also regularly has incidents due to capacity issues in several regions, so that many Azure-managed services also go down. Some of those incidents have been open continuously for many months now.
My guess is that the telemetry data they can collect from interacting with claude code is the "secret sauce" behind a lot of the improvements we're seeing with coding models right now. Look at cursors Composer-2 release today. Clicking "accept" during plan mode, committing changes and pushing to a remote repo, etc. is a really strong reward signal.
Can't collect telemetry from applications you don't control.
Yup, agreed with this as well. Probably also why they've been investing so heavily in the desktop Claude Code experience; very hard to gather great telemetry from a terminal app.
Literally everyone is desperately trying to figure out why it's so bad and how to make it work consistently using harness etc. But in spite of this massive effort things always go awry after a while. Maybe in a year or two someone figures it out.
Because TikTok is free, had no competitors and network effects given that it is a social media platform. ChatGPT already depends on subscription income, has to compete with companies that can offer the same service for free and has no network effects because you're literally talking to a commodified bot
> TikTok [..] had no competitors and network effects
TikTok, or rather ByteDance, acquired Musical.ly as a competitor to absorb the user base and jump start their network. Their also have been a lot of short-form video platforms before (e. G., Vine) and during TikToks growth (Instagram reels, YT Shorts).
Reuters reported that ByteDance (TikTok parent) in Q1 2025 had $48b in revenue.[0] They should surpass $200b for 2025 which would make them bigger than Meta.
In other words, Tiktok has already caught up with Instagram in terms of revenue.
> most of which is from the Chinese market as it continues to face political pressure to divest its U.S. arm.
We're not comparing apples and oranges here. Google and Meta don't operate in China, so there is no giant online ad spend (especially for social) already allocated like there is in the US.
> Like, I've seen no sign of OpenAI building an ads team or product
You just haven't been paying attention. They hired Fidji Simo to lead applications in may, she led monetization/ads at facebook for a decade and have been staffing up aggressively with pros.
Reading between the lines in interview with wired last week[0], they're about to go all in with ads across the board, not just the free version. Start with free, expand everywhere. The monetization opportunities in chatgpt are going to make what google offers with adwords look quaint, and every CMO/performance marketer is going to go in head first. 2% is tiny IMO.
I have indeed being paying attention, thanks. One executive does not an ads product make, though.
I think that ads are definitely a plausible way to make money, but it's legally required that they be clearly marked as such, and inline ads in the responses are at least 1-2 versions away.
The other option is either top ads or bottom ads. It's not clear to me if this will actually work (the precedents in messaging apps are not encouraging) but LLM chat boxes may be perceived differently.
And just because you have a good ad product doesn't mean you'll get loads of budget. You also need targeting options, brand safety, attribution and a massive sales team. It's a lot of work and I still maintain it will take till 2030 at least.
When we asked our reps, they dance around the question by saying they would "escalate to engineering" or some bs like that.
Google just makes far too much money to stop. My guess is that its >40% of AdX display revenue, based on the % of scam ads that come through ad manager.
Context: our site did ~$5m AdX revenue annually, mostly US audience. High CPM niche. This was ~7 years ago till 2 years ago when we sold the business, I would guess it's still happening based on ads I see browsing the internet.
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