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PaperclipPerfector  4d ago (text post)   16569 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of May 11, 2026

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It does feel like this could be a little like the death of mail then the death of e-mail and now everyone wants to do text message for important communications. Each prior one got too spammy. LLM do seem like they could be used for evil this way. But hopefully better uses emerge.

One observation of mine on why home service business exploded is the google tax. $70 a click. People got accustomed to using google. Now plumbers have to charge a lot because the click costs them a lot. In the old days the go to choice would be the phone book and you just paid for one ad a year in the plumbers section. Smaller gate-keeper tax.

you just paid for one ad a year in the plumbers section.

Those ads were pretty expensive too though -- thousands a month for a decent sized (1/2 - 1/4 page) 'attractor' in the yellow pages IIRC.

Do people find plumbers from Google search results? There's a neighborhood Facebook group that's mostly about that, and people will ask in person if they can about that and auto mechanics, unless it's the most trivial possible thing everyone can do. Most of them don't even have listings or websites, that's how they signal they can get enough in person recommendations.

I probably would. Haven’t had a big plumbing issue. But a lot of contractors do use google. FB probably has their own gatekeeper fee on marketplace but cheaper than ads.

The one time I had a plumbing issue I couldn't handle, I asked for recommendations on small businesses at a plumbing supply house. High variance, but I wouldn't use google, it would spit out the same list of home services companies that spend big on advertising.

Is being able to spend big on advertising a major bad signal for home repair? You're probably not gonna get the absolute best combo of inexpensive quality that you'd get from word of mouth but on the other hand somebody sufficiently structured to have a website and a digital marketing presence is probably not going to get you an F- outcome.

The one for my area is, to be clear, not Marketplace based, but a group where people ask other people for recommendations. I might use Google if I didn't have any other choice, but knowing it's a bad source for that kind of thing. I'd be more likely to call the number I see on a sign on the side of the road.

I did that one time for a HVAC issue for a truck that was already at my building. They still tried charging me $170 for spending 20 min looking at the unit when they were already there and direct calling avoided any google fees.

But a lot of places do need to charge very high fees because google is the advertising toll collector and for a lot of the people it’s the default way to find a lot of services quickly. Most people don’t realize that businesses using google ads need to have very high prices due to google fees. I think a lot of people would avoid using google if they knew the fees that were getting passed on to them.

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