This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
The Web was much better and more useful back before it had a business model. Good riddance.
So you’re saying the ad driven internet will die? And we will be left with what? Wikipedia and Lemmy? I for one welcome our AI overlords!
Nah, it’s saying that ad and AI-driven internet will prevail. People only use Google to find an answer and don’t dig deeper, and if they do, it’s often because the links are sponsored. People using GPT’s are even less likely to click a link. Currently no ads, but just wait.
Apologies if you were joking.
"what should I do if I'm going through severe emotional distress? How to choose a good psychiatrist?"
ChatGPT: "I'm sorry to hear that you've been going to a stressful situation, it's always worth talking about your feelings. I've come up with a plan to help you:
1 Purchase an ice cold Pepsi Black™ from a Pepsi official supplier"
This is part of the larger problem that AI tools are trained on (and profit off of) content that is produced and hosted by others who are now seeing their traffic change from humans to bots. For content sources that pay for hosting with ads, this means a loss in revenue to pay for hosting. For content sources like Wikipedia, they are seeing their hosting costs increase significantly due to the increase in bot traffic. Even if you want every website that depends on ad revenue to fail (which I don't entirety agree with), AI is still damaging the open web in other ways. Websites like Wikipedia for example may soon be forced to lock content behind logins or leverage aggressive captchas just to fight the bot traffic, which makes things worse for those of us that still prefer to use actual websites over AI summaries.
For a glorious second, the entire world was able to communicate as one.
Then we catalogued every accessible reservoir of culture and knowledge, mined them bare, and refilled them with slop.
A global collective consciousness, hollowed out, replaced with static. No signal. Only noise.
I really non ironically miss the friction of the old internet.
I prefer how it took time to find some bare HTML university website, slowly browse through an index as if it was a book, and then find one non-SEO optimized page with all the information you needed on a topic for your research.
The time to browse, being exposed to other terms, having to select the pages yourself, being skeptical by nature, and then having to copy it by hand... This is a much more positive scenario than having a gigantic company learn everything about you and everybody else and then make these decisions for you, using some hidden algorithm, and with the ultimate goal of pushing their newest process. And of course, the content has been rendered virtually useless to appeal to that algorithm.
when the internet was a wild and unexplored frontier, and we were adventurers charting the unknown.
Yeah well maybe the web shouldn't be a business
god what I wouldnt give to go back to the days of the mid 90s, when the internet was nothing more than a collection of tech weirdos, with websites being nothing more than passion projects with no advertising, no SEO, no search engines, etc etc.
there was plenty of advertising on america online though almost ever keyword was to a business that was an advertisement.
i do agree that web 1.0 and the 90s internet was superior
America: "No money = no purpose"
the o'l capitalist shalamalama ding-dong...
Don't take this the wrong way, but fuck your business model. The internet was supposed to be open and be ours, and you stole it for profit.
To be honest: you can still make your own website, and in many ways big companies are actually making it easier through open-source projects and stuff like Let's Encrypt. The web industry is remarkably open compared to what big companies do in other industries. A lot of the standards meetings and stuff you can just go to and give your opinion. Or ignore the standards and fork it yourself. This alarmism I fear will make people not take the actually alarming things like encryption bans or ID requirements seriously.
Only for some things, though. If you host your own e-mail these days, chances are, you're going to have a very difficult time sending them anywhere without risking them being deleted, or automatically thrown into spam folders.
True, but sadly that's because of what became a genuine user safety concern
also independent of that, fuck cloudflare
And fuck the region-blocking that often comes with cloudflare.
This is all extrapolated from google's self published survey of how their users interact with their search results. Approximately 60% of users don't click anything after a search. Personally I think that is because users have found their results to be seo garbage and not worth clicking on... but that's just my opinion.
I've watched a lot of students do a search after I tell them to research something, look through a few of the summaries, then look at me in defeat. I have to tell them to actually click some links to try and find an answer
I went to college for networking but the most productive class I've ever had where I learned the most about the internet was instead back in high school. This teacher would make 20 page packets with the most obscure questions like what's the weight of model number 62xRG4 (some obscure car part or something) and he told us to google it. We would spend entire classes just searching for information we would never use, but it drilled into me how to go about finding the information I need. It's been utterly invaluable. Thank you Mr Ward.
Of course they don't click anything. Google search has just become a front-end for Gemini, the answer is "served" up right at the top and most people will just take that for Gospel.
The web doesn't have a business model, cloudflair, you do. And nobody cares because you suck.
Eh, Cloudflare provides a pretty good service for a very reasonable price.
But yeah, the web doesn't have a business model in the same way a town square doesn't, yet you can make a business work in both areas. Make a compelling product and people will pay you for it.
Letting Google break the law for years with illegal anti-competitive practices is now hurting everyone else's ability to earn money.
I wonder if we have the combined will to do anything about it, or if we will wait and hope the invisible hand of the market will fix it....
Good. Maybe we can go back to paying for our services instead of getting tracked everywhere we go.
That’s not what will happen. We will have to pay AND be tracked. They are not going to give anything up.
When Orwell predicted universal surveillance he never anticipated that the people themselves would install the cameras, let alone pay a subscription.
nobody is going to want to create new content when they get paid nothing or almost nothing for doing so.
that's a lie
so basically back to internet 1.0, sounds good actually.
When Google itself is the one stopping you from clicking on a website you've got a problem.
It needs to get even nastier so that it affects all the big players in a huge way so they get to do something about it. While it only affects the indie web we are all just gonna keep suffering.
maybe their business model. trust me. they'll find a way to monetize the zero click internet too. then it's back to square one
Yeah I think we're going to be grappling with this issue for at least the next decade. The traditional web model falls apart under AI
To be fair, the traditional web models were falling apart prior to AI as well. We’ve gone so far past “ad driven” that Everything has to be full of ads and clickbait to drive revenue just to run the infrastructure, let alone pay for the pages creation and upkeep. Journalists and developers, services and goods are all using adword soup to try to get anything close to a useful revenue stream and it’ll just keep getting worse until we figure out a better business model. We’re going to increasingly see paywalls to try to make up for that, but a large part of people on the internet won’t want to spend money on quality sources when they use to be able to get it for free. It’s been a race to the bottom for a while and it’s at a point that isn’t sustainable long term. AI just accelerates that to the next level.
Everyone is too busy doomscrolling TikTok to notice.
