@pluralistic First independent email is deprecated, now blogs.
https://www.justapack.com/how-google-is-killing-bloggers-and-small-publishers-and-why/
And Usenet before them.
Google has ceased to innovate and is now a white elephant in a china shop.
@zl2tod @karmaburrito @pluralistic Iʼm deeply surprised to read this in 2024 when this has been happening for years. It was 2010 when I recommended switching to DDG, something which I stopped doing in 2022 because Bing was past it. Google being an ad company? Evident for nearly two decades, and turbocharged when they bought Doubleclick, and they got greedier and greedier. I had to de-Google from 2009, and here we are 15 years later and people are only now starting to do this?
That's an interesting read. I hadn't heard the connection between SEO and AI before, but that makes a lot of sense. Google's SEO privileges writing that is easy for them to parse, and easily digested for AI training. Literally forcing millions of humans to train their own AI replacements.
Never mind if the prose this forces us to write is sterile and homogeneous, or that it predisposes the AI they feed it to to produce the most banal regurgitation.
@plantarum @karmaburrito @pluralistic Same logic as with colonization. Wield overwhelming power, document the newly conquered land, force societal realignments, strip-mine.
@ghostwise @karmaburrito @pluralistic
I think there are important differences. Colonialism was/is very upfront about its extractive purpose.
Google inserted itself into the blogging economy in a much more incremental, insidious way.
- We can help bring you audience!
- If you tweak your writing ever-so-slightly (SEO) we can help you better
- We're just going to lift a few snippets of your post to display on our page. You'll lose ad revenue, but you get paid in exposure, so win-win!
- we need to protect the community by fighting spam, so we're up-ranking reliable sites. Oh, are those sites we have deals with? Coincidence. I'm sure you'll be fine on page 8.
- hey look at that! we have all the data we need to replace you with a good-enough facsimile of you. Sure, the quality is worse, but this way we get all the revenue and there's nothing you can do about it. Win-win!
Actually maybe you're right. That's not that different from colonialism after all :/
@ghostwise @karmaburrito @pluralistic
The infuriating thing about all this is intellectual line connecting the industrialists who justified the creation of their monopolies by inventing the "tragedy of the commons" myth, to their modern descendants who have turned the myth into reality by destroying the global commons we depend on: the climate, the internet, the free market etc.
@karmaburrito Should also recommend people who use Gmail should find another email provider, something more secure.
Just A Pack is still taking ads, does that plan to change? I guess that’s why bloggers went the Substack/subscription route, so they could present a clean blog w/o ads?
@karmaburrito somehow, reading blogs and newsletters has really never been on my bingo card. Adding ads to these makes me even less inclined toward them. Podcasts are my chosen vehicle for longer form media, and yes they have ads too, which I skip. Mixing ads into content makes it completely incomprehensible to me; first I get irked and then it breaks my concentration. At least they tell you when it’s about to happen on most podcasts (except for those that are sneaky).
Oh yeah, and books. I read those too. I read lots of sample ebooks and buy maybe 10% of the ones I like.
Having to “package” your content to optimize it for SEO is a step too far. Sounds like we’ll all need a content demangling engine to remove the inherent SEO-driven redundancy. Maybe blogging isn’t really a good business after all if it requires such contortions to be money making.
Sounds downright Faustian to me.