Google threatens to cut off news after California proposes paying media outlets

Post by fiddlerwoaroof » Sat, Apr 13, 2024, 2:22 AM UTC

akira2501 wrote: post #254

izacus wrote: post #241

Earlier quoted context omitted.

AMP was deliberately created to mitigate the horrible website experience of news publishers. You're crafting a false narrative of poor news media being forced to dig their own grave by someone else, when that is not even remotely true. They've been cost cutting and compromising themselves way before some evil tech corporation came to them. There's really no industry that deserves this kind of history repainting less…

> AMP was deliberately created to mitigate the horrible website experience of news publishers. That was very generous of the billion dollar corporation to do. I'm sure there was no self serving motivation behind it. > of poor news media being forced to dig their own grave You seem to be struggling to see this outside of a black and white narrative and are mistaking your own polemic as being diametrically opposed to m…

Post by habitue » Sat, Apr 13, 2024, 2:40 AM UTC

babypuncher wrote: post #203

zmmmmm wrote: post #170

I have sympathy for news publishers but I worry a lot about the principle of asserting that linking to something is an act that the link target has proprietary rights to over. At some level, it is almost a free speech issue. If I can't refer to what you are saying, without owing you something, you have power over not just my speech, but a power to limit how your work is subjected to criticism and debate. It's effecti…

If it was just plain hyperlinks, I would agree with you. Google is scraping metadata and articles, and summarizing them so that most people never even need to click the link. Google is getting most of the value from the articles written while not doing the actual work to make them. The whole thing could have been avoided if Google and social media stopped embedding previews and summaries everywhere. It's worse in pla…

Post by sanjiwatsuki » Sat, Apr 13, 2024, 2:43 AM UTC

akira2501 wrote: post #227

izacus wrote: post #220

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> To be fair they were just playing the game Google asked them to play. This outright BS. Noone asked them to fill their sites with popup videos, popup ads, spam and other garbage. Noone asked them to spam people with notifications in iOS either and Google didn't force them to do that either. Stop blaming Google for the deep rot within the news industry, they did it to themselves.

Sure they did. They created page and site metrics that then tied to search engine placement. All the "garbage" is an effort to improve their "performance" within these specific metric categories. It's the same story with "AMP." Publishers had zero incentive to create AMP versions of their site, but they did anyways, because they saw that they lost placement if they didn't comply. I'm not "blaming" Google, nor should…

Post by int_19h » Sat, Apr 13, 2024, 2:44 AM UTC

jaredwiener wrote: post #19

This requires some nuance, since I think it goes beyond a "tax on linking," as I have seen it described. News is a strange product, and one that I think a lot of people in tech get wrong. The atomic unit of journalism is not an article....it's the reporting. Even deciding to write an article is an act based on the analysis of the reporting. Further, a good headline often tells the story itself -- and that is implicit…

Post by int_19h » Sat, Apr 13, 2024, 2:48 AM UTC

alecnotthompson wrote: post #160

The problem with everything is capitalism