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

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

#371

Post by lupire »

abdullahkhalids wrote: post #159
jedberg wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Any retail store. Like Costco and Walmart. They can break an entire company by just buying from a competitor.

There is a business relationship between Walmart/Costco and the product or a competitor of the product. In the Google News case, there is no business relation with any news site (Alphabet ads might have a relation with the news site, but that is not Google News).

Google News is a customer who walks into Walmart consumes the free samples and tells people about them.

Walmart is free to ban Google from the premises (robots.txt) or to negotiate an exchange (monetization agreement).

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

#372

Post by psychlops »

Cesura wrote: post #325
psychlops wrote: post #250

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> and therefore directly tax the platforms and then redistribute the revenue to a fund created by government for news journalism themselves Having any government fund news journalism is a bad idea. In any event, you can be certain the revenue will be redistributed to fund the war machine in another country.

Surely you're speaking about your own country of residence here? In Estonia for example (which tangentially has one of the highest press freedom rankings in the world), ERR ("Estonian Public Broadcasting") is widely considered to be one of the most trustworthy news platforms in the country. The reason for this is simple: there is no incentive to pump out journalistic sludge for clicks, or to prey on the public's coll…

You are Estonian?

Few would consider it unethical to fund wars of self-defense. But self-defense is not a clear term, see for example the Bush Doctrine and preemptive war. America has a historical habit of funding its future enemies, and in more current wars of simply maintaining the status quo.

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

#373

Post by Thiez »

asow92 wrote: post #356
Thiez wrote: post #350

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Definitely not. Nothing noteworthy happens locally, and if it does it will be on the national news.

You have no interest at all in if cronyism is affecting your local politics? Do you care about how your taxes are spent?

Not enough to invest money and time, no. And my preferred party isn't in power, so it's not like knowing the current leadership is corrupt would change my vote - I don't vote for them anyway.

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

#374

Post by paulcole »

teeray wrote: post #317
paulcole wrote: post #307

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There’s nothing wrong with paying for content and still seeing ads.

There is everything wrong with that if that wasn’t the deal to begin with. You’re paying for information and they’re deliberately injecting noise in the signal. It’s degrading the quality of what you’re paying for without a commensurate adjustment in the rate.

Correct me if I’m wrong but Apple never advertised Apple News+ as ad-free.

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

#375

Post by PopePompus »

cush wrote: post #252
notatoad wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>I have sympathy for news publishers i have very little sympathy for news publishers. I have sympathy for the journalists actually doing journalism, but news publishers have spent the last couple decades making their websites absolutely unusable, so that unless somebody links to an article externally there's almost no point in going to their site directly. And even after you've followed that link it's almost impossib…

> news publishers have spent the last couple decades making their websites absolutely unusable To appease Google… Conversely, NYTs site is stellar. It’s fast and gorgeous and the articles are well-written and not full of clickbait and SEO spam. The games have no ads and there’s nothing pushing you to read more. No feed. No algorithm. NYT got the hell away from SEO and focus on the customers, who decide with their wal…

I subscribe to the NYTs, and one thing that drives me nuts is their animated graphics which play in a loop on some articles. They aren't ads - they are artworks created for the story, but I find it really distracting to try to read text when there's some dancing cutesy image looping endlessly in my field of view. They really should add an option to let the reader opt out of that crap.

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

#376

Post by dhfbshfbu4u3 »

bawolff wrote: post #214
alistairSH wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

$40/year for the WaPo and you can pay with PayPal or Apple. You don’t give them any more money than any other online vendor.

That price point seems high. For example, Netflix is $84/year. Netflix content seems a lot more valuable then simply twice what WaPo provides.

I guess if you don’t read that is true.

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

#377

Post by PopePompus »

asow92 wrote: post #268
candiddevmike wrote: post #263

Earlier quoted context omitted.

RE: 4, NPR seems to do OK, same with the BBC. You're choosing to implement all of these terrible things by continuing your employment, so you "not wanting them" is kind of moot. Find a different job if you genuinely don't agree with what you're building. I'm a firm believer that companies would stop doing this kind of crap if we, collectively as tech workers (even better as a union!), stopped implementing it .

NPR is very biased: https://www.nytimes.com/2024/04/11/business/media/npr-critic... And to be honest, I don't think most of these things are terrible per se, albeit mildly annoying. Also, I don't see what you're suggesting as realistic, but idealistic. You can try to unionize developers, but good luck with that because you'll just be replaced with overseas contractors. I'd rather keep my job and feed my family, thank…

NPR used to be a very good news source, but during the Trump presidency it became an advocacy organization: https://www.thefp.com/p/npr-editor-how-npr-lost-americas-tru...

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

#378

Post by bdw5204 »

asow92 wrote: post #258
notatoad wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>I have sympathy for news publishers i have very little sympathy for news publishers. I have sympathy for the journalists actually doing journalism, but news publishers have spent the last couple decades making their websites absolutely unusable, so that unless somebody links to an article externally there's almost no point in going to their site directly. And even after you've followed that link it's almost impossib…

As a developer who works for one of these news publishers you have little sympathy for, what I can tell you is that: 1) Most people don't want to pay for news. Even $1/year is too high. 2) Ad CPMs are low—especially on iOS thanks to Apple's ATT—so we need more ads to make the same amount of revenue. 3) "SEO clickbait" (especially Taboola) helps keep the lights on. Click at your own peril. 4) If governments pay news o…

The main problem the news industry faces is they're trying to run for-profit businesses when they should see themselves as a public service that seeks to break even or produce sustainable losses.

News should be subsidized by people who want to inform the public whether out of public-spirited motives or out of a self interested desire to influence the public debate and, indirectly, the government. That means allowing people who want to support the news outlet to donate or to purchase a print version of the outlet's reporting. If I was a millionaire, I'd probably start or purchase my own media outlet to influence public opinion. Controlling the media is probably a better ROI than directly buying politicians so I'm surprised rich people mostly seem to opt for the latter. Even those who buy media outlets, such as Bezos buying WaPo, often don't noticeably change their editorial line or move away from the "we have to be a profitable business" paradigm.

It also doesn't help that journalists are, on average, well to the left of public opinion or that colleges offer degrees in journalism which was traditionally a blue collar profession that anybody could do. Journalism schools mean journalists are unnecessarily stuck with debts they probably can't ever repay and unable to pivot out of their profession if there's a lack of people willing to pay for it.

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

#379

Post by cout »

bionhoward wrote: post #353
visarga wrote: post #339

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Since they sued OpenAI for copyright infringement I actively avoid them. I don't find them reasonable anymore.

What is unreasonable about not wanting your news organization to be ripped off for free? What is reasonable about OpenAI’s “we learn fairly from everyone’s IP, but paying customers may not train competing models with outputs we gave them?” Imagine you paid a teacher and they said you weren’t allowed to teach someone else what they teach you, while they are actively teaching you things that other people taught them, a…

I agree; moreover, I don't even understand why there's any controversy. A set of weights for a network trained using a particular document is a derivative work.

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

#380

Post by Cesura »

psychlops wrote: post #372
Cesura wrote: post #325

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Surely you're speaking about your own country of residence here? In Estonia for example (which tangentially has one of the highest press freedom rankings in the world), ERR ("Estonian Public Broadcasting") is widely considered to be one of the most trustworthy news platforms in the country. The reason for this is simple: there is no incentive to pump out journalistic sludge for clicks, or to prey on the public's coll…

You are Estonian? Few would consider it unethical to fund wars of self-defense. But self-defense is not a clear term, see for example the Bush Doctrine and preemptive war. America has a historical habit of funding its future enemies, and in more current wars of simply maintaining the status quo.

Not exactly, but I'm an American citizen who has lived in Estonia for the past ~5 years (and often read Estonian language media).

One of the more unfortunate political outcomes I've noticed from the Bush era is a tendency for people to take the tragedies of US foreign policy in the Middle East and project them onto every conflict involving the US since then (this is not targeted at you).

So you end up with well-intentioned individuals who strive for peace and opposed the Iraq War (or eg Vietnam), who find themselves siding with the autocracy invading its sovereign neighbors, for the simple fact that it positions itself as a force against American hegemony and must therefore inherently be "the good guys".

Either way, I sympathize with your point more generally, and also wouldn't like to see my tax dollars spent on drone striking weddings.

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