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Google made me ruin a perfectly good website (2023)

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Re: Google made me ruin a perfectly good website (2023)

#21

Post by teaearlgraycold »

bcrosby95 wrote: post #20
rustcleaner wrote: post #16

Maybe it's time for a market cap maximum. If your market cap exceeds the median GDP of all African countries, you get broken up. No more borg controlling the internet. This should help prevent vertical consolidation. Truly corporate death penalty any children of breakups who collude (full loss to equity, half loss to creditors, assets auction to public). Google shouldn't exist at its scale, nor should Apple, Microsof…

I assume they would just pull some shenanigans to stay under the cap.

I wish there was a way to turn “I’m pretty sure this business is pulling some BS” into “Just shut them the fuck down already”. But that would probably require the Justice system to work.

Re: Google made me ruin a perfectly good website (2023)

#22

Post by Nevermark »

So Google Search sends people to this (originally simple popular) site, but it’s not ad worthy?

They would rather send people to large piles of crap?

So broken - I can’t even come up with an enshittification idiocratic economic game theory drunk CFO rationalization for that.

Re: Google made me ruin a perfectly good website (2023)

#23

Post by bigthymer »

rustcleaner wrote: post #16

Maybe it's time for a market cap maximum. If your market cap exceeds the median GDP of all African countries, you get broken up. No more borg controlling the internet. This should help prevent vertical consolidation. Truly corporate death penalty any children of breakups who collude (full loss to equity, half loss to creditors, assets auction to public). Google shouldn't exist at its scale, nor should Apple, Microsof…

The NSA prefers getting all user data at a one-stop shop.

Re: Google made me ruin a perfectly good website (2023)

#24

Post by kibwen »

shepherdjerred wrote: post #13
gretch wrote: post #7

“a link to what the site looked like last week, before Google made me make it worse on purpose to make money.” Sounds like you sold out. You should own up to your agency in the matter. They made me make it worse so I could make more money - it’s like you think you are under unique pressure to pay bills, thus excusing you, but everyone else in the world shouldn’t be excused.

I think the point is that Google is creating an incentive to have useless content on your website if you want to show ads on it.

Useless content entirely separate from the ads themselves, that is.

Re: Google made me ruin a perfectly good website (2023)

#25

Post by globalnode »

richieartoul wrote: post #2

Is there a word for things that are both hilarious and tragic? I laughed out loud multiple times. Kudos to the author for making such a depressing topic so hysterical.

its funny how at the highest levels and in assorted ways the world is completely bonkers.

Re: Google made me ruin a perfectly good website (2023)

#26

Post by zulban »

rustcleaner wrote: post #16

Maybe it's time for a market cap maximum. If your market cap exceeds the median GDP of all African countries, you get broken up. No more borg controlling the internet. This should help prevent vertical consolidation. Truly corporate death penalty any children of breakups who collude (full loss to equity, half loss to creditors, assets auction to public). Google shouldn't exist at its scale, nor should Apple, Microsof…

When you set an arbitrary cap like "GDP of all African countries" lots of people will argue it's too high, or too low, and you won't have any argument to make because it's arbitrary.

Your solution sounds great but in practice it's simplistic.

Re: Google made me ruin a perfectly good website (2023)

#27

Post by gpm »

bcrosby95 wrote: post #20
rustcleaner wrote: post #16

Maybe it's time for a market cap maximum. If your market cap exceeds the median GDP of all African countries, you get broken up. No more borg controlling the internet. This should help prevent vertical consolidation. Truly corporate death penalty any children of breakups who collude (full loss to equity, half loss to creditors, assets auction to public). Google shouldn't exist at its scale, nor should Apple, Microsof…

I assume they would just pull some shenanigans to stay under the cap.

Announcing GoogleSquared, it's an entity which is entitled to precisely half of Googles profit (or loss) in any year before stock buy backs and dividends. It will buy back exactly as many shares of stock as Google does every year, issue exactly as many stocks as Google does every year to exactly the same entities, and issue exactly the same dividends, and do nothing else.

Every google stock owner gets 1 share per share of google stock.

(perhaps thumbing the nose a bit too much, but the general idea...)

Re: Google made me ruin a perfectly good website (2023)

#28

Post by thiagoharry »

zulban wrote: post #26
rustcleaner wrote: post #16

Maybe it's time for a market cap maximum. If your market cap exceeds the median GDP of all African countries, you get broken up. No more borg controlling the internet. This should help prevent vertical consolidation. Truly corporate death penalty any children of breakups who collude (full loss to equity, half loss to creditors, assets auction to public). Google shouldn't exist at its scale, nor should Apple, Microsof…

When you set an arbitrary cap like "GDP of all African countries" lots of people will argue it's too high, or too low, and you won't have any argument to make because it's arbitrary. Your solution sounds great but in practice it's simplistic.

I agree that the solution is unrealistical. But not for this reason: the "no limit" is also arbitrary and people do not agree if this is right. Moreover, lots of people do not agree with regulations and norms in society, but society creates these things and people learn to comply to live in society.

Re: Google made me ruin a perfectly good website (2023)

#29

Post by bruce511 »

Of course Google didn't make the web site bad, you did. In a purely practical sense you changed the site, not them.

Which leads us to the "why" of it. Which is you wanted to monetize the site (if only to cover its costs.) Since advertising seems to be the business model of the internet that's your first port of call.

But here's a site that performs a task. Quite who uses this site is unclear. Sure lots of people might use it (for some definition of lots) but the site doesn't really give signals to adsense.

Conversely Adsense sells ads based on "targeted users". Which means your original site is pretty useless to Adsense.

Ok,I'm simplifying here, but what ads do you think -should- be shown to your visitors? Ads derived from their browsing history of sites that do intuit user context?

Are users browsing an arbitrary rubbish website more or less likely to be distracted by some special offer? Are people visiting your site to do some very specific task, presumably for a concrete reason, more or less likely to be distracted by an ad?

The problem isn't Google. The problem is that our ability to monetize the web starts and ends with adverts. Which means that sites that "do stuff" are a bad match, and therefore lack funding.

To be honest, I don't have a cunning plan of alternate funding. Probably the only other viable one is "take some of your day-job money and effectively sponsor the site yourself." Which of course is the model you -were- on that you wanted to leave.

Re: Google made me ruin a perfectly good website (2023)

#30

Post by brg »

rustcleaner wrote: post #16

Maybe it's time for a market cap maximum. If your market cap exceeds the median GDP of all African countries, you get broken up. No more borg controlling the internet. This should help prevent vertical consolidation. Truly corporate death penalty any children of breakups who collude (full loss to equity, half loss to creditors, assets auction to public). Google shouldn't exist at its scale, nor should Apple, Microsof…

I wish this preference applied to governments as well. No government should have dominion over more than either a a certain percentage of people nor a certain percentage of production capacity.
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