Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Google Declaring War on the Web

tante.cc

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

81–90 of 466 posts

Re: Google Declaring War on the Web

#81

Post by wahnfrieden »

barnabee wrote: post #69
analogpixel wrote: post #29

I feel like AI has gotten to the point where the message is: If you want to make something (art/code/music/writing) you can do it for your own enjoyment, but you aren't allowed to make money from it anymore; only the large corporations can make money from content. If you do release something creative, it'll just be fed back into the machine to be copied over and over.

Needs to be inverted. Tax excess tech profits that derive from the efforts of others and use the proceeds to fund living artists. Vaguely analogous to levies on blank cassettes that went to offset piracy. Give the money directly to actual artists, not labels/publishers, though.

You’re describing a social revolution. Otherwise there is no way that leaders whose power over us corrupts them would want to put that into law.

The cassette reference was a tax on consumers to send money upward. What you’re describing is the complete inverse.

Re: Google Declaring War on the Web

#82

Post by theendisney »

Out of my countless www experiments the website made for myself turned out most enjoyable. Technically it is a blog with links, quotes, categories, tags and search. Sometimes i download all pages it links to. (tens of thousands)

Google dropped it from the index long ago. I had a fun discussion with some google folk where they kept arguing my website was designed wrong and that some pages had tomany links.

Basically, if you write an article about the largest banana companies you have to chose which to link to!

The 10 best movies article is better than the best 100. If you make a list of all the movies you've seen your page gradually turns into something really bad. Others will be punished for linking to it but only if you add the nth entry.

As the website is just for me it is clearly their loss not mine. No way im ging to consider linking a sub set of patents or research papers.

Re: Google Declaring War on the Web

#83

Post by BuyMyBitcoins »

newAccount2025 wrote: post #16

I would feel more sad about this if the web wasn’t so rotten to begin with. On average, any random site is just trying to throw ads at you and harass you to subscribe and such.

I have a particular disdain for “subscribe to our newsletter” modals. Especially when I’ve spent a sum total of less than 3 seconds looking at the webpage.

How such modals aren’t considered pop-ups is beyond me.

Re: Google Declaring War on the Web

#84

Post by wahnfrieden »

gatlin wrote: post #76
kQq9oHeAz6wLLS wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> downskill the world I feel this. I asked a developer today a question about how our product is programmed to handle something, and he just sent me a summary from the internal AI assistant they've started using. He used to provide really good, thoughtful answers, but now it's just copy/paste from the AI.

I have a co-worker who does this now. He's very smart, very capable, very experienced and it's clear that he's just a frontend for Claude now. It's tragic.

Maybe organize to give these workers more equity or rev share instead of just a wage so they care more for quality results instead of the behaviors they’re evaluated on and you’ll find them more pleasant to work with.

Re: Google Declaring War on the Web

#85

Post by jpkw »

analogpixel wrote: post #29

I feel like AI has gotten to the point where the message is: If you want to make something (art/code/music/writing) you can do it for your own enjoyment, but you aren't allowed to make money from it anymore; only the large corporations can make money from content. If you do release something creative, it'll just be fed back into the machine to be copied over and over.

At least for art - I don't think you'll find anyone who actually enjoys art hanging up anything produced by AI on their walls. For these kinds of "customers", they could equally easily frame & hang up a poster of the Mona Lisa. Artists are not at threat, if anything, AI makes original artworks more precious & enjoyable.

Re: Google Declaring War on the Web

#86

Post by jfengel »

jumploops wrote: post #79

It looks like Google has taken a note out of Facebook's "lose trust" playbook. Facebook had a huge opportunity in the post-AI world: real humans. Instead of focusing on connections, they've been optimizing their properties for doomscrolling. Google, similarly, has lost the plot on what made them trustworthy in the first place: navigating to citable content. Both companies started on this trend well before AI, but thi…

I don't think people cared all that much about whether or not the content was citable. You can't cite Wikipedia, and that's not going anywhere.

Facebook may well fail when people don't enjoy it. But all Google ever promised was information, of variously dubious quality, and that's still their draw.

Re: Google Declaring War on the Web

#87

Post by xp84 »

xmcp123 wrote: post #68
kQq9oHeAz6wLLS wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> government enforced The thing everyone needs to ask before advocating for something "government enforced" is "what would happen if this was in the hands of a hostile government?" And then remember that (a) just because it's not hostile to you today, doesn't mean it won't be tomorrow, and (b) one man's "hostile" is another man's "utopia."

Well, when I said “I’m curious” it was true. I’m actually curious. So how do you think a meta noai tag would be used by a hostile government? It would be something the website owner set.

Step 1: Be really lax in enforcing compliance with it so that nobody complies with it.

Step 2: Abruptly switch to iron-fist enforcement where suddenly people get jail time for violations, but only for entities that have been critical of the government.

This is by no means the only or most likely way, just what I could come up with in 30 seconds. There may be much better "evil government" strategies.

Re: Google Declaring War on the Web

#88

Post by AndrewKemendo »

> The goal is to take away the web and guide people into Google’s abstraction on top of it. An abstraction they control and moderate. It’s about monopolizing access to information.

Google’s Vision since they were founded:

Google's mission is to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful

They told everyone what they were doing the whole time

Re: Google Declaring War on the Web

#89

Post by yakattak »

jpkw wrote: post #85
analogpixel wrote: post #29

I feel like AI has gotten to the point where the message is: If you want to make something (art/code/music/writing) you can do it for your own enjoyment, but you aren't allowed to make money from it anymore; only the large corporations can make money from content. If you do release something creative, it'll just be fed back into the machine to be copied over and over.

At least for art - I don't think you'll find anyone who actually enjoys art hanging up anything produced by AI on their walls. For these kinds of "customers", they could equally easily frame & hang up a poster of the Mona Lisa. Artists are not at threat, if anything, AI makes original artworks more precious & enjoyable.

That's assuming that the only market is stuff people are hanging up. The games industry, one that already takes advantage of its workers, is going to love this to the detriment of really passionate artists who love their craft and industry.

Re: Google Declaring War on the Web

#90

Post by jfengel »

DocTomoe wrote: post #78

Nobody is stopping you from publishing on the net. Nobody is stopping you from blocking bot traffic. You don't need search engines - you can just link between sites or have webrings. Like we used to, pre-2000. Nobody is stopping you from not using ads on the net. Nobody can force you to use non-essential cookies (and thus: a cookie-banner). Imagine there was a war going on, and no-one was showing up.

I don't think people much liked the pre-search-engine era. They used lousy search engines when they became available, and when a good one started they liked it so much that they verbed its name.
Post reply on HN