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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)

#101

Post by Dylan16807 »

zeroCalories wrote: post #100
Dylan16807 wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> that's on you to come up with an alternative Ads should be viable here. "The ad ecosystem is broken" is not something individuals should have to fix. And asking for an entire coffee for a quick tool is not really in line and unlikely to get many takers. And there's no good way to ask for microdonations.

Fair, ads should be viable, but OP really didn't try very hard on that front. There are plenty of ad networks that could be a substitute, but I understand that they're not as good as Google ads, and OP is lazy. Buy Me a Coffee is not literal, it's a service to collect contributions. I like the idea of microdonations, and I think it would be healthy for the ecosystem if sites could implement one-click 50 cent paywalls…

> Buy Me a Coffee is not literal, it's a service to collect contributions.

I know it's not literal, but the size and donator effort required makes it a very bad fit for small interactions.

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

#102

Post by Eiim »

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…

Nvidia is a great example of why a flat rule like this wouldn't work. Nvidia pretty much just does one, pretty specialized thing (GPUs) and trying to break it up into >10 pieces worth <$20B each (approximate median GDP of African nations by IMF) would be completely unnecessary. Just their gaming GPUs had ~$6B in profit in just the last year alone, and we know that their market cap comes much more from the AI market. We definitely could use stronger anti-monopoly laws, but market cap limits aren't the way to do it.

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

#103

Post by sundvor »

bruce511 wrote: post #29

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 migh…

Point here though is that author shouldn't have had to add the extra stuff.

There was ONE actual core piece of functionality they wanted to monetize, so why not?

By adding random crap, author was able to get it approved.

This just proves how everything is turning into the Internet Of Shit - or Enshitification. I loved how the article exposes this in context of the ad networks --- on which Google has an effective monopoly.

See also https://youtu.be/wVYG1mu8Lg8?si=xaAgN3jx2ZC-GCwr (The Internet is Starting to Break by MrWhoseTheBoss).

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

#104

Post by ghodith »

teaearlgraycold wrote: post #21
bcrosby95 wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Sounds like a power that would be ripe for abuse in it's own rite.

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

#105

Post by konstantinua00 »

bruce511 wrote: post #44
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…

How has market cap got anything to do with monetizing the site? You're suggesting that if Google was smaller then that would make this site more appealing to advertisers? That having more advertising companies would make this site more valuable?

if Google didn't make site more appealing, Google2 or Google3 or Google4 or SomeOtherCompetitor5 might

but the problem is that there are no "2,3,4,5' options - there's only one. And it has no incentive for "good people" to leverage

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

#106

Post by konstantinua00 »

Dylan16807 wrote: post #101
zeroCalories wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fair, ads should be viable, but OP really didn't try very hard on that front. There are plenty of ad networks that could be a substitute, but I understand that they're not as good as Google ads, and OP is lazy. Buy Me a Coffee is not literal, it's a service to collect contributions. I like the idea of microdonations, and I think it would be healthy for the ecosystem if sites could implement one-click 50 cent paywalls…

> Buy Me a Coffee is not literal, it's a service to collect contributions. I know it's not literal, but the size and donator effort required makes it a very bad fit for small interactions.

it's a donation

the whole point is to only get donations from people willing to do the effort - with no downsides to others

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

#107

Post by slowmovintarget »

teaearlgraycold wrote: post #18
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…

Yes, 100%. It would be better for the economy, the workers, and the users.

What evidence do you have for that?

Automatic breakup based on stock price is a terrible idea. (Market capitalization is total value of stock in a publicly traded company.)

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

#108

Post by Dylan16807 »

konstantinua00 wrote: post #106
Dylan16807 wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Buy Me a Coffee is not literal, it's a service to collect contributions. I know it's not literal, but the size and donator effort required makes it a very bad fit for small interactions.

it's a donation the whole point is to only get donations from people willing to do the effort - with no downsides to others

The point is to get donations from people that are willing to donate. Not people that are willing to put in pointless extra effort.

Extra effort is just a negative. So is needing relatively large donations to overcome transaction fees.

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

#109

Post by bogwog »

carl_sandland wrote: post #11

thanks for the interesting read, one amusing thing: I went to the site and "where is the adds?", then I remembered I'm using a add-hardened firefox to view it ;) Sure enough using safari showed me the horror. Serious question: why do we put up with this as readers?

I had to pull out the ol' ungoogled chromium browser for this and for a moment I thought it was still a joke because of how absurd some of the ads were. One of them was a picture of an empty toilet paper roll holding up a toilet seat with the title "Put a Toilet Paper Roll Under the Toilet Seat at Night, Here's Why", and clicking it took me to a site[1] with a bunch of nonsense life hacks probably written by some AI. Surprisingly, the site itself has no ads, yet it does link to a bunch of scam products.

I thought Google vetted their advertisers? Are they just accepting ads from anyone now?

1: https://lifehack.getconsumerchoice.com/ (proceed at own risk)

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