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Google Declaring War on the Web

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Re: Google Declaring War on the Web

#381

Post by sph »

MattyRad wrote: post #309
Max-Ganz-II wrote: post #264

To stop this, I a month or two ago put most of my Amazon Redshift research web-site behind a basic auth username/password wall. It all remains free, but you need to email me for a username and password. If I put in time and effort to make content and OpenAI et al copy it and sell it through their LLM such that no one comes to me any more, then plainly it makes no sense for me to create that content; and then it would…

Welcome to the dark forest.

Sad but good. The internet had become too large any way. Once upon a time it was a small pond full of interesting life, today it's an unfathomably large ocean. Everywhere you look, it's mostly empty.

The good stuff now is in small private communities, away from the bots and the eternal influx of september newbies to devolve every discussion into memes. Elitism will be good again.

Re: Google Declaring War on the Web

#382

Post by pacifika »

AlienRobot wrote: post #108
BuyMyBitcoins wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

So you want websites to rely on traffic from Google instead of building their own newsletter? Interesting.

Adding a subscription form at the end of the article when the user is ready for the next task always made more sense to ne

Re: Google Declaring War on the Web

#383

Post by pembrook »

wolvesechoes wrote: post #336
pembrook wrote: post #317

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, the craft to mass production pipeline (democratization) is frustrating for the individual craftsman, as has been true for hundreds of years. AI is simply the assembly line for the digital realm. It takes the trendy products of the rich (custom software, McKinsey PowerPoint decks, etc) and mass produces them in the same style so everyone can afford to buy them at Walmart. For things where the exclusivity WAS the…

Comparing GenAI to any previous "disruptions" (and these also had very negative consequences for large swaths of people, even if you consider them net positive) only shows ignorance of the person making a comparison.

The only thing showing ignorance here is your ad hominem personal attack with zero logical rebuttal of the original ideas.

Not only is it against the rules here, but if I’m so wrong and ignorant, you should be able to dismantle my argument easily!

Yet, you've acknowledged that prior disruptions have been net positive. So I'm struggling to understand your position. You seem to agree.

Re: Google Declaring War on the Web

#384

Post by account42 »

krackers wrote: post #184
aiisahik wrote: post #130

This is such a basic take that totally misses the bigger picture of why Google made this move. Google was forced to do this and it's a miracle of their slow organizational gears that they took so long to do it. So many people have already transitioned to using ChatGPT as a replacement for Google. All of this is driven by consumer behavior and the desire to "just get an answer" rather than having to wade through all t…

>Google SERP results have been gamed by SEO slop for economically valuable search terms So why not use AI to find the obvious spam and SEO? Sites like pinterest, "geeksforgeeks", stackoverflow clones were notorious for ranking highly on almost every technical search and you didn't even need AI to deal with those. Using AI to provide distilled summaries and making it harder to get the actual links is going to make thi…

You don't need AI for that, just downrank all sites with ads. Of course it turns out its actually googles main business that's driving that.

Re: Google Declaring War on the Web

#385

Post by anonyfox »

Andrex wrote: post #249
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 was trying to read some I/O news on some feckless Google news fan-blog. By the time I got to the middle of the article: three massive banner ads (top, right, and bottom) were taking up more content than the text, there was an auto-playing video ad floating in the bottom right corner (overlapping most of one of the banner ads), and a "dynamic" ad in the middle of the text randomly started expanding/shrinking and gli…

to be blunt actual porn sites are hyper optimized and mostly have a polished user experience, even frontier level tech stuff going on at times. you know how onlie credit card payment came really alive? not judging, but I'd not throw corn into the edge of shitty tech by default

Re: Google Declaring War on the Web

#386

Post by account42 »

mschuster91 wrote: post #22
dude250711 wrote: post #11

Well, they are kind of desperate after missing both cloud and AI. I would blame trash like Discord more though. Alternative search engines are available, but the crappy little web chat hides info inside.

> I would blame trash like Discord more though. Alternative search engines are available, but the crappy little web chat hides info inside. Well, we had the same problem with IRC. There's value to be had in not everything being discoverable in 5 seconds with a google search.

The problem id that Discord did not just replace IRC but but also forums and even documentation websites. Its unfortunately not just ephemeral chats locked in there even if the interface is horrid enough to make you question why someone would ever use it for anything else.

Re: Google Declaring War on the Web

#387

Post by notabotiswear »

hakfoo wrote: post #298
JohnBooty wrote: post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This dichotomy is so false. However else you feel, AI is a force multiplier, and that can also REALLY benefit "Artisanal work + Small Business" I feel like the "one person app creator" business is so much more viable than it has been since Web 1.0 Five years ago, to run your own solo business in this space, you had to know most of the following: taxes, legal, backend, frontend, devops, iOS dev, Android dev, and marke…

As I understand it, we used to have the concept of "hiring workers" or "contracting for services". The benefit of this was that when Internal Revenue called and said in lieu of a tax return, you sent a takeaway menu covered in pornographic drawings, you could reach out to the person you paid and expect them to take accountability. Instead, we're getting :sparkles: You're absolutely right! I shouldn't have sent the ta…

I miss when I would receive and email or something that I can easily tell that whomever wrote it is a clueless idiot. Now I have to filter the prose before reaching the same conclusion.

Re: Google Declaring War on the Web

#388

Post by wolvesechoes »

pembrook wrote: post #383
wolvesechoes wrote: post #336

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Comparing GenAI to any previous "disruptions" (and these also had very negative consequences for large swaths of people, even if you consider them net positive) only shows ignorance of the person making a comparison.

The only thing showing ignorance here is your ad hominem personal attack with zero logical rebuttal of the original ideas. Not only is it against the rules here, but if I’m so wrong and ignorant, you should be able to dismantle my argument easily! Yet, you've acknowledged that prior disruptions have been net positive. So I'm struggling to understand your position. You seem to agree.

So called ad hominem is perfectly reasonable argument type, not personal attack. Please, don't be such a snowflake. Saying that someone is ignorant of how history really unfolded, and therefore their claims not only on how history went, but also how the future will look like, are unsound, is very rational thing to do. Also, you cannot make logical rebuttals of ideas, as logic is concerned with relationship inside formal systems, and ideas worth considering are anything but.

You, and people like you, make analogies between current trends regarding AI and historical processes related to different inventions that were supposed to act as milestones technological progress, or even progress in general. Problem is that, primo, historical events are unique, and all historiosophical attempts so far were futile, therefore saying that "AI, in terms of social impact, is like the mass production of clothing" is completely ungrounded.

Secundo, there are important qualitative differences that make subjects of these analogies more different than alike.

Tertio, people are usually, you know, ignorant of what were the real, immediate social impacts of past inventions. For example, steam machine is being presented as thing that freed a common person from mundane, hard work, but the actual outcome was quite the opposite.

Quarto, claims like "mass production benefitted 99% of population and raised the living standards for all" are very non-trivial, and ideologically loaded, especially if you consider environmental pollution, health hazards, social atomization, worker alienation, and so on.

Re: Google Declaring War on the Web

#389

Post by anonyfox »

Maybe I am the only one thinking this, but there is a growing backlash against AI mindset plus a lot of people using the free chatgpt app for "googling" nowadays in parallel too, while realizing slowly that they cannot really trust it to be correct. you know what would provide an actual outstanding value to users that is even at times increasingly searched for? the original 10 blue links with zero distraction or enshittification and a hard AI content filter applied bottom up already at ingestion level, like, what the quality team of google search did for decades (filtering out low quality spammy noise). Just the thing that made the original google great essentially, be an actual useful tool, not another chat people increasingly hate. But I guess I might stand alone here with that reasoning.

Re: Google Declaring War on the Web

#390

Post by AlecSchueler »

pembrook wrote: post #380
nstart wrote: post #333

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is a very poor comparison. Firstly, you're ignoring that behind the mass manufactured stuff, there's a lot of abused labour. People do protest that. Because of how money works, it's also impossible to avoid it. Second, machinery that automated work isn't remotely the same. Engineers have built and refined the machines without having to go and inspect every new work that has been created by artisans each time. Cr…

I never thought I’d see the day when the open source “information wants to be free” crowd is complaining about intellectual property and “stylistic inspiration sources.” The courts have already ruled on this. Creative work that is inspired by (ie. an amalgamation of) other works is not a copy. It’s how ALL creative work is generated by humans too. When enough humans get inspired/rip-off something we just legitimize i…

> I never thought I’d see the day when the open source “information wants to be free” crowd is complaining about intellectual property and “stylistic inspiration sources.”

The difference is twofold: firstly people are intrinsically driven to be creative, that even with inspiration taken there's a desire to create something fresh. As you say, not just mechanical regurgitations of pre-revolutionary French style.

Secondly, "the courts have already ruled in this?" Have they? Are we not doing the IP thing anymore? Does that go for you and I and everyone else, or only for a handful of billion dollar companies?

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