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Google Is Killing Retro Dodo and Other Independent Sites

retrododo.com

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Re: Google Is Killing Retro Dodo and Other Independent Sites

#51

Post by gentleman11 »

miohtama wrote: post #8

The problem is not Google tweaking their algorithm causing large sites getting more traffic. The problem is Google having 90% dominance on the search, without credible competition. The problem is that Microsoft Bing never became a viable search engine. With more diverse Internet, like it was 15 years ago, issues caused by one provider were inconvenience, not a death blow.

Google basically just surfaces content marketing these days. It killed the blogosphere. Anybody who isn’t promoting their crap full time is invisible now, and so corporations basically generate almost the entirety of the content we get to see now

Re: Google Is Killing Retro Dodo and Other Independent Sites

#52

Post by fumar »

doublerabbit wrote: post #39
fumar wrote: post #36

I see some comments here regarding Google or Meta market dominance, but the root issue is the open web's transition to controlled platforms. The rise of discord, twitch, or TikTok point to a continued trend and not a reversal. If I am a leader in content discovery or information aggregation, then I will have to work with the existing platforms like reddit to surface information. If Discord made itself discoverable, t…

Tiktok isn't for everyone. Its was Chinese app that catered for the Asian population, specifically China because of their tight surveillance. It got lucky. It caught on because the content produced was tightly cherry picked to show the best of best. And from another country. The same would happen if a Japanese app was translated to English and had Japanese content. However people saw this and jumped on the bandwagon.…

I empathize you. I am hitting the end of my 30's and for a while I felt lost in the sea of young-folks memes and platforms. I am not on Meta's platforms or TikTok, and I largely quiet reddit. I happen to find YouTube with premium a good content portal for my interests. I started gaming in the last two years after a good 15 years of zero gaming. The PC community is strong now that handhelds are accessible and most recent non-Apple computers can handle popular games.

I also agree with you on TikTok's value proposition – it is not unique – but like the previous networks before it, it has critical mass. That is it. It doesn't mean it will stay on top for a decade, but its heavy state influence (read funding) helped it stay afloat while it accrued users. And its existence and proliferation help enforce that - at least in the US - there is an open market for new platforms to gain mass popularity.

I would take AIM or Apple iChat or a static forum over discord, but the internet changed. I finally understand why folks 20-30 years older than me prefer less change. Adapting is hard.

Re: Google Is Killing Retro Dodo and Other Independent Sites

#53

Post by Osiris »

jamesrr39 wrote: post #49
miohtama wrote: post #8

The problem is not Google tweaking their algorithm causing large sites getting more traffic. The problem is Google having 90% dominance on the search, without credible competition. The problem is that Microsoft Bing never became a viable search engine. With more diverse Internet, like it was 15 years ago, issues caused by one provider were inconvenience, not a death blow.

Is Bing not viable? It looks pretty ok to me. DuckDuckGo and Ecosia also lean pretty heavily on Bing and they work fine. If you know how to change your default search engine (and want to), you can pretty easily be Google-search-free nowadays. Of course the problem is that most people just use the default search engine on their device, and Google has paid big money for being the default. And if you're not interested i…

In my experience it gives really bad results for anything remotely specific. If it's just general popular stuff it's fine. But when searching for a very narrowly scoped query, it just gives back generic popular results.

Re: Google Is Killing Retro Dodo and Other Independent Sites

#54

Post by emahhh »

edude03 wrote: post #9

I'll start by saying, I'm sorry this is happening to the retrododo team, I hadn't heard of them before this article (I'm not really intro retro games) but it seems like they make genuinely good and useful content for the community. On the other hand, more and more these days I see articles & videos that I (possibly unfairly) summarize as "My content deserves to be prioritized by 'the algorithm' and $BIG_CORP is again…

Reading the article makes it really look like 90% of their traffic came from Google queries like “best ps2 games”. So yeah, maybe that’s the problem.

Re: Google Is Killing Retro Dodo and Other Independent Sites

#55

Post by Arathorn »

doublerabbit wrote: post #39
fumar wrote: post #36

I see some comments here regarding Google or Meta market dominance, but the root issue is the open web's transition to controlled platforms. The rise of discord, twitch, or TikTok point to a continued trend and not a reversal. If I am a leader in content discovery or information aggregation, then I will have to work with the existing platforms like reddit to surface information. If Discord made itself discoverable, t…

Tiktok isn't for everyone. Its was Chinese app that catered for the Asian population, specifically China because of their tight surveillance. It got lucky. It caught on because the content produced was tightly cherry picked to show the best of best. And from another country. The same would happen if a Japanese app was translated to English and had Japanese content. However people saw this and jumped on the bandwagon.…

Perhaps try Matrix again? Element as a client might feel a bit sterile but the content is often anything but sterile, plus there are loads of other great clients too (Cinny, FluffyChat, Nheko, Fractal, NeoChat and more).

Re: Google Is Killing Retro Dodo and Other Independent Sites

#56

Post by injuly »

edude03 wrote: post #23
ricardobeat wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I honestly don't understand why so many people seem to believe that their content not doing well by some arbitrary standard means some force is against them How long have you been using the internet for? You don't have to be a content creator to have noticed the huge shift in the past decade, that is basically killing the internet. Google's algorithm played a huge ,role in that, it has become nearly impossible to f…

~20 years to directly answer your question. I said this in a child comment - but to put it a different way - Imagine google didn't exist, how would you go about discovering content? When I first got on the internet there used to be directories, which was literally just a list of links sorted by topic. Although there was no "algorithm" I imagine (based on my own usage) that items listed closer to the top were more oft…

Well, Google does exist. For the overwhelming majority of internet users, it'll be their primary means of stumbling onto a website. And the pool of discoverable websites has been shrinking for years now.

A tiny fraction of internet users will bother with alternate means of finding websites apart from ads, Google search, or sponsorships.

Re: Google Is Killing Retro Dodo and Other Independent Sites

#57

Post by zrn900 »

edude03 wrote: post #9

I'll start by saying, I'm sorry this is happening to the retrododo team, I hadn't heard of them before this article (I'm not really intro retro games) but it seems like they make genuinely good and useful content for the community. On the other hand, more and more these days I see articles & videos that I (possibly unfairly) summarize as "My content deserves to be prioritized by 'the algorithm' and $BIG_CORP is again…

> I'm not a full time content creator so again maybe that factors into the mentality - but I honestly don't understand why so many people seem to believe that their content not doing well by some arbitrary standard means some force is against them

Maybe its because Google started doing this with Eric Schmid saying "Brands is how you solve 'the mess'" and killing smaller sites and sources to prioritize big brands and it never changed since then...

Re: Google Is Killing Retro Dodo and Other Independent Sites

#60

Post by apple4ever »

jamesrr39 wrote: post #49
miohtama wrote: post #8

The problem is not Google tweaking their algorithm causing large sites getting more traffic. The problem is Google having 90% dominance on the search, without credible competition. The problem is that Microsoft Bing never became a viable search engine. With more diverse Internet, like it was 15 years ago, issues caused by one provider were inconvenience, not a death blow.

Is Bing not viable? It looks pretty ok to me. DuckDuckGo and Ecosia also lean pretty heavily on Bing and they work fine. If you know how to change your default search engine (and want to), you can pretty easily be Google-search-free nowadays. Of course the problem is that most people just use the default search engine on their device, and Google has paid big money for being the default. And if you're not interested i…

I've been using bing for over 10 years and it has always been consistently better than Google especially without Googles evilness.
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