- cross-posted to:
- google@lemdro.id
- pulse_of_truth@infosec.pub
- cross-posted to:
- google@lemdro.id
- pulse_of_truth@infosec.pub
For months, Google has maintained that the web is “thriving,” AI isn’t tanking traffic, and its search engine is sending people to a wider variety of websites than ever. But in a court filing from last week, Google admitted that “the open web is already in rapid decline” (with regard to advertising, kinda-sorta)
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Yeah it is, and it’s their fault that it is.
Google has no right to say the open web is in decline, when they’re the main cause of it, this is basically them saying, ‘Yeah, we won this stupid war that we started, screw you, peons,’ this comes off like if MS broke WINE and then admitted no one uses desktop Linux anymore, it will have been their faults that hypothetical scenario happened, this is what Google saying the open web is in decline when it’s largely their fault that it is comes off as to me.
Well they don’t get all the credit. Oh, wait, they control how much of the market? Ok, nevermind.
(the DOJ says 91%. Google somehow claims it’s only 10%, to which I literally LOL’d).
This is the nub of the issue. Markets need effective competition. Without it, you get fiefdoms and serfs, and shit products. Antitrust laws have been terrible for decades. Thanks to broken political thinking. Smash up the tech monopolies and not just tech will improve.
That difference is so large, they must be quoting different numbers. Something like DOJ is looking at Advertising providers or search providers alone, while Google quotes a number for percentage of all websites visited or something.
It’s not entirely their fault. The AI companies share a good portion of the blame too.
The AI companies are doing something different and possibly worse by stuffing all of the open sites full of AI slop and then re-training their models on said slop.
Wasn’t there some mythological figure that was doomed to eat its own excrement or something?
Ouroboros
Human Centipede
Jon Stamos?
A bunny?
Google is an AI company, even if that’s not all they are.
google went from one shiney thing to the next, much like microsoft. at first it was thier chrome browser, then its youtube+chrome+(failed ventures) and now AI, in between all of it pixel phones which they largely given up on.
Genuinely want to know, what web standards have been ruined by the Goog?
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Google commenting on the decline of open standards feels like a tobacco company commenting on cancer rates.
Even browsing existing small to medium sized sites has become such a chore, with all these verifications and rate limiters as part of the anti AI scraper effort.
So many cloudflare verification checkboxes. So many Google sign ins. So many cross site cookies and tracking for even basic functionality.
Care about privacy and restrict browsing data even a little? Captcha hell.
Then you get to load and execute 10MB of JavaScript while another 5MB of ad content loads and displays in the background. With the obligatory two dozen API calls to various trackers, counters, taggers, and “optimizers” in the background of course.
Glad someone else noticed this. I don’t care that the “small” web isn’t as extensive or as polished as the corporate web, but all the anti-scraper stuff and cookie pop-ups are the actual death. It’s horrible.
Off to gopher and Gemini I guess.
Especially since discoverability has pretty much gone down the toilet, between SEO and spam sites.
You’re not going to as easily find a new and interesting website, when the first few results are just computer generated regurgitated text, stuffed with ads by the gill.
Time to bring back the webring and every site having a “links” section.
SEO should be a crime.
That’s basically unenforceable unfortunately. Search engines are effectively made to be gamed by the way they function. SEO up to a certain point is what makes your website actually findable, it has just gotten out of hand.
Some mainstream websites and services are practically unusable when using a VPN, too. I’m glad I stopped using imgur years ago but I wish the rest of the world would catch up…
And then after all that have to read a page full of ego and and thinly veiled sales waffle just to find the tiny bit of info you are looking for.
You have to give up too much time and privacy to get little back. It’s not the internet we knew. It’s a hyper monitized sales board.
I miss being excited about what online would unfurl for me each day.
We really need to change the mindset about what the internet experience should be. I think everyone got too used to the idea of centralized services like Google search, Github, Discord, Twitter, reddit, and etc. and that didn’t turn out well. We need to go back to federated protocol based system instead. Let’s go back to the decentralized federated architecture of email, web, irc where no one corporate entity is the sole owner of said service. I think Lemmy and Mastodon are good start but we have to start replace things like Google search, Github, and Discord with decentralized counterparts. We have to learn from our past mistakes and start reconstructing a better internet infrastructure one piece at a time. It will take lot of effort and patience but it’s really the only way out of the mess we put ourselves into by being addicted to simplicity of centralized corporate controlled systems.
Prior to GitHub, everyone just hosted their own Git repositories. The nature of Git is pretty decentralised. And Linux kernel development still uses old-fashioned mailing lists for development co-ordination, rather than something like GitHub. I have heard before someone say the difference between Git and GitHub is similar to the difference between porn and Pornhub.
Prior to Discord, there was IRC.
This makes me think that a big part of the solution is some sort of very low barrier to entry guide or product for self-hosting. Like something even a non-technical person can do. Imagine if it became the norm to have a little always-on device that serves up your personal website, instead of social media accounts…
We need a startup to just make and try to sorta standardize a mini pc product pre-installed with a proxmox-like setup with an easy web interface and self-hosted solutions pre installed. 5-10 apps for main internet service needs like email, social media, content hosting/publishing and personal media libraries.
Give it a cute name like “Web-Pal”, keep it open and Customizable for powerusers, watch the internet become a better place while you’re the household name for devices that are as essential as a router.
I think this is a really good idea. A baby server for every privacy concerned house. Make it simple enough that customizing software features is like putting together Legos, but leave in the potential for complexity as some users grow.
If you could sell this for $500 or less you have yourself a customer
Exactly my thinking. You could even have some sort of containerized environment so that people can easily just download and run containerized apps for various things. A podman image for your music server, for your photo hosting… almost like apps but less proprietary and less closed source
Yup. I really wish we had an open source alternative to proxmox that used containers under the hood. Would make customizing and mounting external volumes much easier too.
I love the idea, but until stuff simplifies significantly that’s simply not happening. I’m a moderately technical person and all the self hosting options are such a chore. Even simply looking up info about them can sometimes be harder than installing and starting the centralized option.
the difference between Git and GitHub is similar to the difference between porn and Pornhub.
🤣
I hope forgejo’s federation efforts come along. Being able to host projects on my own instance, yet receive contributions without having to allow people to register on my instance, would give me the push to completely abandon Github.
I worked at a place that had self-hosted git and IRC for internal messaging. Was great!
The cat is out of the bag and long gone.
People got used to the simplicity of centralized services, and corpos made great efforts to make everything 1-click.
So when the average users need to do more than 1-click, they won’t use the software.
It would help if anti-trust laws were applied and these mega-corpos got broken in a thousand pieces. Centralized monolith services would have a harder time to thrive and give space to federation/decentralization.
I don’t know how this will help during World War III when billions of people will die.
Seriously? WTF? We’re talking current reality here, we can’t do anything to start or stop war, so just keep moving and living.
From my perspective that seems to be happening. I feel like there’s a rift between the websites I use for work and the ones I use on my own time. I realize that for most people on the internet, the big central platforms are the internet–I’m not trying to universalize my perspective.
It’s just that I remember when computers and the internet itself were niche and business was still barely aware of its potential, so this kind of feels familiar: You’ve got biz churning away in the mainstream, unaware of another culture that’s growing up, outside of their malls and parking lots.
I miss the old internet. Thanks capitalists
Late stage capitalism ftw
Late stage cancer is still cancer.
Yup, it wouldn’t have gotten to late stage if it was treated before it went metastatic
Maybe just a liittle cancer until we get smartphones and then we can nip it in the bud and ooops why is everyone mad oh no why are all the animals dying I just wanted to scroll for gods sake
You got internet because of capitalists as well.
Came out of government-funded research actually. Back when we could still achieve scientific feats on behalf of our country.
It was private at that time. My point is that it spread so quickly to millions of people worldwide because of capitalists specifically the telecom companies and ISPs stepping in. Without them, the internet could never have developed on such a scale.
The telecom companies got paid by the government to do it, they just as easily could have paid themselves to do it but we as a society are allergic to the idea of taking money out of the hands of poor billionaires and their potential profits
That doesn’t undermine my argument that it was ultimately because of the capitalists that the internet spread in the first place.
It does undermine your argument though, because you are saying that it only spread because of capitalists. I’m telling you it spread because of government funding and capitalists were just the medium by which the funding was used. The capitalist part is replaceable and unnecessary.
I’m telling you it spread because of government funding and capitalists were just the medium by which the funding was used.
It doesn’t work just by you saying it. According to multiple sources, the government clearly didn’t want to fund commercial internet and largely backed out during the 90s.
The capitalist part is replaceable and unnecessary.
It doesn’t matter if you think it’s replaceable, I can make that claim too. What matters is what actually happened in reality.
Could you explain how it doesn’t undermine your argument?
And how would you know without the internet being developed under a different system at the time?
That’s not an argument. I don’t need to speculate on hypotheticals when reality already proves the point.
The internet would not have existed without government investment. Back when the idea of the internet was being floated around in the early 1960s the US government did contact every major telecom company in the country snd all flat out refused meaning the government had to publically foot the bill (and the work).
No, capitalists would never, ever have invented the internet.
And I never said that they invented the internet.
You are speculating on hypotheticals though, since no one can know for certain how things would have unfolded in a different world.
I’m not even going to argue that capitalism doesn’t get you some positive outcomes for certain people.
How am I speculating when my argument is based on reality?
TIL DARPANet wasn’t a government funded project… \s
Google is so goddamn at fault for this it’s not even funny.
They admitted, with obvious glee
You can tell they’re scared of it because they immediately tried to retract/clarify the statement.
Though IDK why they’d care this point since the Supreme Court already declared Google a monopoly and turned around and said they weren’t abusive enough and gave them no punishment.
That’s a weird way to spell “celebrates”.
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Not to mention a lot of site traffic is now getting tanked by the UK blocking everything because of the “online safety act” that’s actually anything but (source)
Most recently my friend couldn’t access a Reddit post about a dental issue of all things because it got marked as NSFW and it asked for her face or ID (can’t remember) so she could see it (I ended up making her download TOR)
And Reddit completely.blocks you from reading when coming from a VPN exit, unless you are logged in (at least with. MullvadVPN).
Brave new world… :-(Not if you put “old.” before the “Reddit” into the address bar, the old UI doesn’t force you to login
At least on TOR
It is a 50/50 shot for me if it makes you login with old or not
Thanks, will try that!
The problem for years has been good stuff being drowned in slop.
It’s not going to be fixed.
Ever since search engine “optimization” became a thing — which was not long after the Internet was opened to the public in the ‘90s.
Capitalism has distilled its parasitic behaviour down to a science to suck the life out of anything that dare to stand out, and leave its corpse dry, for the sake of more profits.
One of my most unfortunate thoughts is that people were as excited about radio and television before they were centralized.
Once we lost synchronous internet connection the internet started evolving.
Content currated by our betters to help us fulfill their lives.
More like Google/Alphabet is doing what it can to close up the net, and hopes that openness on the net goes into decline.
They already squeezed the open net for all its worth.
Misleading title.
By the way, if you still want to use google’s search engine but want to avoid the AI stuff, see https://udm14.com/ or just add &udm=14 to your search query
There’s no way to avoid the ai stuff
Ai is in all the results
