Comment on Is Google about to destroy the web?

• rottingleaf@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago

  I remember it when good websites didn’t have any business model at all because there weren’t anyone busy with inventing it, all people involved spent their effort on making the website valuable.

  The business models were in TV and radio outside of the web.

  I’m not old, I’m 29.

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  • Libra@lemmy.ml ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago

    I’m 52, I remember when websites were little more than ‘Oh I guess we have to have an internet presence, so here’s a website that’s nothing more than an ad for our TV show, book, movie, etc.’

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• LodeMike@lemmy.today ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago

  Ydes but it will not “destroy the web”

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  • Libra@lemmy.ml ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago

    What do you imagine ‘destroying the web’ looks like if not killing off huge swaths of websites that relied on traffic/ads to sustain themselves? Do you imagine a man has to bleed all the way out before we can say he’s going to die, or is it sufficient to look at the severity of the wound to critical systems in his body and determine that he is probably going to die?

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    • AmbitiousProcess@piefed.social ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago

      Not to mention the fact that the remaining sites that can still hold on, but would just have to cut costs, will just start using language models like Google's to generate content on their website, which will only worsen the quality of Google's own answers over time, which will then generate even worse articles, etc etc.

      It doesn't just create a monetization death spiral, it also makes it harder and harder for answers to be sourced reliably, making Google's own service worse while all the sites hanging on rely on their worse service to exist.

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      • Libra@lemmy.ml ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago

        Or paywalling literally everything so there’s basically no easily-accessible content on the web anymore. But yeah I’ve been adding ‘reddit’ to most of my searches for years so I can get answers from actual people instead of full-page articles filled with AI-generated bullshit I don’t care about, so that’s a fair point.

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