Comment on Is Google about to destroy the web?
phantomwise@lemmy.ml 1 week ago
“about to destroy the web” ???
Where have you been these last 10 years? It’s been getting worse for a long time, even before AI. It’s just getting worse quicker now.
Comment on Is Google about to destroy the web?
phantomwise@lemmy.ml 1 week ago
“about to destroy the web” ???
Where have you been these last 10 years? It’s been getting worse for a long time, even before AI. It’s just getting worse quicker now.
AmbitiousProcess@piefed.social 1 week ago
This is fundamentally worse than a lot of what we've seen already though, is it not?
AI overviews are parasitic to traffic itself. If AI overviews are where people begin to go for information, websites get zero ad revenue, subscription revenue, or even traffic that can change their ranking in search.
Previous changes just did things like pulling a little better context previews from sites, which only somewhat decreased traffic, and adding more ads, which just made the experience of browsing worse, but this eliminates the entire business model of every website completely if Google continues pushing down this path.
It centralizes all actual traffic solely into Google, yet Google would still be relying on the sites it's eliminating the traffic of for its information. Those sites cut costs by replacing human writers with more and more AI models, search quality gets infinitely worse, sourcing from articles that themselves were sourced from nothing, then most websites which are no longer receiving enough traffic to be profitable collapse.
phantomwise@lemmy.ml 6 days ago
I’m not saying that it’s not a lot worse now, I do agree that it is. But things were already headed this way long before ChatGPT. SEO had already gone a long way in killing the web, I think AI will just be the death blow.
AmbitiousProcess@piefed.social 5 days ago
Fair enough. SEO was definitely one of the many large steps Google has taken to slowly crippling the open web, but I never truly expected it to get this bad. At least with SEO, there was still some incentive left to create quality sites, and it didn't necessarily kill monetizability for sites.
This feels like an exponentially larger threat, and I truly hope I'm proven wrong about its potential effects, because if it does come true, we'll be in a much worse situation than we already are now.