I know it’s a small and unimportant thing, but it’s still kinda annoying that some authors (editors?) choose a phone with a giant black hole in the middle of a screen to show something on thumbnails.
Well people who make content are already suffering for a collapse of ad prices. News sites are shutting down left and right. Not everything is about money, but they need revenue or external support to continue operating.
I see the advent of AI browsers much like ad blockers; the web has become increasingly user-hostile and users are pushing back. Advertising was never sustainable, and that has only become more apparent over the past decade. This is a long-overdue comeuppance. The cost of the advertising economy is extraordinary and cannot be measured in mere dollars.
I miss the internet from the 90s, when sites were information-dense and operated mostly as a public service by enthusiasts, usually for free. Of course, that was not sustainable as the Internet became more popular, because the cost of serving a thousand people was, like, couch-cushion money, but the cost of serving billions of people…well, I don’t have millions of couch cushions to plunder.
But also, the cost of web site operation today is artificially high, largely because of advertising and the incentives that an ad-driven market creates. What was once a few KB of text is now many MB of ads, scripts, layouts, and graphics, or even GB of videos, all for the sake of manipulating users into viewing more ads. Commercial sites do not compete on the quality of information; they compete over ad impressions. This was not borne out of need, but out of economic incentives that are misaligned with the needs of society, individuals, and, yes, even content producers.
This isn’t new, of course. I remember the same conversations back in the 90s and early 2000s. First with Sherlock, then later with Google.
People who make content for money are suffering from a collapse in ad prices. There are people who make content because they enjoy making and sharing content.
That’s not what we’re talking about… we’re talking about news. Real news, with investigative journalism costs money. You need to pay for people to be on the ground, travel expense, etc.
This thought that everything you consume online should be completely free is insane. If everything we consumed online was just someone’s hobby there’d be even more trash.
I have a long-running blog for fun, so you’re preaching to the choir. But some things can’t replace a dedicated journalist, particularly at local level, sitting in city council meetings, chasing leads, and interviewing people.
I feel like the cat is way out of the bag on this. Stable diffusion can be run locally. Hugging Face has over 15,000 models labelled with text to image generation.
Thank you to Arc for reminding me how much I enjoy browsing the internet and its many unique pages — these soulless generated results are the opposite of what I want.
How does it help creators? Without them there is no web…” After all, if a web browser sucked out all information from web pages without users needing to actually visit them, why would anyone bother making websites in the first place
This reminds me of when Mozilla was 0.9 and the web was just taking the baton from Gopher.
When Ben suggests there would be no web without monetization, he seems to forget WHEN HE WAS THERE before the sellout.
Thank you to Arc for reminding me how much I enjoy browsing the internet and its many unique pages — these soulless generated results are the opposite of what I want.
Like, for example, breaking my ability to back out of this Engadget page on Connect for Lemmy’s default web browser so I had to close the app and reopen it.
In browsers you can long press the back button, and it will show the history so you can really jump where you want. Not sure if on Connect you can but maybe is worth a shot.
While I prefer to doing the reading/searching/summarizing myself, rather than have it presented to me, the current website revenue model is so broken with ads, tracking, and other pop ups. The user experience is really horrible.
engadget.com
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