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AI stealing our work. The collapse of social networks. The need to pay journalists to produce impactful journalism. Here is why we are asking for your email address to read 404 Media (www.404media.co)
submitted 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago) by alyaza@beehaw.org to c/humanities@beehaw.org
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this is an interesting article on the difficulties of running anything as SEO makes everything worse, AI proliferates, and things generally get worse for journalism. probably best summarized by this paragraph:

The long answer is that, through our own reporting, we are realizing that in order to combat the fracturing of social media platforms, a Google discoverability crisis fueled by AI generated spam and AI-fueled SEO, and a media business environment that is in utter freefall, we need to be able to reach our readers directly using a platform that we own and control. To do that, we need your email address.

but it's a very good read in general, and i'd encourage you to read the whole thing.

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[-] Moira_Mayhem@beehaw.org 2 points 10 months ago

Is there a better solution? I don’t know. But it’s not this.

If people were still interested in discussions of in-depth knowledge on a close cluster of topics, webrings could come back.

In a way that's kind of what Lemmy does, lets communities share links of interest, and a human curator has ALWAYS been better than any results google provides, even back when it was still good.

And, tinfoil hat time: I think google actively worked to kill rss to increase searches.

[-] davehtaylor@beehaw.org 3 points 10 months ago

And, tinfoil hat time: I think google actively worked to kill rss to increase searches.

The death of RSS has definitely been a deliberate thing. It's part of the same campaign against open API access. Everything is a walled garden now, and every platform wants total control over it. They want you on their app, looking at their ads, their content, driving and being driven by their algorithm. They don't want third-party readers viewing an RSS feed, or a third party app showing their content. They want full control of you and how you interact with them. Nearly all social media platforms require you to have an account with them just to view their content.

It's made the web a significantly worse place

[-] Moira_Mayhem@beehaw.org 1 points 10 months ago

You are absolutely correct in every point and it is a massive tragedy that we have been shunted into siloed tribalism.

I don't see an easy way out of this besides the total collapse of online advertising.

Maybe this will warn people about the dangers of profitization, and how poorly regulated capitalism destroys everything it touches.

this post was submitted on 27 Jan 2024
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