We desperately need more small static websites that are mostly just some text and a few pictures.
Absolutely. You can still make some pretty beautiful looking static websites using well-crafted HTML and CSS instead of making the user download and execute 10 MB of JavaScript bullshit.
Not exactly the same thing, but I listened to a really interesting podcast featuring the founder of Neocities who went into great detail about how he was able to save massively on infrastructure costs by not just blindly tossing everything onto AWS or Azure (link below, transcript included):
https://www.softwaresessions.com/episodes/bringing-geocities-back-with-kyle-drake/
Had no idea people have been trying to bring geocities back under a different name. That's awesome. Bring back the old web!
it has killed the printed media 
feel like local cinemas should just expose their schedule via api and have millions of websites bloom
Municipalities should just run websites with this information on simple flat html tables and rss feeds.
.ical
Definitely
Google has been killing websites for years. They tried to kill off RSS and they forced everyone to flood the internet with 'content' to stay at the top of rankings long before AI slop came along to make the job easier
SEO is a never ending mistake.
Things like this sort of give me hope that socialist reconstructions of the web will be better. Web peaked 20 years ago and everything else after is rent-seeking because there were no more problems to solve.
There should be a way for websites to charge Google to scrape that data. A lot of blogs and news websites have that problem as well.
That doesn't work. The websites are loosing traffic that is coming from Google in the first place. If the websites don't let Google scrape, they would have even less visitors.
https://developers.google.com/search/docs/appearance/featured-snippets?rd=1#how-can-i-opt-out-of-featured-snippets might actually work if you don't want your website content to be spoiled.
Sure, but instead of opting out, Google pays the site for using their data in a snippet
They've been through this in Germany over a decade ago. German press got their dumb law passed. Google wouldn't pay for scraped content and unlisted the German press instead, with exception of Springer who were the loudest demanding the law and the fastest to agree to give Google a free license. In the end most of the German press gave Google exclusively a free license to use their content to show their articles on Google News so Google has even more of a monopoly.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ancillary_copyright_for_press_publishers
On the road to fully automated luxury gay space communism.
Spreading Linux propaganda since 2020
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