The author of @allaboutberlin on how Google AI Overviews are killing independent web publishing, citing a 70% drop in traffic after seven years of steady growth.

[hellomiakoda@pdx.social]

@everton137 @allaboutberlin Sooo.... when Google AI kills all the web.... the fuck the AI going to pull answers from?

[beandev@social.tchncs.de]

@everton137
Google is shooting itself in the foot. For one thing, no tracking or ad impressions are generated on websites. Additionaly, other search engines will likely start to gain ground.
@allaboutberlin

[ginevracat@toot.community]

@everton137 @malachy @allaboutberlin Instantly bookmarking the site.

[everton137@social.vivaldi.net]

@brad @allaboutberlin thanks for sharing.

[ooze@wirejunkie.net]

@ayl @everton137 @allaboutberlin webrings. They still exist.

[made@mastodon.gamedev.place]

@everton137 @allaboutberlin just subscribed to RSS
Didnt know about the sitr. Pretty nice

[decoderwheel@hachyderm.io]

@everton137 @allaboutberlin Thing is, I would be prepared to bet it's _not_ being trained on their site specifically. I bet it's a generically trained LLM that is live querying Google's cache of their website and "summarising" it (and other related content). In other words, it would bypass the debate about training and copyright. It could be incontrovertibly live copyright infringement.

[scottishwildcat@mastodon.ie]

@CyberPunker @NatureMC @everton137 @allaboutberlin How do you do that without poisoning the sources you’re trying to preserve?

[alci@pouet.chapril.org]

@beandev @everton137 @allaboutberlin seems for tracking Google has a plan: they already own a large part of our mails, documents, phones,...

[cyberpunker@mastodon.social]

@scottishwildcat
Trying to identify the AI Scraper and serve them other content than humans.
There are projects to do something like that, if i am not mistaken.

@NatureMC @everton137 @allaboutberlin

[irina@critter.cafe]

@hellomiakoda a handful of "news providers" with licensing deals, and just making stuff up

[charlie_house@mastodon.social]

@everton137 @allaboutberlin
Qwant.Com
-->independence.

[joeltruher@sfba.social]

@everton137 @allaboutberlin It's almost funny how on-the-nose another recent example is: overfishing.org. The content harvester/processor is literally overfishing the content fishery. In the real world, overfishing was allowed to happen until enough bounty was destroyed that the surviving processors recognized their doom and got laws passed to restrain each other. Is something like that possible here? It's not a perfect analogy (previously harvested fish can be endlessly recycled, the crisis is more on the margin, processor concentration is much higher), but maybe?

[shadowfetch@indieweb.social]

@everton137 This is exactly why I've stuck to native iOS apps over web tools, but even the App Store feels precarious now. Seeing years of hand-curated, high-quality work get digested into an LLM with zero return for the creator is incredibly demoralizing for any indie builder.

[sterpeto@social.vivaldi.net]

@everton137 @allaboutberlin Then stop supporting Google. If you're not making money from you better ignore it and do your work to be indexed by other search engines. They'll replace you anyway soon. Fuck SEO. Maybe we should come back to build curated indexes of directories.

[dec23k@mastodon.ie]

@Steve @ayl @everton137 @allaboutberlin
Already done:

"Before Google, before Facebook, in the internet that time forgot, we needed a way to find websites. By joining a webring with similar-themed sites we can help each other out by cross-linking between them."
https://faircamp.webr.ing/directory.html

See also:
https://waywardweb.org/
https://www.webring.gg/

[ayl@mastodon.social]

@dec23k @Steve @everton137 @allaboutberlin thanks for sharing!

[dec23k@mastodon.ie]

@Ooze @ayl @everton137 @allaboutberlin
I put some webring links here:
https://mastodon.ie/@dec23k/116624249351912791

[djsouthworth@wandering.shop]

@sterpeto @everton137 @allaboutberlin

Bring back webrings. In fact, I am going to add one to my site this weekend!

[itchi5@illo.social]

@everton137 @allaboutberlin

Let them open an account on non-US social media, and see if Mojeek (a 100% UK searchmachine) can do something for them.

The worst thing to do is to complain (which is understandable) but then change nothing.