This is why I shut The Den of Amateur Writing down after 25 years of running and developing it. I had written the entire codebase for Googles SEO, rolled out the update so my users would see a bit more traffic trickle in, and then watched them delist all my URLs 3 months later when this change rolled out. I just gave up. It was taking way too much of my life fighting googles bullshit to provide a free community.
I’d not heard of your site before, but it sounds like it was a cool thing while it lasted. That seems to be the trend of the day. The cool things are giving way to very dumb things.
It really was a great thing. It happened naturally too. Started as just a site I posted my writing to, a personal site in 1997, and friends wanted to add their stuff. By 1999 it was renamed from Routhy’s Den to the Den of Amateur Poetry, and then the domain was purchased and the site renamed to The Den of Amateur Writing.
I still remember the pre-PHP days. People would email their works to me and I would manually build an HTML page and update the site within 24 hours.
SEO is scummy.
Yep, I fought against it for years but eventually my new user intake was lower than the rate at which the typical user would fizzle out and move on. We had users that were there for 20 years and regulars, but without fresh ideas and posts things would get stale. So I had to yield and start adhering. Around 2018-2019 things really took a dive in traffic and I could not afford ads as it was all completely out of pocket, so I started a new codebase and rewrote it over 4 years in my spare time. The site before it shut down had a top grade from all of Googles site scanners and I had thought “Perfect… now folks will trickle in again at the right rate.”. And then the delisting.
But Google’s guidance was also telling us that recovery was possible if we just “removed” our “unhelpful” on-page content:
This is very chilling because it means websites will delete content. If the internet archive didn’t grab it in time it means knowledge is gone forever. An algorithm is not going to always be accurate in determining what is helpful.
That’s right. It’s why I began donating to the IA recently.
As one Google executive recently explained: “Organizing information is clearly a trillion-dollar opportunity, but a trillion dollars is not cool anymore. What’s cool is a quadrillion dollars.”
Any exec saying remarks like this should be old yellered.
I’m saying this being fully aware of what I just said, and I say it because of what it implies.
It requires massive poverty, massive control, massive casualties, people dying from whatever comes with that level of poverty, just so that a few assholes can brag about a quadrillion dollars.
Fuck
That
Shit
We need to start hard capping maximum sizes in companies. No company can employ more than 1000 people. No company can have a net worth of over one billion dollar. When a company goes over the met worth, handle it with taxes. When it reaches the employee max, that’s it, can’t hire no more.
We also need to hard cap personal wealth. Both income and net worth must be taxed in brackets. Nobody should be allowed to own more than 10 million (or whatever is a sane max maybe less, maybe a little bit more)
The lowest of the low pay no taxes, they have no money to do so. Then the next starts with 5, 10, etc. middle class should pay around 30 like in most countries. After that it goes up and up until you reach 100% for income, and whatever % is required to put the person’s net worth back into that 10 million limit.
With this we don’t have a single quadrillion dollar company with a king that will soon enough fail, we’ll have thousands of multi million companies, thousands of owners of which some might fail, others won’t. Tax income will be so much that we can quite easily fund a giant social support system, free healthcare (physical and mental, eyes and teeth), free education, universal income to ensure everyone can live nicely
NOBODY has the right to be a billionaire, it is not a right, it is not a privilege, it should be forbidden and the very fact that it’s not is a cancer on humanity.
This “quadrillion” asshole is a clear and present danger to humanity, it’s the seed of a cancer that will destroy us all.
None of your proposals would work for long, they only touch symptons of the real problem. We should be dismantling capitalism. It’s the system itselft that allows the massive unequality we see around us, and it’s by design.
Any exec saying remarks like this should be old yellered.
And their offspring if they grow up to be the same or worse.
As one Google executive recently explained: “Organizing information is clearly a trillion-dollar opportunity, but a trillion dollars is not cool anymore. What’s cool is a quadrillion dollars.”
Any exec saying remarks like this should be old yellered.
I’m saying this being fully aware of what I just said, and I say it because of what it implies.
It requires massive poverty, massive control, massive casualties, people dying from whatever comes with that level of poverty, just so that a few assholes can brag about a quadrillion dollars.
No, it don’t for the simple reason that for them to be in the quadrillion dollars someone should be able to buy/use/rent whatever they do. And they know this even if they don’t say it.
We need to start hard capping maximum sizes in companies. No company can employ more than 1000 people. No company can have a net worth of over one billion dollar. When a company goes over the met worth, handle it with taxes. When it reaches the employee max, that’s it, can’t hire no more.
We also need to hard cap personal wealth. Both income and net worth must be taxed in brackets. Nobody should be allowed to own more than 10 million (or whatever is a sane max maybe less, maybe a little bit more)
The lowest of the low pay no taxes, they have no money to do so. Then the next starts with 5, 10, etc. middle class should pay around 30 like in most countries. After that it goes up and up until you reach 100% for income, and whatever % is required to put the person’s net worth back into that 10 million limit.
Instead of these stupid ideas, what about closing all the loopholes that allow these companies to not pay taxes ? It seem simpler and more effective.
BTW, all your ideas would work only in a socialist country where the state control what the people do. When you say
When it reaches the employee max, that’s it, can’t hire no more.
what about a guy that want to do that job but then can’t ? He start a new company (but is he able to do so ?) Or the state plan what everyone must do ?
You are simply trading, by hate and ideology, the freedom of few to be billionaire with the freedom of everyone else to do what they want in their life.
True, the current system has a lot of problems, but you don’t solve them simply not allowing a company to become too big hoping that this will lead to a multitude of smaller companies.
With this we don’t have a single quadrillion dollar company with a king that will soon enough fail, we’ll have thousands of multi million companies, thousands of owners of which some might fail, others won’t. Tax income will be so much that we can quite easily fund a giant social support system, free healthcare (physical and mental, eyes and teeth), free education, universal income to ensure everyone can live nicely
Nope, you hope so but you have no evidence that it would happen, not even theoretical. And such solution would work only if it is applied world wide, if you apply only to US (or any other country or area like EU) your companies would be crushed from the bigger ones that your laws cannot touch.
Or are you proposing isolationism as the default for every nation in the world ? Are you sure it is a better option ?
NOBODY has the right to be a billionaire, it is not a right, it is not a privilege, it should be forbidden and the very fact that it’s not is a cancer on humanity.
But everybody has the right to try to be one as long as he follow the rules.
So the problem, maybe, is that we should start to ask for laws that force these big companies to follow the rules everyone else play by instead of asking to destroy companies that became that big because the laws are bad.
You are simply trading, by hate and ideology, the freedom of few to be billionaire with the freedom of everyone else to do what they want in their life.
Da ruski, good job pointing out the actual issue and then moving past it like it doesn’t destroy your argument. To your billionaire owners: we will thresh them just like the tsar and his family. The freedom from oppression exceeds anyone’s freedom to amass wealth. They will pay for their success either by death or taxes and I really dont care which one
Da ruski, good job pointing out the actual issue and then moving past it like it doesn’t destroy your argument. To your billionaire owners: we will thresh them just like the tsar and his family.
Genius, the problem is not that they are billionaire but that they can legally avoid to pay the taxes. I don’t care how much money you do as long as you pay the taxes. Same for them.
And you already can begin to trash them: stop using their products/services.
The freedom from oppression exceeds anyone’s freedom to amass wealth.
The two are not mutually exclusive.
They will pay for their success either by death or taxes and I really dont care which one
Ok, got it. Envy is bad.
JFC if there a uBlock list I can add to block most AI crap or do I have to get a new addon for that?
Yes but also stop using Google
Fwiw, I’ve been enjoying qwant for a few months now.
Ublock exists on multiple browsers.
We need other ways to discover shit on the internet.
I don’t know, maybe bring back the fucking webrings or something.
Webrings were so good, I would spend hours clicking through them
Man I miss Webrings.
The Internet Used to be a Place
There are still active webrings:
sadgrl.online webring directory
digilord.neocities.org/webring
webringworld.org
brisray webring listAnd there’s still web directories hanging around, similar to the now dead dmoz site.
https://url.town/ and https://curlie.org/ for example
Fediverse… You are here
Yeah, but this only works because we are so few still, when the masses floods in anywhere, everything turns to shit. Because of greed
You aint wrong. I am not sure how federation will handle prime time tbh
Easy, it’s actually hard enough to join Lemmy in comparison to the other sites, that I don’t believe the masses will ever flood here.
That isn’t necessarily a bad thing, althought I still have to follow my favourite projects on discord and reddit . Since they are publishing for the masses
I seek out out-of-the-way websites maintained by one or two people and then subscribe by RSS. RSS may be the only thing left keeping the web sane.
Man it’s miss the nethernet
We need other ways to discover shit on the internet.
I remember seeing a few days ago that Microsoft would be closing down its Bing API. I wonder how DDG will handle that.
Like a block chain - like system where each site gets listed.
Oh Hells no, no blockchain. Like AI, its worthless, beyond extremely inefficient, and people have been desperately trying to cram it into everything where it doesn’t belong.
Search doesn’t need a block chain.
I’m imagining more a federated system, like Lemmy. Currently it aggregates posts from different servers, I can see these servers actively spiderii the Internet and together making a whole.
They’ve been doing shit like that* without AI for decades. But yeas, it’s getting worse all the time.
* censor | suppress - tomatos | tomatoes
Google’s methods are shitty and exploitative, yes, but this is far from “censoring”. And “censor” is not used just for a clickbait title - the author claims “censorship” multiple times in the article before I stopped reading for health reasons (the doctor says if I keep rolling my eyes, my ocular muscles will spasm and eject my eyeballs).
Really wish people would stop wielding powerful words irresponsibly.
Not saying you’re wrong but people use words that are useful in conveying to their target audience. Denylisting by the search monopolist is perceived as censorship by many.
Bombast aside, I think the process and its implications are interesting and people need to be aware.
Agreed. It makes some solid points, and it seems well-researched in the way of exposing how the search-result hotdogs are made (at least in the 2/3 or so that I read). I just couldn’t stomach the way it was framed as “censorship”.
I’m very passionate about “words have meanings” and strongly dislike when words typically reserved to describe mountains are inappropriately used (and watered down) to describe mole hills.
Would you prefer “suppress”?
Also, wouldn’t your eyes bounce right back since they’re attached with a sort of rubber band?
No, because nothing is being actively suppressed, either. The gist of it is that they’re basically being ignored which is completely separate from active measures like censorship or suppression.
Perhaps this is how they’re trying to solve the factuality problem of their LLM? Limit the sources to a known good allowlist. Train the AI answers model on those. If that’s what’s happening, it would be ironic that they’d have to undo their search results enshittification in order to overcome the LLM’s inherent flaws. Of course the regular search results could keep being shitty. In fact they might get worse depending on the cost of the AI Mode.
