Letting Google break the law for years with illegal anti-competitive practices is now hurting everyone else’s ability to earn money.
I wonder if we have the combined will to do anything about it, or if we will wait and hope the invisible hand of the market will fix it…
maybe their business model. trust me. they’ll find a way to monetize the zero click internet too. then it’s back to square one
Don’t take this the wrong way, but fuck your business model. The internet was supposed to be open and be ours, and you stole it for profit.
To be honest: you can still make your own website, and in many ways big companies are actually making it easier through open-source projects and stuff like Let’s Encrypt. The web industry is remarkably open compared to what big companies do in other industries. A lot of the standards meetings and stuff you can just go to and give your opinion. Or ignore the standards and fork it yourself. This alarmism I fear will make people not take the actually alarming things like encryption bans or ID requirements seriously.
Only for some things, though. If you host your own e-mail these days, chances are, you’re going to have a very difficult time sending them anywhere without risking them being deleted, or automatically thrown into spam folders.
True, but sadly that’s because of what became a genuine user safety concern
also independent of that, fuck cloudflare
Lol. Yup 100%
The first spam email was sent in 1978. It’s been downhill since.
Can someone check in with the inventor of the web and ask him what the web’s business model is?
Anyone know Al Gore’s email?
I didn’t come here for heartwarming stories; yet here I am.
Everyone is too busy doomscrolling TikTok to notice.
I’m not buying whatever a billionaire nepo baby CEO monopoly owner is pedaling. Let’s hear what some labor leaders have to say about it for a change.
i’d like to be a labor leader, but i’m not (yet). Yet here’s my opinion:
Knowledge was meant to be free since the beginning. I look at ideas as human-cultivated, carefully cultured viruses. They’re packages of information that live within a host.
They’re a lot less aggressive than their feral counterparts, but they’re still individual beings who want to spread. Holding back knowledge is unnatural, and the internet should be free.
peddling
But it’s felony contempt of busoness model!!
Are they still defending the fact they host Stormfront?
Host_ed_, right? They did drop them at some point, I thought.
deleted by creator
Good. Maybe we can go back to paying for our services instead of getting tracked everywhere we go.
The internet was founded on the sponsorship model where content was free and ads were ubiquitous. while I completely agree with you that I would rather pay for the product instead of being the product, at this informs every single sign up I make on the internet, I think it’s self deluding to think there’s any great again to go back to. The philosophy was always there, the execution just wasn’t possible until they had finished building their walled gardens
When Orwell predicted universal surveillance he never anticipated that the people themselves would install the cameras, let alone pay a subscription.
That’s not what will happen. We will have to pay AND be tracked. They are not going to give anything up.
Time to look for other services then.
Besides the internet?
Meshtastic is free… now imagine remaking the internet on our own terms. (blackjack + hookers)
My food subscription is about to run out!!
This sounds more like “everyone is on TikTok and Instagram and will only ever be using TikTok and Instagram”.
This is all extrapolated from google’s self published survey of how their users interact with their search results. Approximately 60% of users don’t click anything after a search. Personally I think that is because users have found their results to be seo garbage and not worth clicking on… but that’s just my opinion.
Of course they don’t click anything. Google search has just become a front-end for Gemini, the answer is “served” up right at the top and most people will just take that for Gospel.
I’ve watched a lot of students do a search after I tell them to research something, look through a few of the summaries, then look at me in defeat. I have to tell them to actually click some links to try and find an answer
I went to college for networking but the most productive class I’ve ever had where I learned the most about the internet was instead back in high school. This teacher would make 20 page packets with the most obscure questions like what’s the weight of model number 62xRG4 (some obscure car part or something) and he told us to google it. We would spend entire classes just searching for information we would never use, but it drilled into me how to go about finding the information I need. It’s been utterly invaluable. Thank you Mr Ward.
I love this, so much. Blue Links have been the most critical pass to my future, across my entire life.
Purple links often, too. I can’t imagine surrendering the ability to sift through information with my own eyes and hands and brain.
I mourn for humanity.
Yeah well maybe the web shouldn’t be a business
America: “No money = no purpose”
the o’l capitalist shalamalama ding-dong…
god what I wouldnt give to go back to the days of the mid 90s, when the internet was nothing more than a collection of tech weirdos, with websites being nothing more than passion projects with no advertising, no SEO, no search engines, etc etc.
Tried a few searches. “no results”. Oh well
It’s a small web search engine so there is not a result for everything (as there was in the early Internet). The ‘Explore’ feature is probably more entertaining (stumble upon-esque) than using it as an actual search engine.
Will give a spin
there was plenty of advertising on america online though almost ever keyword was to a business that was an advertisement.
i do agree that web 1.0 and the 90s internet was superior
will give a spinSorry answered wrong comment. Big finger issue
Can’t we go back? What’s stopping you?
the pesky linearity of time as we understand it.
I’m going to risk that going back to personal websites would be a blast. And people would enjoy it.
People on neocities: “what’s stopping all of you?”
The small-web exists and thrives in its little bubble of creativity
Neocities? what even is…
Oh.
Such style. Such creativity. Personality in design! It’s like looking back into a lost age from when things were allowed to be fun. None of this ‘advertiser safe minimalism’.
This makes my brain do the happy chemicals.
This one is mine: https://h0p3.neocities.org/. Lemme know if you make one. I’ll read.
Does self hosting, at home, really pays off nowadays, or does hiring server space is a mandatory requirement?
what is that, some successor to geocities? or is the naming convention purely coincidental
Successor by a small community, forget the chain of events but, basically yeah.
That’s not gonna happen, and I even disagree with the statement but I can see the merit in it.
That being said the new business model will be the old business model, where everything is paid for. And I do not think that’s so bad, for example I’d pay for a browser if it respects my privacy.
You can’t say something like that without bringing forth some arguments…
For a glorious second, the entire world was able to communicate as one.
Then we catalogued every accessible reservoir of culture and knowledge, mined them bare, and refilled them with slop.
A global collective consciousness, hollowed out, replaced with static. No signal. Only noise.
Great prose and truthful. My brain heard it in James Earl Jones’ voice.
I really non ironically miss the friction of the old internet.
I prefer how it took time to find some bare HTML university website, slowly browse through an index as if it was a book, and then find one non-SEO optimized page with all the information you needed on a topic for your research.
The time to browse, being exposed to other terms, having to select the pages yourself, being skeptical by nature, and then having to copy it by hand… This is a much more positive scenario than having a gigantic company learn everything about you and everybody else and then make these decisions for you, using some hidden algorithm, and with the ultimate goal of pushing their newest process. And of course, the content has been rendered virtually useless to appeal to that algorithm.
when the internet was a wild and unexplored frontier, and we were adventurers charting the unknown.
I’ll drink to that memory, my brother
Wild and magical, where we…upon getting our first connection to this wide world of wonder, would just explore. Clicking every link with wild abandon and discovering magic behind every one of them. No need for caution, Viruses were rare, Malware didnt exist, just spread wings gliding over vast lands of unbridled discovery… Not even realizing 16 hours had passed and you had missed sleep, the adrenaline of adventure keeping you going, wide eyed and focused.
God I’m depressed now.
That’s because real information looks like that. If you can find a shortcut, then it’s fake.
Sorry for beginner reaction, can I use this in a website for an open source XHTML-extension I am developing? do I need to credit you somehow or lemmy link is enough or what is the best practice here?
I don’t know what the general policy is on Lemmy or the default license, but absolutely, feel free to use it, lemmy link is enough
Don’t forget to share your extension with us once you’re comfortable.
The Web was much better and more useful back before it had a business model. Good riddance.
Cloudflare already ruined the web way before AI was even a thing.
In what way?
So you’re saying the ad driven internet will die? And we will be left with what? Wikipedia and Lemmy? I for one welcome our AI overlords!
This is part of the larger problem that AI tools are trained on (and profit off of) content that is produced and hosted by others who are now seeing their traffic change from humans to bots. For content sources that pay for hosting with ads, this means a loss in revenue to pay for hosting. For content sources like Wikipedia, they are seeing their hosting costs increase significantly due to the increase in bot traffic. Even if you want every website that depends on ad revenue to fail (which I don’t entirety agree with), AI is still damaging the open web in other ways. Websites like Wikipedia for example may soon be forced to lock content behind logins or leverage aggressive captchas just to fight the bot traffic, which makes things worse for those of us that still prefer to use actual websites over AI summaries.
Nobody is scraping wikipedia over and over to create datasets for AIs, there are already open datasets and API deals. But wiki in particular has always had a data dump of the entire db bimonthly.
You clearly haven’t run a website recently. Until I set up anubis last week I was getting constant requests from dozens of various bot scrapers 24/7. That included the big ones.
Kay, and that has nothing to do with what i said. Scrapers, bots =/= AI. It’s not even the same companies that make the unfree datasets. The scrapers and bots that hit your website are not some random “AI” feeding on data lol. This is what some models are trained on, it’s already free so it’s doesn’t need to be individually rescraped and it’s mostly garbage quality data: https://commoncrawl.org/ Nobody wastes resources rescraping all this SEO infested dump.
Your issue has everything to do with SEO than anything else. Btw before you diss common crawl, it’s used in research quite a lot so it’s not some evil thing that threatens people’s websites. Add robots.txt maybe.
Oh ok I’ll just ignore the constant requests from GPTBot, ByteSpider, and the hundreds of others who very plainly, sometimes in their useragent, tell you that they’re grabbing content for training data. Robots.txt is nice and all but manually adding every single up and coming AI company is impossible. Like I said Anubis is the first time I’ve gotten them all to even remotely calm down.
But with the rise of AI, the dynamic is changing: We are observing a significant increase in request volume, with most of this traffic being driven by scraping bots collecting training data for large language models (LLMs) and other use cases. Automated requests for our content have grown exponentially, alongside the broader technology economy, via mechanisms including scraping, APIs, and bulk downloads. This expansion happened largely without sufficient attribution, which is key to drive new users to participate in the movement, and is causing a significant load on the underlying infrastructure that keeps our sites available for everyone.
- https://diff.wikimedia.org/2025/04/01/how-crawlers-impact-the-operations-of-the-wikimedia-projects/
republicans and oligarchs are already going after wikipedia
Nah, it’s saying that ad and AI-driven internet will prevail. People only use Google to find an answer and don’t dig deeper, and if they do, it’s often because the links are sponsored. People using GPT’s are even less likely to click a link. Currently no ads, but just wait.
Apologies if you were joking.
“what should I do if I’m going through severe emotional distress? How to choose a good psychiatrist?”
ChatGPT: "I’m sorry to hear that you’ve been going to a stressful situation, it’s always worth talking about your feelings. I’ve come up with a plan to help you:
1 Purchase an ice cold Pepsi Black™ from a Pepsi official supplier"
Or one of these https://lemmy.world/post/29579726
Normies get AI slop, prosumer uses local llm…
Not sure about social media… Normie is allergic to reading anything beyond daddy’s propaganda slop. If it ain’t rage bait, he ain’t got time for it
So, prosumers, leveraging computers that are not optimized for AI workloads, being limited to models that are typically inferior to commercial ones, are wasting more energy for even more slop?
That’s the price of privacy that I am willing to pay. With respect to electricity, I pay my bills at consumer rate while subsidizing corporate parasites who pay lower rates and get state aid on top of it.
Home grown slop is still slop. The lying machine can’t make anything else.
At least my idiocy ain’t training the enemy.
Also, AI ain’t there to be correct. AI is there to help you get something done if you already know the outcome mostly.
It can really turbo charge a Linux experience for example.
Also local is way less censored and can be tweaked ;)
What LLM you using?
You can pick something that fits your GPU size. Works well on apple silicon too. My fav’s now are qwen3 series. Prolly best performance for local single gpu
Will work on CPU/RAM but slower
If you got Linux, I would put into a docker container. Might too much for the first try. There easier options I think.
I use oobabooga, little bit more options in the gguf space then ollama but not as easy to use imo. Does support openAI api connection though so can plug in other services to use it.
It would be very naïve to think they won’t go against Wikipedia and the fediverse at some point unfortunately…
