Technology
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related content.
- Be excellent to each another!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
Approved Bots
How does it help creators? Without them there is no web…” After all, if a web browser sucked out all information from web pages without users needing to actually visit them, why would anyone bother making websites in the first place
This reminds me of when Mozilla was 0.9 and the web was just taking the baton from Gopher.
When Ben suggests there would be no web without monetization, he seems to forget WHEN HE WAS THERE before the sellout.
Thank you to Arc for reminding me how much I enjoy browsing the internet and its many unique pages — these soulless generated results are the opposite of what I want.
More and more of the Internet is being ai generated, so you'll get to choose from a soulless summary or soulless SEO spam.
There will be alternatives I think. Maybe the web turns into even more trash but then there will be alternatives for people who knows where to look.
I guess it's the fate of the web to become cable TV. But that doesn't mean we have to watch that content.
If I want to get them quick, I'd take them soulless and summarized.
Definitely not the IT people keeping their ai servers running, that's for sure.
TIL IT is volunteer work.
Why does everything have to be about money?
Well people who make content are already suffering for a collapse of ad prices. News sites are shutting down left and right. Not everything is about money, but they need revenue or external support to continue operating.
I see the advent of AI browsers much like ad blockers; the web has become increasingly user-hostile and users are pushing back. Advertising was never sustainable, and that has only become more apparent over the past decade. This is a long-overdue comeuppance. The cost of the advertising economy is extraordinary and cannot be measured in mere dollars.
I miss the internet from the 90s, when sites were information-dense and operated mostly as a public service by enthusiasts, usually for free. Of course, that was not sustainable as the Internet became more popular, because the cost of serving a thousand people was, like, couch-cushion money, but the cost of serving billions of people...well, I don't have millions of couch cushions to plunder.
But also, the cost of web site operation today is artificially high, largely because of advertising and the incentives that an ad-driven market creates. What was once a few KB of text is now many MB of ads, scripts, layouts, and graphics, or even GB of videos, all for the sake of manipulating users into viewing more ads. Commercial sites do not compete on the quality of information; they compete over ad impressions. This was not borne out of need, but out of economic incentives that are misaligned with the needs of society, individuals, and, yes, even content producers.
This isn't new, of course. I remember the same conversations back in the 90s and early 2000s. First with Sherlock, then later with Google.
Not everyone creates content to make money. This discussion and this thread is not about making any money, as an example.
So why do we post when there is no monetary gain? Because we enjoy it.
I have a long-running blog for fun, so you're preaching to the choir. But some things can't replace a dedicated journalist, particularly at local level, sitting in city council meetings, chasing leads, and interviewing people.
People who make content for money are suffering from a collapse in ad prices. There are people who make content because they enjoy making and sharing content.
That's not what we're talking about... we're talking about news. Real news, with investigative journalism costs money. You need to pay for people to be on the ground, travel expense, etc.
This thought that everything you consume online should be completely free is insane. If everything we consumed online was just someone’s hobby there’d be even more trash.
There sure was a lot less trash when the web first came to the internet and there weren't any paid sites. Of course there was a lot less everything.
When it first started there were more smart people using it over dumbasses. What was there that would have even been worth paying for?
we live under capitalism.
And yet there are still hobbyists. We only "live under capitalism" to the extent that we have to, people still do things for reasons other than money.
-
We create WWW, where everyone can freely put things on and discuss anything.
-
Oh no! But what about the profits?
-
We create this summarize tool to quickly get knowleadge without always needing to peek deeper into text.
-
Oh no! But what about the profits?
It's not about profit. It's about being compensated for one's hard work which was appropriated without permission by giant corporations
Lesson #1 on the Internet.
Put something on it, expect it to be there forever. You never own whatever you put out there. Both text, pictures nor video.
Maybe companies should realise this too.