AmbitiousProcess

This wouldn’t be an issue if Reddit always attached relevant posts, including negative ones even if those were the minority, to actually help people make a more informed judgement about an ad based on community sentiment, but I think we all know that won’t be the way this goes.

Posts will inevitably only be linked if they are positive, or at the very least neutral about the product being advertised, because that’s what would allow Reddit to sell advertisers on their higher ROI. The bandwagon effect is a real psychological effect, and Reddit knows it.

You mean the phone that originally sold for $250, that now sells for only about $170, that has been reviewed as having poor camera quality and limited 5G network speeds?

The one Trump Mobile is charging $500 for?

What a deal! /s

Fair enough. SEO was definitely one of the many large steps Google has taken to slowly crippling the open web, but I never truly expected it to get this bad. At least with SEO, there was still some incentive left to create quality sites, and it didn’t necessarily kill monetizability for sites.

This feels like an exponentially larger threat, and I truly hope I’m proven wrong about its potential effects, because if it does come true, we’ll be in a much worse situation than we already are now.

Not to mention the fact that the remaining sites that can still hold on, but would just have to cut costs, will just start using language models like Google’s to generate content on their website, which will only worsen the quality of Google’s own answers over time, which will then generate even worse articles, etc etc.

It doesn’t just create a monetization death spiral, it also makes it harder and harder for answers to be sourced reliably, making Google’s own service worse while all the sites hanging on rely on their worse service to exist.

This is fundamentally worse than a lot of what we’ve seen already though, is it not?

AI overviews are parasitic to traffic itself. If AI overviews are where people begin to go for information, websites get zero ad revenue, subscription revenue, or even traffic that can change their ranking in search.

Previous changes just did things like pulling a little better context previews from sites, which only somewhat decreased traffic, and adding more ads, which just made the experience of browsing worse, but this eliminates the entire business model of every website completely if Google continues pushing down this path.

It centralizes all actual traffic solely into Google, yet Google would still be relying on the sites it’s eliminating the traffic of for its information. Those sites cut costs by replacing human writers with more and more AI models, search quality gets infinitely worse, sourcing from articles that themselves were sourced from nothing, then most websites which are no longer receiving enough traffic to be profitable collapse.

Even if you want AI answers, you can use DuckDuckGo. They have an AI assistant too, and even it does better than Google’s at not hallucinating as much.

The military is also very good at propagandizing to the youth.

They primarily target young men who don’t know what they’re going to do with their life, then send them marketing materials (and even officers to their school) trying to tell them how much freedom and travel they’ll get if they join, and how it’ll build them into big strong well-respected men.

So even for the people who I wouldn’t say are dumb or even economically struggling, they can get roped in with false promises of things like the ability to get stronger and do work to help their community be safe, then in actuality just get deployed later on to fight the same people in their community when they protest.