It’s as if Google hasn’t merely stopped at prioritizing profit over providing a service that people actually value, but has set out with the deliberate goal of actively eliminating any and all possible value they might provide.
It’s almost like a dare - “Let’s see if we can arrange things so that we provide absolutely nothing of any value to anyone and still make billions.”
I mean as a public company their end goal is to find the spot where the profit line crosses the satisfaction line. The goal is not to provide good service. It is to provide just enough service that you don’t go elsewhere.
provide just enough service that you don’t go elsewhere.
It’s not even that, is it? As long as they can force you to use their stuff it doesn’t even have to provide any service.
If there was a way for Google to hold you at gunpoint via internet until you pay them $100 every day they’d have a fiduciary duty to do so.
It’s… it’s almost as if the law about shareholder value as intended as a metaphor for accountability, not a literal, reductive claim that results in ouroboros. Almost like, our economic system is supposed to be a means, not an end in of itself?
No. Definitely can’t be that.
But don’t worry! Google’s AI summaries will soon have ads!
dear fuck, pasting ads onto the part of Google search that’s already known to be unreliable and annoying at best seems like a terrible idea. for a laugh, let’s see if there’s any justification for this awful shit in the linked citation
Ads have always been an important part of consumers’ information journeys.
oh these people are on the expensive drugs huh
It’s going to be so much worse than pasting ads if it ever actually works.
Rewriting the search results with LLMs let’s you seamlessly mix the adverts into the text people are trying to read… That’s why I need to sip a refreshing glass of coke zero™ when I’m contemplating the collapse of the internet into pure advertising drivel.
me visually: morning meeting poker face, unfireably cheerful when called on
me internally: dear fuck,
I have long written those sort of internal business emails by first writing the “RIGHT THEN YOU FUCKER,” version then euphemising it
Wow
Also this:
is great. It should be taught in schools. When you have a problem, buy the first thing you see on your screen for a solution.
PS (O/T): anyone know of an easy tool to do screen recordings like that for non-evil purposes?
Wait, are those people so fucked in the head they genuinely tricked themselves into thinking users… Like ads?
I swear every VP of Marketing at ShitCorp on mastodon shows up with that exact take in every adblocker thread. some of them follow it up with “…and the modern web wouldn’t exist without ads”, which is how you know they’re on the expensive drugs — these marketing geniuses haven’t noticed the fediverse’s got a pretty fucking dim view of the modern web as a whole
I think people will stop using AI if it has ads. People like LLMs because search engines return a bunch of Amazon affiliate link spam articles as the top hits under their own sponsored results which are also spam articles. Something that gives a straight answer is preferable even if it is often confidently wrong. If they put ads in the AI it removes basically the one thing it does better.
Ads have always been an important part of customers’ information journeys.
Yeah; the fucking hazards obstructing the path to the destination.
On the one hand, Google’s still the dominant search engine, having used every dirty trick in the book to reach that position and maintain it. If you aren’t on Google, you arguably might as well not exist.
On the other hand, Google’s already under heavy scrutiny since being officially declared an illegal monopoly, and the public is pissed with how Google’s declined in search quality - and deliberately so.
Part of me says we’re about to see some truly wild shit go down.
I changed to kagi 3 months ago and first was weird paying for a search engine but now it makes complete sense. Love being a customer and not a product!
You could try the brave browser as an alternative they don’t collect your data.
On that note, why not try serenity? Or urbit, while you’re at it. Careful, don’t get caught supporting these, use monero, putting the “cryptofascist” in “cryptocurrency”.
“Don’t be evil”
If they squeeze this rock hard enough, maybe it’ll bleed.