This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
"...wasting massive amounts of ad money."
I don't see this as a problem.
And our time. I’m sick of googling something and getting nothing out these fluff pieces with little or no real information. It’s made Google near useless for entire subjects. Try searching for troubleshooting on anything Apple for example.
Yeah it’s even shit for dumb searches.
Decided to Google the most popular SUVs and I get a top 10 article where it expects me to click through each one so it can load a new page and ads for each item in the list.
Then you get the news tab in edge, msn news maybe and half the ads are literal scams.
The latter is infuriating to me. If I’m actually searching for a product, by all means show me an ad for the type of product I’m looking for. That’s a win-win scenario. How these mainstream sites put up literal scam ads I don’t understand. How can they be paying better than Ford?
We've come full circle. Original web searches sucked because you couldn't trust the results to be ranked in a useful way. You could search for a historical fact and you were just as likely to get an 8th grader's homework they posted online instead of a credible source. Then Google came along and solved that problem with their magic algorithm. Only took them a little more than 20 years to get to the point where their algorithm now sucks so bad that we're back to where we started. But instead of an 8th graders homework, we get AI articles that appear to be trained from said homework. Fascinating.
Yeah ads are a plague and not just online.
I can’t walk around my town without having billboards and super bright ads shoved down my throat.
Driving down the motorway, yeah we’ve got ads here too. Don’t look at your phone but sure read this advert as you fly past at 70mph.
This is why you need to add reddit to the search.
Which is sad as hell.
Yeah, Google and Microsoft brought this on themselves.
Programmatic ads placed on programmatic content boosted by programmatic view bots.
More seriously, this is ridiculous. Websites are junk because they are filled with programmatic ads in the first place.
Eventually, 99% of the internet will be bots talking to each other.
Soon the entire internet will just be bots shit posting back and forth.
TBH i feel like some social media would even profit of this.
ChatGPT is a predictive text engine than can already generate more coherent and accurate information than 90% of Internet Contributers and it doesn't even have the capacity to add 5+5 together. I welcome our new overlords.
Oh no :( Won't somebody think of the poor advertisers???
It affects me, the user, because I have to sift through garbage sites, because advertisers pay to keep those garbage sites online. So I think it's a problem worth discussing and addressing.
Bots making websites and filling it with bots so advertising bots will buy ads that will only be seen by bots
The internet as we know it is going to change dramatically very soon. Probably for the worse in the short term, but I do hope something better emerges from the ashes.
The internet has been dying and changing for the worst for a long time.
Websites trying to be a one stop all on one site that keeps you there are 90% of web traffic these days.
Having multiple bookmarks for multiple sites for individual reasons are the small user basis.
Sites like Reddit, Twitter, Facebook, tik tok and YouTube etc are the majority of web useage. Gone are the days of forums for bespoke interests.
Discord as a closed ecosystem with none threaded or web searchable topics.
Ad ladden shit hole news sites. Click bait shite etc are the norm.
Gone are the days of enjoyabls fun to explore web surfing.
I feel Lemmy is the new .. eh forums golden age or something. Anyone will quickly be able to fire up an instance, I mean anyone can fire up a community today already!
We have been spoonfed dopamine triggers since Facebook came around, before that you'd be on the internet because you actively wanted something. I hope that's coming back.
Grr /old rant off :-)
If Lemmy is an early indication, I suspect the proletariat will make our own internet. With blackjack and hookers.
And enormous compute capacity and volunteer hours.
What happened to reddit will probably happen on a much larger scale to the entire internet. First the enshittification destroys everything and then a new thing will emerge that much more resembles the old internet. Google's Web Environment Integrity could be the last nail in the coffin and speed up the change significantly.
I’d like to help. What’s the best way to create a garbage site to make money off these advertising scums? I’ll give the money to planned parenthood.
Fuck the whole advertising industry
This just increases the importance of human-driven filters like Lemmy (and Reddit while it's still relevant), as well as StackExchange for the subset of topics it encompasses.
Cue the world's smallest violin. Not sure how this is any consumer's problem lol.
Maybe, just maybe, advertising needs to become more carefully selected and regulated rather than the clown fiesta it has been since the dawn of the internet where Google and friends want to 'set and forget' and milk money for eternity.
But you know the reaction won't be sensible lol, instead we will get an AI arms race of AI adverts vs AI advert reviewers.
Haha, imagine having to solve a captcha for closing popups, so the content provider can prove to the advertisers that their shit was watched by a human.
And when that finally fails, we'll have to auth to every website with a crypto key to prove that we're a valid human data point.
I feel like this is the ad-equivalent of the sub-prime mortgage situation, pre-crisis. With mortgages, you had loans that no individual bank or bank manager would want, and then you had an automated process that obfuscated the individual loan details and produced financial products that could be sold as high quality. In the ad world, it's the same thing. You have these websites that nobody would buy ads from, individually, but somehow, through an automatic process offered by Google and friends, the worthless product becomes valuable.
Surely we'll see a new Ad crash soon. The entire internet seems to be run on ads and sponsorships which doesn't sound stable to me.
The irony that this story was posted by a bot…
The more direct problem for people in general is that finding what you're looking for has become even more of a "needle in a haystack" problem than it already was.
The indirect problem is that if genuine content creators can't get much out making content (not necessarilly money: for many simply the satisfaction of seeing how many people liked their content is incentive enough) because viewers are much more dispersed due to the AI-rewritten info cloning sites, then there won't be much new info for the cloners to copy in rewritten form, which is maybe fine for "questions already answered 1000 times" but won't be for questions or tutorials about new stuff.
Sounds like a good gig while it lasts. Half a mind for a weekend project it seems
"Junk websites filled with AI-generated text"
And here I thought this was going to be a headline about Reddit.
so what's the problem? it's a good thing that ads get served to sites that I don't visit
It's making search engines useless, for one thing.
The fact the ad industry doesn't have people veto the platforms they advertise on is a negative aspect of modern society. I see no issue with this going down. I'm far more lenient to capitalism when they produce sponsorships and financially aid events.
