this post was submitted on 27 Jan 2024
49 points (100.0% liked)

Humanities & Cultures

2537 readers
38 users here now

Human society and cultural news, studies, and other things of that nature. From linguistics to philosophy to religion to anthropology, if it's an academic discipline you can most likely put it here.

Subcommunities on Beehaw:

This community's icon was made by Aaron Schneider, under the CC-BY-NC-SA 4.0 license.

founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
alyaza@beehaw.org
gyrfalcon@beehaw.org
TheRtRevKaiser@beehaw.org
Gaywallet@beehaw.org
luckless@beehaw.org
remington@beehaw.org
49
AI stealing our work. The collapse of social networks. The need to pay journalists to produce impactful journalism. Here is why we are asking for your email address to read 404 Media (www.404media.co)
submitted 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago) by alyaza@beehaw.org to c/humanities@beehaw.org
23 comments fedilink hide all child comments
 

this is an interesting article on the difficulties of running anything as SEO makes everything worse, AI proliferates, and things generally get worse for journalism. probably best summarized by this paragraph:

The long answer is that, through our own reporting, we are realizing that in order to combat the fracturing of social media platforms, a Google discoverability crisis fueled by AI generated spam and AI-fueled SEO, and a media business environment that is in utter freefall, we need to be able to reach our readers directly using a platform that we own and control. To do that, we need your email address.

but it's a very good read in general, and i'd encourage you to read the whole thing.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[โ€“] davehtaylor@beehaw.org 3 points 10 months ago (1 children)

And, tinfoil hat time: I think google actively worked to kill rss to increase searches.

The death of RSS has definitely been a deliberate thing. It's part of the same campaign against open API access. Everything is a walled garden now, and every platform wants total control over it. They want you on their app, looking at their ads, their content, driving and being driven by their algorithm. They don't want third-party readers viewing an RSS feed, or a third party app showing their content. They want full control of you and how you interact with them. Nearly all social media platforms require you to have an account with them just to view their content.

It's made the web a significantly worse place

[โ€“] Moira_Mayhem@beehaw.org 1 points 10 months ago

You are absolutely correct in every point and it is a massive tragedy that we have been shunted into siloed tribalism.

I don't see an easy way out of this besides the total collapse of online advertising.

Maybe this will warn people about the dangers of profitization, and how poorly regulated capitalism destroys everything it touches.