- cross-posted to:
- pulse_of_truth@infosec.pub
- cross-posted to:
- pulse_of_truth@infosec.pub
For months, Google has maintained that the web is “thriving,” AI isn’t tanking traffic, and its search engine is sending people to a wider variety of websites than ever. But in a court filing from last week, Google admitted that “the open web is already in rapid decline” (with regard to advertising, kinda-sorta)
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Not to mention a lot of site traffic is now getting tanked by the UK blocking everything because of the “online safety act” that’s actually anything but (source)
Most recently my friend couldn’t access a Reddit post about a dental issue of all things because it got marked as NSFW and it asked for her face or ID (can’t remember) so she could see it (I ended up making her download TOR)
And Reddit completely.blocks you from reading when coming from a VPN exit, unless you are logged in (at least with. MullvadVPN).
Brave new world… :-(Not if you put “old.” before the “Reddit” into the address bar, the old UI doesn’t force you to login
At least on TOR
It is a 50/50 shot for me if it makes you login with old or not
I wonder how long old.reddit will stay available.
Thanks, will try that!
But in a court filing
Why is this legal? It’s always like this with large companies. " Yeah we were just lying to everyone all the time, but this filing for court is the absolute truth!"
It’s the same as Fox News which always says they’re fair and balanced news and they bring the news nobody else does, but in a court filing… They suddenly claim that no reasonable person would believe them to be a real news organization… Uuuh huh…
Any court should dismiss this filing immediately and punish them for submitting a false filing, or continuously lying outside the courts. This sort of crap should be inadmissible.
Leopards eating everyone’s face these days.
This is all according to plan for Google tho. What could be better than having everyone sign up for the GoogleNet? We’ll finally back to the ways of pre-Internet AOL and Compuserve.
Pretty sure all the AI companies were hoping to wrap the internet in their AI as a user interface, for a fee oc.
There will be such a thing that arises as a “grey net” I think. Not the dark web, but also not mainstream internet.
So basically the fediverse?
I mean at some point even websites seem grey net when the mainstream internet is basically AOL Future.
I think if there’s going to be an Eternal August version of the internet, it will be hidden in plain sight created by some of the same people that want to use it.
I think the term you are looking for is “Deep Net”, although it originally meant websites that weren’t indexed by web searches.
What I’m hearing is: I can replace saying “I have a dumb little WordPress blog that no one reads” with "I host a part of the ‘Deep Net’.
Sweet.
They are making it happen.
Thanks for helping
I wonder what took them so long to figure it out. After all, they are the ones that broke it.
Not broken, working as intended (for them). They just happened to say the quiet part out loud this time.
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Yeah it is, and it’s their fault that it is.
Google has no right to say the open web is in decline, when they’re the main cause of it, this is basically them saying, ‘Yeah, we won this stupid war that we started, screw you, peons,’ this comes off like if MS broke WINE and then admitted no one uses desktop Linux anymore, it will have been their faults that hypothetical scenario happened, this is what Google saying the open web is in decline when it’s largely their fault that it is comes off as to me.
Well they don’t get all the credit. Oh, wait, they control how much of the market? Ok, nevermind.
(the DOJ says 91%. Google somehow claims it’s only 10%, to which I literally LOL’d).
That difference is so large, they must be quoting different numbers. Something like DOJ is looking at Advertising providers or search providers alone, while Google quotes a number for percentage of all websites visited or something.
This is the nub of the issue. Markets need effective competition. Without it, you get fiefdoms and serfs, and shit products. Antitrust laws have been terrible for decades. Thanks to broken political thinking. Smash up the tech monopolies and not just tech will improve.
It’s not entirely their fault. The AI companies share a good portion of the blame too.
The AI companies are doing something different and possibly worse by stuffing all of the open sites full of AI slop and then re-training their models on said slop.
Wasn’t there some mythological figure that was doomed to eat its own excrement or something?
A bunny?
Ouroboros
Human Centipede
Jon Stamos?
Google is an AI company, even if that’s not all they are.
google went from one shiney thing to the next, much like microsoft. at first it was thier chrome browser, then its youtube+chrome+(failed ventures) and now AI, in between all of it pixel phones which they largely given up on.
Genuinely want to know, what web standards have been ruined by the Goog?
I am so fucking exhausted of EVERYTHING in this society being treated like a statistic.
But what pisses me off even more, is when a gigantic corporation makes a bold claim, pretending they aren’t a major contributor to what’s happening in the said claim
Google commenting on the decline of open standards feels like a tobacco company commenting on cancer rates.
Even browsing existing small to medium sized sites has become such a chore, with all these verifications and rate limiters as part of the anti AI scraper effort.
So many cloudflare verification checkboxes. So many Google sign ins. So many cross site cookies and tracking for even basic functionality.
Care about privacy and restrict browsing data even a little? Captcha hell.
And guess how awesome that is with blocked google. I fucking hate lazy bastard sysops who prefer recaptcha. Half the web is basically locking me out. And cloudflare is another bad thing that monopolized infrastructure.
Then you get to load and execute 10MB of JavaScript while another 5MB of ad content loads and displays in the background. With the obligatory two dozen API calls to various trackers, counters, taggers, and “optimizers” in the background of course.
Glad someone else noticed this. I don’t care that the “small” web isn’t as extensive or as polished as the corporate web, but all the anti-scraper stuff and cookie pop-ups are the actual death. It’s horrible.
Off to gopher and Gemini I guess.
Especially since discoverability has pretty much gone down the toilet, between SEO and spam sites.
You’re not going to as easily find a new and interesting website, when the first few results are just computer generated regurgitated text, stuffed with ads by the gill.
Time to bring back the webring and every site having a “links” section.
That shit did work pretty decent. Yet hard to find the initial go to when you’re looking for something specific.
SEO should be a crime.
That’s basically unenforceable unfortunately. Search engines are effectively made to be gamed by the way they function. SEO up to a certain point is what makes your website actually findable, it has just gotten out of hand.
Some mainstream websites and services are practically unusable when using a VPN, too. I’m glad I stopped using imgur years ago but I wish the rest of the world would catch up…
And then after all that have to read a page full of ego and and thinly veiled sales waffle just to find the tiny bit of info you are looking for.
You have to give up too much time and privacy to get little back. It’s not the internet we knew. It’s a hyper monitized sales board.
I miss being excited about what online would unfurl for me each day.
Yeah. We saw the peak of the web and since then its ugly decline. Surfing today is actually more frustrating than satisfying. For me. Half the shit doesn’t work, bugs me with paywally or any other wall just to - MAYBE - finally reveal not really an answer but my problem…rephrased, dragged to five hundred words, or worse, a 20 minute video of a shit bird that shows me how he types text into notepad.
I miss the times where we had to search the search-engines. And the web would be so damn fast today if not every shit would also load 583u2 libraries of blingbling and tracktrack
We really need to change the mindset about what the internet experience should be. I think everyone got too used to the idea of centralized services like Google search, Github, Discord, Twitter, reddit, and etc. and that didn’t turn out well. We need to go back to federated protocol based system instead. Let’s go back to the decentralized federated architecture of email, web, irc where no one corporate entity is the sole owner of said service. I think Lemmy and Mastodon are good start but we have to start replace things like Google search, Github, and Discord with decentralized counterparts. We have to learn from our past mistakes and start reconstructing a better internet infrastructure one piece at a time. It will take lot of effort and patience but it’s really the only way out of the mess we put ourselves into by being addicted to simplicity of centralized corporate controlled systems.
The cat is out of the bag and long gone.
People got used to the simplicity of centralized services, and corpos made great efforts to make everything 1-click.
So when the average users need to do more than 1-click, they won’t use the software.
It would help if anti-trust laws were applied and these mega-corpos got broken in a thousand pieces. Centralized monolith services would have a harder time to thrive and give space to federation/decentralization.
From my perspective that seems to be happening. I feel like there’s a rift between the websites I use for work and the ones I use on my own time. I realize that for most people on the internet, the big central platforms are the internet–I’m not trying to universalize my perspective.
It’s just that I remember when computers and the internet itself were niche and business was still barely aware of its potential, so this kind of feels familiar: You’ve got biz churning away in the mainstream, unaware of another culture that’s growing up, outside of their malls and parking lots.
Prior to GitHub, everyone just hosted their own Git repositories. The nature of Git is pretty decentralised. And Linux kernel development still uses old-fashioned mailing lists for development co-ordination, rather than something like GitHub. I have heard before someone say the difference between Git and GitHub is similar to the difference between porn and Pornhub.
Prior to Discord, there was IRC.
I hope forgejo’s federation efforts come along. Being able to host projects on my own instance, yet receive contributions without having to allow people to register on my instance, would give me the push to completely abandon Github.
I worked at a place that had self-hosted git and IRC for internal messaging. Was great!
IRC is still there. The user numbers just aren’t that great anymore 😒 I fucking hate discord and what it did and how it took over. And also, of course, murican.
Lots of “muricans” hate discord too
Sure sure, you’re not all idiots. Wasn’t meant this way. Just that, on top of being shit, being murican is another no-go for an app.
I hate that everyone fucking uses discord for everything, discord when I’m using it is strictly to game and for online game related activities.
People are just clueless and lazy, and take the easiest way “that everyone else does too”. And here we are. Recently had to join one…and was asked for a phone number before being allowed to enter. Lol. Yeah sure. Guess I won’t join then 😐
This makes me think that a big part of the solution is some sort of very low barrier to entry guide or product for self-hosting. Like something even a non-technical person can do. Imagine if it became the norm to have a little always-on device that serves up your personal website, instead of social media accounts…
Considering that many don’t even know anymore what a website actually is, or domains (especially TLDs that are not .com or <insert local one>)…
Also take into account that people are lazy (not meant condescending). Using the major shit is easy, “everyone else does too!” and technologically challenged people can use it.
Even IF selfhosted XYZ would be as easy as downloading something (it already starts to be “too complicated” for many) and executing it, it probably wouldn’t happen.
I, personally, fear for the future of the web. I’ve seen the peak of the web and its constant accelerated decline since.
Yeah I know more than a few people fitting that description. But I do believe things can turn around. It’s less likely to make converts of people who already have that mentality, but things can resurge among new people and I think there’s a real movement there with tech literacy.
I sure hope so, yet am not as optimistic as you 😑
I love the idea, but until stuff simplifies significantly that’s simply not happening. I’m a moderately technical person and all the self hosting options are such a chore. Even simply looking up info about them can sometimes be harder than installing and starting the centralized option.
We need a startup to just make and try to sorta standardize a mini pc product pre-installed with a proxmox-like setup with an easy web interface and self-hosted solutions pre installed. 5-10 apps for main internet service needs like email, social media, content hosting/publishing and personal media libraries.
Give it a cute name like “Web-Pal”, keep it open and Customizable for powerusers, watch the internet become a better place while you’re the household name for devices that are as essential as a router.
Great idea. From a nerd 😁
But who do you think would be the target demographic? Critical users, that don’t want to use major crap but are also not suited for doing it all by themselves, either due to skill, time, money or a combination thereof?
I wouldn’t think that group is significantly large. And definitely not large enough to seriously put a dent in the major crap apps.
Better than nothing, but probably not worth investing in such a project. Sadly so, I might add.
Platforms keep getting shittier and more exploitative, while government thirst for control with things like Chat Control, OSA and whatever the US is doing.
The more we see of that the easier it becomes to market a “your internet services in a box” to a layman.
But first they have to care. The amount of people who don’t care for e.g. privacy - even if explained in detail - is flabbergasting. Even today I heard two times “why? I have nothing to hide” or “but WhatsApp is superior!”
I think this is a really good idea. A baby server for every privacy concerned house. Make it simple enough that customizing software features is like putting together Legos, but leave in the potential for complexity as some users grow.
If you could sell this for $500 or less you have yourself a customer
Exactly my thinking. You could even have some sort of containerized environment so that people can easily just download and run containerized apps for various things. A podman image for your music server, for your photo hosting… almost like apps but less proprietary and less closed source
Yup. I really wish we had an open source alternative to proxmox that used containers under the hood. Would make customizing and mounting external volumes much easier too.
the difference between Git and GitHub is similar to the difference between porn and Pornhub.
🤣
I don’t know how this will help during World War III when billions of people will die.
Seriously? WTF? We’re talking current reality here, we can’t do anything to start or stop war, so just keep moving and living.
Google is so goddamn at fault for this it’s not even funny.
