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> I would actually be looking to either reddit, or gaming YouTubers or gaming sites I already use

In my mind, this is actually the problem. Over the past 15 years, the "web" has become increasingly platformized, and it's getting more platformized every year.

The web is, for all intents and purposes, at the control and direction of Google, Meta, YouTube and a few other players.

When you do finally get into the "independent web", it made up Forbes, Tom's Guide or CNET. 16 companies own the vast majority of the web that we all use: https://detailed.com/google-control/

So, I agree with you, but as a counter anecdote - I was subscribed to Nebula for ~2 years, and I barely used it because there was no algorithm telling me what things it thought I'd like. Even when I had a topic in mind that I was interested in (mega projects as a random example) I'd get low 100s of results, many from creators I had never heard of, and the ones I chose to watch would typically be from creators I knew from YouTube which of course, were presented to me by "the algorithm".

While I agree it's harmful to the web to be essentially under control of a very small number of mega corporations, even when you actively avoid them like I did in my nebula example, it's not clear what the solution to content discovery is (and of course, google et al don't really stop you from consuming content you already know about which is my problem with the original article)

Similar experience when I tried using DuckDuckGo as default on recently bought Android phone.

I'm all in for privacy - and actively dislike many of Google/YouTube moves (which seem intentional part of plan and not so much accidental or with technical reasons) - e.g.:

YouTube doesn't allow parents to limit their young kids to only whitelisted channels ...

Even worse, if you block YouTube.com domain - kid can't sign into school account (Google classroom stuff) because signing into anything Google actually goes through something like accounts.youtube.com.

And yet after 20th or 30th time when I was not finding things though DDG and manually typing "google.com" to do a search there (browser and other android search boxes were defaulting to DDG).

I just switched default browser and search engine back to Google :(

> I honestly don't understand why so many people seem to believe that their content not doing well by some arbitrary standard means some force is against them

How long have you been using the internet for? You don't have to be a content creator to have noticed the huge shift in the past decade, that is basically killing the internet.

Google's algorithm played a huge,role in that, it has become nearly impossible to find independent websites, and they don't even bother giving you more than a couple pages of search results. There is no possibility of the "organic growth" you talk about outside of social media platforms. And then the flood of AI-generated content nailed that coffin.

~20 years to directly answer your question.

I said this in a child comment - but to put it a different way - Imagine google didn't exist, how would you go about discovering content? When I first got on the internet there used to be directories, which was literally just a list of links sorted by topic. Although there was no "algorithm" I imagine (based on my own usage) that items listed closer to the top were more often clicked and thus grew faster than items lower on the list.

In fact, even before the internet, this phenomenon existed in the Yellow Pages which is why you have things like "aaa local plumbers" so they'd appear before their competitors.

Well, Google does exist. For the overwhelming majority of internet users, it'll be their primary means of stumbling onto a website. And the pool of discoverable websites has been shrinking for years now.

A tiny fraction of internet users will bother with alternate means of finding websites apart from ads, Google search, or sponsorships.

Reading the article makes it really look like 90% of their traffic came from Google queries like “best ps2 games”. So yeah, maybe that’s the problem.

> I'm not a full time content creator so again maybe that factors into the mentality - but I honestly don't understand why so many people seem to believe that their content not doing well by some arbitrary standard means some force is against them

Maybe its because Google started doing this with Eric Schmid saying "Brands is how you solve 'the mess'" and killing smaller sites and sources to prioritize big brands and it never changed since then...

Agreed. I guess the only fair complaining is the text snippet that Google get from sites to put on SERPs, saving a click. This is gross.