Hacker News Reader

Comment by timothyduong | Hacker News Reader

Catch 22? Let the robots scrape cause you want to be indexed, but at the same time, you don’t want to give the data scraped away for free.

I mean realistically, shouldn’t the news outlets just not let those articles be scraped and be done with this debate?

View on HN

Well it's more like, we want free traffic and also pay us for the privilege of sending it to us. That isn't happening and it isn't the way traffic works. Pay news organizations for the rights to republish the articles on Google (e.g. Reuters or AP feeds)? That's a business model. It also means the small one off news sites are dead.

Once all of the third party cookie stuff dies, meaningful display ad revenue for non-mega publishers (Google, Facebook, Amazon) will evaporate. These news organizations are dead men walking already and the debate is a waste of time at this point.

>"These news organizations are dead men walking already"

It means we are burdening zombies to create the real news. Who is going to do it after they are gone? Only paid for state propaganda and politico. That Doesn't sound too good.

I am all for the unified newspaper membership, where you pay for a membership that pays newspapers for their articles. The problem is how much would that cost to really fund the journalists. They would obviously still need to run ads.

But at least that might be a good start.

What search has done to news has for decades been the canary in the coalmine for what AI is doing to art now.

Because news has weaker copyright protections than original artwork ("can't copyright facts"), Google et. al. have been free this whole time to use news as a data input and pull traffic away from the original sources.

The end result is what has happened to the news industry, and we can extrapolate what will happen to commercial art if copyright protections on artworks are discovered to be similarly weak.

That's the thing though. Google doesn't cough up the article content. It just shows headlines with links to the article for people to read. It's nothing like the AIs which are actually generating the entire content from questionable source rights.

Is the real story that nobody wants to admit the majority of people don't read past the headline? Because that's a pretty stark reflection on how journalism as a field should maybe not exist then. Hah.

The majority of people don't read past the headline, and the majority of people don't care if the art on a billboard came from a human or a machine.

It is possible that some human practices aren't compatible with a simple capitalist model of sustaining them.

Nothing is AI based here, the newspaper give themselves what they want to show on Google. So of they are not okay with the content they send, they can just send an empty string instead. The newspapers are in full control here and always have been.

Except that they're not, because they know that in this modern era, people use search to find information. So if they don't want to become irrelevant, they have to play the game; they can't just robots.txt-exclude Google, they'll be tossed into the wastebin of history against other news sources that people can just find with a click. It's not real choice when the choice is "Let this company harvest your information or become obsolete."

Similarly, artists in this modern era are stuck because to be relevant, they have to show off online (where the eyeballs are) but everything they put up online can become fodder for an AI synthesizer.

It's not any different than the newspaper stalls of the past. The newspapers show their title and cover for free on the street as well to get somebody to pick them up. And same as in the past, nobody wanted to show a blank page on the street either.

Where the newspapers are struggling in isn't getting traffic but in converting this traffic to paid customers and Google isn't responsible of any of that problem.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com