Online news publishers face extinction-level event from Google AI-powered search | Hacker News Reader

Online news publishers face extinction-level event from Google AI-powered search

npr.org

9 pointssogen6 comments

I have zero pity. Zero. Because what kind of metric is this?

- Google is invented and brings lots of traffic to publishers for many years.

- Publishers drink from the firehose, getting used to a lot of traffic. To get even more traffic, quality goes down, SEO spam goes up.

- Publishers give zero fucks about readers privacy and install a gazillion trackers (personalized ad networks)

- Google makes AI snippets with similar quality to the SEO spam on publishers websites resulting in less traffic.

- Publishers whine, because they realize that their spammy unsustained business practices kinda suck for readers and most readers weren’t loyal after all.

- Publishers blame Google, because they felt entitled to this low-quality traffic they got so used to because of their SEO spam.

Anyways. We can talk about the necessity of a general purpose search engine. We can talk about Google‘s role in stealing content from websites. But these are different topics and for now, I’m sick of whiny publishers.

They also have a major trust problem. They have repeatedly published half truths, clickbait, propaganda, and even outright lies under the guise of news. Good riddance.

While I agree SEO and click-based ad revenue have degraded the media greatly, we should still be very concerned about the potential collapse of journalism. Proper journalism requires large budgets, trained journalists and things like reporters traveling to war zones. These things can't be replaced by your favorite Substack. They require wealthy media entities.

Can I sketch out one future of news for input?

- Personalized

- No adverts

- No hidden dopamine hooks

- Assigns probability of accuracy

- Explains relevance to you personally

- Explains emerging news events and context, highlighting propaganda/news manipulation where relevant.

This is like a news editor suggesting a future of development: zero bugs, never goes down, can be used anywhere, usable be anyone. Yes these all seem nice, but they're just a wishlist that is borderline impossible in practice.

Also personalisation of news is almost the number one 'hidden dopamine hooks', and in many ways the most insidious in its impact.

Thanks. V helpful. Especially the point about dopamine hits.

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