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Do you think the advertising model is sustainable? I personally don't think it is because as an advertising network that gives a cut of its proceeds to various

Do you think the advertising model is sustainable? I personally don't think it is because as an advertising network that gives a cut of its proceeds to various sites that host ads from their network they're incentivized to look the other way when it comes to SEO spam. So as Google has gotten larger so has the problem of SEO spam (which is mostly content designed to hack the Google ranking algorithm to earn a cut of revenue from the clickstream controlled and managed by Google). SEO spammers are incentivized by Google to create incoherent content that Google itself ranks highly because it increases their main source of revenue. This is why I think their model is not sustainable. Eventually the web will be saturated with adversarial SEO spam instead of information curated by people.

mrkramer 4y ago
If that happens people will abandon "Open Web" and will only use "Walled Gardens" like FB, IG, Twitter, LinkedIn, YT, TikTok, Reddit, Discord etc. That would be tragic.
- koyanisqatsi 4y ago
  I think people do this now already. How many people do you know that host their content on open platforms?
  - mrkramer 4y ago
    For example there are thousands of blogs out there but the question is how much are they consumed by people. Overall I would say majority of people(casual users) still use Open Web to find general information and some smaller percentage of Web users use it to find more specific and specialized information, those are power users. The reason for all this is that they(casual users) think Google is the Internet and that the information is out there sort of hosted on Google for them to find it. I think the Web users need to develop more personal connections(following) to websites and not just rely on Google to spit out information for them. For example some ways of doing that are: Website's comments section which is out there for users to engage with each other and with the website operator, another way is RSS/Atom feeds, newsletters etc.
    - koyanisqatsi 4y ago
      Curation is the main problem. Google's promise was automatic curation based on the link metadata created by people but that's starting to fail as they try to infer intent from other signals fed into large ML models. I'm not sure if this is solvable problem in the current ecosystem. The commercial web is now pretty much set in stone and I don't think there is a way around the juggernauts and their data centers.

mrkramer 4y ago

If that happens people will abandon "Open Web" and will only use "Walled Gardens" like FB, IG, Twitter, LinkedIn, YT, TikTok, Reddit, Discord etc. That would be tragic.

koyanisqatsi 4y ago
I think people do this now already. How many people do you know that host their content on open platforms?
- mrkramer 4y ago
  For example there are thousands of blogs out there but the question is how much are they consumed by people. Overall I would say majority of people(casual users) still use Open Web to find general information and some smaller percentage of Web users use it to find more specific and specialized information, those are power users. The reason for all this is that they(casual users) think Google is the Internet and that the information is out there sort of hosted on Google for them to find it. I think the Web users need to develop more personal connections(following) to websites and not just rely on Google to spit out information for them. For example some ways of doing that are: Website's comments section which is out there for users to engage with each other and with the website operator, another way is RSS/Atom feeds, newsletters etc.
  - koyanisqatsi 4y ago
    Curation is the main problem. Google's promise was automatic curation based on the link metadata created by people but that's starting to fail as they try to infer intent from other signals fed into large ML models. I'm not sure if this is solvable problem in the current ecosystem. The commercial web is now pretty much set in stone and I don't think there is a way around the juggernauts and their data centers.