Back in 2017 Google changed their algo to prioritize “reliable” sites: aka. mainstream sources like Wikipedia. The blogosphere, what was left of it got hit hard. Now everyone’s getting hit. AI scrapes whatever someone writes and presents the information without referring traffic to whoever created the actual information.
This has been a long trend. Google and Facebook from about 2004 on slowly strangled everyone, taking almost all the value for themselves and destroying the ad-networks which existed before them. The money dried up, the audiences dwindled and sites went under, including some very large ones. Places like mine survived only because they had enough legacy goodwill, but I certainly saw massive decreases in referral traffic, especially from 2017 on.
The Web which existed has been replaced by a bunch of walled gardens, all offering the same takes. Once the Web was amazing, full of weirdness, beauty and opinion diversity. Those days are gone, perhaps never to be seen again.
This is part of an endless drive in the West towards creating oligopolies with massive profit rates. “I’ll just take 80% of the value since people can’t find you without me.”
The end result is less and less real interesting content because it pays less and less, and even people who don’t care about that can’t get an audience.
If you decide to join the crowd and post on X, instagram, Facebook, Youtube or whatever, your account can be removed at any time, and there’s no recourse. Usually you can’t even find a human to to talk to, 99% of censorship and appeals are entirely automated.
All this before the various “real ID” stuff being justified by “protecting the children” and the buy-up of both old and new media by Zionist billionaires. It’s becoming much harder to find any non oligarch approved content on the web.
It’s sad, because the web used to be a marvelous place full of the oddest most interesting people. Now it’s just a mass surveillance and value extraction machine for half a dozen billionaires.
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Feral Finster
It is truly rich that the same governments that so earnestly seek to Protect The Children could not seem to do jack about Jeffrey Epstein, even after his extracurricular activities were an open secret for decades. Ray Charles could have seen that shit.
For that matter, it also beggars belief that, considering Epstein’s high profile friends, either the intelligence agencies, with all their surveillance powers and manifest contempt for civil rights, either knew of Epstein’s proclivities and did nothing to Protect The Children.
Either that or they didn’t know, which means that they are really really clueless. I mean, I was aware of Epstein and his antics, and I’m a cat!
cc
> “the buy-up of both old and new media by Zionist billionaires.”
Ex. TikTok USA forcibly sold to Zionist billionaire Larry Ellison, he and his son’s purchases of Paramount, CBS, CNN, HBO, Warner, etc. their appointment of Bari Weiss to head CBS News, etc.
It seems in part driven by Zionist facism and their desire to control what the Western world’s public gets to hear and see – or not hear and see – about Gaza, Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, Iran, etc.
They subverted and corrupted Wikipedia long ago. Now they’ll starve out the remaining sources of alternative news, turning them into smaller and smaller islands or “reservations”, as was done to the genocided natives here in North America, and is steadily being done to the natives in the West Bank.
What the Internet commons could have become for humanity has been subverted for profit and control – very sad to see.
> “X, Instagram, Facebook, Youtube”
That’s Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, Sergei Brin, Larry Page – what’s in common? Weren’t they all in the Epstein files?
That increasing control also extends into Western governments and legislation.
In terms of new media, AI, and mass surveillance, according to Sam Altman, in OpenAI’s contract with the Pentagon:
“The AI system shall not be intentionally used for domestic surveillance of US persons and nationals”
Note the carefully inserted words: “intentionally”, “domestic”, and “US persons and nationals”
In other words, the Pentagon can use ChatGPT to unintentionally conduct domestic surveillance of Americans. “Oops, it wasn’t our intention. But since we now have the data we might as well use it.”
Probably the same goes for anyone, including Americans, using ChatGPT from outside of the US.
And if you’re not a US national but are using ChatGPT, well, the US government can – and so, as we know from Edward Snowden, probably will – intentionally use ChatGPT to surveil you all they want, regardless of whether you’re in the US or not.
Ergo
Since the beginning of the search engine for the Internet, they have controlled the search results. Admittedly, initially it had been much more liberal, but early on Google ruined it for everyone.
Comparing peak month to this year’s first month to indicate the decline can be somewhat false. For the peak month there might had been some event/news/releases/etc., that resulted in lot of clicks, while last month might’ve been a dull month depending on the site in question. I am not questioning your view of the web, you have valid points, just questioning the metric used to indicate the level of censorship….
StewartM
It’s sad, because the web used to be a marvelous place full of the oddest most interesting people. Now it’s just a mass surveillance and value extraction machine for half a dozen billionaires.
Sad, but exactly this.
It’s not just the web, before there was usenet. Forums where true anonymity was possible so people couldn’t be traced and silenced, and de-platformed, where one had to tolerate opinions different than your own as no other recourse was possible (other than blocking them so they didn’t appear in your feed). Yeah, there were plenty of kooks, but even they could be entertaining. Even lurking anonymously was possible.
This is what the Unabomber should have ranted about; how new technology always begins with the promise of more freedom, but eventually the PTB find a way to capture it and turn it into a tool of surveillance and suppression. In short, technology cannot save us as long as we continue to have the same political and economic structures.
Oakchair
the buy-up of both old and new media by Zionist billionaires.
————
The media and internet has been controlled by the Epstein class for a long long time.
Propaganda and control is far more efficient when it is covert and contains real information and bits of dissent. The overt buying of the media is a sign of weakness. It is a transformation away from an effective, cheap brainwashing apparatus to an expensive low quality one. One in which people’s knee jerk reaction will always be “The child killers are lying again.”
We are moving towards a Soviet propaganda system because the oligarchs have lost the thread. That is not a bad thing. The Soviet propaganda system was so shitty that even the Soviet ruling class decided to trash their own country because they ended up believing Western propaganda.
The same ruling class that has been lying non stop and discussing “how to get rid of all the poor people” in the Epstein files are the same ones who control Hollywood, the internet, the media, the medical journals and the government.
The sooner everyone not only accepts this fact, but accepts the implications of it the better. You’re not free and what you’ve been told to feel, and to believe is the prison guard.
mago
Useful to remember that the web was a US military invention, but still, back in the glory days its potential seemed infinite.
Don’t know when or how I learned about this site, but I’m most grateful that I did. Hoping more whackadoodles cross the barren desert and find a home here. (Well, not too whackadoodle, just enough to counterbalance the conventional.)
Eric Anderson
Push the #fediverse Ian. Everyone with a voice needs to help push the fediverse.
Eric Anderson
I’ll add:
To anyone roaming Ian’s halls still on corporate social media?? Pull your head from your rectum and stop being a useful idiot. The fedi is the way. Climb on board. Tell your friends, tell your family, shout it from the roof. The tools to destroy the corporate stranglehold on communication are built. People just need to pick them up.
Jan Wiklund
It seems like a typical social trap. When AI has killed everything it scrapes there will be nothing more to scrape and AI will die. .
Jan Wiklund
There is also another way of killing by AI – AI created films where well-known people say stupid things. A few weeks ago, for example, there were plenty of them at Youtube, telling that the US Senate had deposed Trump. Easy to check, but what it does is to create distrust even to people you had learned to reasonably trust.
I wonder who gains from it. It can’t be youtube. Old media, who want to silence sources outside their control? Or what?
bruce wilder
In the heady, early days of the World Wide Web, I had a friend — an old IBMer — warn me that, my enthusiasm notwithstanding, this is how it would be, this is what power would insist it become.
I tend to be “late” to everything. I was alert to blogging, but I was very late to social media because, introverted, I am not very “social” (or not good at “social” anyway). And, paranoid, I was horrified to read the fine print indicating the surveillance price of Facebook or twitter or Google — put any of these on a smartphone and you are thoroughly mapped, sliced and diced, served up as a morsel of consumer capitalism.
But, thanks to my friend, I wasn’t late to the expectation that monopoly capital would concentrate and control internet communication, “publications” included.
I have been surprised by how stupid everyone would become. Notice, please, I didn’t say, “everyone else”. No exemptions for self or present company implied, I am afraid. Ian mourns the loss of access to quirky voices, and I get that. My taste for the exotic individualist was never all that refined, but I appreciated digby before she got gender and what I wouldn’t give for an acerbic observation from billmon.
Looking back though, long before the recent submergence of the name-brand commercial archipelago Ian shows in his table, all the early (before ~2005) hope I had for mass learning drowned beneath the waves. Waves of often absurdly cynical propaganda, reinforced by principle-free dogmatists and bullies.
I think I have explained the economic principle of the Pony Express in comments before. It is the idea that as the prospect of new structures emerge, those mere possibilities almost magically reach back from an only imagined future into the present to build trial structures. The prospect of a transcontinental telegraph created the fantastically expensive Pony Express for a brief time to courier documents to San Francisco allowing that city to become a financial center even before the infrastructure of a financial center existed.
Even before AI transformer architecture was a twinkle in a Silicon Valley VC’s dim eye (2017?), the path to the automation of bullshit generation was being paved by the dull dogmatists of partisan struggles on the intertubes. The diversion of revenues from institutions is no doubt important, but I submit it is a very late development in the whole sad progression. AI’s facile and instant rhetoric can be mistaken for reasoning because human reasoning and skepticism have been eroded and flattened severely in anticipation.
I have an example that shocked me: search for “Russiagate” on Wikipedia and read the article on Russian interference in the 2016 election. Wikipedia’s neutral voice is abandoned in favor of a doctrinaire recitation of Brennan and Clapper’s narrative. This is the social construction of reality without the social. Doubt and critical thinking are cast aside. All that remains is to re-do Wikipedia, without human editors: Grokipedia! Which Elon assures us is needed and will adhere to the standard of “truth”.
This is AI paving over the Enlightenment. I wish I was exaggerating. Dividing people into epistemic herds and silo-ing their information fodder is just more means to the same end.
bruce wilder
When AI has killed everything it scrapes there will be nothing more to scrape and AI will die.
Something will die, certainly. AI will “enshittify” pretty rapidly. Tesla self-driving limos and taxis will run over people and it will be no one’s fault and statistics will prove auto traffic safety is “still” safer than with human drivers at the wheel who could be prosecuted or blamed or made to feel guilty.
Human critical thinking might die. It is starved of facts already, as memory and attention are eroded and propaganda floods the landscape. The “theory of mind” that is the foundation of natural language and dialectical reasoning is under assault: political narcissism is nurtured, and, never eager to appreciate “other” points of view, now people are eager to sort themselves into veal pens of mutual incomprehension and contempt. Basic skills like relating abstract labels to concrete details to operationalize meaning are as endangered as navigating the streetscape without Google.
bruce wilder
Everyone with a voice needs to help push the fediverse.
maybe. honestly, I want to believe. just like I wanted to believe in rumble, or Telegram, or Substack or Bluesky.
I feel nauseated just thinking about Bluesky.
Jefferson Hamilton
“Tell your friends, tell your family, shout it from the roof.”
Good way to alienate friends and family. Normal people don’t care, and they way, way outnumber those who might.
Nat Wilson Turner
@JanWiklund fascists benefit by destroying trust and credibility. It’s a post-rational ideology that thrives on lies and mistrust. I highly recommend this essay by Umberto Edo on Ur-Fascism https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/umberto-eco-ur-fascism
Like & Subscribe
The tools to destroy the corporate stranglehold on communication are built. People just need to pick them up.
I can’t tell you how many times I’ve read this before.
Ecclesiastes 1:9 says, “What has been will be again, what has been done will be done again; there is nothing new under the sun.”
In otherwords, this has been said about so many things and yet civilization marches on. The necessary tool is a ten kilometer wide asteroid. That’ll do it. Sans that, don’t waste my time.
Eric Anderson
Bruce:
Just give it a test run. Ian is on Mastodon: https://kolektiva.social/@ianwelsh@mstdn.social It’s nothing like Bluesky. It can’t be, because Bluesky is centralized — but #Fedi is federated across thousands and thousands of servers across the world all connected to each other. It **is** democracy in action.
No ads. No algos. Local moderation control. And, amazingly enough — real community, because the community blocks the (family blogger’s) out with a vengeance. It’s OUR place. WE own it.
Jefferson:
As to friends and family … are they really friends and family if they’re trying to destroy your children’s future? See my old post here: https://www.ianwelsh.net/shun-the-climate-change-deniers/
Like & “YouTube” Subscribe:
What is the tribute vice pays to virtue, again? Oh, right — hypocrisy.
Especially when tools like PeerTube: https://joinpeertube.org
and Loops: https://joinloops.org exist.
It’s just laziness disguised as cynicism and is precisely the reason we can’t have good things.
Oakchair
Basic skills like relating abstract labels to concrete details to operationalize meaning are as endangered as as navigating the streetscape without Google.
——
25 years from now when me and the GPS/chemical generation are in full swing, crashing GPS will destroy countries because without it no one will be able to get to work.
I fairly recently read the book “Amusing ourselves to death” by Neil Postman. Despite being nearly half a century old it described the current intellectual state perfectly. Why are people seemingly unable to follow from point A to B to C? Unable to listen to an argument without interrupting every sentence? Need constant jokes, and explosions? Unable to go from evidence to conclusion let alone weigh contradictory evidence, how that evidence was gathered and it’s limitations when evaluating a subject? Unwilling to check primary sources, if they even have the skills to do so? and so on?
We’ll because “the medium is the message”. The primary medium in our society for several generations now is one almost entirely geared toward entertainment, dopamine hits, and images. We aren’t a reading culture anymore where people would choose to sit for 4 hours to listen to people discuss a topic. We became a TV culture years ago and are now a Facebook culture.
Add that with extensive universal neurological poisoning from birth onwards and we should applaud the resilience of humanity because society should have crashed into a radioactive dumpster pit years ago.
Nat Wilson Turner
This is absolutely 100% critical and so overlooked. It’s no coincidence that the first generation raised to primarily be video literate has been a disaster since taking power.
Eric Anderson
Oakchair & Nat —
Fully agree with this. See my comment Feb 6, 2026 to Ian’s Boomer post. Worth, imho, reproducing in full:
_________________________________________________________________________________________________
Here’s the issue as I see it:
The printing press was invented in 1440 and freed humanity from intellectual enslavement.
500 years later #TV was invented and we obligingly refastened shackles.
They won’t come off again until we stop consuming the #billionaire priest’s #propaganda.
You’re right. It’s not per se the boomers. It’s the generations raised on billionaire propaganda spewed at them 24/7/365 from birth. The rise of the screen generations that allowed the one way propaganda to be disseminated.
The rise of the screen generations also marked (i) a downturn in reading, (ii) in critical thinking skills, (iii) in socializing among peers where the face to face information was exchanged.
History will look back on the rise as the screens as the ignominious death of the intellectual freedom born from the invention of the printing press.
It’s billionaire addiction control technologically injected directly to the frontal lobes of democracy.
Plain as the nose on everyone’s faces. Breaking that control means entirely breaking from the elite controlled addiction devices.
It’s no longer about socializing the “means of production.” It’s about socializing the means of information dissemination.
_________________________________________________________________________________________________
That more ink isn’t spilled on this topic is a sad social evolutionary statement.
Carborundum
For all of the reasons that you enumerate above, Eric I don’t think that even a decentralized system like the fediverse is a complete antidote. There’s something about short form social that has really bad effects on cognition, particularly when combined with the shift away from paper-based, mastery-of-basics focused education.
Don’t get me wrong, definitely better than the current status quo, I just don’t think it constitutes a complete mitigation. Parenthetically, I thought it quite interesting that the two most viral of Ian’s tweets of late have specifically been ones that foment negative engagement related to US-Canadian relations. It’s almost as if someone at Twitter has their thumb on the scales running an IO campaign…
different clue
Perhaps we should refer to the Video Generation as vidiots. Perhaps we should refer to the “digitals” as ” digidiots”. And the Digital Video Generations as ” Digividiots”.
I have read in several places that the various Lords of Social Media and Computers and stuff don’t allow their own children to have computers or cell phones. And send them to very expensive private schools where the teaching is done by hand and everything is real or at least analog.
And they are introduced to computer-stuff when they are old enough to have a personal interior analog-meatspace-reality-brainbase.
The most recent article I read in that vein was in a dead-tree issue of Town and Country. Of course the online article was paywalled. Which is only fair because shit gots to be paid for. Still, it was frustrating.
responseTwo
Capitalism. The corporations buy it, control it, and make lots of money from it.
different clue
Is this blog considered ” social media”? Are other blogs considered “social media”? Then I, too, use “social media”.
But if “social media”means things like Facebook, Instagram, SnapChat , TikTok and other commercial pay-to-be-played algorithm-driven velcro-for-eyeballs, then I don’t use “social media” and I never have.
Which means I don’t know very much about “social media”. I note that Eric Anderson above recommends Mastodon as being way better than Xitter. And it may be.
Mr. Guard the Leaf has just recently talked up another new Social Media company on his video-casts such as the one I will offer here. And I will say what particular timepoints bracket when he starts talking about this new Social Media company and when he stops.
” A Democratic Candidate Says Canada Caused This Kentucky Bourbon Crisis”
(Which, by the way, Mr. Guard the Leaf does not agree with at all).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VuCrNO0pfow
Now, here are the timepoints bracketing his short mention of this new Social Media company called Hey. Cafe’ .
The timepoints are . . . from 1: 07 to 1: 48 . Mr. Leaf also says he will have links jn the comments-section of his video. He finishes the little talk-up for Hey.Cafe’ by saying it is built in Canada and only provides service in Canada and Europe. NOT America. That seems unfortunate to my American self. But if NO service in America remains Hey. Cafe’ ‘s Prime Directive . . . and potential Social Media engineers in America see its success in Canada and Europe, they could try building something like it here, and keep it pure to itself to see if it can attract enough joiners to survive and thrive as a business. Orrrrr . . . . eventually a group of New Social Media wanna-runs could see about paying for permission to license and use the Hey. Cafe’ system here as long as they demonstrate to Hey. Cafe’s satisfaction that they will keep it rigidly firewalled and contained from trying to reach into Canada or Europe. Maybe that’s the price to be paid for having a decent Social Media company here.
Then again, I still wonder why all the layoffed Twitter employees in exile didn’t and still haven’t tried re-creating Old Twitter under a New Name. They might have gotten joiners. They still might. They could call it Twitter In Exile. They could call its tweets by the name Tweets from Exile. Or they could call it Cricket and call its tweets by the name ‘chirps’. Or maybe someone else could do that.
Or maybe someone could design, found and launch a Shinola Search and Social. It would have clean social and clean searches. It could be a slow growing company making modest profits and modest money. It could be intended to never ever be a launching pad for multi-billion-dollar fortunes among its early creators and operators.
different clue
Here is an article called: ” YouTube ads are about to get even longer and they’ll be unskippable ”
https://www.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/1rpzhrm/youtube_ads_are_about_to_get_even_longer_and/
I can think of 2 reasons for You Tube to do this.
1: to make more money off of ads.
2: to repel You Tube watchers into signing up for “ad free” You Tube Premium at a higher price which will keep on rising and rising.
I can think of two ways to fight back.
1: If you have a computer which allows you to be in-and-viewing two different things
depending on which you toggle to , ( I think those are called “sessions” but I am just
an analog amateur here), whenever a You Tube ad comes on, you can toggle over to
other “session” to look at stuff before toggling back to the You Tube. Over time
will develop a feel for how long to stay on the other session before toggling back.
When You Tube discovers people doing this, they will try to lengthen and shorten
the length of ads randomly and unpredictably to try defeating that strategy. Then
You Tube watchers will have to try defeating that too.
2: You Tube watchers can keep track of every company which puts an ad on You Tube
and write the Marketing Department of that company a land mail letter saying you
will boycott that company as long as you see their ads on You Tube . . . and that you
will boycott them a week for every ad of theirs that you see. So for example, if
see 3 of their ads during the time you are watching a You Tube, you will boycott
them for 3 weeks. And tell them what You Tube video you were watching when
you saw their ads. Maybe they will go afflict some other video and torture IT’S
watchers into doing the same. Maybe if enough tens of millions of You Tube
do the same, they could all pack all the ads into a dwindling number of You Tube
videos, the way a long drought packs all the fish into a few dwindling pools.
different clue
Here is a story about how much ad money You Tube is already making even before their new ” All Ads, All the Time” initiative.
“YouTube pulled in a staggering $40.4 billion in ad revenue, which is more than Disney, NBC, Paramount, and Warner Bros. Discovery’s (WBD’s) combined ad revenue”
https://www.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/1rqdwu5/youtube_pulled_in_a_staggering_404_billion_in_ad/