Ian Welsh

The horizon is not so far as we can see, but as far as we can imagine

Category: Internet Page 1 of 4

Pre-Internet Journalism Was Optimized For Information Transfer Efficiency, Post-Internet For Inefficiency

By

On February 16, 2026

18 Comments

We’ve all seen the titles of articles “Big Company decides to do something BAD” or “This famous actor’ adorable dog saved his life!”.

Click bait. The information you want is “what the big company is what big company did what, or who the actor is.

Back when we had newspapers the titles would have been “X AI is making degrading nudes of people without their consent”. It would name the actor.

The rules of pre-internet Journalism were as follows: the most important information goes into the headline. The first paragraph summarizes the article and each paragraph after includes information in order of importance, with the least important information in the second last paragraph. The last paragraph sums up the article again.”

The rule of thumb I was taught is that half the readers only read the title and that you should expect to lose half the remaining readers per paragraph. I don’t think it was always that bad, and it varied by type of article, more people will read an entire book or movie review, for example, but the thrust of it was correct.

Newspapers knew that people wouldn’t read the whole article so tried to get the most important information to them first, the second next and so on.

Modern internet journalism optimized for clicks and for time on site. The title leaves out the important information to get a click. The article is often written so that the most important information is near or at the end, so you have to read all the way thru, with paragraphs before that being teases, meant to keep you reading.

One reason people are more likely to be ignorant today is simply this change from “get them the information they need as fast as possible” to “get them to click and stay on site as long as possible.” Bonus points if you can get them to click on more links inside your site. While strictly speaking internet news isn’t optimized for inefficiency, it might as well be: that’s the effect.

Overall I think that the internet has been bad for humanity. I don’t make this judgment call lightly, I make my living here, after all, and there’s a lot I love about the internet, especially the ease of looking up information.

Inefficient information transfer is just one part of why the internet has been bad for humans, I’m going to return to this issue over and over during the next few weeks.

This site is only viable due to reader donations. If you value it and can, please subscribe or donate.

AI Will Degenerate In Much The Same Way Google Did

By

On January 30, 2025

24 Comments

If you’re old enough to remember search before and after Google, you remember how good Google search was at the beginning.

Google used links to rank what to show to searchers. In the old web, before Google, every link was, in essence, an endorsement. We linked to what we thought was good, that other people should read.

It was a pristine “state of nature” system.

But the minute Google became dominant in search, everyone started manipulating links and metadata and everything else to get Google to send them more traffic. Links were no longer organic, no longer endorsements, but attempts to manipulate the algo. The more that was true, the more it became necessary to engage in “search engine optimization”, and the more algorithmic search engines sucked. Of course, Google also self-sabotaged, by trying to optimize search results so that Google would make the most money possible.

I recently read a regular traveler saying he never reads travel blogs and magazines any more, because AI is so much better. I’m sure he’s right.

But AI is better because it’s reading all the travel blogs and magazines, sorting and summarizing. AI being better, readership is cratering, and so the blogs and magazines will slowly die off. Travel’s one of those activities where you need relatively recent information, where was great to stay years ago isn’t very helpful. So, as the blogs and magazines die, the AI’s results will slowly get worse, until they’re crap scraped from official websites of hotels, museums and other travel destinations, since that’s all that will remain.

AI, in other words, in this and other ways, many of them similar, will destroy the ecosystem required for it to be good, same as Google did.

This is “eating the seedcorn/destroying the soil’s fertility” type of stupidity. If you destroy an ecosystem you’re dependent on (and we’re all dependent on some ecosystems) then whatever you’re doing is only short term viable.

So enjoy AI as an alternative to search for now (but always check its source, because it does hallucinate) but understand this is a moment in time, a moment which is destroying what makes it possible.

This blog runs on donations and subscriptions from readers. It’s free, but not free to produce. If you value it, please give.

The Tik-Tok Ban Is Hypocritical Nonsense

By

On January 17, 2025

12 Comments

The justification for the TikTok ban is that it supposedly collects a ton of data.

TikTok’s data collection practices are insane. The app gather data that other apps normally consider off limits, including the content of users’ private messages, and the full contents of a user’s device contacts.

I agree, this is insane. But it isn’t unusual, and it isn’t even the worst in class.

That’s a lot of data – but it’s worth noting that TikTok does not seem to collect more data than other social media companies. A privacy researcher working with the Washington Post found that TikTok gathers less data than Facebook in some cases.

So it’s obviously not about data collection. As for sharing with the Chinese government, well, Google sells user data to the Chinese thru third parties.

Perhaps it has something to do with TikTok users being against genocide?

But most revealing of all is that Biden and Trump are both trying to avoid a TikTok shutdown. See, what Congress wants is the Chinese parent company to sell TikTok to an American. But TikTok has refused and has said it will shut down on the 19th.

And here Biden is saying he won’t enforce the shutdown, and Trump saying he wants to find a solution.

It’s a shakedown.

Whatever it is, it isn’t because Congress has suddenly decided to crack down on apps collecting too much user data.

SUBSCRIBE OR DONATE

The End Of Zoom & Video Evidence

By

On April 8, 2024

13 Comments

Back in February, deepfake technology was used to steal $25 million dollars:

A finance worker at a multinational firm was tricked into paying out $25 million to fraudsters using deepfake technology to pose as the company’s chief financial officer in a video conference call, according to Hong Kong police.

The elaborate scam saw the worker duped into attending a video call with what he thought were several other members of staff, but all of whom w

Open AI has tech to clone someone’s voice in instants. They haven’t released it and aren’t going to, but that will only slow the revolution.

I suspect this will mean a return to in-person meetings for any important decisions. Outside of corporations and businesses, this will include you having to physically go to your bank to move or withdraw significant amounts of money.

In court cases it may lead to a return to pre-photography evidentiary standards: do you have a witness and/or physical evidence plus a chain of custody? A picture or a video will mean nothing.

With respect to decision-making an attempt will be made to get around this by using codes and passwords, but that won’t work very well. As the modern world has proved, any password or code that’s on a computer system is not secure.

All of this means, ironically, a partial regression: electronic comms won’t be trustworthy and so will be used less.

Welcome the to the past in the future.

You get what you support. If you like my writing, please SUBSCRIBE OR DONATE

The TikTok Forced Sale

By

On March 14, 2024

20 Comments

A bill stating that TikTok must divest or sell TikTok or stop operating in the US has passed.

Commenter KT Chong pointed out the stakes for China and the US

This ban is NOT just about protecting America from China. TikTok has global reach OUTSIDE the US. TikTok is a most popular app in over a hundred countries in the world — including in the Global South where China’s influences are steadily rising while US is facing increasing hostility due to the US complicity in Israel’s genocide of Palestinians in Gaza and ethnic cleansing in West Bank. Once the US gets its hands on TikTok, the US government will definitely use it to spread anti-China and pro-US propaganda. That is the true purpose of forcing Chinese to sell TikTok to the US, so that that US can seize/steal a most popular media tool and then use its global influences against China. I would rather TikTok just gives up its US market (i.e., banned in the US) than to hand over its global influence to the US government.

By laws, the Chinese government can block the forced sale as ByteDance (the parent company of TikTok) has to follow Chinese laws. The CCP should absolutely NOT approve the sales. This is not just business. This is but a battle in the bigger war between the US and China over global influences and the new media. TikTok should NOT be handed over to the US and then be used as tool to expand US influence in the global market. I would rather TikTok just give up on the US market rather than to hand over TikTok influences on all those overseas markets to the US. I hope China is smart enough to realize what is at stake here.

This seems reasonable to me. It would be like China saying “the US must sell or divest Apple because Apple does business in China.”

I will point out that TikTok has been notorious or famous, depending on your view, for contradicting US propaganda on many issues, most recently on Palestine. The videos are often savage, and make politicians look like fools in a way that is much easier to do in video than with writing or audio only, and they are seen by millions. “A Modest Proposal” is famous because it’s so hard to be so savage and because there was no audio recording and transmission during the Irish Potato Famine.

Another issue is that America wants to force the sale of a successful internet/social media company: the most successful in recent years, and the first to make video work on social media.

If you can’t innovate: steal.

If the US was truly just concerned about damage to users, it could simply set up rules the US subsidiary has to follow, in the same way that China has specific rules for US internet companies that apply in China, but not elsewhere.

As for the fears of all user info being turned over to the Chinese government, that’s laughable, not because it might not happen but because governments mass gobbling such data happens all the time, and because some hacker group will inevitably crack every social media company and just sell data to everyone.

Anyway, China should definitely tell the US they don’t get to force a sale of a Chinese company. While they’re too polite to do so, it really should be accompanied with the metaphorical middle finger.

You get what you support. If you like my writing, please SUBSCRIBE OR DONATE

Google Neural Net “AI” Is About To Destroy Half The Independent Web

By

On May 11, 2023

22 Comments

As various folks have quipped the safest place to hide a body is on the second page of Google search results, because no one goes there.

Google is about to role out its “AI” for search (I’ll be saying AI in quotes as policy when referring to neural nets because they aren’t intelligent) and if it stays as it is it’s going to destroy most sites that provide information or analysis. (I’ll feel some hit, but will survive as I have my own audience.)

https://twitter.com/APZonerunner/status/1656384261249703938

That screen-shot is the kicker. It takes up too much of the page. Worst, people don’t like to click, so if Google presents the info they want, they’ll just stay on Google.

Now, of course, Google is summarizing data that the neural net has scraped from the Web, much like when you used to read some books then summarize them for your term paper. None of the information Google’s “AI” will present in answer to questions is information from Google, it’s scraped, swallowed and regurgitated from the websites which won’t be getting the traffic any more, who will then die. The perfect parasite.

There’s going to be lawsuits, and I’m no lawyer, but my understanding is that just as if you do your research and re-write to summarize this probably doesn’t fall under current copyright law. That law is entirely reasonable, for people, but for neural nets it seems like a huge gap, but without a change in the law, it seems unlikely there’s a legal remedy.

I’m thinking about this. I may decide to keep most of my site off search engines (which is a problem in the sense that I use search engines to find my own articles, I’ve written so many).

But in the larger sense “AI” is a giant parasite (well, Google won’t be the only one) devouring other people’s expertise and denying them a living. Google controls about 45% of the internet ad market already with most of the rest divided up between various social median giants, and doing so destroyed a vast swathe of sites. Now they are set to kill much of what remains.

Tacitus’s line, supposedly quoting Calgacus, about the Roman Empire, was that the Romans “made a desert and called it peace”, Google and “AI” is making an internet wasteland and calling it profits.

My ability to write these articles depends on donors and subscribers so if you value this writing, please DONATE or SUBSCRIBE.

The Decline Of Facebook (Meta)

By

On December 23, 2022

8 Comments

Back in August of this year Cheryl Sandberg stepped down as Chief Operating Officer of Meta, . I’d been keeping a lazy eye of Facebook and Meta for a while: the organization felt sick to me, not in terms of ethics, but in terms of health. Sandberg jumping was a sign: the most important insider other than the founder and CEO leaving.

Then, this week:

Facebook is going down, is my guess. There’s irony to this, Facebook built it’s HQ where Sun Microsystem’s HQ was and Sandberg and Zuckerberg were fond of saying that they did so to remind people that Facebook would have to stay on the ball or go down.

Facebooks new virtual world is crap and is doing abysmal numbers. Their audience growth is anemic, and they’ve had some periods of negative growth in the last couple years, though it’s minor. Young people aren’t interested in Facebook. Their VR goggles are excellent, but not showing a profit.

Every social internet company (this includes Google search) which manages to get large enough numbers to achieve audience capture; where you have to be there because everyone is there; starts excessive fiddling with their algo.

(I am fundraising to determine how much I’ll write this year. If you value my writing and want more of it, please consider donating.)

In Google’s first years its search results really were excellent. But once almost everyone used Google, they started fiddling the algo to increase revenue as much as possible, rather than optimizing for good search (so far, they’re fine, but it’ll be what brings them down.) Social media does the same thing with their algos — instead of just showing people the content they signed up for by following someone, they start boosting some content, de-emphazising other content and shoving content in front of users faces they didn’t ask for, and not just some advertising.

This degrades the utility of joining them: you aren’t actually getting the feed you signed up for: content from the people and orgs you explicitly said you wanted to see, in chronological order.

Everyone does this. They start of mostly clean, like twitter, then they optimize and tweak until they damage the experience. By optimizing for profit “now” they damage their profit potential going forward.

This isn’t necessarily a huge problem for the decision makers: Sandberg and Zuckerberg, absent profound stupidity or civilization collapse, are never not going to be rich.

But it is how companies destroy themselves. Something similar happened to General Electric when Jack Welch decided to optimize for short term profit over long term and gutted the most important industrial producer in America. He was praised to the heavens for it at the time and died rich in 2020, but he also turned GE into a second tier company after it was one of the 10 most important companies in America for about a century.

Every time a company tries to optimize profits over providing a good service or product a price is paid. Make into your corporate culture to do so, and you gut the firm.

Facebook had some real utility (finding people you had lost contact with and staying in contact), but it doesn’t even really offer that any more because of the crud load-up.

No one will really miss it. Some other place will offer what it used to. Or maybe it’ll stagger along for a few decades, a shadow of its former self.

But it’s in grave danger now, and it’s simple to tell, because the people in the know who can leave, are.

 

Why Twitter Has Been Marvelous

By

On November 23, 2022

15 Comments

I try not to write about topics about which a lot of other people have said what I’d say, or, indeed, written it better than I would. Musk’s takeover of Twitter is one of those topics. There have been plenty of excellent articles about what it means and about how Musk could really screw up Twitter by destroying the feeling of safety which advertisers require and by misunderstanding that the users are the product, not the customers.

I’ve been on Twitter since August of 2008 (@iwelsh). I visit it almost every day, and for many years, I spent a lot of time there. Nowadays, it probably takes up 30 to 45 minutes of my day. My account isn’t huge; I have something like over four thousand followers, and I follow about thirteen-hundred. (Following too many people is a sign of disrespect and twitter-gaming, because it means you don’t actually read them.)

For me, Twitter takes the place of the email lists I was on in the 2000s and which collapsed near the end of the decade. “Townhouse,” which some people may have heard of, was one, but only one of them. Emails on these lists would often include links to articles of interest and discussion of important topics of the day.

Each list would have a primary topic; I was on lists that focused on domestic US politics, foreign affairs, the tech industry, and so on. The lists acted as both a filter and a way to read people discussing topics in which I was interested — often, very well-informed and smart people. Because the lists were semi-private, there was some additional value: People could be frank.

These lists collapsed near the end of the decade, in part because of a series of leaks. A lot of the value was that it was “off the record.”

Twitter, frankly, isn’t quite as good for quality of discussion about controversial topics, simply because it is public. You can’t “let your hair down” and everything you say can and probably will be used against you. But it is still a venue where everyone talks about everything, and if you curate who you follow, you can still connect with people interested in specific topics discuss them and share article links and so on.

I don’t just follow political types; I follow book-twitter, archeology-twitter, a bunch of artists, a fair chunk of the crypto-crowd, some pagans and hermeticists, classicists, and so on.

A lot of what passes in my Twitter-stream is chuff, especially from the political junkies, but a lot is smart and interesting and seeing what the people I have chosen to follow think is worth talking about is useful in itself.

Twitter is a curated experience, and if Musk doesn’t fuck it up (his idea of not showing non-blue checks content would destroy its value — most of the best accounts I follow don’t have a blue check), it will remain useful because you choose who  you follow. It’s just that simple. Turn the timeline to chronological so the algo doesn’t go all Facebook on you, and it’s much like early Facebook was before Zuckerberg screwed it up by trying to over-monetize it.

A timeline on Twitter is just people you chose to follow talking or re-tweeting something they like someone else wrote.

And frankly, at it’s base, that’s marvelous. If you don’t like your Twitter feed, well, you chose it, and you can change it.

This can easily be fucked up, of course. Facebook screwed this up with algos instead of just giving you a chronological timeline of people you chose to follow; Twitter has gone some way down that road, but it can still be made to work. Musk may screw that up, and if he does, I’ll leave. If he doesn’t, I’ll stay.

DONATE OR SUBSCRIBE

Page 1 of 4

Next

Powered by WordPress & Theme by Anders Norén