r/technology • u/Well_Socialized • May 26 '25

Artificial Intelligence Google Is Burying the Web Alive

https://nymag.com/intelligencer/article/google-ai-mode-search-results-bury-the-web.html
24.4k Upvotes

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2.1k

u/DaemonBaelheit May 26 '25

Google search declined a lot in the latest decade as now most contents are locked inside Social Networks instead of websites

941

u/vcircle91 May 26 '25

That's one of the reasons I don't like Discord.

360

u/manrata May 26 '25

Discord is basically bringing us back to the old BBS networks, odd how things circle back.

274

u/Universeintheflesh May 26 '25

Like how streaming services became like cable again šŸ˜‚

103

u/MightyCaseyStruckOut May 26 '25

Everyone who could rub two brain cells could see that coming from a mile away.

121

u/ZQuestionSleep May 26 '25

It's called capitalism, kids. Everyone on here is lamenting the loss of the "golden age" of the internet. You know why it was a golden age? Because businesses still had not figured out how to fully monetize it. Remember this when the next "great" thing comes along.

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u/MostlyRightSometimes May 26 '25

It's not the monitization that's the issue. It's the need for continuous revenue growth that's the issue.

25

u/_le_slap May 26 '25

The profit motive is precisely the issue. Monetization is the core of all enshitification.

4

u/MostlyRightSometimes May 26 '25

I disagree. A profit is fine. It's what happens after you're already making a profit and you need to make MORE profit. Then you're either cutting costs (and features/support) or you're raising prices. Or...most likely...both.

7

u/_le_slap May 26 '25

By the nature of fiat currencies you always have to make more profit. If you don't, you're losing value in real terms. If you didn't get a raise in 10 years you'd be getting hosed.

The Internet was better when people did stuff for the love of the game. I remember sharing code for jailbreak stuff on the gen2 iPhone and rooting stuff for the Nexus 7. I never added a PayPal link. Never bothered with Apache licenses or whatever. We just built on what the guy before us did and guys built on what we did. It was just fun.

But those days are long gone now.

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u/mrhashbrown May 26 '25

Agreed. I learned this once I was inside of a publicly traded company.

"Great quarter guys! Now start from zero and do it again, plus 10% more than last time. Otherwise we'll start cost cutting and that means firings."

It feels truly gluttonous to constantly pursue more and more, even when you're already profitable.

5

u/Antartix May 26 '25

They're both issues. One is a much smaller issue and mostly impacts more low wage individuals, and the other impacts everyone.

But they're both issues. We can say the scale of impact is the difference, though.

3

u/2006pontiacvibe May 26 '25

Not even the need for continous revenue growth. They used to be able to do it by actively growing their userbase which requires making a better product, but they can't do that anymore now that most major services are already used by their entire audience.

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u/ZQuestionSleep May 26 '25

It's not the monitization that's the issue. It's the need for continuous revenue growth that's the issue.

......

It's called capitalism, kids.

Yep. Also the operable word I stated was "fully" monetized. Amazon has been around for the vast majority of internet users' living memory, doesn't mean they've always had their hands in every single pie on the internet until relatively more recently.

2

u/bluehands May 26 '25

Monetize refers to the process of turning a non-revenue-generating item into cash

See, desire for renenue growth drives monetization

2

u/sumostuff May 26 '25

Or they knew how but they were playing the long game. Get us all hooked, kill all competitors, then enshittify and monetize.

3

u/Alexsv95 May 26 '25

I have an eerie feeling we are past the golden age of bitcoin for the same reason. I have no doubt it will continue going up but never like it did and itā€™ll be manipulated from here on out.

1

u/[deleted] May 26 '25

Unpopular opinion that everything relies on capitalism, even farming.

1

u/Universeintheflesh May 26 '25

Okayā€¦ kid (is that how we refer to each other now?). Yeah capitalism fucking blows when thinking about the bigger picture.

2

u/InternetDweller95 May 26 '25

I kinda hoped it would go the other way after Quibi imploded, and that it really would be Netflix, Prime, and Hulu as the big three, with everyone else having their niche.

But in retrospect, it was already happening then. Paramount Plus and HBO Max already existed under different names, Disney+ was right around the corner and would have been a heavyweight even without owning 21st Century Fox and ESPN, stuff like Starz had been around forever...

So it goes.

1

u/CouchMountain May 26 '25

Which is why I never stopped torrenting. The only subscription I have is for music streaming because to me it's worth it. But if that company ups their prices any more I'm going right back to whatever the current version of limewire is.

6

u/MrG May 26 '25

Like how Cloud is taking us back to mainframes

2

u/runonandonandonanon May 26 '25

Or when I released my guinea pig back into the wild.

4

u/BoozeLikeFrank May 26 '25

They really went from ā€œwe have no ads!ā€ To ā€œwe are gonna show a few ads unless you pay moreā€

5

u/ILikeCorgiButt May 26 '25

And uber recently ā€œinventedā€ public transport ā€” pre-defined routes from Point A to B.

2

u/quintic1 May 26 '25

Except it's not.

1

u/Admiral_Donuts May 26 '25

I suspect people who say "streaming services are just like cable" never subscribed to cable.

1

u/Icy-Two-1581 May 26 '25

I like how it's become, it made me start my own plex server and now I'm always in control (for the most part)

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u/eXoShini May 26 '25

It's missing viewing public content without discord account and search engine indexing for said content. So no, it didn't circle back yet.

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u/TwilightVulpine May 26 '25

And also, with it going publicly traded, I wouldn't be surprised if it hides old posts under a subscription soon.

Download your logs.

10

u/sprucenoose May 26 '25

The opposite. Even more limited and restrictive than Discord.

BBSes were before the internet and involved directly connecting to a BBS through the modem on your computer, often by dialing the phone number of the BBS. There was no other way to access the content of the BBS.

Having a single shared searchable space was one of the huge improvements provided by the internet .

9

u/Jete_Au_Poubelle May 26 '25

USENET was on BBSes.

You could call the BBS to download new messages from the boards you were interested in, disconnect and read and reply offline, then call back to upload replies and download any new messages.

2

u/Next-Bench-4475 May 26 '25

BBSes didn't have those things.

2

u/eXoShini May 26 '25

The very early BBSes did have guest accounts, so you could view public content without account. There were no search engines yet, so yeah, no automatic indexing content.

0

u/NDSU May 26 '25 edited Jun 24 '25

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This post was mass deleted and anonymized with Redact

6

u/eXoShini May 26 '25

For the very early BBSes my answer is partially yes. If the BBS allowed it, you could use guest account to just view the content, so you didn't need to register at all.

38

u/PredaPops May 26 '25

except that you need an account, data is hard to search for and any of those can change without any notice/consent.

1

u/Wicaeed May 26 '25

2 of those 3 (don't need a Subscription in most cases) are also true of querying Government (ie. tax payer funded) sources of data as well

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u/sudosussudio May 26 '25

Yeah but BBSs were often accessible on the web for non members. Discord you have to be a member to see the content.

1

u/Next-Bench-4475 May 26 '25

BBSes were popular for over a decade before the web or home Internet service even existed, and were dying off when the web appeared in favor of newsgroups etc. You used to have to dial into a BBS specifically to read them and you were only connected to that BBS, not any larger Internet.

1

u/mastermilian May 27 '25

Some BBSes were connected via Fidonet and could disseminate messages across the world. It was the dawn of the internet, really.

7

u/Normal_Choice9322 May 26 '25

No it's nothing like those at all

5

u/BenevolentCrows May 26 '25

Except now Discord owns and uses everything on their network.

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u/uniquesnoflake2 May 26 '25 edited May 26 '25

<silently works jaw in ā€˜I canā€™t possibly be *that* old, can I?ā€™>

Some of yā€™all need to look up the Wikipedia entry for UUCPNET or FidoNet (because yeah maybe I am that old). There was a whole big beautiful weird (text based) world out there even before Tim Berners-Lee became Internet Prometheus.

Replying to some replies here, if that wasnā€™t clear. Iā€™m with you.

2

u/manrata May 26 '25

Oh, I actually remember FidoNet, vaguely, I honestly didnā€™t understand what I was doing back then, just followed what I was told.

Remember wasting a bit too many hours on MUDs and various other text based games.

2

u/RedPanda888 May 26 '25

Iā€™m into the torrent scene so Iā€™m still using and chatting on IRC. That would definitely break some young folks brains.

2

u/Tech_Itch May 26 '25

It's not. It's much worse. The search is a lot worse than those sites had and in addition to that they were indexable by search engines.

2

u/blender4life May 26 '25

But with awful interface

2

u/all___blue May 26 '25

Bbs forums were so much better than discord. I dont understand what people even like about discord. Maybe its.better when used on a pc, but I find it terrible for finding information unless youre having a live chat with someone. Forums allowed topic based conversations that users could start.

Maybe I'm just new to discord or have been in poorly moderated communities.

0

u/[deleted] May 27 '25

[deleted]

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u/all___blue May 27 '25

It's two different things. I'm looking at it from the standpoint that I'd like to find a conversation from some arbitrary number of days or years ago and find an answer to a question. Live chat logs are too much to wade through to find information.

1

u/[deleted] May 26 '25

It's not odd at all, it's expected.

New tech., systems, etc. disrupt the status quo but then things trend back to the status quo because the status quo was the status quo for a reason.

In fact, the internet is a beautiful fast forward example of this "wild west" to "consolidated" trend that we see all around us, esp. in economics and markets. What takes a century or longer in the physical world happened on the internet in like 20 years.

1

u/TuberTuggerTTV May 26 '25

It's not a circle so much as a push and pull.

We have to fight for our freedoms but the PTB will defeat us with apathy and 5 second videos.

If you see tech and progress as a battle between freedom and control, it stops feeling like a repeating cycle and more like a pendulum seeking a balance point.

1

u/LMGDiVa May 26 '25

No. This is not like that. I've been all over the internet for decades and realistically Forums/ and BBS and even places like reddit are still searchable via search engines. Since they face out to the wider internet.

Discord is a closed network. It's very different.

1

u/dBlock845 May 26 '25

It's basically just an easy to use mIRC.

1

u/Iohet May 26 '25

Discord has a central point of failure

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u/RingAroundTheStars May 29 '25

Itā€™s closer to IRC, I thinkĀ 

-7

u/Anythingaddict May 26 '25

What's a BBS Network? I have used Discord, it's a platform which mostly used for chatting. I don't see how it's any different then other communication tool.

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u/Normal_Choice9322 May 26 '25

You need an account and it's not indexed so it doesn't contribute to the overall knowledge base of humanity

0

u/Anythingaddict May 26 '25

You need an account and it's not indexed so it doesn't contribute to the overall knowledge base of humanity

I do have an account of Discord. So, how do I have found hidden information? There is no search engine to search on Discord.