- cross-posted to:
- technology@beehaw.org
- cross-posted to:
- technology@beehaw.org
this is an interesting article on the difficulties of running anything as SEO makes everything worse, AI proliferates, and things generally get worse for journalism. probably best summarized by this paragraph:
The long answer is that, through our own reporting, we are realizing that in order to combat the fracturing of social media platforms, a Google discoverability crisis fueled by AI generated spam and AI-fueled SEO, and a media business environment that is in utter freefall, we need to be able to reach our readers directly using a platform that we own and control. To do that, we need your email address.
but it’s a very good read in general, and i’d encourage you to read the whole thing.
You must log in or register to comment.
I 100% agree with their premise: AI garbage is ruining the web. Algorithmically driven results and content is ruining the web. SEO is ruining the web.
Email lists, however, are not the answer. Feels like every damned site on the web these days pops up asking for your email address. I never give it. I do not want that kind of shit. The worst is when they ask for your email address before you even spend time on a page to decide if you even want to give it to them. Even sites that say “you can read this article if just sign up for a free account” aren’t getting it. I’m not signing up for piles of different accounts on different sites so that they can all spam my email. And asking for an email address just puts you in that crowd. I get where The 404 is coming from. I truly do. But the solution they’re gravitating toward makes them look like a spammy content farm.
They barely touch on RSS as a solution, but that’s a better option than this. Is there a better solution? I don’t know. But it’s not this.
But the solution they’re gravitating toward makes them look like a spammy content farm.
i fail to see how this is the case when newsletters are quite a normal part of even reputable publications. for example: my state’s nonprofit news outlet has like five, several of which are paid newsletters that help them fund their newsroom.
Is there a better solution? I don’t know. But it’s not this.
If people were still interested in discussions of in-depth knowledge on a close cluster of topics, webrings could come back.
In a way that’s kind of what Lemmy does, lets communities share links of interest, and a human curator has ALWAYS been better than any results google provides, even back when it was still good.
And, tinfoil hat time: I think google actively worked to kill rss to increase searches.
And, tinfoil hat time: I think google actively worked to kill rss to increase searches.
The death of RSS has definitely been a deliberate thing. It’s part of the same campaign against open API access. Everything is a walled garden now, and every platform wants total control over it. They want you on their app, looking at their ads, their content, driving and being driven by their algorithm. They don’t want third-party readers viewing an RSS feed, or a third party app showing their content. They want full control of you and how you interact with them. Nearly all social media platforms require you to have an account with them just to view their content.
It’s made the web a significantly worse place
You are absolutely correct in every point and it is a massive tragedy that we have been shunted into siloed tribalism.
I don’t see an easy way out of this besides the total collapse of online advertising.
Maybe this will warn people about the dangers of profitization, and how poorly regulated capitalism destroys everything it touches.
Good article, big problem, but I doubt email lists are a solution. I have over years subscribed to many email lists, they get filtered to mailboxes by topic, which I’m afraid to open because overwhelmed by messages. I prefer to find specific news items recommended by communities as here on Lemmy. As for AI dominating SEO for google, it seems there could be an opening for a new search engine that guarantees only content from original-sources, neither AI nor content-farms.
As for AI dominating SEO for google, it seems there could be an opening for a new search engine that guarantees only content from original-sources, neither AI nor content-farms.
unfortunately it’s really hard to make a search engine that people want, and most of the ones i’m aware of have gone bust because you have to commit to running it at a loss for years (or forever)
Hmmm, so maybe such a search engine could began with a whitelist of ‘real’ journalistic sites from around the word, inviting suggestions for more, keeping a reputation score for each, evidence of plagiarism / AI risks to be dropped. If the list is smaller, the searching task is easier. It shouldn’t be funded by advertising, as that provides bad incentives. Maybe small subscriptions both for searchers and sites on list, to balance incentives.
Fediverse likes / votes / boosts could also help provide rankings for such an engine (evaluating external links, not message content), as real people here are checking stuff, and it’s less distorted by commercial clickbait motives.
RSS still exist…
you guys have got to start reading the article (and being even a little bit curious, frankly) before posting, they address RSS and have a footer link which is just the site’s RSS feeds
So far, for the five months this company has existed, we have erred on the side of making almost all of our work available for free with no wall of any kind. We did it that way because ideally we would like our work to reach as many people as possible with as little friction as possible and we want our work to be impactful, which is often easier when more people read it (we are working on a fix for our paid, full-text RSS feeds).
I understand the reason but any news site asking for my email is a automatic dns block on my dns server for me.
I have that knee jerk reaction too.
I just add a character or two to my email address and filter it or use one of the addresses Firefox will generate.
Easy to filter then.
I agree with most points in the article, but why e-mail? What’s wrong with a website where people can click on whatever they deem interesting, or (as suggested elsewhere) RSS?
Besides the questionable benefits of e-mail over a website, this is also practically guaranteed to deter most privacy-minded people. When 999 out of 1’000 websites ask for your mail address to send you spam, few people are going to take the time and read a lengthy explanation why this one website promises to be different.Besides the questionable benefits of e-mail over a website, this is also practically guaranteed to deter most privacy-minded people.
i mean, i would imagine most people are simply not privacy-minded in a way that this is a serious consideration for them.
That’s probably true, but I imagine there’s considerable overlap between privacy-minded people and people aware of the existence of (or wanting to peruse) news outlets such as 404. It just looks like a largely unnecessary obstacle for new readers.
I can see how most people would be turned off by having yet another website have their email address (even if it’s honestly just for sending them the newsletter), but, at the risk of sounding like an advertising agent, there are solutions to that.
rambling that might sound a bit too much like advertising, feel free to skip
You can set up more or less complicated rules so that mails from imanewsletter@newsman.gg are automatically put into a folder that you created for newsletters. But that still leaves you open to them using a different address like marketing@newsman.gg to sneak past that filter. Also, if (more like “when”, honestly) their database gets leaked, you’re going to receive a lot of spam mails from less reputable people. Or you create different email addresses for different websites and auto-forward those mails to your main account, maybe?
Alternatively, and that’s the service I’ve been enjoying for the past months, you can use the mail service Port87. To be frank, it’s still a bit buggy at times and it doesn’t seem to work for every sender (for some encoding reasons, as far as I understood, DHL delivery mails just don’t get loaded properly), but the idea is that you have built-in the ability to create sub-adresses and you only give out those sub-adresses to sign up for things. So my main address might be crowbro@port87.com, but I would sign up as crowbro-newsletter@port87.com. From what they know, my “real” adress is simply crowbro-newsletter@port87.com. Even if that database gets leaked and I suddenly receive mails from “my bank” about needing to refresh my credit details, I would immediately see that it’s in crowbro-newsletter@port87.com instead of crowbro-mybank@port87.com and this likely is a phishing attempt. I’m gonna end this here, because I really don’t want to seem like I’m just trying to advertise the stuff I use.
On the general topic: I feel for anyone who is trying to get into journalism and stuff like voice acting right now. Any article that reads a little weird and too stiff (same with voice-over in YouTube videos), I almost immediately scoff off (is that a word?) as being AI-generated and not worth my time. I wouldn’t be surprised if, doing this, I already skipped one or two pieces of media that were actually from humans but those humans were still novices in their field.
You can also do this in Gmail natively by using a plus sign instead of the hyphen. E.g. myemail+newsletter@gmail.com will deliver, as the plus and everything between it and the @ are ignored. This may work on other platforms too.
Or, as mentioned in another comment, you can do this easily with a domain you own. Although you may get the occasional call from a merchant validating that StoreName@mydomain.com is an actual order.
Oh that’s a cool and really helpful thing I didn’t know about Gmail! I think I’ll use the plus-trick for the few sites that won’t play ball with Port87! Then, on that front, Port87 only has the advantage that people who try to mail the bare address would receive an automated response, telling them to use one of the sub-adresses (you can choose which to show in this automated reply).
Getting your own domain would allow you to give any and every website their own contact email as well, while allowing you to do lots of other stuff if you ever get the inclination. For less than 10 usd / year
I never knew that having your own domain was that cheap! I’m pretty happy with Port87 at the moment, but I might use a custom domain in the future, if it’s really that affordable.
Yep, does depend on the TLD. Some cost more than others. Most common ones average about $10 annually, with discounts on the 1st year.
Well, this was convincing enough for me to give an email.
