I know that the source is more focused on retro gaming as a topic but the topic of this post is Google and its pagerank algorithm which is more appropriate for this community.
We’ve all noticed the enshittification of Google Search over the last few months, but it’s still hard to hear how it is affecting content creators and putting them out of business so we can see 20 AI generated spam pages about whatever our query is.
Everything turns to shit whenever a metric becomes a goal, and multiply that by Infinity whenever that goal involves making money.
Ads are the worst thing about the internet. There’s not an option to escape them under any circumstances and when you use things like adblock people crawl out of the woodwork to tell you how you’re stealing money from people.
I’m sorry, I’m paying for the service of accessing the internet. How I do so should be my decision and not somebody else’s under any circumstances, so long as I am not breaking the law.
I agree in principle that commodifying page rank, and using trackers to identify would-be anons (to market at them or otherwise), and popups, and sponsored results, and in-content-ads, product placement, etc is all cancerous and shitty.
BUT to play devil’s advocate, how is it that one should make success of their business without advertising? I agree that most things in advertisement (like I mentioned) are scum of the earth, but I disagree that all of advertising is bad. It is an okay and righteous thing to promote yourself to others, especially where you can provide value!
To go full devil’s advocate (I don’t believe this but could absolutely debate it) I am going to say that advertising is the pinnacle achievement of art and science. It is by far the most interesting medium of communication – if you’re like an anthropologist, and you come across some bootable server full of TV ads from 1950 to 2020, you’d learn more about society than you would from just about any other medium of art or from just about any discipline that informs anthropologists.