Right. Because AOL, Prodigy, CompuServe, Excite, Yahoo, MyNetscape, etc held more sway per capita than Google alone holds ? We moved from a world with many “portals” to a world with effectively one.
Even Reddit, stackoverflow, and other “portals” originate most traffic from Google. Facebook is probably one of the rare “internet” estates that isn’t navigated to via Google, but I’ll betcha the browsers they start opens Google first.
The whole “the internet is dying” is a continuous and trite refrain. It’s not dying but continuously changing. There’s always subcultures in various places. But the mass market internet has always been corporate curated crap for profit. That won’t change. And the whole AI is ruining the universe is malarkey. SEO garbage has taken over most search results and it’s of such incredibly low quality that AI generated SEO is actually a significant step up. At least LLM AIs are trained on stuff that has the content looked for whereas the SEO crap is written by people with know knowledge of the subject. While the AIs may hallucinate a bunch of weirdness into a page, that’s no different than some SEO content monkey typing in nonsense to capture clicks. Probabilistically the AI is more likely to write something cogent.
>And the whole AI is ruining the universe is malarkey
Quantity is a quality of its own. In moderated forums there has been a distinct rise in moderation load because of AI generated "not quite" crap and bots that still do not contribute to the quality of discussions. This is what the death of the internet is about. It's turned into an ocean of piss and pollution that is and will continue to drive people away.
Even Reddit, stackoverflow, and other “portals” originate most traffic from Google. Facebook is probably one of the rare “internet” estates that isn’t navigated to via Google, but I’ll betcha the browsers they start opens Google first.
The whole “the internet is dying” is a continuous and trite refrain. It’s not dying but continuously changing. There’s always subcultures in various places. But the mass market internet has always been corporate curated crap for profit. That won’t change. And the whole AI is ruining the universe is malarkey. SEO garbage has taken over most search results and it’s of such incredibly low quality that AI generated SEO is actually a significant step up. At least LLM AIs are trained on stuff that has the content looked for whereas the SEO crap is written by people with know knowledge of the subject. While the AIs may hallucinate a bunch of weirdness into a page, that’s no different than some SEO content monkey typing in nonsense to capture clicks. Probabilistically the AI is more likely to write something cogent.