Okay I'm already having a shitty week and this article isn't helping so apologies for my tone.

I know a guy who was in the room when Larry and Sergei pitched Jerry Yang on buying Google for "one...MILLION dollars." Yang wasn't dumb he was just myopic: Yahoo had become Yahoo by hand-coding massive lists of curated website picks. Yahoo was a DJ playing deep internet cuts for early connoisseurs of the wonders of the Internet while Google was Spotify, vomiting up whatever the algorithm felt was appropriate, and at the time, algorithms had a deservedly bad rap. It would have been a quantum leap for Jerry to go "my entire business model is about to be obsolete because the algorithm is about to do a semi-mediocre job, and it will do it for so much cheaper than my staff, I must completely upend my business model." He did not do this and Yahoo slowly, painfully faded into the sunset. They have applied the "we know the Internet better than you" approach to the bitter end - imagine owning Instagram in 2005 and persisting in the viewpoint that there was no money in user-generated content.

Google won out, obviously, but more importantly, "mediocre for nearly free" won out over "good for pennies." If you want to summarize the last 20 years of the web, that's it in a nutshell: we traded Salon for Huffington Post, specialist blogs for eHow. It's been a race for the bottom since search engine results stopped sucking and whoever could sit across that drawbridge made biblical profits.

here's the thing, though. It's just a toll bridge. It's only viable from a business standpoint if traffic is restricted. Larry and Sergei fought the idea of Google Ads for like five, six years... until they finally realized there was absolutely no money in search other than ads, at which point they smothered themselves in money to console themselves for selling out and vowed they'd change the world in other ways like Google Glass and shitty implementations of iOS designed by people who hate UX.

The practical difference between some sweatshop banging out eHow articles for a dollar each and an LLM banging out eHow articles for a tenth of a penny each is it the incentive eHow has to get into LLMs early and often. Multiply by every shitty company that has been polluting the web with garbage since AdWords was invented. Everything on the internet is optimized to get the most response out of Google for the least amount of money. it's just a damn toll bridge. Everything Google has ever done has been about maintaining and protecting their toll bridge.

This article fundamentally ignores how much of our online lives revolve around paying and avoiding tolls.

Potentially, it would damage whole swathes of the web that most of us find useful — from product reviews to recipe blogs, hobbyist homepages, news outlets, and wikis.

Product reviews are garbage. I don't buy anything major off Amazon without running the product through a bot detector and haven't for years. Recipe blogs are garbage; they're 2500 words of SEO followed by 100 words of "mix bleach and ammonia, stir, breathe deeply." Hobbyist homepages? No longer exist; everyone puts up a gopro, fucks around at the workbench for two hours, throws it in timelapse and posts it to Youtube with a still image of them being kicked in the nuts with 80 point type saying "SHIP IN A BOTTLE EXPLODES! WHYYYYYY!??!????" because that's what the algorithm wants. News outlets? Who the fuck is left? Al Jazeera? Wikis? You mean "places where fans exercise their love of Sailor Moon and figure out how to get past that annoying puzzle in Zelda?"

ZOMFG algorithms will destroy the Internet

Funny thing happened in 2003. The Bush Administration destroyed the integrity of the Third Estate by pushing a narrative that Iraq had WMDs. Iraq had no WMDs and people started questioning the "main stream media." It became "the MSM" when the Tea Party decided that the government shouldn't bail out the banking system, ironically joining the Occupy Wall Street left in their fundamental distrust of traditional media outlets. Where are we now? newspapers are dead, you can't have a conversation about an article without parsing it for bias and journalists are bolting for Substack.

There's been this pernicious belief for generations that if it's in a database, it's infallible. It's never been right, but it's never been so wrong as it is now, when every major internet company is busily trading "things that answers our questions" for "thing that wants to be our friend." They're doing it because everyone is doing it and because when your business model has deprecated accuracy for speed the only thing you can do is unchoke the shotgun.

But we've been bitching about autocorrect since it came out and the only reason the general public hasn't figured out that AI is just an elaborate version of same is they haven't interacted with it enough.

Alexa lost Amazon three billion dollars in a single quarter. You can make a thing that will fart on command? But if it doesn't actually do something useful for you, you'll stop using it. There's this whole undereducated overhyped army of journalists out there who honest-to-god hands-on-hearts think we're a week away from the HAL 9000 who are busy writing what they think are their last bullshit puff pieces about the death of information because while they can tell the difference between an incorrect guide on eHow and an incorrect guide conjured up by Sydney, their entire self image revolves around the idea that their readers can't.

Content has been hot, steaming garbage for ten fucking years and it's all because of algorithms. Changing out the algorithm will merely change the color of the garbage. If it makes the garbage more toxic and concentrated, that's a good thing because if it's too stinky for people to hold their noses while they eat it, maybe they'll go plant some carrots or something.

Fuck you, fuck everything you have ever written, fuck everything you will ever write.