when average users start fleeing en mass, it’s already to late, and arguably it’s approaching a critical mass where there is enough common knowledge and “friends who use that” to make the jump easier. Right now, the average user doesn’t have much of a reason to jump, but if Google has to restructure their business model due to their ad monopoly getting crowbarred, they might implement stuff that would be enough to get average users to start jumping.
great, just, one issue.
“The company says the content served to bots is deliberately irrelevant to the website being crawled, but it is carefully sourced or generated using real scientific facts“
Nah, screw that, actively sabotage the training data if they’re going to keep scraping data after being told not to. Poison it with gibberish bad info. Otherwise you’re just giving them irrelevant but not unuseful training data, so no real incentive to only scrape pages that have allowed it.
but think of the shareholders! How would they feel if the company stoped growing? They need to cram their attempt at an audio content monopoly down your throat or else they’d only just be a music streaming monopoly.
I wonder how effective it would be just to put a bunch of data on servers meant to poison the training data they’re scraping. Like, make it data that only a bot trying to get everything would find, not something that users would see or encounter.
Huh, funny, isn’t that. Almost like Israel’s leadership was lying through it’s teeth.
It’s so absurd, the website’s appeal lies entirely in the user driven experience created by volunteer moderators and user submitted content. Yet the path of profit growth for them lies in company placed ads, and LLM bots spamming comment sections to astroturf. The more they push for profit, the less appeal to users the site has.
I think Netflix has brought on some management people straight from Hollywood who have implemented the worst ‘data driven’ strategies.
Netflix’s earlier success never came from getting involved with content production, as the article says, their biggest hits came from giving skilled teams blank checks, or buying up already good stuff. They wanted to convince people that they could produce as good stuff as any studio or cable network, become the hot new thing that would get people to sign up.
But now, Netflix is trying to maximize viewer retention, prevent people from canceling subscriptions at the end of the month after they’ve seen what they wanted. They’re looking at what factors keep people watching for a long time, watching regularly, and then interfering with production till they get stuff that matches those metrics. They want Netflix to be a daily fixture in people’s lives so they won’t consider canceling it at the end of the month, and thus are making slop content to try and get that.
Their monetary losses are insubstantial compared to the gains in power they will receive from further weakening the influence and power of the average person.
That drop largely just cancels out the numbers since November. If it drops further then it indicates a general souring if market opnion.
The problem is that the AI branded software doesn’t run easily on old devices, unless you just stream it from one of their server farms. But they’re losing money every time they run one of these services for you, and the vast majority of people aren’t going to pay them a subscription for that.
They’re trying to justify selling new devices with software now, not giving out software that can run on old devices. You gotta replace your 2017 laptop to run windows 11. Gotta get a new computer with an NPU to run AI models locally. But it’s happening again, users are not embracing these new AI features, let alone buying new devices just so they can use them.
Much like wearables and VR headsets, the interest for these things is largely limited to enthusiasts spaces and isn’t translating to mass adoption. The average person doesn’t care about having their computer writing their email in to a limerick, they just want their email client to not freeze up and crash because they got an email with a weirdly formatted picture.
it goes deeper than just “investors are greedy” though. Most people making these investment decisions are doing it at the behest of other people who have handed them their saving in exchange for returns. Those people aren’t privy to the nature of how money is getting invested and why, they hire someone else for that, the investors.
The investors may be making short sighted, stupid decisions, but they’re doing it because they’re pursuing their own personal incentives, get a raise, a promotion, or just not get fired. The managers are doing the same. If they don’t do it, someone else will.
It’s not the fault or moral failing of any one individual, but a fault in the system of incentives. A failure in the fundamental structure of how we decide how investments are made, in how we accumulate capital for investment.