Mastodawn

Abandoned America Jul 5, 2023

After spending the last few years working really hard to beef up longer format histories of abandoned locations on my website I am seriously considering pulling all but, say, three paragraphs of each and putting the rest on Patreon for subs because of how disgusted I am that the work I've done will be used in Google's AI training and search results without my consent. It is a very frustrating situation to be placed in.

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Abandoned America Jul 5, 2023

To be clear, I would really rather not have to do the extra work and paywalling content is something that runs against what I've wanted to do with my work from the beginning, which is make info accessible to whoever wants to view it.

But I also really abhor the idea of my writing being absorbed and plagiarized by search summaries that encourage bypassing my site entirely and I don't know of another way to prevent it.

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Abandoned America Jul 5, 2023

I would bet a not insignificant amount of money that a good number of other small websites that are looking at the same predicament are mulling what their options are to prevent data scraping of decades of their work and deciding whether paywalling is the only way to prevent it. This will absolutely devastate the internet as we know it. I'm well aware of the social media debacles here but the issue stretches far beyond corporate behemoths trying to monetize APIs

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Austin Heller Jul 5, 2023

@AbandonedAmerica I'm not trying to tell you how to feel, but I'm curious if there's a way to view this from another perspective. If I had no control of the situation but still wanted to share my content with the world, maybe I could take comfort in knowing that my hard work is now reaching an even wider audience as an unknown contributor to our collective knowledge. What are your thoughts on that?

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Abandoned America

@livingcoder yeah, why attribute anything to anyone? Let's take all the artists and creators that are already clinging to the edge of a precipice by the meager thread that the ownership of their work affords them and just Sparta kick them into complete destitution and oblivion. That a corporate behemoth has stripped the last benefit I get from my work for its own gain to incorporate it into the "collective knowledge base" that they can then monetize and control is a huge reward for that price.