Abandoned AmericaJul 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.
Show threadAbandoned AmericaJul 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.

Show threadAbandoned AmericaJul 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
Show threadCheapPontoon
@AbandonedAmerica
I know!
It really sucks that Google, Apple, etc. can provide your content as "search results" so the searcher never visits your website.
Jul 5, 2023 at 5:05amWeb
Show threadAbandoned AmericaJul 5, 2023
@CheapPontoon yep. It will wreck so many sites that are struggling to stay alive and only doing so through traffic and (unfortunately) ad revenue