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Before there was Reddit, there was a little something called Yahoo! Answers, where I saw my favorite question ever asked on the internet:
"When is Truck Month historically celebrated?"
When 404media skewers a company, you know it's well deserved. There's a little more grandstanding and "told you so" in this piece than necessary, but it's still great.
https://www.404media.co/rip-metaverse-an-80-billion-dumpster-fire-nobody-wanted/
AI SLOP WEB PAGES ARE TRAINING AI
It is a circle of slop
Was the internet a mistake?
In media, we have all been talking about the problem of search for many years, at least starting in 2022 or 2023 when Google made a huge change to how it returns results and all the media outlets saw huge dips in traffic
With AI summaries showing up in search results for people who have not opted out of them, the traffic loss continues. It's a major issue for anyone who runs an online business or is in media. But I haven't heard in my daily life of non-media people discussing it
More and more AI slop pages are turning up in my basic search results. I use Duck Duck Go, and I have AI assistance disable. Yet, when I click through to the top websites in any search results, I'm landing on more and more pages that are clearly written by AI with AI-generated images and so forth.
I won't link to them bc I don't want to give them traffic but here's an image. Just look at the arms. We are so overdue for a major correction in how search works...
