Welcome to the cycle of generative AI making search worse.

Quora uses ChatGPT which hallucinates an answer to a nonsense question.

Google Search picks up this nonsense answer from Quora which has high page rank and treats it as an instant answer.

A few thoughts on quote posts. A quote post is just a visual treatment when you link to a post. It’s basically the link preview equivalent when the URL is on the same service.

The assumption that quote posting leads to toxic interactions is based on the flawed assumption that the only reason to link to something is to say something negative.

Maybe that was true on Twitter but it doesn’t have to be true anywhere else. People are conflating a visual treatment with people’s behavior.

The idea that ads are bad so instead you should pay $10-$20 a month for every newsletter, podcast, streaming service, social network or news site is slowly being revealed as untenable and elitist.

However so many entities have invested so much of their brand and credibility blaming ads for every online problem, we’re entering a new era of enshitification online because they can’t walk back their positions.

Community notes is one of the most thoughtful and innovative features to cone out of Twitter.

It provides a model for fact checking of content across a breadth of topics regardless of importance of the topic which means you end up flagging both big lies like election misinformation but also small lies like rise & grind grifters posing besides rented cars claiming to be millionaires.

Centralized fact checking via companies like Snopes aren’t going to catch the latter. https://vitalik.ca/general/2023/08/16/communitynotes.html

Verizon is shutting down the Zoom competitor it purchased for $400 million in 2020. This isn’t even the most ignominious failed tech purchase by Verizon that’s their Yahoo acquisition.

Cellular carriers are great proofs of the saying that culture eats strategy for breakfast. Verizon and AT&T keep wanting to be tech & content players but keep botching acquisitions. They should embrace being sellers of dumb pipes who grow their business by adding random fees to phone bills https://www.theverge.com/2023/8/8/23825112/verizon-bluejeans-shutting-down-sunset

A great example of a strategic pivot was Netflix going from a Spotify strategy (the most convenient way to consume all the content you love) to an HBO strategy (the best source of unique & original programming worth paying for).

This was a strategy pivot borne out of necessity because the content studios kept raising their prices. In fact, this pivot is why Netflix is profitable and Spotify is not.

This is why a strategy can’t simply be defining and chasing a metric.

https://news.yahoo.com/netflix-details-strategy-become-hbo-145053108.html