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   Carl T. Bergstrom (ct_bergstrom@fediscience.org)'s status on Tuesday, 09-Jan-2024 08:57:39 JST Carl T. Bergstrom

   This is a fantastic story about how the search engine tail wags the online content dog.

   It's a form of enshittification, but it's a two-sided one that involves google's algorithmic choices and web designers' responses via Campbell's law (when a metric becomes a target, people do stupid shit)

   https://www.theverge.com/c/23998379/google-search-seo-algorithm-webpage-optimization

   • Tim Chambers repeated this.
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     Carl T. Bergstrom (ct_bergstrom@fediscience.org)'s status on Tuesday, 09-Jan-2024 12:56:56 JST Carl T. Bergstrom

     in reply to

     "It’s hard to overstate how important Google traffic has become for publishers.
     These incentives are how we’ve ended up with a web full of content farms instead of diverse and interesting sites.

     The rise of AI-powered content farms and other platforms like TikTok could destabilize this entire ecosystem. Users and creators are beginning to look elsewhere to find information as the web gets more and more polluted."