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Casey Newton (caseynewton@mastodon.social)'s status on Wednesday, 27-May-2026 09:19:27 JST Casey Newton

I wrote about Google's new “Ask YouTube” and other ways the web is being summarized to death https://www.platformer.news/google-agents-daily-brief-newsletters-ask-youtube/
In conversation about 2 months ago from mastodon.social permalink
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1. While still an experiment, this feature is essentially AI Mode for video. And just as that mode reshaped the economics of web publishing, I suspect it will have real consequences for YouTube as well. Today there many large creators with channels dedicated to how-to videos, crafting, cooking, home repair, tutoring, and other educational subjects. Those channels make money by getting people to subscribe to them, watch mid-roll ads on their videos, and stay to the end. Ask YouTube, on the other hand, might return a synthesized answer that stitches 30 seconds from three different videos — and resolves your question well enough that you never click into any of them. The old job of the YouTube search bar was to direct you to the best video for your query; its new job is to create a multimedia answer to your question, with video as a component.
  https://files.mastodon.social/media_attachments/files/116/615/307/865/919/584/original/33dc27ef764fc55f.png
2. Domain not in remote thumbnail source whitelist: storage.ghost.io
  
  Is the web being summarized to death?
  
  from @CaseyNewton
  
  At Google I/O, new features bring AI agents into the inbox and YouTube in ways that further strain the relationship between publishers and platforms

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