Technology

58451 readers

4976 users here now

This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.

Our Rules

Follow the lemmy.world rules.
Only tech related content.
Be excellent to each another!
Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
Politics threads may be removed.
No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed

Approved Bots

founded 1 year ago

MODERATORS

1043

Google has sent internet into ‘spiral of decline’, claims DeepMind co-founder (www.telegraph.co.uk)

submitted 11 months ago by [email protected] to c/technology

192 comments fedilink hide all child comments

Google has plunged the internet into a “spiral of decline”, the co-founder of the company’s artificial intelligence (AI) lab has claimed.

Mustafa Suleyman, the British entrepreneur who co-founded DeepMind, said: “The business model that Google had broke the internet.”

He said search results had become plagued with “clickbait” to keep people “addicted and absorbed on the page as long as possible”.

Information online is “buried at the bottom of a lot of verbiage and guff”, Mr Suleyman argued, so websites can “sell more adverts”, fuelled by Google’s technology.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] Aceticon 1 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago)

I was there and can tell you we had a peak of quality maybe in the 00s and have been going backwards towards worse than the early Internet really fast in the last decade or so.

Sure, if you want to find info on something, now you can now watch a glitzy 1080p video with lots of fancy graphics on Youtube of some guy explaining it - it will have a clickbait title and be interspected with Ads, sponsor segments, and it will take half an hour to explain something which in the old days you could read all about on a website in 10 minutes and actually came out knowing more about it.

The funny bit is that the old website is still there, but if you use Google to search for it that video and another 20 like it will be shoved in front of you, along with "sponsored results" and a ton of SEO-optimized clickbait websites which you'll have to wade through to find the one needle in between all that straw (and meanwhile the system is designed to distract you away from what you want, so you'll have to battle your own subconscious pulls to manage to stay the course).

And don't get me started on how you actually had a decent expectation of privacy on the Internet back in the late 90s and early 00s whilst nowadays all dominat players almost force you (in some cases actually do) to give them your phone number to better link your various online and offline profiles in multiple devices.

IMHO, the actual Internet in software, usability and software systems terms now is not superior to what we had in the late 90s, early 00s, it's the electronics tech (mainly thanks to bandwidth and portable computing devices) that's superior.