Comment by mensetmanusman

Absolutely. As someone who spent about 5 years working in local news a bit over a decade ago, it wasn't the search engines or Facebook that killed us, it was craigslist. Especially business classifieds, while not individually big $$$, they added up. We had some edge in content quality for a while, but the classifieds drying up led to deep cuts in the newsroom, and then there was nothing separating us from the local TV stations who also had superficial coverage, but got it out much quicker.

I guess fundamentally I agree with this, but the user experience on most online publications is, and has been, wow, for more than two decades, I think, so bad that every time I'm forced to experience it, I can't even get through a single article before I get so repulsed in worst cases I get an actual negative physical reaction. And it's getting worse as time goes by.

I get that online publications have to advertise, but to do it with auto-play video w/ audio of unrelated content, animated/video ads, ads for items you already bought a month ago, the outright scam ads, SEO garbage ("this one trick to get a supermodel girlfriend"), superstitials blocking content, dark pattern ads (e.g. x icon opens a link rather than closes the ad), ads that move and hover on the page when you scroll down.

I could go on for longer, but I'm getting that same negative physical reaction by simply describing this crap.

Another version of this discussion that comes up frequently is something like the "Support local businesses!" thing, where we're supposed to spend more money at the local diner and ignore a chain like Denny's.. but Denny's is open 24 hours. And people should use Mom+Pop's furniture store, even though they can get a better price plus light bulbs, and the rest of the groceries from Walmart. And we need to use less water during my showers, and ignore the golf courses or the chip factory down the road.

The idea of being a "responsible consumer" at most just delays the inevitable shutdown for a few years, because economies of scale is a real thing. Moralizing to people that they need to spend more money / time / convenience / change their habits isn't effective, because even if consumers are genuinely interested in making sacrifices in exchange for quality, everything that's independent is closing anyway when the small owners sell out to whoever is buying. Those who thrive on mergers and acquisition don't care whether consumers are "responsible".

Consumers aren't children or robots, but we also don't have any choice or agency.. in the US at least there are 4-5 companies that make 80% of the groceries you buy. Telecommunications and media are going to look even worse, depending on how you want to measure it. As much as I hate to say it, it looks like only big government can protect us from big business. So yes, blaming big tech is missing the point, but so is blaming consumers. Write your congressman I guess? Wish I could write his economist instead though.. for whatever reason discouraging monopolies doesn't seem to work, so maybe we should look instead at deliberately incentivizing variety.

The "professional" journalists were all to happy to load their sites with chum boxes and native ads disguised as articles. The search aggregators don't expose that crap.

> If we just say "tech companies bad" and don't admit that our behavior is part of the problem, and that we're not robots or children—that we have choice and agency—we will only ever get a version of the same outcome.

This is a remarkably-astute comment. The problem is that it is very difficult for people to be aware, in any given moment, that a seemingly-innocuous action they're taking now will have devastating consequences in a decade or a century or more. This is made more difficult by well-heeled commercial interests which are highly motivated to discourage such insight. Ultimately, one of the roles of government, and it seems strange to say this, is to develop laws which paternalistically protect people from themselves. As an example of this, see privacy/data protection legislation for the internet, e.g. GDPR. As a counter example, see any country which very deliberately avoids developing privacy legislation for the internet.

There is a trivial solution to this. Store your own copy (or hash, or whatever) of the article and don't rank it until your copy is at least a month old.

The idea is still nonesense because some other search engine will show up without this restriction, and any news site would prefer to be listed there, rather than not.