Comment by johnny_canuck
5 hours ago
But ultimately that strategy is good for the consumer right?
In this context, if Google is going to give me the recipe without having to scroll through the story, that seems like a win to me.
The ad-revenue driven Internet of web 2.0 is finally dead and I'm not sure I'm all that sad.
But google won’t give you the recipe. It’ll give you a pretty piece of text that resembles a recipe. You’ll only find out it’s not a recipe when it fails to produce a cake.
But then, the sites its training on are starting to do the same thing, so maybe it won’t matter. Just last night, I pulled up four sites with “gluten free almond cake” recipes. One specified less than 1/4 the flour it would have needed, and another didn’t have any butter in the ingredients list. I had to eyeball the median and tweak from experience to actually get a bakable cake out.
> But ultimately that strategy is good for the consumer right?
No because it's killing competition and becoming an even more obvious monopoly. Then at any occasion they have to choose between consumers and profits, they'll do what shareholders want and increase profits.
Without some way to generate revenue, people aren't going to publish recipes (for Google to scrape into their AI.) Maybe we could live without more recipes being fed into the machine, but there are many other types of content that will suffer the same fate.
It would be nice to find something better than an ad-revenue driven web, but I'm not sure this is it. We'll find out I guess...
> people aren't going to publish recipes
Sure they are. I can attest that musicians will gladly publish their music even when no recompense is offered. Surely culinary artists are the same.
We just won't get countless recipe websites where you have to scroll, scroll, scroll through slop about someone's day to read a scraped recipe that every other website has.
This is just disruption.
You can find many ad free recipes in the cookbooks at your local library. They're likely of higher quality as well.
> But ultimately that strategy is good for the consumer right?
No. Temporarily it’s good for the consumer. Ultimately it is bad for the consumer, because as prices drop, so to does quality.
It's not uncommon for free things to be higher quality than cheap things, especially when we're not talking about physical goods. Think hobbyist vs hack. Selective pro bono vs quantity over quality. The former describes old internet while the latter describes much ad-supported internet. I'm not saying cheap is better than expensive, and I'm not saying everything works this way, but I do think many things do, especially for pure information that doesn't have a major capital cost associated.
No, because now Google controls entirely what you see. They could decide to show you the recipe after all.
Also, at some point even the ad-laden websites will die, and then Googles sources will be extinguished.