Comment by jumploops
1 hour ago
It looks like Google has taken a note out of Facebook's "lose trust" playbook.
Facebook had a huge opportunity in the post-AI world: real humans.
Instead of focusing on connections, they've been optimizing their properties for doomscrolling.
Google, similarly, has lost the plot on what made them trustworthy in the first place: navigating to citable content.
Both companies started on this trend well before AI, but this might be the final nail in their respective coffins[0].
[0]Yes they'll likely still be profitable for a long time, but the Bell Labs-esque downfall has begun (imo).
I don't think people cared all that much about whether or not the content was citable. You can't cite Wikipedia, and that's not going anywhere.
Facebook may well fail when people don't enjoy it. But all Google ever promised was information, of variously dubious quality, and that's still their draw.
Fair, citable is probably the wrong term.
This is a problem Google has been battling forever, with all the SEO click spam.
In either case, Google was the tool that many people used to find "trustworthy" information (citable or not), compared to the other tools online.