The most effective government intervention would be to ban paid advertising / paid promotion. Paid advertising, unlike SEO, can be banned because it can be defined clearly. It would fix the perverse social media incentives to maximize engagement, and it would solve the price floor issue of “i can’t compete with someone who does it free with ads”.
The same Government that used these business to censor individuals and agency’s? That Government? That is asking to supersize the problem. You really want to hurt them, first, routinely stop using devices, social networks and such. Stop giving them access to everything on your phone or tablet by blindly excepting all, use blocking apps, and utilize any browser other than the mainstream ones. I would tell you to stop using Firefox also, due to their relationship with Google and a softening on filtering as of late. Try this for awhile and watch things change. Also, use VPN and Encryption where possible before true AI takes it away.
Even though I agree with some of what you're saying, your tone is unnecessarily aggressive. We're all just people here.
To your main point, I think it is very hard to meaningfully put the blame on individuals. It may feel nice to do that since it absolves people of having to do hard work. But the problems remain. Companies spend billions of dollars per annum to make products that are built to become addicting. Society has structured itself around these products, purely organically. You cannot get a date without being online. You cannot keep in touch with friends without being online. You cannot do many jobs without being online. This is a structural problem, and pinning the usage of social media, phones, and tablets on individuals is a luxury belief.
(I also think you are kinda missing the point of the post? I'm not really talking about privacy or data collection)
We've mostly lost the idea of a sellout, someone looked down upon for using their talents to make more money in a way that harms the world instead of producing useful or good things.
I think there's a compounding effect on society when people view a job that produces no value or negative value (SEO specialists, rent seekers, etc.) at parity with one that does produce value.
More people work for institutions that aren't making life better. People feel that institutions are taking advantage them. People then feel justified taking advantage of systems. Systems get worse.
One contention: you describe SEO as being prisoners-dilemma like, avertable in a world where businesses can coordinate on that. But I don’t think so.
Specifically:
- in a world where companies A & B compete on roughly equally good product X - they would like to coordinate to not compete on SEO if possible.
- but, in a world where A has a great product, and B has a mediocre one, B has much stronger incentives you muddy up any organic search signal.
- in general I read the latter scenario as more common. clickbait/algorithmic feeds make this point the strongest.
- substance or novel ideas are hard, a consensus to compete on the merit of that is a losing proposition for many, instead playing on the virality/marketing front is just winning.
I don't think you can assume businesses will coordinate, in the same way that you can't really assume the social media companies will coordinate. You have to rely on an external actor, eg government
Digging even deeper on engagement, why do SV companies so often use engagement as a key metric? It's because of advertising. It's not a full rebuttal of your point, but advertising revenue is the original sin of a lot of enshittification. You can also blame this on users though - since no one is willing to pay for anything.
In the case of AirBnB, it's interesting to consider their decline as just re-learning the lessons of the hotel industry. I think there were plenty of Cassandras saying that things would go this way in the end and AirBnB could only exist in its "good" form for a short time until market dynamics re-asserted themselves. The same is true of Uber.
Well, maybe. IMO its more because engagement is a very easy thing to measure. I am sympathetic to the facebook folks here -- they tried to get rid of algorithmic feeds but by the measurements available to them it seemed like users had a worse time. But 'worse' is obviously subjective, and measurements for 'better' or 'worse' are in fact imperfect proxies for some extremely-difficult-to-conceptualize platonic ideal.
Engagement generally *does* mean that you're building something that is useful/good. It's only at the extremes where engagement starts to fail as a metric because it edges into 'addiction' territory. But this is true of like all optimization -- at the extremes, optimization fails to handle human values correctly. Thus paperclip maximizers.
So I think you sorta have cause and effect backwards. Advertising is a business model that naturally falls out of optimizing for engagement; engagement doesn't fall out of optimizing for advertising.
(Obviously these are 'just so' stories, so take with a grain of salt.)
Long before most here existed, I was a Circulation Mgr at a Regional Newspaper. The most important thing the Paper as a whole did was circulation(sale papers). Not report news. Not sell advertising, but circulation. Might seem odd but the number of readers drove what could be charged for ads. The news, weather and sports? Well that was just the bait to get people to buy the paper.
Compare it to current days. Today the “News” is the person engaging on a social media site with arguments , post, memes etc. Advertising is still advertising, just more focused, and circulation is the number of likes or followers that are there. All that matters to the company in the background is the “circulation” and how much they can charge for adds. So it behooves them to allow a site to become a mud pit to keep people engaged/present. But one thing you can’t do is deny the company ad revenue, because without it there is no network (as I type AWS is down taking two local Universities with it ). No SM site, no users.
This isn't even a good use of 'tldr', if your takeaway was `big company bad` you completely and totally missed the point of the article, which was defending big companies!
How exactly can the government regulate SEO? I am all for government regulation, but the government regulating SEO just sounds impossible. How would they do it?
You could imagine various ways that the government (or Google!) could try and rein in this externality. Here are a few, none of which I will actively defend but just food for thought:
- Google could charge businesses that appear at the front of search rankings if said businesses also have adwords/adsense accounts
- Google could literally randomize the first page of results, thereby removing the incentive to game the SEO as hard as they would. Of course, Google would never do this because they would lose market share, so the *government* could mandate that this is required of all search engines, which would have the same effect
- The government could introduce some kind of legal liability for excessive SEO — this would primarily result in less SEO for the most rule-abiding players (who are also least likely to be spammy), but that would then free Google up to be way more aggressive about downranking or outright ip blocking SEO spam (because they can be less worried that they are accidentally blocking good actors). Probably this would be a 1A violation, but note that this category of thing cannot be unilaterally implemented by Google.
- The government could tax SEO. I have no idea how, but again something that is unique to the government.
The reason I didn’t suggest these in the article is because for the most part, I think these tradeoffs just make the search page worse, or introduce worse incentives/outcomes in other areas, and I want to come up with solutions that solve the bad behavior but also keep the search page pretty good. Like, consider the randomizing-the-first-page-of-results ‘solution’. Is that really any better than just dealing with the SEO? Unclear. Probably on net, from a societal impact perspective, it might be. But its very fuzzy to me — Google puts a lot of effort into trying to get the first few hits to be really really accurate.
The business that appear that the beginning of a Google search pay to be there currently. A friend of mine runs a business and the franchise handles it for all the stores, but he pays for it.
What is the actual aim of search results? Is it to help people find useful information they're searching for? If it is, there's a way to fix the incentives and make it happen.
But I don't think useful search results are the point of search engines anymore. That's the bigger problem; these things are not what they seem.
The free internet is working its way into a dead end and will take a lot of big companies down with it, ironically aided and abetted by AI, which people will rely on to avoid having to actually use the internet. Discrete nets will arise for particular economic, social, political and cultural communities, particularly as privacy and hacking concerns render the internet the virtual equivalent of Mad Max.
"the government could mandate that algorithmic personalization is opt-in by default, with a big warning sign about the addiction risks over the toggle." This will end up like the EU cookie consent form—annoying and easy to overlook.”
Possible. Legislation needs to be smart about this -- for example, the law could be framed as "Any algorithmic personalization indicator cannot interrupt the normal usage of the product by any customer, and cannot advertise any benefit to the end customer", which I think should kick out any kind of pop-up banner. But, yes, I cannot defend bad legislation
The most effective government intervention would be to ban paid advertising / paid promotion. Paid advertising, unlike SEO, can be banned because it can be defined clearly. It would fix the perverse social media incentives to maximize engagement, and it would solve the price floor issue of “i can’t compete with someone who does it free with ads”.
I think paid advertising is just a much broader swath of the economy. So a bit more of a blunt hammer. But yes that would also work
The same Government that used these business to censor individuals and agency’s? That Government? That is asking to supersize the problem. You really want to hurt them, first, routinely stop using devices, social networks and such. Stop giving them access to everything on your phone or tablet by blindly excepting all, use blocking apps, and utilize any browser other than the mainstream ones. I would tell you to stop using Firefox also, due to their relationship with Google and a softening on filtering as of late. Try this for awhile and watch things change. Also, use VPN and Encryption where possible before true AI takes it away.
Even though I agree with some of what you're saying, your tone is unnecessarily aggressive. We're all just people here.
To your main point, I think it is very hard to meaningfully put the blame on individuals. It may feel nice to do that since it absolves people of having to do hard work. But the problems remain. Companies spend billions of dollars per annum to make products that are built to become addicting. Society has structured itself around these products, purely organically. You cannot get a date without being online. You cannot keep in touch with friends without being online. You cannot do many jobs without being online. This is a structural problem, and pinning the usage of social media, phones, and tablets on individuals is a luxury belief.
(I also think you are kinda missing the point of the post? I'm not really talking about privacy or data collection)
We've mostly lost the idea of a sellout, someone looked down upon for using their talents to make more money in a way that harms the world instead of producing useful or good things.
I think there's a compounding effect on society when people view a job that produces no value or negative value (SEO specialists, rent seekers, etc.) at parity with one that does produce value.
More people work for institutions that aren't making life better. People feel that institutions are taking advantage them. People then feel justified taking advantage of systems. Systems get worse.
Great post!
One contention: you describe SEO as being prisoners-dilemma like, avertable in a world where businesses can coordinate on that. But I don’t think so.
Specifically:
- in a world where companies A & B compete on roughly equally good product X - they would like to coordinate to not compete on SEO if possible.
- but, in a world where A has a great product, and B has a mediocre one, B has much stronger incentives you muddy up any organic search signal.
- in general I read the latter scenario as more common. clickbait/algorithmic feeds make this point the strongest.
- substance or novel ideas are hard, a consensus to compete on the merit of that is a losing proposition for many, instead playing on the virality/marketing front is just winning.
I don't think you can assume businesses will coordinate, in the same way that you can't really assume the social media companies will coordinate. You have to rely on an external actor, eg government
Digging even deeper on engagement, why do SV companies so often use engagement as a key metric? It's because of advertising. It's not a full rebuttal of your point, but advertising revenue is the original sin of a lot of enshittification. You can also blame this on users though - since no one is willing to pay for anything.
In the case of AirBnB, it's interesting to consider their decline as just re-learning the lessons of the hotel industry. I think there were plenty of Cassandras saying that things would go this way in the end and AirBnB could only exist in its "good" form for a short time until market dynamics re-asserted themselves. The same is true of Uber.
Well, maybe. IMO its more because engagement is a very easy thing to measure. I am sympathetic to the facebook folks here -- they tried to get rid of algorithmic feeds but by the measurements available to them it seemed like users had a worse time. But 'worse' is obviously subjective, and measurements for 'better' or 'worse' are in fact imperfect proxies for some extremely-difficult-to-conceptualize platonic ideal.
Engagement generally *does* mean that you're building something that is useful/good. It's only at the extremes where engagement starts to fail as a metric because it edges into 'addiction' territory. But this is true of like all optimization -- at the extremes, optimization fails to handle human values correctly. Thus paperclip maximizers.
So I think you sorta have cause and effect backwards. Advertising is a business model that naturally falls out of optimizing for engagement; engagement doesn't fall out of optimizing for advertising.
(Obviously these are 'just so' stories, so take with a grain of salt.)
Long before most here existed, I was a Circulation Mgr at a Regional Newspaper. The most important thing the Paper as a whole did was circulation(sale papers). Not report news. Not sell advertising, but circulation. Might seem odd but the number of readers drove what could be charged for ads. The news, weather and sports? Well that was just the bait to get people to buy the paper.
Compare it to current days. Today the “News” is the person engaging on a social media site with arguments , post, memes etc. Advertising is still advertising, just more focused, and circulation is the number of likes or followers that are there. All that matters to the company in the background is the “circulation” and how much they can charge for adds. So it behooves them to allow a site to become a mud pit to keep people engaged/present. But one thing you can’t do is deny the company ad revenue, because without it there is no network (as I type AWS is down taking two local Universities with it ). No SM site, no users.
This isn't even a good use of 'tldr', if your takeaway was `big company bad` you completely and totally missed the point of the article, which was defending big companies!
tldr: blocked for 30 days.
How exactly can the government regulate SEO? I am all for government regulation, but the government regulating SEO just sounds impossible. How would they do it?
Copying from my comment here (https://substack.com/@theahura/note/c-149170787)
===
You could imagine various ways that the government (or Google!) could try and rein in this externality. Here are a few, none of which I will actively defend but just food for thought:
- Google could charge businesses that appear at the front of search rankings if said businesses also have adwords/adsense accounts
- Google could literally randomize the first page of results, thereby removing the incentive to game the SEO as hard as they would. Of course, Google would never do this because they would lose market share, so the *government* could mandate that this is required of all search engines, which would have the same effect
- The government could introduce some kind of legal liability for excessive SEO — this would primarily result in less SEO for the most rule-abiding players (who are also least likely to be spammy), but that would then free Google up to be way more aggressive about downranking or outright ip blocking SEO spam (because they can be less worried that they are accidentally blocking good actors). Probably this would be a 1A violation, but note that this category of thing cannot be unilaterally implemented by Google.
- The government could tax SEO. I have no idea how, but again something that is unique to the government.
The reason I didn’t suggest these in the article is because for the most part, I think these tradeoffs just make the search page worse, or introduce worse incentives/outcomes in other areas, and I want to come up with solutions that solve the bad behavior but also keep the search page pretty good. Like, consider the randomizing-the-first-page-of-results ‘solution’. Is that really any better than just dealing with the SEO? Unclear. Probably on net, from a societal impact perspective, it might be. But its very fuzzy to me — Google puts a lot of effort into trying to get the first few hits to be really really accurate.
The business that appear that the beginning of a Google search pay to be there currently. A friend of mine runs a business and the franchise handles it for all the stores, but he pays for it.
What is the actual aim of search results? Is it to help people find useful information they're searching for? If it is, there's a way to fix the incentives and make it happen.
But I don't think useful search results are the point of search engines anymore. That's the bigger problem; these things are not what they seem.
The free internet is working its way into a dead end and will take a lot of big companies down with it, ironically aided and abetted by AI, which people will rely on to avoid having to actually use the internet. Discrete nets will arise for particular economic, social, political and cultural communities, particularly as privacy and hacking concerns render the internet the virtual equivalent of Mad Max.
"the government could mandate that algorithmic personalization is opt-in by default, with a big warning sign about the addiction risks over the toggle." This will end up like the EU cookie consent form—annoying and easy to overlook.”
Possible. Legislation needs to be smart about this -- for example, the law could be framed as "Any algorithmic personalization indicator cannot interrupt the normal usage of the product by any customer, and cannot advertise any benefit to the end customer", which I think should kick out any kind of pop-up banner. But, yes, I cannot defend bad legislation