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Beginning Decline

I have been reading recently that websites are being penalized for backlinks if they are deemed "unnatural" by Google. As always, its the small businesses that get hid hardest by the capriciousness of the algorithm. They don't have the resources to even discover what they are doing wrong let alone pay for those wrongdoings to be corrected. Then I ran into this article about the broader problem of backlinks not being the backbone of the internet anymore - a far more problematic thing.

If you degrade hyperlinks, and you degrade this idea of the internet as something that refers you to other things, you instead have this stationary internet where a generative AI agent will hoover up and summarize all the information that’s out there, and place it right in front of you so that you never have to leave the portal

Lot of folks say they never go beyond the AI generated response to their search query because the organic search results in Google are garbage anyway (and finally they did something about it, thought might be a case of too little too late) and you have to scroll through a lot of ads to even get there. If the AI can get it mostly right then why bother. And that is exactly the slippery-slope we need to avoid. If the question was what day is Thanksgiving in 2024 and AI provides the right answer, there is no reason to believe that it will come even within striking distance your query was about the recent port strike, what caused it and where things are headed from here. 

The AI may decide to offer up spin that it's corporate overlords and the political handlers have decided is aligned with "responsible AI" behavior. If the person who asked the question has no reliable way to get "real" answers to their query then they will need to go on without knowing. The more things that people collectively don't know the easier it is to manipulate them all.

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