Less depressing example. A country (I think it was India but my memory is hazy and I'm too lazy to go google it right now) had a problem with a certain venomous snake. They decided to offer a bounty for every snake corpse brought to them. The goal was to incentivise people to hunt snakes. What actually happened was people started breeding the snakes to turn in for the bounties. They realized the program wasn't working and cancelled it at which point the breeders dumped their snakes into the wild making the whole situation even worse.

A lot of my queries only call for oversimplified summaries. Either I'm simple like that or I google stupid shoot no one else would bother. A recent example:

Are there butterflies or moths that don't have mouths? (No but some have vestigial mouths connected to non-functioning digestive systems.) Good enough!

That said, I'm very skeptical about answers if it's anything I care about or need to act on.

AI literally produces better answers than 99% of ad supported, SEOptimized websites.

That's saying not a lot about AI though. It tells you how utterly awful searching the web is thanks to those sites.

So I had this joke idea of "they'll just start showing the ads to the AIs", but the more I thought about it the more it started to sound less like a joke. Imagine if someone figured out how to cram ads into the AI training models and it skewed the outputs. Why astroturf when you can train the AIs to astroturf for you. This is some black mirror shit and now I've made myself a bit depressed.

Hadn't thought of this before.

The AI summary stops people from going to the website, which means the website the AI used isn't getting any page views.

On a long enough timeline, it would kill webpages, then the AI has no new info to steal.

Are you stupid?

I think Alk is referencing, the concept of perverse incentives. Without explicitly saying it. It's a concept, or a way of refering to an incentive structure that gives un-desirable results, in economics.

Example: When clicks give you ad revenue. And hurt kittens nurtured back to health gives the most clicks. People start hurting kittens, so they have more to nurture back to health for clicks.

Edit: my example is unfortunately a very real thing. Multiple channels on YT have been found to do it. Someone else will have to find the articles about it. I don't want to ruin my day reading about it again.

Yes you said it better than I could have. Not only the perverse incentive, but also just the way ads have annihilated the usability of the internet for the average user. I know some sites can't exist without ads, but the web now is an unusable mess of for-profit click bait SEO slop and the average non-profit oriented enthusiast with a website for something has a harder time than ever existing because of it.

I am not smart enough to know what to change, but I know something has to change. Short of a complete upheaval of the current web, the ones profiting off the current model will do everything in their power to make sure nothing changes.

This is why I'm conflicted. AI destroying ad revenue is that upheaval that could be fast and powerful enough to disrupt the status quo, but at what cost?

Yes you said it better than I could have. Not only the perverse incentive, but also just the way ads have annihilated the usability of the internet for the average user. I know some sites can't exist without ads, but the web now is an unusable mess of for-profit click bait SEO slop and the average non-profit oriented enthusiast with a website for something has a harder time than ever existing because of it.

I am not smart enough to know what to change, but I know something has to change. Short of a complete upheaval of the current web, the ones profiting off the current model will do everything in their power to make sure nothing changes.

This is why I'm conflicted. AI destroying ad revenue is that upheaval that could be fast and powerful enough to disrupt the status quo, but at what cost?

Thanks you for letting me know that my interpretation wasn't completely off base.

Well I have an idea and its a bit archaic but it just might work. Local homegrown news bulletins. Like how punk rock bands and other subcultures back in the day spread around. Registers and news, and compilations of cool sites you and your group of friends or "club" have found. The old internet had loads of sites or BBS's that were link lists.

It doesn't have to be janky paper magazine's. But communities need to engage more in genuine material and sites. Remember happy tree friends? No algorythm spread that. Kids did! Same thing with meatspin and all those crazy sites and content. Word of mouth is crazy powerful. Like take peertube for example, finding content you like there ain't as easy as on YouTube. But if you in a group / forum honestly recomend something or someone you found, chances are someone like minded that didn't know of it, now finds it. But we can't, on the other hand, go around and spam everything we find.

So monthly bulletins of content, sites etc in a forum would be my 2 cents.

Honestly that's kind of what lemmy is, in a roundabout way. I think you are right, but actually getting people to engage with that would be difficult. Today, word of mouth with younger people mostly revolves around individual things inside centralized platforms like a TikTok meme or something. I think in addition to independent sources of content, there needs to be a cultural change in how everyone accesses content. That's the hard part.

Are you stupid?

Indeed! But let's be the change we want!

Do you have any good mastodon, pixelfed or peertube or other fediverse recommendations to follow ? I'm still new here so my feeds are pretty monocultural (to borrow an agricultural term).

On lemmy, I just browse "all" then filter out anything I don't want instead of the opposite. I don't use Mastodon much, or any twitter-style platform. As for videos I still use YouTube, just through the FreeTube application on desktop.

Edit: one thing I do follow is the gaming news posts by this person, who puts a whole lot of effort into them: @PerfectDark@lemmy.world

Oh, that's me!

Thanks, Alk. I'm glad my little posts mean something to the general public here, I appreciate it!