OC The Web is Indeed Being Looted by Corporate Fat Cats

Ed Zitron posted another solid article on the state of the web that I think belongs here.

Here's the link to it.

It seems like the word is getting out about how the web is declining. That is, the mainstream web. Naturally, advertising is in the spotlight, thanks to big platforms like Facebook, Youtube and Instagram being absolute cesspits of the worst sort.

I do think that advertising has its place and by no means should be considered objectively evil. It's mostly big public companies spurred on by ridiculous quarterly earnings projections and hubris that have been pushing advertising practices to untenable extremes.

Ads don't need personalized targeting to actually reach the right people, but Alphabet and Meta would have you believe they do. Ed Zitron covers the deceptive practices these companies resort to quite well.

An excerpt that caught my eye:

"In the mid-2010s, Facebook "mistakenly" told online publishers that their videos were receiving more engagement than they actually did, leading multiple publishers to "pivot to video," a disastrous industry movement that cost hundreds of reporters their jobs and led to a massive class action suit against Meta. Meta is currently the subject of a class action suit led by Metroplex Communications, which claims that Meta’s inflated metrics lured advertisers away from competing platforms — something it’s been sued for before."

That's not the only thing that these companies are lying about. I get the feeling a series of catastrophic downfalls are in the works for the lot of them.

Obviously that'd be great for webmasters like myself. I do run my own smol search engine after all. But, I think it'd be best to see people shift away from the mainstream web altogether and explore its many other intriguing nooks and crannies.

I wanted to focus on alternative protocols on my own search engine, but lately I've been thinking of ways to help people explore pockets of the HTTP space without getting trapped on its overly exploited surface.

Big public companies have effectively succeeded in destroying the surface web at this point and so many small publishers are being drowned out of existence. Personally, I've seen traffic from sources like Google drop from 800 visitors per day to about 8. Yes, 8.

Luckily, OddNugget.com gets a lot of direct traffic now, in between DOS attacks from AI theft bots, of course. I've been working on better ways to stop the constant DOSing and get site speed back up, but it's been tough. I can only imagine how most other webmasters are faring right now.

Most of the websites that appear on a search engine results page are little more than empty husks used for profiteering by the same 20 or so companies that own most of them and pay for the privilege of appearing in results at all.

Gone are the days of organic search discovery in Google, DuckDuckGo and Bing. It's very clearly pay to play.

My Plan So Far

I've been working on crawling the web and creating some new indexes. It's not much of a plan, but it's a start...

• An index for ecommerce shops that aren't billion dollar goliaths stomping on everyone and everything in sight (so, not Amazon, Etsy, Ebay, etc.). Basically mom and pop shops.
  

• An index for old-school forums and discussion spaces not tethered to meta or Reddit.
  

• An index for simple blogs (many use wordpress or blogger, etc.)
  

I'm also interested in building an IRC client into Odd Nugget alongside an index of IRC servers. I don't know much about IRC, but I'll look into it further to see what I can do.

Anyway, as you've no doubt already guessed, I'm just spitballing here.

I'd love to know what platforms people are having the most trouble on and how I can help make stuff that might make the web better than whatever the hell we have to deal with right now. I'd also love to hear more about the alternatives others are making and what already exists, hence this magazine.

If anyone has any suggestions for my site or this sub, I'm all ears.

It seems pretty obvious that we should start fighting back against the nonsense big tech companies are pushing if there's any hope of having nice things online in the future.