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Surprising no one, new research says AI Overviews cause massive drop in search clicks
(arstechnica.com)
this post was submitted on 24 Jul 2025
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Joke's on them, I've already been working on that for decades. *pats ublock* This baby can bankrupt so many websites and I always hoped it could collapse the ad model completely.
In all seriousness, it's becoming increasingly clear that we're eventually going to have to build a new, free internet out of the wreckage of this one once the corporations are done with it. Technically it's already there, nascent but ever so slowly growing and taking root, hiding in plain sight. Like the so-called dark web of tor, it already exists in parallel to the existing structures of the internet. Call it the deep web, the indie web, nostalgia web, unsearchable web, I've heard countless terms and most of them aren't terribly accurate, but the web doesn't need ads and google search to exist, it never did. It just needs humans, which despite the best efforts of big tech many of us still are, communicating directly with one another and documenting our billions of lifetimes of diverse collective experiences and knowledge.
We are the wealth of information in the internet. Corporations don't own it. We are it.
Very much yes.
I have this great visual image of the corporate web, marked by neon signs and billboards and holographic ads, populated entirely by bots talking to each other while the humans sneak away, giggling and shushing each other.
I see your ublock and raise you Pihole.
The internet has always had ads, some of the most obnoxious were those mid to late 90s banner ads with sound. I’ll never forget loading a random page and my speakers screaming: Helllllloooooooooo.
I genuinely forgot about the ads with sound.
I don't miss them.
Porque no los dos?
I've been wondering how we can build a new underground net that is just the internet of 2002, but with more bandwidth. Somewhere normies can't access easily and with a bad ui so they don't want to.
What kind of revisionist bullshit is this?
Like, it's almost always safe to write off anyone using "normies" but do you think 2002 was like in movies/TV?
"The net" wasn't some secret thing, kids had been using it in school for over a decade.
I can't tell if you weren't born then or already 50 years old...
But wherever you're getting your opinions on 2002 internet, it wasn't first hand
As a 50-something, I can see the case for putting the “golden age” of the internet between the birth of Wikipedia in 2001 and Facebook in 2006.
I’d expand it a bit further. Maybe 1999 to 2009. While Facebook did exist towards the end there, everyone’s grandmother wasn’t on it yet and they weren’t entirely intrusive and walled gardened. Forums still existed. Search engines still returned good results.
But it was the beginning of what would come. After 2009 it went downhill fast.
You're totally right
About the same time reddit starting making inroads and googles collusion
Pre-Facebook as the endpoint, sure. But mid- to late-90s was pretty cool, too.
It’s just nostalgia applied to the internet. Some people call it Eternal September. Everyone prefers what the internet was when they first discovered it and hate what it’s become since then. I remember the internet from 1996 most fondly. Many prefer it from the 80s or earlier 90s. This is no different from other media: music, TV, movies.
Of course this is separate from the real issue which is the consolidation and silo-ification of the modern web.
Yeah, the best is never going to be “now”, which is always drown in uncertainty and chaos. When you look back, everything looks safe and deterministic.
Punch the Monkey, Shake the Tree, Bonzi Buddy, flash animation, sites that only worked in IE, etc, etc.
You're right, anyone who thinks 2002 was some golden age of the internet clearly wasn't there.
As what was said below, it was kind of a golden age. It was usable by normal people but still pretty novel to most. And it was a while before corporations ruined it. I lived through it so I can confirm it was better in most ways, besides speeds. I should say, 05 would be a better choice.
Kagi has a “small web” filter that brings this back to an extent.
Marginalia.nu does too with similar additonal filters like Tildeverse and Forums.
Marginalia should be one of the most important things to preserve, in a similar importance to Wikipedia.
I2P