Thread by @eshear

The real villain here is Google.
Google found one of the very best business models of all time, skimming all the surplus profit off of the entire free open internet.
This is the natural end state of that process.

The closure of internet has been driven by this because the only way to make money sustainably is to *not* leave your shit open on the internet where Google will index it, middleman you, and eventually clone you.

If your content was hard to index (eg video) that would work for a while, but those days are coming to an end. Plus Google bought the world’s *second* biggest search engine, YouTube, so it’s sort of a moot point anyway.

This could have been averted if Google was less avaricious. Instead of trying to eg. eat Yelp alive with by giving Google reviews an unfair advantage in search, they could have partnered with them and cut them in on the revenue.

The fact revenue sites now optimize to trick you into reading for as long as possible before giving you the recipe is directly due to this phenomenon…more time on site both ranks them higher on Google, and also lets them show more ads, which they need to compete for top spot.

The reason the % of the internet that is globally indexed keeps dropping is because of this.

If Google worked closely with their partners, the sites and people who provide the open content that makes one of the most profitable businesses in the world work…then people like SEO-heist-man would be out of luck. Bc Google would know they were being ripped off.

Look how it works on YouTube. Extensive controls mean you can’t just copy someone else’s videos and rank. If you tried to GPT-steal their YT videos they’d rightly strike you. But Google hasn’t bothered to build that for the open web because it’s just a commons to plunder to them.

Sad. I remember the huge surplus of an open web. Maybe someday we’ll figure out how to get it back.