I’ve only been on the bad end of a conspiracy one time, but that’s one too many for a lifetime. What I learned from this experience is that there’s a brief moment of relief that comes from knowing you’re not crazy, followed by the paralyzing realization that all your darkest fears are coming true. That’s a little bit what it’s like to be a publisher of a website in 2025.
LinkedIn is a good industry barometer, and right now, the automotive news industry is split between people hoping to pivot to some sort of membership model and people losing their jobs. I’ve long tried to offer at least freelance work to individuals who lost gigs in one of the now innumerable prior rounds of layoffs, but we’re getting squeezed by the same factors squeezing everyone else, so it’s a lot harder to keep up with the pace of people who need help.
No mega platform owes us anything. I want to acknowledge this. Google (or Alphabet, if you prefer) doesn’t have to send us any traffic or any advertisers, and it still does a lot of both. My understanding was always that we work hard to provide the content that makes Google’s many products valuable, and the company, in return, provides some reasonably proportional level of traffic. This was also the deal with Facebook before Facebook decided to pull the rug out on publishers. Implicit in this understanding is that, is that under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act and similar laws, companies like Google get a “safe harbor” from certain lawsuits because Google isn’t the one making any content. We are. So we assume that risk.
With the push to make everything about artificial intelligence, Google has tried to integrate its own AI systems into its suite of online products. You’ll notice the Gemini diamond on your Google Sheets, an AI assistant in your Google Meets, and generative AI maps in your Google Street… views.
I mentioned this in my previous article on the topic, but as these AI products started to roll out, it seems like Google understood this could be detrimental for publishers who assumed they’d still be at the top of searches, either via Google News or via regular search. This change didn’t have as big an impact on us as we were new and didn’t have a long tail of search results.
What Google did to make up for this is a product you may not even be aware of, but everyone in the industry knows as Google Discover. Basically, any time you go to any Google product, it’ll serve you up some stories, videos, or social media posts. Here’s what my search page looks like:
This has been a key way that people have found us, because it’s a more competitive place than search and gets more traffic than Google News. If more people clicked on our stories, Google seemed to show more people what The Autopian was writing. We write great stories and headlines, with excellent thumbnails, so we absolutely killed on this platform.
And then, as I mentioned, it started to go away. I attributed a lot of this to Discover ignoring its own guidelines for content and instead promoting a lot of AI-generated slop that somehow managed to sneak past the company’s own crossing guards (so much for Google’s excellent machine learing). The bulk of it may just be Google itself, as the latest report from web analytics firm Marfeel (full disclosure: this is the one we use) shows:
In key markets like the US, Brazil, and Mexico, AI Summaries already make up 51% of the feed. When they appear, AI Summaries often display multiple publisher logos but provide a single actionable click, which in most cases plays an inline YouTube (77% in the US, 100% in Brazil and Mexico). Deeper in the feed, AI dominates even more, quietly replacing publisher links.
It looks something like the graphic below, and you can understand why suddenly publishers aren’t getting the traffic that they expected to get in lieu of the search traffic slurped up by AI. We often get crammed in with other logos at the top in a way that results in little or no traffic to anyone.
Who owns YouTube? Oh, right. Alphabet.
None of this is a huge surprise, as TechCrunch reported on this summer, but seeing it in our reports confirms the fears of diminished traffic were correct. And it’s not just us. It’s either comforting or terrifying that our main competitors are also being smacked around by the same changes.
If you’re wondering why so many of your favorite sites are suddenly even more ad-heavy than usual in the fourth quarter, this is likely the cause. With less traffic, the only way to get more money is to squeeze more ad impressions on the page, but this causes more supply and then forces prices down, creating a need for even more ads… ad infinitum.
The difference between our site and those other sites is that we’re way more careful about how we roll out ads because we don’t look at display as our major source of revenue (my guess is that if you were out of the industry for even a year, you’d be shocked at how crappy RPMs are). We have a membership business, and that means we care about getting people to check out the page and then want to stick around.
I think about it this way: If your friend told you about this great restaurant with a chill vibe and a perfect juicy hamburger, you’d probably go. If you got there and the restaurant was full of TV screens blaring ads, the menus were dirty, and the waiter kept trying to shoo you away from your table, you wouldn’t care how good the burger was. You’d never come back. That’s what most websites are like now.
When your friend (in this metaphor, Google) sends you our way, we want you to love it here. We want it to be a nice experience. We want the burger to be delicious. And we want you to come back. Slamming the page with ads is counter to this, and other publishers in our space that have experimented with a lot of ads and membership have found that people didn’t really want to become members.
Our goal is to eventually turn as many of you as possible into members by making membership super valuable, but we also want more people to find this place, which means we’re not entirely paywalled. It’s a tough balance, but our plan has always been to lower our dependency on revenue from all platforms, not just Google, while also keeping our discoverability high.
I write this because it’s going to be difficult for publishers who have insisted on the other model to function going forward, and you’ll probably see other automotive websites you love either get smaller or do all sorts of seemingly nonsensical things (AI slop, trending TikTok articles) just to make up the difference. I also expect a lot more layoffs in Q1 of 2026.
Here’s another chart from Marfeel:
Do you really think the AI summaries are going to stay at the bottom of the page? I don’t.
Marfeel’s report pretty much nailed it when it said “Google Discover is shifting from a traffic distributor to an attention controller.”
This is also bad for Google! Going back to the original conceit of the Google-Publisher relationship, AI needs human thinking to feed its models. We provide that thinking. The more watered down and terrible and sloppy the inputs, seemingly, the harder it is to get a good output and the less valuable that input becomes.
Again, we’re building our business to be resilient against these sorts of changes over the long term. That means merch, toys, partnerships, some display advertising, and, most importantly, membership. If you’ve been thinking about becoming a member but haven’t yet, and are able to, now is a good time to do so.
Our plan is to review what sort of membership we can project out into 2026 based on Q4 of 2025, and we’ll use that data to decide how much we can spend on freelance, the website, more events, et cetera.
And if you’re already a member, as always, thank you for your support. It makes moments like this a lot more tolerable and keeps us focused on making this the best place to hang out on the web for car people.
This above is why I decided that if possible- I need to retire as soon as possible. I’ve spent 25+ years as a graphic designer, creative director, videographer, animator, and many other type jobs and I have no doubt all of that is going to get replaced with AI.
There will be no creative digital jobs in the future. Just robots spewing out things for the general public.
I’m in the exact same situation (but only 15+ years, so even longer to go). Hoping I can hold out, or just sell my body on the streets so my children can eat.
Yay, the future!
I needed a new headshot a few weeks ago. Option A was to find a photographer, get on their schedule, get a haircut, travel to them and pay for their services.
Option B was to upload a few selfies to some AI site and pay them a couple bucks to instantly create an image that looks as good as anything I’ve had before.
Even if you would choose Option A, a huge majority of people are going to go with the cheaper, more convenient option.
At least for now it appears we’d be better off had this tech not been developed. But, now that it has, there’s no putting the genie back.
It’s taken generations of human talent to develop these art forms. The way things are going, a generation or two from now there won’t be any humans who have any understanding of how to compose a photograph, do a voiceover for animation, write a song, etc etc. And, even if people want to learn, there will be no one left to teach them. The only option will be to start over and “rediscover” all the knowledge we are currently losing. OR, future generations will accept that artist = someone who tells an AI what they want it to make.
ALWAYS put -ai at the end of your searches.
I thought that Google stopped applying Boolean logic in searches a long time ago.
I got curious and looked. Seems they still apply it.
I checked it before I posted and it still worked.
Matt, I’m sure you know that “slop” is Meriam-Webster’s word of the year. Perhaps someone has already mentioned it.
I’ve been a member for a couple of years or so now and I don’t remember how I stumbled on this site. I think it may have been a search along the lines of “whatever happened to that crazy guy Torchinsky” or something like that. Because I did check out the “old site” periodically, back in the day.
The Autopian is the first or second site I check every day, and I go through a little bit of mourning on weekends. Sometimes, I intentionally leave a couple of articles unread on Friday, so I have a little snack to read over the weekend. As I did this week.
My default search engine is Duck, Duck, Go. But I still feel like I’m being tracked with targeted ads. I guess I should try their browser as well, so I don’t get bombarded with ads for lingerie after I buy my GF something nice.
Edited to add that I appreciate the content all of you put out day to day. Some of the things you get to experience, I envy. And the daily grind of producing content, I don’t miss. Getting up at 4:30 am and heading to two police departments and going through the reports was a social depressant in my early 20s. You can’t stay up past midnight and do that on the regular.
I second this comment from Cars? I’ve owned a few. The ability of The Autopian to bring people together in a good environment from disparate backgrounds and with a variety of skills and life experiences is unique. This is one of only a few sites and the only automotive site that I follow every day.
I mostly use DDG for searches, but have considered Kagi. I’m a member of the Electronic Frontier Foundation in a small attempt to stem a little of the massive enshittification of the online world. Been a member here for a few years and followed Torch for what seems like a lifetime (in a good way ;). I read and enjoy just about everything that is written here.
That is only because they lacked the courage to go with “shitification”.
No, it’s bad for the quality of Google’s service! It’s likely quite good for Google.
yup. And who cares if the product is crap. As long as it remains half a click less crappy than Bing, what are people going to do, go back to paper maps and research libraries?
Public libraries (…which might be different from “research libraries”, but I don’t do academics) are the opposite of AI and social media in so many positive ways.
DO IT NOW
Anyone who hates the future as much as they love The Autopian can be my friend.
Hey, buddy.
Hey pal.
I’m here for you
I ain’t never had a friend before. Hot dog!
I just want to say thanks for giving us these BTS looks on how the site runs, it gives me hope that not everything will suck in the future.
This alarming article convinced me to become a member!
Yassss
One of us. One of us.
WELCOME!
The greater good!
Disheartening, but informative, so thanks Matt.
It all makes me wonder which is worse: a Terminator-style takeover by AI warbots, or a future where people huddle around campfires, eyes glued to their phone screens, all filled with reprocessed/repackaged/simulated dreck churned out by the server farms scattered from coast to coast.
It’s kind of wild to me the degree to which the tech companies are just absolutely strip-mining the ecosystems they rely on – like, there seems to be absolutely no thought whatsoever for what happens tomorrow, what they eat after the seed corn’s all gone. I’ve known a couple genuine actual addicts – the kinds of people where the substance doesn’t matter, they’re compulsive about anything – and that’s the only thing I can compare this to.
All of them are completely tied to the success of AI. Some may have a fall back plan, but I bet the fall back plan for google is to buy and kill anything that could offer any non-ai solution.
The only actual use I would have for AI is to sort AI-generated garbage out of my search results.
I saw a statistic that something like 70% of younger workers us AI to generate their work email. That means that if two 20-somethings are emailing each other, it’s more likely than not that the conversation is just two AIs having a chat with each other. We know nothing worthwhile is going to come from that exchange, and the company is paying two salaries and whatever AI costs to accomplish nothing.
I feel like the push for data centers and the required power plants is, at least in part, hoping to tie real jobs to the AI economy so we all have to believe in the value of these virtual tulip bulbs. Unfortunately once construction is finished, the only job in the data center is the guy making sure the power is on. It’s not like a factory that is going to employ a lot of people for a long time. It’s not even as ‘good’ as an Amazon distribution center coming to town.
Indeed. I’m glad I’m 70.
The “work” done in data centers is you as a customer pay $300 / hr to rack a server in your cage, or recable something, and it takes them 3 hours to do what would be 20 minutes to do yourself. You need to be extremely specific in what you request to the point of telling them to route the fiber through the cable management covers as for some reason they always think this server is somehow special from your other 200 and should instead have cables dragging across the floor, what path to take, specify the max bend radius, point out which side of the server is up, what lights to look for when a job is done, etc. and they still screw it up 60% of the time because they hire the cheapest non-skilled worker that can pass a background check.
I was thinking more of an AI-specific data center owned by / serving a single customer.
But I don’t know enough about the way this industry operates to even know if such a thing exists. I do know it’s not a ‘save the town’ type of operation once the construction work dries up – and that’s often done by out of state labor at much cheaper than local prevailing wages.
I was just editing when your reply made it un-editable. Was going to add that all of the ones I’ve used are extremely security focused, but when working in a trading firm price is the last consideration. I wouldn’t be surprised if your average data center employs about 50 people for security, 20 for pay by the hour customer work, and 10 building engineers. Janitorial work is minor as it’s not far off from a clean room environment. In the very unlikely shit hits the fan moment when there’s a major problem they’ll fly people in, but overall they’re very well engineered reliable operations that mostly need no human intervention once built. The amount of work that gets done in designing them and ensuring redundancy is off the charts though and is mainly handled by the very high paid engineers at the headquarters. If Equinix was hired to design the Fukushima power plant it would have taken a series of additional disasters to get it to the point of failure.
This reminds me of when I had to get a web server set up for my work.
The guy who did the final website (and just needed a server to host it on) told me “oh you can just pay $60/month and have it hosted on an existing server at a web provider”
Of course the other sites this guy did for other countries regularly had outages for one reason or another… and often had lousy performance for one reason or another.
I wasn’t having any of that.
I specc’d out my own server with redundant power, redundant hard drives, redundant network connections, a decent processor and a good amount of ram, specificied it would run Linux (not the shit Microsoft was offering), hired a Linux guy to configure it, physcially checked web hosting companies to see what sort of infrastructure they had (many were complete jokes) and as a result, my website had excellent up time, great performance and great reliability.
Eventually the other sites were hosted on the server and service I specc’d.
Cost the company $300/month is hosting fees and the server lease… but it was worth it because it worked and worked well.
A huge part of office “work” has no value add. It is just busy work and meetings. However, if that “young” worker uses the AI summary of the meeting to send out the meeting notes with a link to the transcript that is a whole lot more productive than that employee typing it all out themselves.
My current employer is pushing big on getting employees to use our official AI tool (MS CoPilot) to speed up tasks. It works quite well for things like making graphs / tables and creating slides. This big push basically is so they don’t have to rehire / backfill the 20% of their office staff that has been reduced.
I have no doubt many younger workers are talking advantage of these tools. Plenty of us older employees are hoping to make it to that gold watch moment without learning a new tool.
We have quite a few data centers in my city. Each employ 15 – 20 people once they are up and running.
Amazon is the second largest employer in the USA and today represents a half-way decent job for people without higher training or skills. That is about to change though as Amazon is looking to automate 75% of their jobs and are currently building out distribution centers that need many less humans. If you want to work at Amazon in the future – robotic tech might be the career path to choose.
I don’t know… I am neither young nor new tool adverse, and I had entirely the experience I expected with these AI tools. I needed to categorize around 200 records in a spreadsheet by theme from a written description. If I was doing academic work I’d load it into dedoose and properly theme it, but this wasn’t academic work—just needed to be done fast.
Attempt 1: Copilot.
We have a license, and are an MS shop. I dropped it into excel and attempted to use the copilot formulae. No dice—it appears you not only need a license, it also only works in M365 *and* you have to be enrolled in the beta channel.
Attempt 2: Gemini.
We use workspace (education) but it’s not our first choice and while some Gemini features are exposed, spreadsheet functions aren’t, and for edu workspaces requires hefty configuration. I’m betting because there are greater privacy rules for edu/gov accounts.
Attempt 3; ChatGPT.
Dropping plain text into ChatGPT worked… sort of. It processed about 25 records and then choked. It got worse as the session went on. Restarting would allow for another 25 or so before it failed.
When I took my first computer science course (Turbo Pascal baby!) one of the key lessons was “always keep in mind what a computer excels at—repeating known tasks at high speed with zero mistakes” and while Statistical Inference and Neural Nets change the outputs slightly, it does not appear that AI is anywhere near successful at doing the repetitive stuff accurately and predictably. Which will matter if you’re depending on it to, say, reliably keep your car from crashing while moving between destinations.
The Infinite Monkey Theorem writ large.
My experience with copilot is with M365 as that is what we moved to earlier in the year.
“Half-way decent” is doing some heavy lifting in that last paragraph.
Amazon pays a minimum of $15 per hour + medical insurance. I’d say that is better than average for someone off the street with zero relative experience or marketable skills.
But don’t they have like 100% annual turnover for their warehouse employees? Maybe the pay is decent but the job sucks hard enough people still don’t want to stick around.
Yes, they have a very high turn-over rate. Some of that is planned – they greatly increase their workforce for seasonal work before Christmas. (UPS does the same – I worked as a seasonal driver back in 2014 – hired in mid Oct and let go on 31-Dec)
High turnover is common and not new in warehouse work. I worked UPS 25 years ago and a package handler unloading, sorting, loading because they paid double minimum wage and provided health insurance. Most people didn’t last a week and very few made it past the 1 month probation.
Anything that pays multiple times minimum wage for brute physical labor is going to be a punishing grind.
I saw an Adobe ad on TV with a young guy whose boss asked him to do a last-minute project. He then got Adobe to do every part of it for him and kicked back with a smile on his face. I turned to my wife and asked how this idiot can’t see that he is not needed?
AI is marketing themselves to young people as a convenience, but hiding the real goal of saving corporations money.
I encourage anyone having Big Feelings about AI to check out this cri de coeur on the trail of wreckage this technology is set to unleash on labor markets, education, the environment, politics, and much else, from the best little magazine around, n+1:
https://www.nplusonemag.com/issue-51/the-intellectual-situation/large-language-muddle/
Resist! They haven’t won yet.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rYaZ57Bn4pQ
I’m retired from 20+ years in essentially, IT. And 20+ years before that in journalism. Your metaphor of “eating all the seed corn” really resonated. I think I’m decent at spotting AI-generated content, but on the other hand, there are still people who aren’t very good writers.
Stripmining the ecosystem we rely upon; no thought for tomorrow; compulsive addict behavior – you have described our entire culture.
Surprised an outfit the size of autopian can afford marfeel. They are awesome, but not cheap.
Every publisher needs to be prepared for the google-zero future.
The worst thing google is doing is bundling their search crawler with their AI crawler. Your choice is to feed their AI summaries or disappear from search results. It is scummy as all hell, and can only exist because of google’s monopoly position in search. This is a textbook example of why we need functioning anti trust enforcement.
Good luck to Matt and all the autopians.
The Google / YouTube / big tech monopoly is going to ruin our society.
I am an old guy (closing in on 70) happily running my small tool & die shop.
I pay for school and books / supplies for my employees, I have no takers these days.
My youngest team member is a Google scholar.
He did take a couple of classes at a tech center very close to his house.
Mostly, he just googles things he needs to know.
So my company is paying for a google education.
He is also paying, google is limiting his learning, therefor, his pay.
I am not anti tech (except in cars).
We need to limit our use of Google / You/tube / Fedbook, if we want things to change.
I am planning on trying a de-googled phone next time around.
I do not search with google, mostly stay off YouTube and have never had a Fedbook account ( way to much drama for me).
Not so hard for me as I grew up without a computer or cell phone.
I do need a cell phone today as my crew and customers want to communicate via text. I can also ignore my cell for many hours a day.
So, push back on big Tech to crate change.
I tend to agree with you these big tech companies are a problem and there’s really no easy answer.
I did the google-cleanse a few years ago because I was disgusted by how much of my personal online activity they were tracking and packaging up. It’s tough and I still find myself watching videos linked back to YouTube or sometimes I land right on their site.
But it is possible to have a life filled with tech, phones, internet etc without google. I’ll be the first to admit the quality of search results isn’t as high or my Apple Maps isn’t nearly as good as Waze or Google Maps and that is a compromise certainly. But I don’t allow a single google app on my phone or other devices and I don’t miss it at all.
But then there’s also Amazon. That one has proved immensely harder to quit. It is tough to reconcile they still offer so much convenience while using tactics and business practices I find objectionable. It’s not easy navigating the modern world and trying to maintain a conscience.
Speaking of how much Google tracks, I have a separate Google account for my work Android phone. That account is not linked in any way to my work Outlook and Teams accounts. However, in the last month, I have started getting Google notifications for all my calendar notifications in addition to my Outlook or Teams notifications. That means they have now figured out how to read my calendars that have no linkage beyond being on the same device. If they are scraping my calendar I am certain they are scraping my work emails as well.
I have always been an Apple user (graphic design and print background) so I’ve only ever used Android as part of my job having one assigned to me, so obviously there is more bias than just privacy concerns on my part.
However, I could never trust anything on that platform. Google controlling the entire operating system? Not a chance.
And now auto OEMs want to install that shit to run the entire car/infotainment? No thanks.
As a long time avoider of Google for search, and my own frustration of AI slop ending up in my search feed – it’s everywhere right now. It’s just worse with Google.
But going back to Google? No: they are horrendously and blatantly worse than most other search engines.
Even googly admits their search algorithms have collapsed. Not a secret.
I wonder if there’s a way to game the system and use YouTube, shorts, TikTok, and others as advertising for the main site here.
Just flood the market with teasers for articles. Reaction videos to articles, Podcasts about the articles…
Got insane with saturation.
There is actually a pattern to producing viral content, similar to social interaction in a group off the internet.
It has to be the right content for the time, and works best when it is useful.
Timing is everything.
Why was it ever a consideration that this would not happen?
Companies do not care about the quality of content, and apparently neither do content consumers. The shit spiral of the ‘influencer’ was never going to elevate the art. They created enough predictable garbage that an AI can reproduce that level of crap indefinitely and consumer piggies will gobble up whatever slop is served to them.
2007 Youtube : Here’s a 3 minute video about a 5 minute fix.
2015 Youtube : Here’s a 15 minute video about a 5 minute fix.
2018 Youtube : Here’s my 25 minute reaction to a 5 minute fix. (Fix not included)
2020 Youtube : ASMR about the time I watched the 25 minute fix video, brought to you by tactical wallets.
2025 Youtube : Crypto is a real thing. Pay someone to fix it with $HAWK.
2028 Youtube : Fart! (The Musical)
I admit I would unashamedly watch Fart! (The Musical) while simultaneously decrying its existence. My inner 12 year old needs sustenance.
I was curious last night and I did find Fart! The Musical on Youtube. It has far more mouth noises than my production would.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6l6t-Ad4eSY
There is a much better alternative to Google than DDG, as long as you’re prepared to pay for it (I switched in 2023 and never looked back) — and really, why shouldn’t you pay for an infrastructure-heavy service? We now know very well what “free” inevitably leads to: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2025/08/enough-is-enough-i-dumped-googles-worsening-search-for-kagi/
“Going back to the original conceit of the Google-Publisher relationship,“
Was this a freudian slip?
FWIW I have to watch every penny so I have yet to join. I find your website a joy to read, though, and that should count for something. Soon, but has to be next year.
This post pains me, but it does explain a recent experience I had with a non-car website. Matt Hardigree made this problem understandable to me, an old man with limited computer skills, unlike other accounts I have read. For that I thank him.
You guys keep smiling through adversity, though, and I love to see that. In that spirit, I suggest sending Mercedes Streeter to the bus museum in Hibbing, MN – hopefully you can arrange it so she can drive a few. But please wait until right after Labor Day when northern Minnesota enjoys the three week pause between Cessna-sized mosquitoes and zero-visibility blizzards.
A bus museum sounds amazing, and thank you for reading!
Few people know Greyhound started by giving miners a ride to work.
I’m slightly more than halfway through the book “Enshitification” by Cory Doctorow and in an effort to get the spelling right looked it up in Google. Just below the sponsored result for the audiobook read by the author and above the popular products result for the e-book is an AI summary: “There isn’t a specific book titled Enshitification but rather….” With a picture of the fucking book!
A little too on the nose?
I have been trying to navigate the video apocalypse streaming became and it only reinforces how wonderful Netflix DVD was and how tragic the current mess is.
No wonder hard copies of video are being collected and shared at a frantic rate especially in most of the country without useful broadband.
I looked up Max Headroom, specifically the dystopian science fiction drama.
Amazon video describes it as a comedy!
While it has its dark comic moments, it is definitely not a comedy, particularly now that most of its predictions of the future have already come true.
For those unfamiliar, Max Headroom began as a simulated cgi talk show, first in UK, then in USA.
A backstory was later created of a journalist targeted for murder whose thoughts were recorded and used to create a digital version.
This was a short film with a huge impact.
The drama series was on ABC, and the primary theme was corporate control of news in particular being manipulated for their benefit and to the detriment of democracy and freedom.
Especially ironic considering what abc has become. Some of the most chilling episodes never aired on ABC. I often turn nightline on long enough to confirm it’s actors yammering about life on Pandora, so once again NOT a news show.
Yet amazon describes this dystopian drama as a comedy!
The destruction of news and journalism goes back to the 1960s and got worse and worse as the FCC became a hollowed out puppet working for media corporations.
All media belongs to the citizens of a country and broadcasters had a specific legal obligation to meet journalistic standards with news.
There are many books on the subject that tell the whole story. Life magazine is a good starting point.
I recall going into the metro room of a city newspaper, which looked like everyone was out on stories, but in fact almost no one was still employed there. Now, no one is.
For decades, the gutting of actual journalism has continued.
Many of the best began writing books, or moving to those rare islands still operating, but most newspapers became so understaffed, that even covering major stories was impossible.
Parsing journalism for validity and accuracy was actually taught in middle school, as it should be.
Are students now even aware of what journalism is, and what happened?
What do you consider “useful broadband” if most of the country doesn’t have it?
97% of the US population has access to internet with 25 mbps download speeds.
29% have access to 100 mbps or higher
Now I’m right with you on local news – print and TV. Those have been devastated over the last 15 years especially.
The govt definition of broadband is 250.
Experts say that is still twenty years out of date.
I’m actually referring to the country by area, but I don’t really buy the 97% number at all.
I am literally within sight of the city limits here, yet I only have a decent connection by a fluke.
This house was empty for decades due to lack of access to the internet.
The country ignores this issue at its own peril.
The current FCC definition of broadband is 100 mbps down and 20 up. The old definition was 25 down.
My wife and I had 50 mbps internet during Covid and never had an issue both working from home with both on video calls all the time. Today we have 100 because it is the slowest and cheapest package and we simply can’t see paying for 250, 500, or 1 Gig
When we switched from Netflix DVD to streaming we had 10 down max
A lot also has changed in the last decade with mobile and now satellite internet. We aren’t as dependent on running fiber to every house.
That appears to be the current case, but I’m certain I heard 250 previously.
Maybe something changed or it has something to do with measurement standards?
I’ve had service that only hit the guarantee at moments, with past providers.
My minimum speed abruptly changed to 250 before I even got hooked up, after the announcement about standards.
The standard supplier here refused in the past to connect this house even when they offered to pay the total line cost to connect here.
I have a business class service that perhaps more important than speed, offers a fat, stable signal.
They tell me my speed should be reliable running up to 20 computers at the same time. For $20 more a month the speed doubles, another $20 it doubles again.
I just got lucky here.
No other house I looked at or attempted to buy offered anything more than a landline copper feed.
I am literally at the end of the line for their service in this area.
The default provider still refuses to connect here.
I actually had difficulty finding out who would provide service. I literally ended up tracking lines across fields.
My previous provider keeps trying to sell me service, which they still cannot provide.
Before I got service I had to drive to Lowes to access the web.
In 2015 the FCC defined broadband internet as a minimum of 25 Mbps down. Back in March 2024 they redefined it as a minimum of 100 Mbps down.
You seem focused on broadband as only coming from a hardline running to your house. Mobile broadband and Satellite broadbands are other options. AT&T, T-Mobile, Verizon all have home mobile broadband. Speeds ranging from 100 Mbps to 1 Gb. If you live in sight of a large city I would be shocked if you didn’t have one or more mobile options.
If you live anywhere in the lower 48 you have the option of Starlink
I know people still waiting for starlink.
I’m paying six times what I used to, but all options cost much more and do less.
My phone data ran out in days using a mobile.
I’m not even doing anything serious yet, and the monthly data level sounds impressive, but I’m not even a blip on a fiber feed.
Satlinks didn’t discount until they faced other options.
I’m lucky to have a useful option.
I still couldn’t afford entry level when I got here.
Home 5G broadband is unlimited data
Yes, like anything else satellite broadband was expensive until they had competition. I’ve talked to a lot of people happy with Starlink.
They fixed it. I ran my search at 6:45am Eastern
The other auto site has descended into AI-ification with several “journalists” touting their AI degrees in their profiles. How low they have fallen.
And the doofiest made up names I’ve seen yet.
Other?
I have been informed from folks on the inside that those people are real people with real degrees who actually write those articles. Apparently, there may be some AI shenanigans going on with research or fact checking, but real people are putting their names on it.
I read a bad article there the other day that I suspected of AI, so I looked up the author who started writing SEO content for fiverr. The way it was written really seemed like the website was paying people on fiverr to generate their content.
As long as a real person hands in the AI-generated crap, you can say it was produced by a person.
I miss altavista, there I said it, let the algorithm punish me but it worked fine.
Web 1.0 was the best.
Let’s AskJeeves where it went.
I miss the version of Google that had competitors.
I remember when the motto of Google was, “Don’t be evil.” For a brief, halcyon period they mostly managed it.
And Altavista was powered by the most powerful CPUs of that time… the DEC Alpha… which Compaq fucked up after they bought DEC. And after HP bought Compaq, HP proceeded to kill off the remaining bit Alpha processor ecosystem… not to mention VMS now being a shadow of what it once was.
I will never forgive Mike Capellas (former Compaq CEO) or Carly Fiorina (former HP CEO) for this and will never invest in any company that has either of these two idiots involved in management or the board.
I personally blame Ken Olsen for losing his vision, becoming arrogant, lazy and complacent.
Same. And Lycos.
One thing that doesn’t get nearly enough coverage is that advertisers are getting royally hosed by the dominance of Google and Facebook. If the CEOs ever wake up to how much they’re suckers, this could change, but who knows.
Ford, Toyota, Goodyear, heck, Turtle Wax were all sold on the dream that big internet companies could microtarget audiences and deliver incredible amounts of valuable data. It’s not happening. They’re throwing huge sums at bots, not customers.
They were better off when they could reach huge real audiences by advertising on Monday Night Football, or placing ads in Sports Illustrated and the LA Times. And also the automotive press.
It wouldn’t even take a 100% shift in ad spending to yield a huge boost in support for human-written car content. The top ten manufacturers shifting just a few million bucks each in ads could easily generate a huge boom in independent media and giant benefits in reaching actual customers.
But CEOs are sold on AI marketing, and it’s going to take at least a few years for reality to drive home how dumb it is.. Hopefully real journalism can outlast them.
But, Bot interest in Turtle Wax brand products has never been higher! Awareness in the key Bot demo groups is particularly strong.
Bots don’t buy cars. Humans buy cars. And Turtle Wax Hybrid stuff is killer.
There’s a bubble in advertising for sure. The market for goods had shifted to being a market for marketing, which to any sane person clearly doesn’t make any goddamn sense, but here we are. You can only buy so many fucking febreze taint spritzers and Nifrexavium psoriasis treatments.
Ever since Google screwed the MSM into thinking they would design websites for newspapers for free and guide traffic to newspapers web sites where newspapers could monetize the traffic for advertisers when instead they simply asked allow us to market the news outside your market for uses you are not currently getting. Then Google news show news content but not the newspaper. It is the biggest scam since time sharing. Funny even now the MSM could reverse the problem but refuses to admit they had no idea how stupid they were and are.
I basically go to five sites for entertainment these days: The Autopian, The Model Car Maker forum, the Britmodeller forum, New York Times (subscription) and Politico. Once in a while I’ll dip into Cars and Bids or BaT, especially if I’m researching a model build, but I don’t spend the time there I used to. The internet has turned into the digital equivalent of a shopping mall… it used to be a place to hang out and now it’s somewhere you go when you need pants. Fortunately Autopian-brand pants fit great and are guaranteed not to make your butt look big, so I’ll always come back for more!
You pay to be lied to by the NYT? I Suggest stopping that subscription you can get all their content for free.
I’m pretty sure 90% of current nyt subscribers are there for Wordle and Spelling Bee.
Google enshittification is getting so bad that I’m no longer salty towards China for blocking their services, though Chinese AI is just as atrocious 🙁 so kneecaped by patriotic requirements even Chinese users are staying away