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A few days ago, Wired magazine decided to remove an article from its site. “After careful review,” the editors wrote, “and relevant material provided to us upon publication,” they decided to remove it. The editorial was titled “How Google is disrupting search to get into your wallet.”
Their basic and terrible argument was that Google changes the search for “children’s clothing” and adds keywords (e.g. a children’s clothing brand) that deliver higher paying ads that the user wasn’t actually searching for. The only beneficiary of this ploy was Google: neither the advertiser wanted to pay for these ads, nor did the user want to search for this brand.
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Google flatly denied this. Wired believed them and removed the piece. The author said she saw it on a slide during a presentation in the major monopoly case against Google, the trial of which is largely secret and began in September. Despite Google’s response, the article’s author, Megan Gray, stands by her argument: “Google’s search team and its advertising team worked together to secretly increase commercial queries, which gave them more revenue,” he told The Atlantic.
In another monopoly case against Amazon, as revealed by the Wall Street Journal, it was revealed that the company had a project called Nessie: it consisted of an algorithm that observed competitors’ prices and recognized whether they were linked to Amazon’s. If so, Amazon could raise its prices and all other major platforms would follow. The only ones harmed? The consumers.
Amazon claims that the US government does not fully understand how Nessie, which is no longer in operation, worked. But it’s one of those logical ideas within a company that has enormous control over online sales: If other companies monitor my prices and match them to mine, I go up and everyone goes up with me, I end up making more. According to the Journal, Nessie gave Amazon more than $1 billion.
The skeptical or cynical consumer will see these practices as obvious. Any business will tend to maximize its profits to the limit of legality. Or get over it if you think they won’t get caught anyway.
The Internet was born as an alternative to the physical world: freer, less predictable, larger. The success of a handful of companies means that their promise has become another capitalist paradise: if we already have 1,000 million customers, why don’t we try to get 1,000,000,001 customers too?
This truism is recounted here by a former Google employee in a viral post titled “The Tyranny of the Marginal User.” The goals of a software company are to satisfy growth at the expense of the original users. This former employee, Ivan Vendrov, remembers OkCupid in 2014 when it involved answering dozens of questions in hundreds of words. The games were closer. Now OkCupid is Tinder: Swipe left or right and quickly please.
“It’s not just about dating apps,” Vendrov writes. “Almost all consumer software tends toward minimal user control, infinite scrolling, and junk content. Even the crown jewel of the internet, Google search, has declined to the point where it is useless for complicated searches,” he adds.
But why does it happen? This is the crucial paragraph:
“Companies that create apps have strong incentives to attract more users, even users who get little value from the app. Sometimes this is because you can monetize these low-value users with ads. Often it is because your company relies on the network effect [cada nuevo usuario de una plataforma aumenta el valor de esa red para otros usuarios] and even low-value users can help strengthen a company’s position. Therefore, the star metric for designers and engineers is usually something like “daily active users”: the number of users who log in to your application within 24 hours.
This means you need to attract users in order to sell them more ads at any price. Facebook, Instagram, X, Google and Amazon die naturally on this wall. It’s not a new trend. We talked about Cory Doctorow’s Internet “message” back in early March. We have been following this trend for some time, but there are concrete milestones, such as the monopoly trials in the US this month.
Now it’s war again
What do Israel and Palestine have to do with this decline in user experience? The race for users affects all fronts. Elon Musk has decided to remove link headings on X because they lead users away from the platform, even though they are useful for better understanding a tweet. Content moderation costs money and it is better for users to do it for free with Community Notes while defending freedom of expression.
X is still the place with the most comprehensive debate. But the algorithm makes this experience more complex: one day it’s the alleged babies beheaded by Hamas, another day it’s the alleged attack from Lebanon. The algorithm focuses on this, for example when the singer comes out at a concert and jumps onto all users’ screens. The goal is to collect views to earn influence or money. Why not use images from other wars? Why not exaggerate, even at the risk of being cruel? Why not say something just to see if it goes viral? Why not invent it? Historically, the media has been the first to benefit from attracting attention. But there are now thousands of accounts experiencing the problem.
The big difference therefore lies in the amount of content circulating. There are two unstoppable trends: First, when the effort to find out what is happening is so great, the incentive to spend two hours every day trying to find out the truth is exhausting. This would encourage more people to turn to traditional media. But secondly, there are millions of people, especially young people, who go to TikTok to educate themselves because there are users/influencers there who express their point of view in a transparent manner.
The Washington Post published an article about the reason behind the billions of views on news videos about the Middle East. A young Palestinian-American woman, clear about her preferences, said, “People really want things that are nice and easy to understand and break down, but also designed for social media, which is where people get their news today received.” Day”. An American academic added: “These TikTokers are skeptical of media agendas and less interested in participating in them.”
The big difference with the media is that they are open about who they support. You know where everyone comes from. This all sounds nice until you read that Joe Biden’s digital campaign will also take up this space: “[De cara a la campaña de 2024] We will place an intense focus on producing viral content that reflects the changing battlefield of modern campaigns: from driving talking points and influencing journalists to editing popular videos and distributing them to allied influencers. It also means combating the rapidly spreading misinformation.” In the area where everyone has equal weight, “paid” influencers also have influence. The pollution is enormous.
This change towards more transparency in opinions is also taking place in the media. This week I interviewed Ben Smith, who left the New York Times to start a global media outlet that was simply more “transparent.” The multiplying newsletters are evidence of this change in tone and style.
Nobody knows where it will take us. But it certainly doesn’t take us back in time. We are no longer the same people fighting on Twitter now. We are 20 years older and the world has changed. The people coming now have different goals and it is impossible to recreate the 2010s universe with Bluesky or Threads.
If this all sounds chaotic, that’s because it is. Getting information has never been easy. Make money too. It is logical that companies that have earned so much want a new dollar until their last breath. I’m not a fan of proverbs, but it’s clear that they summarize centuries of human experience and greed breaks the bank.
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