I think people have a lower tolerance for this than that, and will just go back to relying on personal recommendations and other reliable forms of curation.
I think we will see the pendulum swing back. Yahoo lost to google because they were a manually curated search engine and could not keep up with google indexing and search. Now that all search is SEO gamed garbagebwe are going to see a new curated search engine rise in market share again
That’s not why Yahoo lost. They switched CEOs and corporate direction / business models more than once a year on average toward the end.
Also, during the collapse of yahoo, it was a poorly kept secret that google had already mostly abandoned page rank, and had large manual curation teams.
To add insult to injury, in unbranded head to head tests, Yahoo search had better search result quality than google for many years before it was sold to Microsoft.
that's the part that I love love love. society has gotten to this ridiculous follower stage that people seem to think it is a personal connection. maybe i've just spent too much time too close to the ad agency world to see how nasty they are, but anytime i see some random person on the internet that i do not personally know recommending anything, i immediately assume they are paid for that "recommendation". too much "inside baseball" to know that nothing you see in an ad is real even if you don't consciously recognize the fact what you are looking at is an ad.
Hell yes. +9000 for your post. To me, the solution is much transparency around paid product placement through strong regulation.
See "Parasocial interaction".
Parasocial interaction (PSI) refers to a kind of psychological relationship experienced by an audience in their mediated encounters with performers in the mass media, particularly on television and on online platforms. Viewers or listeners come to consider media personalities as friends, despite having no or limited interactions with them. PSI is described as an illusory experience, such that media audiences interact with personas (e.g., talk show hosts, celebrities, fictional characters, social media influencers) as if they are engaged in a reciprocal relationship with them. The term was coined by Donald Horton and Richard Wohl in 1956.
I'm currently noodling on a blog website and I'm thinking about adding a "recommendations" page largely in an anti-influencer sort of way--any affiliate marketing money is pretty incidental to somebody working in tech, but I want companies that make stuff that's good and valuable to stick around and continue to make stuff, so I want a way to spread the good news in a credible manner.
Then don’t use sponsored links. If you’re making money off of the recommendation in any form, it loses credibility for people that care. Otherwise, you’re just like all of those listicles that exist for no reason than a way to use affiliate links.
> anytime i see some random person on the internet that i do not personally know recommending anything, i immediately assume they are paid for that "recommendation"
Yes, and doubly so if they say something like "this is not sponsored".
lifestyle marketing. goes hand in hand with the AI stuff, really.
if 90% of the market is bullshit, the key is to find the people you trust and want to be similar to.
"This is who I am, and who I'd like to be, and this is what they do and use".
And admittedly, a lot of these oft maligned influencers are actually trying on the makeup on camera, eating the food, etc. Not a random bot but a human.
We'll see if GPT and Midjourney are able to hack that, too.
Taking things off the net would be a huge step back for economy.
LLMs will cause a total collapse of trust online. This problem will be solved by a brand new online trust model (instead of the old one "has gained some followers by formulating text messages and forwarding gifs").
The trustees (bots/humans/orgs mixed) would probably need to sacrifice much more of their privacy. Not for the sake of orwellian Big Brother, but for re-establishing any trust whatsoever online.
Yep. Case in point - I've given up buying on Amazon UK and use Argos as my go-to shop instead, for products of far better assured provenance without having to really overthink it all.
