AmbitiousProcess

This wouldn’t be an issue if Reddit always attached relevant posts, including negative ones even if those were the minority, to actually help people make a more informed judgement about an ad based on community sentiment, but I think we all know that won’t be the way this goes.

Posts will inevitably only be linked if they are positive, or at the very least neutral about the product being advertised, because that’s what would allow Reddit to sell advertisers on their higher ROI. The bandwagon effect is a real psychological effect, and Reddit knows it.

Fair enough. SEO was definitely one of the many large steps Google has taken to slowly crippling the open web, but I never truly expected it to get this bad. At least with SEO, there was still some incentive left to create quality sites, and it didn’t necessarily kill monetizability for sites.

This feels like an exponentially larger threat, and I truly hope I’m proven wrong about its potential effects, because if it does come true, we’ll be in a much worse situation than we already are now.

Not to mention the fact that the remaining sites that can still hold on, but would just have to cut costs, will just start using language models like Google’s to generate content on their website, which will only worsen the quality of Google’s own answers over time, which will then generate even worse articles, etc etc.

It doesn’t just create a monetization death spiral, it also makes it harder and harder for answers to be sourced reliably, making Google’s own service worse while all the sites hanging on rely on their worse service to exist.

This is fundamentally worse than a lot of what we’ve seen already though, is it not?

AI overviews are parasitic to traffic itself. If AI overviews are where people begin to go for information, websites get zero ad revenue, subscription revenue, or even traffic that can change their ranking in search.

Previous changes just did things like pulling a little better context previews from sites, which only somewhat decreased traffic, and adding more ads, which just made the experience of browsing worse, but this eliminates the entire business model of every website completely if Google continues pushing down this path.

It centralizes all actual traffic solely into Google, yet Google would still be relying on the sites it’s eliminating the traffic of for its information. Those sites cut costs by replacing human writers with more and more AI models, search quality gets infinitely worse, sourcing from articles that themselves were sourced from nothing, then most websites which are no longer receiving enough traffic to be profitable collapse.

Even if you want AI answers, you can use DuckDuckGo. They have an AI assistant too, and even it does better than Google’s at not hallucinating as much.

My VPN’s perfectly fine. To be fair, it’s not a free plan of a VPN that’s heavily throttled, but I can even play multiplayer FPS games with only a few milliseconds of additional delay, and my overall max upload and download speed is almost exactly identical to when I have my VPN off.

This seems like it could be a viable replacement for many plastics, but it isn’t the silver bullet I feel that the article is acting as if it is.

From the linked article in the post:

the new material is as strong as petroleum-based plastics but breaks down into its original components when exposed to salt.

Those components can then be further processed by naturally occurring bacteria, thereby avoiding generating microplastics

The plastic is non-toxic, non-flammable, and does not emit carbon dioxide, he added.

This is great. Good stuff. Wonderful.

From another article (this shows that this isn’t as recent, too. This news was from many months ago)

the team was able to generate plastics that had varying hardnesses and tensile strengths, all comparable or better than conventional plastics.

Plastics like these can be used in 3D printing as well as medical or health-related applications.

Wide applications and uses, much better than a lot of other proposed solutions. Still good so far.

After dissolving the initial new plastic in salt water, they were able to recover 91% of the hexametaphosphate and 82% of the guanidinium as powders, indicating that recycling is easy and efficient.

Easy to recycle and reclaim material from. Great! Not perfect, but still pretty damn good.

In soil, sheets of the new plastic degraded completely over the course of 10 days, supplying the soil with phosphorous and nitrogen similar to a fertilizer.

You could compost these in your backyard. Who needs the local recycling pickup for plastics when you can just chuck it in a bin in the back? Still looking good.

using polysaccharides that form cross-linked salt bridges with guanidinium monomers.

Polysaccharides are literally carbohydrates found in food.

This is really good. Commonly found compound, easy to actually re-integrate back into the environment. But now the problems start. They don’t specify much about the guanidinium monomers in their research in terms of which specific ones are used, so it’s hard to say the exact implications, but…

…they appear to often be toxic, sometimes especially to marine life, soil quality, and plant growth, and have been used in medicine with mixed results as to their effectiveness and safety.

I’m a bit disappointed they didn’t talk about this more in the articles, to be honest. It seems this would definitely be better than traditional plastic in terms of its ecological effects, but still much worse than not dumping it in the ocean at all. In my opinion, in practice it looks like this would simply make the recycling process much more efficient (as mentioned before, a 91% and 82% recovery rate for plastics is much better than the current average of less than 10%) while reducing the overall harm from plastic being dumped in the ocean, even if it’s still not good enough to eliminate the harm altogether.