Casey Newton
Appearances
Search Engine
How do we survive the media apocalypse? (Part 2)
Yeah, one of the most popular queries on Google, as you might imagine, is what time is the Super Bowl? Because that is a day, I'm told, when people who do not ordinarily watch football games will watch a football game. And they don't know what time it is, PJ. Without looking, do you know what time football games are on?
Search Engine
How do we survive the media apocalypse? (Part 2)
Is it 5 p.m.? When's the kickoff show?
Search Engine
How do we survive the media apocalypse? (Part 2)
So the Huffington Post realizes that it can write an article that answers the question, what time is the Super Bowl? And it will be a traffic bonanza akin to the Super Bowl itself. The what time is the Super Bowl post is the Super Bowl of SEO traffic for the Huffington Post.
Search Engine
How do we survive the media apocalypse? (Part 2)
And you can probably guess what the ultimate conclusion of the story, which is that Google says, we also know what time the Super Bowl is. We're just going to start showing it on top of search results.
Search Engine
How do we survive the media apocalypse? (Part 2)
And it is that shift, Google sort of realizing if what people are looking for from us are just answers, we don't have to leave it to the Huffington Post and all these other hangers on to answer people's questions. We can just start doing it for them.
Search Engine
How do we survive the media apocalypse? (Part 2)
And if you are the frog in the pot of water that the entire media industry has been for the past 25 years, this is when the temperature went up by five degrees.
Search Engine
How do we survive the media apocalypse? (Part 2)
Yes, but only in the sense that I thought, well, here is a place where Google's power is increasing. I've been writing about Google for more than 10 years, and I would say the whole time they've been trying to figure out how can we answer more people's questions on what they call the SERP or the Search Engine Results Page. It's an acronym.
Search Engine
How do we survive the media apocalypse? (Part 2)
And to me, one of the most interesting statistics about Google over the past two decades is the rise of what they call the zero-click search. which is the search that does not result in any outbound traffic to anything. You sort of flash back to the first days of Google.
Search Engine
How do we survive the media apocalypse? (Part 2)
I would guess that almost every search resulted in a click to somewhere because Google itself didn't know anything except for maybe where the webpage was that you were looking for. But then you get into the 2010s, and all of a sudden, it's not just answering what time is the Super Bowl, it's pulling snippets out of Wikipedia. It is telling you what movies actors are in.
Search Engine
How do we survive the media apocalypse? (Part 2)
It's telling you what movies directors have directed. And all of this is appearing in various little boxes and carousels on top of the classic 10 blue links that have always been the heart of Google.
Search Engine
How do we survive the media apocalypse? (Part 2)
And so, yeah, what I noted over the past decade was every year, there's another box, there's another widget, there's another answer, and there's one fewer what time is the Super Bowl bonanza for publishers to count on.
Search Engine
How do we survive the media apocalypse? (Part 2)
Right. And it is a great example because we all ran into it and we were all annoyed by it. And this was just one of many things that Google did to take over the web experience. They also created the Chrome web browser. The Chrome web browser helps to dictate HTML standards, how web pages are built, how browsers interpret them. It's able to exert pressure in that way. So it's not just...
Search Engine
How do we survive the media apocalypse? (Part 2)
Like in what order do links appear on webpages? Like Google is actually dictating the shape of the web itself through all these different things.
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How do we survive the media apocalypse? (Part 2)
Yeah, they built like the greatest highway system that the internet had ever seen. And then over time, it is just shrunk to the size of a parking lot. And anybody who searches it is just like driving around in a circle in the parking lot. And why did that happen?
Search Engine
How do we survive the media apocalypse? (Part 2)
I mean, I think my answer to that would be that Google just wound up being arguably the biggest economic victor from the internet in terms of certainly the amount of digital advertising revenue that they were able to generate from the internet. And digital advertising revenue is like the single biggest category of revenue, I think. Is that true? Well, I don't know. We should look that up.
Search Engine
How do we survive the media apocalypse? (Part 2)
The publishing industry, it was really amazing when it was just like newspapers, but nobody was making $100 billion a year, right? Like Google was able to just sort of go out and over the years, more and more of the advertising revenue just accrued to Google. Like Google just became like the most powerful thing and publishers just became... disempowered. They laid people off.
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How do we survive the media apocalypse? (Part 2)
They scrambled, you know, whatever they could do to like get up high on those search results, they would do. It would work for a time. Then the algorithm would change. Then, you know, more people would be laid off. Like all of this just had like a downward pressure on the quality of things. Like people couldn't afford to take big swings anymore. They couldn't afford to to hire big staffs anymore.
Search Engine
How do we survive the media apocalypse? (Part 2)
And so you just get more of these like generic websites telling you about that week's movie trailer. So like basically Google got too much of the money and like the rest of the digital media ecosystem, in my opinion, did not get enough. And there's a very solid narrative that has unfolded over the past few years that Google just isn't as good as it used to be at searching for things.
Search Engine
How do we survive the media apocalypse? (Part 2)
In part, that is just because there are so many more ads now on the sort of high-value searches that people often do on Google. A predictable way that Google has added revenue over the past couple years when they need to show growth to Wall Street is they'll literally just add one more sponsored link to mobile search results.
Search Engine
How do we survive the media apocalypse? (Part 2)
So maybe it used to take five links before you would see what they call an organic result, so a result that has not been paid for. Now I think it's up to seven, right? Now maybe most people don't even realize that those are sponsored links and they're perfectly happy to click on ads all day.
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How do we survive the media apocalypse? (Part 2)
But for people who are a little bit savvier and who just kind of wanted to see a web that wasn't totally corrupted by commercial values, that just feels like it is harder to find. And it is in part because people are not making as much stuff for the web as they used to because there is not as much money in it.
Search Engine
How do we survive the media apocalypse? (Part 2)
They always have been. I mean, this is kind of what led a former Googler in the early days to coin their famous catchphrase, don't be evil. This was what don't be evil was about. It was about not compromising the integrity of what they were doing by reaching for the easy revenue.
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How do we survive the media apocalypse? (Part 2)
And over time, I think that they have just reached more and more for the easy revenue and have not thought enough about the health of the broader web ecosystem that ultimately they do depend on.
Search Engine
How do we survive the media apocalypse? (Part 2)
So this week at Google I.O., they laid out some changes to the way that search results will work. And there's the way that it will work in the near future, and then there's the way that it will work in the medium term.
Search Engine
How do we survive the media apocalypse? (Part 2)
The way that it's going to work in the near-term future, and in fact, a lot of people have had this feature already in preview, I've had it for several months now, is when you search for some things, Google will just show you an AI-generated summary of the results. So if you say something like, what's the best laptop I can buy right now?
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How do we survive the media apocalypse? (Part 2)
Before this feature rolled out, you would see a list of links to sites like Wirecutter that had done a lot of rigorous testing of laptops. Now, with what Google is calling AI overviews, it'll say like, here are some of the best laptops of 2024 as judged by experts. And they'll sort of look at
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How do we survive the media apocalypse? (Part 2)
50 different companies that have written a page like this and they will summarize it and they will sort of show you in little footnotes maybe who wrote that story. But most people, of course, are not going to click on those footnotes. They're just going to see a little summary. So why does that matter? Well, This is one of the places where publishers are still making money.
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How do we survive the media apocalypse? (Part 2)
They're able to put affiliate links if they do these sort of wire cutter style tests of products. And if people buy something because they read that web page, then the publisher gets a little bit of a kickback. now those kickbacks are probably gonna start going away too. And so this is just, again, one more place where publishers aren't gonna see revenue.
Search Engine
How do we survive the media apocalypse? (Part 2)
But it's actually much bigger than that because the real idea here, PJ, is that whereas browsing the web used to be considered something of a pastime to older folks like you and me, now it's being sort of presented as a chore, something that you shouldn't have to do. something that you should just let Google read the web for you, show you a bunch of results, and you'll never have to leave Google.
Search Engine
How do we survive the media apocalypse? (Part 2)
So the reason that this is so important is this is really the first step toward you not having to visit the web anymore because Google is going to read the web for you. And like,
Search Engine
How do we survive the media apocalypse? (Part 2)
Yes. So I hated what Perplexity was doing. I hated what ArcSearch, another company, was doing that was basically exactly the same thing. And the reason I hated it so much was that I knew that Google would do it. because in some ways it is a better user experience, right? There's a reason that people really like asking ChatGPT questions.
Search Engine
How do we survive the media apocalypse? (Part 2)
And it is that they do not get a big research project back when they say, show me the best shoes, right? ChatGPT will just say, oh, if you're a man, here's like 10 kinds of shoes that should be in your wardrobe. Google will show you 4,800 links to websites. It's clear to me what is the better user experience, right?
Search Engine
How do we survive the media apocalypse? (Part 2)
So I knew when I saw what Perplexity and Arc and some of these others were doing that Google was going to feel pressure to do the same thing. But still, it had to happen. And then this week it happened.
Search Engine
How do we survive the media apocalypse? (Part 2)
Yeah, and I do think that they will move a little cautiously here because to some degree that is almost certainly true. If truly every publisher in the world went away and restaurants stopped creating websites and dry cleaners stopped posting their phone numbers online, this does create a problem for Google.
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How do we survive the media apocalypse? (Part 2)
I'm just not sure, one, that it's as big a problem for them as a journalist I would like it to be. And two... they are going to be in control of this entire process, right? Like they have their fingers on the knobs and the levers. And so they can just tweak it like 5% this way or 10% that way. They can see what happens.
Search Engine
How do we survive the media apocalypse? (Part 2)
And if nothing really breaks for them, then they can dial it another 5% or 10%. Every other business on the internet might be kicking and screaming the whole time, but there is almost truly nothing they can do because Google is in control.
Search Engine
How do we survive the media apocalypse? (Part 2)
So to me, what this moment has meant is that on stage this week at Google IO, the company essentially put the web into a state of managed decline where they said, without saying it, that the web was really useful for 25 years. but we don't need it anymore.
Search Engine
How do we survive the media apocalypse? (Part 2)
Because with generative AI, we'll be able to tell you anything that the web could have told you, and you're not even going to have to leave Google to get the information.
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How do we survive the media apocalypse? (Part 2)
Mostly via microphones. Because that's just the relationship you've set up for us.
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How do we survive the media apocalypse? (Part 2)
Yeah, and I'm a little nervous that I am over-rotated here, right? And yet, if you look at the trajectory of the journalism industry since I got into it in 2002, it pretty much just is a line falling off a cliff.
Search Engine
How do we survive the media apocalypse? (Part 2)
Not always causation. And I'm not saying it's all the internet's fault. I'm not even saying this was Google's job to fix this necessarily. It just did become the economic engine that powered the web. And so the moment when it says, This honestly just is not that important to us anymore.
Search Engine
How do we survive the media apocalypse? (Part 2)
Regardless of what you think of whether that is good or bad or what Google should have to do, it just is a big deal for publishers. There's been some reporting on this in the Wall Street Journal. And analysts believe that publishers might lose between 20% and 40% of their traffic over the next year as this stuff rolls out, right? Because we should say, what happened this week was Google...
Search Engine
How do we survive the media apocalypse? (Part 2)
took this AI overview experience that they've been testing. They've now rolled it out across the United States. By the end of the year, they say a billion people around the world are going to have it. So it's gone from this very small test to now a billion people are going to have it by December. And
Search Engine
How do we survive the media apocalypse? (Part 2)
Once that happens, if people are really losing 20 to 40% of their traffic, we're just going to see so many more publications go out of business. Last year, a bunch of publications went out of business. BuzzFeed News, Vice as we know it, The New Gawker, Protocol, sites that just kind of disappeared.
Search Engine
How do we survive the media apocalypse? (Part 2)
And when I think about the few and the proud big publishers that remain, if you walked into any of their C-suites and were like, what's your plan to have 40% less traffic by December? I don't think anybody has a really good plan for that.
Search Engine
How do we survive the media apocalypse? (Part 2)
So there is a big lawsuit. filed by the New York Times against OpenAI, essentially for the same reasons, and that is now unfolding. It is an open legal question whether it can be permitted for a company like Google to go in and look at all of the articles that a publisher like Platformer has ever published and use those to train a large language model.
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How do we survive the media apocalypse? (Part 2)
The case for it being illegal is, hey, you're stealing my work. Knock it off. Don't do that. You're just like taking my labor and using it to make something valuable. I don't want you to do that. So maybe it's illegal. The case that it is legal, though, is, I don't know, all of us are allowed to go and read webpages and form thoughts and do other things based on that information.
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How do we survive the media apocalypse? (Part 2)
And these LLMs are not reproducing what they are ingesting perfectly in most cases. And so are you really going to tell computers that they can't read the internet? Because guess what? Computers are already reading the internet in all sorts of ways. So this is just going to have to get litigated.
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How do we survive the media apocalypse? (Part 2)
But of course, all of the big tech companies are just making the bet that courts are going to side with the big corporations here and the publishers are going to be out of luck.
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How do we survive the media apocalypse? (Part 2)
Some people do think that. Some people will say that ChatGPT and Google Gemini are like the fruit of a poisoned tree, that because you used all this copyrighted material in the creation of them, you will actually have to destroy them. But vanishingly few people I've spoken to think that is a likely outcome.
Search Engine
How do we survive the media apocalypse? (Part 2)
I can't figure that out yet. I had an opportunity back when Platformer was still on Substack. If you want to know why we're not there, that's another great story that you can Google. For now. And they had some kind of toggle where I could say, don't train your LLMs on Platformer, you rogues. And I didn't switch it on. Because number one, Platformer publishes like three articles a week, okay?
Search Engine
How do we survive the media apocalypse? (Part 2)
We're a very low volume publisher. We've never, frankly, even relied on Google for very much of our traffic. I started a newsletter because I didn't want to have to fight platform algorithms for the rest of my life. I just wanted to write about them. So I've never thought that... whatever happens in Google is necessarily gonna be like curtains for a platform.
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How do we survive the media apocalypse? (Part 2)
In fact, sometimes I think I'm weirdly worked up for this given how little I actually expect this to affect me in the near term. Except that I love the web. I grew up on the web. The web brought me like everything that I have.
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How do we survive the media apocalypse? (Part 2)
And Platformer is much better when there is more journalism for me to read and have thoughts about and inspire questions in me and, you know, send me chasing stories on my own. I don't think this is going to have a huge effect on me directly. But like indirectly, it feels like the only story.
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How do we survive the media apocalypse? (Part 2)
Which is, what is the internet going to look like in five years? And you think it's that fast. Yeah. This stuff is moving very quickly. Every few weeks, it seems, one of these AI makers comes out with a more efficient version of a model or a model that has been tuned for some specific purpose. Like maybe it's better at education or it's better at science or it's better at healthcare.
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How do we survive the media apocalypse? (Part 2)
And we're just kind of in that liftoff stage. And this stuff is starting to... accumulate. These chatbot assistants are getting better and better. A lot of people probably watched the demo that OpenAI had this week where they've made this assistant that has this uncannily emotional voice. It's like actively flirting with you now. I was watching their videos. It's crazy.
Search Engine
How do we survive the media apocalypse? (Part 2)
Yeah, another way I would put that is just like, I want the benefits to be a little bit more evenly distributed, right? I know that the majority of the spoils here are going to go to the companies that do the most innovation. And I'm basically fine with that. But again, when you flashback and think about what Google was like in the early 2000s, I just feel like we had a better bargain.
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How do we survive the media apocalypse? (Part 2)
We got a guide to the web that was really fast and easy to use and reliable. They got a bunch of advertising revenue. And there was a rising tide that was lifting all boats. And what I'm worried about is that tide has now sort of, I don't know, come in and washed out a lot of what was on the shore. And Google is going to be the last boat. boat standing or whatever.
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How do we survive the media apocalypse? (Part 2)
I've sort of lost track of this metaphor. I don't know if Google is a boat now. It's gone completely away from me. But if you just sort of imagine them as a large thing that survived whatever I was talking about, that's what it would be.
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How do we survive the media apocalypse? (Part 2)
Well, I mean, set the journalists aside for it. I mean, this is something else I think is important to say so people don't just think we're navel-gazing about our own industry. Google does not only deliver traffic to publishers. It's how people discover all sorts of businesses, right?
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How do we survive the media apocalypse? (Part 2)
You move to a new town, you need a dry cleaner, you need a dog walker, you want to know some cool restaurants or cool bars. Right now, imperfect as it is, all of those things can like jockey for a position. They can go to the search engine optimizers and they can get some tips.
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How do we survive the media apocalypse? (Part 2)
And hopefully if they're a really good restaurant or a really good dry cleaner, they'll pop up to the top of search results. And they might not even have to buy a Google ad, right? Like they can compete just by being really good.
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How do we survive the media apocalypse? (Part 2)
We are talking about the beginning of a future where all of those web pages, whatever all those other businesses are doing to sort of wave their hands and say, hey, we exist. That is all just getting subsumed into an even more complicated and mysterious set of algorithms that's just going to be spat out. And you're just going to be told, yeah. Here's the three dry cleaners in your town.
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How do we survive the media apocalypse? (Part 2)
And hopefully, one of those will be good. So I don't want to overly romanticize the present state of affairs because I do think that SEO has ruined a lot of things. But... It still seems preferable to me to a world where there is just this kind of mystery AI giving you the answer to everything and actively discouraging you from visiting websites to make up your own mind.
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How do we survive the media apocalypse? (Part 2)
And I just keep going back to like at this conference this week, they just kept coming back to this phrase, let Google do the Googling for you. And what they were telling us was, searching the web is a chore, using the internet is a chore, Google is now the thing that stops you from having to do that chore.
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How do we survive the media apocalypse? (Part 2)
Google is just going to be the Star Trek computer, it's going to tell you whatever you need to know, don't worry about visiting the web anymore.
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How do we survive the media apocalypse? (Part 2)
And while they protested, that's not really what we meant, and we're still going to send lots of traffic, and we believe in the web, at the end of the day, I was like, no, you're telling us what you want to do, you've been building it for 20 years, and now you're really close. So I just think it's time that we take them seriously about that.
Search Engine
How do we survive the media apocalypse? (Part 2)
I have the best, worst, dorkiest answer to that question, PJ, which is that we have to finish building the Fediverse. Really? Yes. You're already so upset that I'm making you talk about this, and that's fine.
Search Engine
How do we survive the media apocalypse? (Part 2)
We should all be upset that we have to talk about the Fediverse, but that's where Google has driven us to.
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How do we survive the media apocalypse? (Part 2)
Yeah. So... Fediverse is a way for people to take back the internet for themselves. It's a way to have an identity and connect to other things that are important to you online and just not worry about having to fight through a Google algorithm or a Facebook algorithm. In fact, you can bring your own algorithm if you want to. I'm already doing such a bad job of explaining what the Fediverse is.
Search Engine
How do we survive the media apocalypse? (Part 2)
But that's pretty good, right? It's a collective term for these various web platforms that use open source and decentralized protocols to let different platforms communicate and interact across these different hosting services. That's probably about as technical as you need to go. But the way I think of it is... It's just like a way to bring some humanity back to the internet.
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How do we survive the media apocalypse? (Part 2)
It's a way to sort of rest it back from these giant mega tech platforms. It's a way to personalize things to your own liking, to like sort of customize them. And so it is starting with these social platform. Mastodon was the first thing in the Fediverse. Threads, which is actually now much bigger than Mastodon, is a meta product, but it is part of the Fediverse. Flipboard is joining it.
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How do we survive the media apocalypse? (Part 2)
WordPress is joining it. Ghost, which is this hosting provider that I use for Platformer, is going to join it. And so someday you might just have an app on your phone. And instead of just going to Google to see what's the news of the day, you just open up your app that links you to the Fediverse. And you might be following some publishers there. You might be following some creators there.
Search Engine
How do we survive the media apocalypse? (Part 2)
There might be some ads in it so those folks are getting money. Maybe you do pay a subscription to some of the publishers in there so you get to see all of their paywall posts and they just kind of show up right in your feed. And while there's a lot to figure out in terms of how do you create a good user experience, how do you make that kind of more fun and useful than Google?
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How do we survive the media apocalypse? (Part 2)
That just kind of feels like the direction to go to me because instead of one giant walled garden that is just keeping you there, keeping all the revenue for itself, it is a way of rebuilding a web where there's just a lot of organic connections between people and publishers who like each other and have ways about how we can make and share money with each other.
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How do we survive the media apocalypse? (Part 2)
And so if it works, we're going to have something, I think, that feels much better than the world we have today.
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How do we survive the media apocalypse? (Part 2)
Threads is an app that has 150 million monthly users. It is 10 months old, and it is part of the Fediverse. So that means, as hard as it is to believe, 150 million people every month are in the Fediverse. For the most part, they don't know about it, and they don't care. And that's actually a great sign. Because as we've just established through our tortured explanations of the Fediverse...
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How do we survive the media apocalypse? (Part 2)
Nobody wants to understand what it is or how it works. So we're already working on one of the biggest problems with the Fed. And the thing is, PJ, I'm not the only person who's worried about this. You know, yesterday... I met with two folks. One is a guy, Eugene Rochko, who's the founder of Mastodon. The other guy is Mike McHugh, who's the co-founder of Flipboard.
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How do we survive the media apocalypse? (Part 2)
And these two guys are running at this Fediverse stuff at 100 miles an hour. And the main thing they wanted to let me know was just how many other people are building this stuff with them, right? There's a lot of old timers and even young people around
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How do we survive the media apocalypse? (Part 2)
who remember the early promise of the internet, who remember how exciting it was that we were going to have this thing that was decentralized, that was open, that shared the wealth with a lot of people. And they're going out and they're picking off these name brand websites like WordPress and Tumblr, you know, The Verge, the site where I used to work. They're pushing into federation.
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How do we survive the media apocalypse? (Part 2)
So at this moment, is it a crazy band of insufferable, obnoxious rebels? Absolutely not. But I ask you, PJ, what movement in the history of the world has not begun with a band of insufferable and obnoxious rebels?
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How do we survive the media apocalypse? (Part 2)
It might be the Fediverse. I mean, look, a lot of people are going to use Google. Again, one of the reasons why I'm so mad, PJ, is that this is going to work, okay? It's like, I'm mad because it feels like game over. I'm mad because most people are going to be totally happy to get the sort of Star Trek computer answer and not give two thoughts to...
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How do we survive the media apocalypse? (Part 2)
any of the labor that went into producing the answer. And I'm sure Google will have a great business for itself. But like some of the people that worked at Google in the early days were really idealistic about what the web could be. And I believed in that optimism and I'm not ready to give up on it.
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How do we survive the media apocalypse? (Part 2)
So if that means that I have to learn what the Fediverse is and explain it to other people, that's what I'm going to do because a better world has got to be possible here.
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How do we survive the media apocalypse? (Part 2)
tell you this. I felt things talking to Eugene and Mike yesterday. I was honestly shocked at how emotional I was at Google. It felt weird that I was as upset as I was walking around this developer conference.
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How do we survive the media apocalypse? (Part 2)
And I think I was upset because I felt gaslit, honestly, because nobody at Google would just stand up and say, we actually do have a long-term plan to replace most web visits with our wild garden. So that's kind of why I was mad. But I was also really just pessimistic about the future. Then I sat down with those two and they were like, here are the next three things that we're going to build.
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How do we survive the media apocalypse? (Part 2)
And here's like the next three big platforms that we're going to go after and get them to federate. And I'm like... This might work too because the thing about Google taking most of the winnings of the internet for itself is there's a lot of other people on the internet that would also like to eke out a living. And they're highly motivated to make it work for them.
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How do we survive the media apocalypse? (Part 2)
So there will always be a rebel alliance and I would not count them out because companies that are old and have a lot of money, they get really lazy. and they can't move as quickly as sometimes they need to adapt to the future.
Search Engine
How do we survive the media apocalypse? (Part 2)
So, you know, if the Fediverse folks can build a better future that is truly more fun to use, it'll be really small for a while relative to the size of Google, but there's no reason why it couldn't grow very large in the end.
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How do we survive the media apocalypse? (Part 2)
Do you have a Fediverse account? Are you on mastodon.social?
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How do we survive the media apocalypse? (Part 2)
If this airs, will I be the first returning three-time champion on Search Engine?
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How do we survive the media apocalypse? (Part 2)
I'm a dark horse, just like that one Katy Perry song.
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How do we survive the media apocalypse? (Part 2)
So PJ, when the internet was young and exciting, it was just a series of webpages, famously delivered over a series of tubes. And these webpages were so vast in their number that to find them, we needed a box we could type into. And there were many boxes with names like Excite and Hotbot and Infoseek.
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How do we survive the media apocalypse? (Part 2)
But one day, a couple of Stanford grad students come along with this thing that is better at searching these webpages than anything we've seen before, and it's called Google. And basically from the minute anyone sees it, people are saying, this is the one. They've come up with some really clever stuff that helped them find webpages better than anything else.
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How do we survive the media apocalypse? (Part 2)
And the story of the next 25 years is Google gradually wrapping its arms around the web until it essentially became synonymous with it.
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How do we survive the media apocalypse? (Part 2)
They did a bunch of things, but the most famous is something called PageRank. PageRank, named after one of the co-founders of Google, Larry Page. And the idea was really simple. It was just that as they created this index of all of the web pages, they would look to see which web pages were linking to other web pages.
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How do we survive the media apocalypse? (Part 2)
And if a bunch of webpages link to that webpage, that was a really strong signal that it was valuable. So if as they're crawling, they see 100 different webpages linking to the New York Times, that's going to rise up in search results as people search for the New York Times. And in fact, it is the website of the New York Times. And so everybody sort of gets what they want.
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How do we survive the media apocalypse? (Part 2)
So that was a really good and useful thing. And it enabled them to become the default search engine for most of us. And after that, it turned into basically the greatest advertising business that anyone's ever seen. And why did it turn into the greatest advertising business that anyone's ever seen? Because it turns out that what search engines do is they capture intent and desire.
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How do we survive the media apocalypse? (Part 2)
If you are typing in new car, you might be in the market for a new car. If you're typing in shoes, you might be in the market for new shoes. And so really quite easily, Google could just go out to people who wanted to advertise to people who were in the market for various products and services.
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How do we survive the media apocalypse? (Part 2)
And it started, it actually had this idea of running an auction so that advertisers could bid to be above all of the search results. And it just worked incredibly well. And I would argue it was actually just a really fair bargain for anyone. If you are looking for shoes, it probably actually doesn't hurt you too much to see one ad for shoes on top of a list of links to other websites.
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How do we survive the media apocalypse? (Part 2)
So I think it's important to say that the first decade or so of Google, while it had various problems, it just fundamentally felt like a good bargain for everyone. People got to the webpages they were going to, it was paid for by ads, and that seemed fine.
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How do we survive the media apocalypse? (Part 2)
Yeah, and we should say it really helped the web grow and establish itself. Google made the web much more useful, and the more useful the web became, the more people rushed into it. Google started showing ads on other websites.
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How do we survive the media apocalypse? (Part 2)
And so if you were a publisher or even just a blogger that had decent traffic, you could just run ads that Google would manage, and you could begin to make money on the web as a creator. So you just see this huge rush of talent and capital into the web as Google leads the charge in making it more useful for all of us.
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How do we survive the media apocalypse? (Part 2)
A big reason is just that the more that people used Google, the better that it got. So for example, I used an example earlier of somebody trying to find the New York Times website, and Google starts out with this thing, PageRank, that says, we actually have a pretty good idea of what you're looking for right now.
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How do we survive the media apocalypse? (Part 2)
Well, then think about all of the people who start visiting Google and they search for the New York Times and they click the link and they go to the New York Times and they don't go back to Google. And Google says, aha, we served them the right link. And it starts feeding that model. And it does that across every category of search for every single thing.
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How do we survive the media apocalypse? (Part 2)
And so all of a sudden, Google has the most accurate index by far of any of the search engines. And the longer that it goes, that just becomes more and more true. So it starts to gain this momentum that nobody else can really match.
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How do we survive the media apocalypse? (Part 2)
Yeah, so from the start, people were trying to figure out how do we optimize our webpage so that it floats to the top of these Google search rankings? Because as Google becomes... A default place to start your day on the internet, one of the things people are doing is searching for news.
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How do we survive the media apocalypse? (Part 2)
And so publishers, they're changing the HTML, they're talking with people at Google about what exactly are you looking for, and it becomes this dance. And there are some players in the game, like I think probably most of the publishers were, that were pretty good actors.
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How do we survive the media apocalypse? (Part 2)
And then there were a bunch of unscrupulous fly-by-night characters that were just trying to sell you a vacuum or whatever and wanted to swarm every keyword you can imagine just on the off chance that maybe their webpage would get to the top of the search results. And so it becomes this very competitive adversarial thing.
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How do we survive the media apocalypse? (Part 2)
And an effect of that was Google just became increasingly powerful because basically it's not just the publishing industry. It's like every industry is beating down a path to Google's front door saying, hey, how do I get to be the top link on the thing? And that becomes like one of the sort of main drivers of Google eventually taking over the web.
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How do we survive the media apocalypse? (Part 2)
Yeah, I mean, Google did do things to put itself at the center of the news conversation. The first thing it did was it had a product called Google News, where it just started to aggregate headlines. And you can visit Google News and get a rundown of what was happening around the world.
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How do we survive the media apocalypse? (Part 2)
Another thing that it started to do, and this happened much later in the mobile era, but eventually by the time you Google something on your phone, even before you search for anything, Google would know your previous searches and they would show you news stories that you might be interested in. And all of a sudden, that was starting to send a flood of traffic people's way.
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How do we survive the media apocalypse? (Part 2)
A third thing that happened was that publishers just started to pay attention to what people were searching for. There are various tools that let people understand, oh, wow, a lot of people are searching for the Game of Thrones trailer. It's going to take us four seconds to embed the Game of Thrones trailer in our website.
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How do we survive the media apocalypse? (Part 2)
Let's just go ahead and do that so that when anybody searches Game of Thrones trailer, maybe we'll rise to the top and we'll be able to gain that ad revenue. And here's where I do think the publishers just made a mistake because there was a lot of easy traffic that was available. The...
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How do we survive the media apocalypse? (Part 2)
output wasn't actually that high in journalistic quality, but the revenue that was coming in from all those visits was like pretty good. And so this dynamic was just created where these big digital publishers just saw this ocean of traffic available to them.
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How do we survive the media apocalypse? (Part 2)
And all they had to do is figure out what are people searching for and what's the like cheapest webpage that we can quickly get up to take advantage of the traffic.
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The New Zuckerberg
And by the way, I would say that this perspective does run counter to what I think the stereotype of early Zuckerberg was, and to some extent still remains, which is a sort of bloodless lizard creature who has no empathy and does not understand normal human relationships. Yeah. I never really thought that that was true.
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The New Zuckerberg
I think that in order to do what Zuckerberg does, you have to get deeply in touch with what people want. He just does it differently than most people.
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The New Zuckerberg
Yes, I do think that the social network played a huge role in shaping not just the perception of Zuckerberg, but it shaped Zuckerberg itself. Like, it was a very formative moment for him.
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The New Zuckerberg
Imagine being Zuckerberg, still in your early 20s, and there's an Oscar-winning movie that is just based on a series of lies about how you started this company, right? Can you say more about that? What were the lies?
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The New Zuckerberg
The premise of Aaron Sorkin's The Social Network is that Mark Zuckerberg was a unlucky in love loser who started Facebook because he was desperate to meet girls and would essentially stop at nothing to do that. When in reality, At Harvard, Zuckerberg was dating the woman who is now still his wife, Priscilla Chan, and that was true the entire time.
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The New Zuckerberg
And it's just sort of left on the cutting room floor, but it actually is quite a profound deception because the entire film rests on this premise of why Facebook was started that just is not true.
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The New Zuckerberg
Before 2016, Facebook had... pretty light moderation in a lot of ways. Their workforce of content moderators was relatively small. They would do irresponsible things like set up shop in countries in the global south where they did not have any or more than a couple employees who spoke the language. It was just sort of grow, grow, grow at all costs.
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The New Zuckerberg
but he had this understanding of free speech, which was just frankly very similar to the set of values that were handed to me growing up in America in the 80s and 90s, where, for example, there was a lot of tolerance for Holocaust denial, not because folks agreed with it, but because we held this value of free speech so preciously in America that we thought that the way to fight back against all forms of prejudice
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The New Zuckerberg
was to air it out rather than to chase it into the shadows. And so Zuckerberg, who is Jewish, famously for many, many years, permitted Holocaust denial on the platforms. And, you know, I think probably some degree of anti-Semitism directed his own way because he felt like this is just sort of how we do things in this country.
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The New Zuckerberg
Wait, I have to pause you right here. You missed the most important part of his outfit. The enormous watch? That cost $900,000.
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The New Zuckerberg
This man and his trillion-dollar company sat in front of a camera and told his user base they were going to need to step up and become volunteer moderators of his platform while he wore a $900,000 watch.
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The New Zuckerberg
These are the most important changes that Meta has made to content moderation and just basically what it feels like to use Facebook or Instagram since the aftermath of the 2016 US presidential election.
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The New Zuckerberg
It is going to take us some time to understand not just what the new policies are, although we do know a lot about that now, but also how they are enforced. One of the major changes is that instead of proactively scanning every post to see what policies it might violate, Meta is now going to rely on users to report things that potentially have violated those guidelines.
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The New Zuckerberg
It is going to take us some time to understand what the effect of that is. Does bad stuff on these platforms continue to get reported and removed if it needs to be? Or with more conversations taking place in private groups and private chats where maybe bad stuff is less likely to be reported, maybe a lot of it just kind of skates underneath the radar.
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The New Zuckerberg
Or maybe stuff gets reported but doesn't get taken down. So there are still many, many swirling questions. But when I've talked to executives at the company about what they think this means, they've said the overall effect is you should expect us to take a lot less action on posts on Facebook and Instagram in general.
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The New Zuckerberg
I do see it as that sort of adjustment, and I would offer a reason that Meta is doing this that is perhaps a bit less discussed. which is that for many years now, when Meta would pull users about their criticisms of the company, what they didn't like about using Facebook or Instagram, the number one thing that they would get back is that
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The New Zuckerberg
Meta had taken action against their post, that they had published something that they thought was benign and found that had been removed, that they had been put in what is sometimes called Facebook jail and weren't allowed to post for some time. This drives people insane. And that is a real thing. You know, I've had, you know, an Instagram story, you know, got a strike on it.
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The New Zuckerberg
I posted a tweet that like made some sort of joke about Al-Qaeda and I got some sort of, you know, notification accusing me of offering material support to terrorism. That is an annoying thing. Well, I don't want to get into it on the advice of my lawyer, PJ. But that is an annoying thing. And of course, it is exasperating to be falsely accused of something that you didn't do, right?
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The New Zuckerberg
And Meta was effectively doing this millions of times a day to people, and it was truly infuriating people.
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The New Zuckerberg
And if you think about the composition of Meta's user base, particularly on Facebook in the United States, which is what they pay the most attention to, that is a user base that is getting older, that leans much more to the right than maybe the median journalist or the critics of the company.
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The New Zuckerberg
And we've also seen through empirical studies that people on the right are more likely to share misinformation and they're more likely as a result to have their content taken action on.
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The New Zuckerberg
So what that means is that over time, this truly was becoming a worse and worse problem for Meta with Facebook in particular because their policies were disproportionately affecting some of their best customers. I see.
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The New Zuckerberg
Yes, and this touches on left and liberal politics as well. There's been good empirical reporting that Meta disproportionately removed content expressing support for Palestine. This gets a bit wonky as well. Hamas is designated by the United States as a terrorist group, and Meta will downrank content that is linked to designated terrorist groups. Wow.
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The New Zuckerberg
And so people on the left who've been trying to express their support for Palestine have seen their posts removed. Another long-running complaint on the left is that sex workers constantly have their posts removed from Facebook and Instagram, even if the posts themselves are relatively benign. And so there may be a world in which... We see more left and liberal speech on these properties.
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The New Zuckerberg
And, you know, again, we're just going to have to sort of wait and see. But at least as written, there are elements of these changes that would seem to benefit the left more. and right.
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The New Zuckerberg
Now, I would also say they specifically carved out exceptions to their hate speech policy, seemingly specifically to appease Republicans when it comes to LGBT people and immigrants, but that is a different thread in the story. So tell me, what are these carve outs? So Meta communicates its policies in two ways. One, there is a public set of guidelines, which tend to be fairly high level.
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The New Zuckerberg
And then there is a second secret set of guidelines that are distributed to the Meta employees and contractors who actually have to enforce those guidelines when they're looking at posts.
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The New Zuckerberg
That's right. And last week, a great publication called Platformer published some of these guidelines, PJ. I happened to get ahold of some of them. And I was really struck by these guidelines that were given to moderators on the question, do insults about mental illness and abnormality violate when targeting people on the basis of gender or sexual orientation? So in the past,
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The New Zuckerberg
you could not say, for example, gay people are insane. PJ, today you can say that gay people are insane, which is something that typically I only approve of when gay people are saying to each other at brunch. But now it's anything goes.
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The New Zuckerberg
The justification is that this is now just part of what Meta calls the mainstream discourse, which is essentially whether you view these... statements as harmful or not, and I view them as harmful, Mehta would say, well, it's being debated on the floor of Congress, and there should not be anything that can be debated on the floor of Congress that could not be debated on our properties as well.
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The New Zuckerberg
That sounds like a really savvy point, but then you realize that there is actually a law in Congress that enables members of Congress to say literally anything with no legal consequence. The floor of Congress is the single most protected speech zone in the entire United States. Wait, really? What does that mean? I have to look that up, too. Mike Masnick wrote a great post about it at TechDirt.
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The New Zuckerberg
But for example, the big one is like you can slander your political rivals. So you could say, you know, pick your congressman. You know, you could accuse them of like a heinous crime and you could not be held liable for that. Oh, I didn't know that. Yeah. Yeah.
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The New Zuckerberg
So anyway, my point is just Congress, maybe not the best example of where we want to set our speech rules because truly anything goes there. But, you know, the truly most alarming part of these new guidelines to me was in these new guidelines, Metta says you are allowed to say a trans woman isn't a woman, it's a pathetic, confused man, or a trans person isn't a he or she, it's an it.
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The New Zuckerberg
Again, I regard that language as very harmful. It is dehumanizing, like truly just actually denying the humanity of another person. And now you have people at Meta who are just writing these statements and giving users carte blanche to say them and also to say, this will not be removed.
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The New Zuckerberg
I mean, that is basically asking me to predict the position of an atom in two years. Like, good luck to any of us who would hazard a guess. The range of possibilities for that question is basically infinite. But maybe I could sort of sketch out two scenarios. Yeah.
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The New Zuckerberg
One scenario I've been thinking about is this question of, will the social networks that we once had, which were very large and monolithic, splinter into more partisan versions of themselves? And so eventually you have like the Fox News version of Facebook. And this actually did start to come to pass. You see the rise of a platform like a Truth Social or a Parler, right?
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The New Zuckerberg
One scenario that I've been thinking about over the past couple of days is like, maybe Facebook becomes the Fox News version of Facebook, right? Maybe there is just this kind of right word lurch in social networking in general, because when Meta runs the numbers and they're obsessive about numbers, they just find this is better for our business.
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The New Zuckerberg
And if there is some tiny remnant of screeching liberals, they can go elsewhere and Meta will be fine. So like that is a possibility. The other scenario, though, is that this is just Mark Zuckerberg making another 20-year mistake in the opposite direction. And in the same way that he gave the left so much of what they asked for after 2016 and found that he got nothing for it,
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The New Zuckerberg
he will now give the right everything that they asked for for so many years, and we'll find that he gets almost nothing for it, right? It's the kind of, if you give a mouse a cookie problem, right? Okay, you have now sold out all trans people to the Republican Party. Did you think they were going to stop there? No, there's going to be another ask, right?
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The New Zuckerberg
So how do you actually get the result that you want that way? The other reason that I'm Likelier, I think, to believe in this scenario is you look at the problems that Facebook is having right now in the majority of state legislatures around the country.
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The New Zuckerberg
So many states are trying to prevent or dramatically limit the amount of time that teenagers can spend on social media, in some cases trying to block them from using social media altogether because of these child safety issues on the platform.
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The New Zuckerberg
And so this moment when Facebook is under so much scrutiny for all of the harms that befall children on their platforms, for them to say, well, this is the moment that we're kind of just going to stop analyzing any posts to see if they're bad until a user reports them, that could be a world where a lot more kids get hurt and that puts even more pressure on Facebook and it makes even more people mad at them.
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The New Zuckerberg
So that is truly one of the big question marks for me in all of this is how does a company wind up reconciling that? So anyway, those are two visions that I see.
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The New Zuckerberg
They're really not. They're really not. Disdain for Mark Zuckerberg is a truly bipartisan phenomenon. The other thing, just wrapping up here is, you know, I was reflecting at the end of our conversation the other day, you made some remark to the effect of like, well, gosh, Casey, like you seem, you know, depressed.
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The New Zuckerberg
And what I wish I had said at the time was, has it ever even occurred to you to ask me a fun question, PJ? You know, I listen to your other episodes and the guests get to be like, hey, why don't you walk me through the history of balloon animals? Like, I would do that too. But no, it's like, oh, hey, Casey, another piece of the internet is falling into the ocean.
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The New Zuckerberg
Do you want to come gawk at the wreckage with me? So that's on you, PJ.
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The New Zuckerberg
Absolutely. Zuckerberg has always been known to be a supremely competitive person, sort of like on the level of a Michael Jordan. You read the stories about Michael Jordan being sort of unable to avoid turning anything into a competition. And Zuckerberg is that way too. His favorite video game is Civilization and always has been.
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The New Zuckerberg
And in his free time to this day, he plays Civilization and schemes to take over the entire world.
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The New Zuckerberg
He was not like a bold, defiant, confrontational persona. He was slipping in his own flop sweat. Was like kind of early Zuckerberg.
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The New Zuckerberg
I think that early Zuckerberg was characterized by some amount of humility. He grew up and he surrounded himself with people who would disagree with him often and seemed to relish disagreement. Like this was not the sort of visionary who believed that only he could build the future. This was somebody who was much more collaborative and was sort of seeking other people's opinions.
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Should we be worried about OpenAI?
90 percent of the company's 770 employees signed a letter threatening to leave unless the current board of directors resigned and reinstated Altman as head of OpenAI.