Decoder had a great episode where Hank Green interviewed Nilay Patel, the Editor-in-Chief of The Verge, about his experience of building and maintaining the business. It covers a lot of topics like the state of the media nowadays, why creating content for platforms can be a mistake and the importance of distribution channels.

The Verge focused on their website and building a sense of community that attracted people back to the site. There are many media companies that suffered by allowing social media companies like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn and YouTube to act as intermediaries between them and their audience. Email and RSS feeds, while not likely to go viral, can provide a more sustainable foundation for businesses to build on.

This does not mean ignoring social media. It builds on the POSSE (Publish Own Site, Syndicate Elsewhere) concept promoted by IndieWeb.

A story that stood out is one where Patel was traveling with Satya Nadella, the CEO of Microsoft. They were going through the list of things that Nadella had done during the day. Patel asked how he got so much done. Nadella looked at him and said:

It's your time. You have to be selfish about it.

Satya Nadella according to Nilay Patel (Guest host Hank Green makes Nilay Patel explain why websites have a future/Decoder)

This reminds me of a quote:

People are frugal in guarding their personal property; but as soon as it comes to squandering time they are most wasteful of the one thing in which it is right to be stingy.

Seneca

Maria Popova wrote a piece on The Marginalian on Seneca and the Shortness of Life that expands on his thinking about this subject.

404 Media reported on a study published by German researchers from Leipzig University, Bauhaus-University Weimar, and the Center for Scalable Data Analytics and Artificial Intelligence titled "Is Google Getting Worse? A Longitudinal Investigation of SEO Spam in Search Engines".

Google isn't the only search engine dealing with this issue. Jason Keobler writes:

Notably, Google, Bing, and DuckDuckGo all have the same problems, and in many cases, Google performed better than Bing and DuckDuckGo by the researchers' measures.

Google Search Really Has Gotten Worse, Researchers Find (Jason Koebler/404 Media)

The research does highlight how much damage search engine optimization (SEO) has done to the ecosystem of the internet. The release of generative AI is only going to make the problem worse. Amazon is dealing with product titles and reviews being generated using ChatGPT.

David Roth had a good piece on Defector about the promises made by the developers and boosters of AI and its actual use in the present day.

One reason it is not very interesting is that everything they have touted as the future of some essential human thing or other—the future of art, or money—has mostly crashed out in ways that left behind very little useful residue. Another is that the ways in which AI is used in the present, by your lower-effort plagiarists and scammers, are so manifestly not the future of anything that works, but rather both the present and the future of shitting-up web search results, which is roughly analogous to saying that robocalls about homeowners insurance are the future of human communication.

The Future Of E-Commerce Is A Product Whose Name Is A Boilerplate AI-Generated Apology (David Roth/Defector)