How Managers Are Breaking The Internet

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2:14This episode is the first of a three-part series about how the tech industry has been snatched from the hands of people who actually build things using software and hardware by a bunch of managers that have little or no interaction with the products they're actually profiting from. These same managers also don't appear to do much work. And today, I'm going to walk you through exactly how bad things have gotten as a result. In early April, Meta revealed, in a motion trying to dismiss an FTC anti-monopoly lawsuit, that Instagram made an astonishing$32.4 billion in advertising revenue in 2021. That figure becomes even more shocking when you consider Google's YouTube only made$28.8 billion during the same period.

2:59I'd argue YouTube is significantly more useful. Anyway, Bloomberg reports that Instagram made almost 30 % of Meta's entire revenue in the early part of 2022. 96 % of Meta's$40.1 billion fourth quarter 2023 revenue came from advertising, and it's made over$100 billion a year since 2021, a trend that's likely to continue based on the fact that the only thing these platforms care about is juicing as much revenue from these apps. Google made$86.3 billion in the fourth quarter of 2023, with$48 billion of that coming from Google Search and its related advertising, up 13 % from the previous quarter. According to Pew Research, in America, 83 % of adults use YouTube, 68 % of them use Facebook, and 47 % of them use Instagram.

3:54Each platform boasts over 2 billion users, and over the last three years, Meta and Google have made over a half trillion dollars in revenue from these platforms. I now want you to go to Facebook. I want you to scroll down, and I want you to see how quickly you hit an advertisement or a sponsored content thing. In my case, after a single post from a friend, I was immediately hit with a suggestion for me to join a group for adult Bluey fans. I do not watch Bluey. I have not watched Bluey. This was then followed by a post from a friend, followed by another ad, followed by two posts from a friend, followed by a suggestion to join a group called Aviation Meme Lords, followed by another ad.

4:40On Instagram, I saw one post from a person I followed, followed by an ad for a game, followed by a suggested video, followed by something from someone I followed, followed by a suggested video, followed by an ad, followed by a person I followed posting something, and then another suggested piece of content. The first ad when I clicked my stories, a totally different and even more confusing part of Instagram that's mostly just a rip-off of Snapchat, I got an ad for a game using footage that isn't actually in the game itself, an outright bait-and-switch employed by mobile game developers like those who make Ebony that make millions of dollars off of these horrifying, annoying, microtransaction-heavy games.

5:23When I went to YouTube, my first result was for an 11-minute-long Taiwanese news video of some sort. the next one was a video that appeared to be in chinese i don't speak these languages that's my fault not theirs but it is kind of youtube's fault for trying to show them to me in fact when i went around and i scrolled through it was all in chinese so i went to google and i typed why are my youtube videos in chinese the first result was a reddit post where several users were for whatever reason being served random videos in chinese there was actually no conclusion to this i still do not know why this happened.

5:59I can't read. I can only speak and read in English, and I can barely do that. I'm very sorry. Anyways, Google, though, is especially annoying because while researching the beginning of this podcast, it took me about half an hour to get the basics for the beginning. Because every time I Googled something like, say, what percentage of web traffic goes to Google, which I really was not able to find, I kept being given these so-called authoritative sources like Forbes Advisor, which, to be clear, is not Forbes magazine. It is an affiliate marketing arm of Forbes. It's very deceptive. The sources inside the Forbes Advisor piece I found ranged from things from Blogging Wizard to a literal list of website names with no links.

6:43I'm talking about just a plain text list. The state of Google is very worrying. A year-long study from Leipzig University published last year and reported on by Jason Kogler of 404 Media found that the quality of Google's search results has decayed at a remarkable rate. The incentives of content creators to search engine optimize their content based on standards published by Google has filled search full of crap, with higher-ranked pages that are on average more optimized, more monetized with affiliate marketing, and featuring predominantly lower-quality text. To make matters worse, the researchers found that only a small portion of product reviews on the web use affiliate marketing, but the majority of search results raised by Google do.

7:29If you're unfamiliar with affiliate marketing, it's when outlets run pieces about something, say top 10 speakers or top 10 laptops, and they have a bunch of links to like Amazon or Walmart or Best Buy, and they get a little bit of cash from the platform whenever someone clicks that and buys something, doesn't even have to be the thing that they were originally clicking on. This revenue model incentivizes sites to write lots of best-of articles that exist entirely to make you click things to make them the money. To be clear, this is actually a perfectly normal business model in the right hands.

8:02The Wirecutter has done a great job of monetizing affiliate marketing while providing very thorough recommendations. The Verge has too. There are decent people doing this. The majority of them are not decent, though, just so we're abundantly clear. To quote the study, Search engine optimization is a constant battle. And we, in this case, the study people, see repeated patterns of review spam entering and leaving the results as search engines and SEO engineers take turns adjusting their parameters. So in layman's terms, Google is in this battle with the people writing search engine optimized content.

8:39Now, to be clear, this content, the search optimized stuff, is done so with Google's approval. and there are people at Google who kind of nudge you in the right direction. They never really give full directions, but they're okay with search engine optimization. You'd think they wouldn't be. You'd think they'd want to fight for standards and quality, but no, they actively help these people game the system. So what Google will do is they will update Google, and then these people will change their means to beat Google, and then Google will maybe update again. And that's kind to the problem. You see, the Leipzig University researchers refer to tweets to these algorithms to fight spam as only really having a temporarily positive effect, and that search engines always seem to lose the cat-and-mouse game that is SEO spam.

9:26Now, in March 2024, Google announced that it was making changes to its algorithm that would reduce spam and AI-generated content by 40%, and very specifically said it would raise human-authored content to the top of Google. everyone in the press was gleeful about this they're saying how good it was and that google was finally doing something it's been a month nothing's happened things still suck scammy outlets called things like tech gate and daily good morning cashmere wholesale steel articles from places like tech crunch and coin telegraph and at times these stolen articles will rank above or in place of the original articles depriving journalists and publishers of traffic and revenue it's insane.

10:11I briefly sparred with Danny Sullivan, who is the search liaison for Google about this. And TechGate has now disappeared as of doing this. Daily Good Morning Kashmir has them. And indeed, there are multiple journalists I know that have said that their articles are regularly outpaced by these spam shops. And seemingly every time I talk to anyone on the Google side about this, they say, I don't know what to do about it. Danny's a good bloke. Danny used to run search engine land, I believe. And yet he's just part of the machine now. And it sucks. Danny's a good bloke. I want to like Danny. But mate, Danny, if you're going to be the search liaison, it's time to liaise with the search engine.

10:51It's time to promote the journalists. Saying, oh, mate, we don't know how to fix the machine is not a bloody excuse. Google, a company worth around$2 trillion, is either unable or unwilling to fix the problem. them. But I think the truth might be just a little simpler. There's just no incentive for it to make things better, as Google search remains one of the most profitable businesses in the damn world. In episode two, by the way, I'm going to tell you the people responsible. And they're led by a fellow called Prabhakar Raghavan. You're going to hear that name a lot in the next episode. I'm not going to say it another time.

11:29I've been thinking and saying it a lot, though. Anyway, this is the state of the modern internet. Ultra profitable platforms outright abdicating any responsibility toward the customer or even the wider digital ecosystem. They're not offering a service or a portal or an app or a useful thing, but they're finding as many ways to interrupt you, the user, to push you into doing something or seeing something that's profitable for them. And yes, I realize I am describing modern business, but if you look at Facebook or Instagram right now, Can you really tell me that's a service? Can you really tell me you are getting to see your friends and family on Instagram or Facebook?

12:10No. The whole thing's a mess. A huge, big, ultra-profitable mess. The greatest lie in tech is that Facebook and Instagram are for catching up with your friends. Because that's not what they do, and it's not what they've done for years. These platforms are now pathways for this nebulous concept of content discovery. which really means it's just a barely personalized entertainment network that occasionally drizzles or dribbles things you choose to see on top of crappy sponsored content ads and groups that are part of a relational database that has your name on it on some level it's kind of hard to say you even use these apps anymore the term use suggests the level of industry and user control that meta has spent over half a decade destroying and they've turned instagram and facebook into tubes to funnel human beings in front of those who either pay for the privilege of visibility or have found ways to trick Facebook's algorithms into showing you their crap.

13:09And it's all the direct result of what I call the rot economy, a growth-at-all-cost mindset built off the back of immovable monopolies, where tech companies profitably punish you as a means of showing the markets eternal growth. In practice, this means turning these platforms into something that offers you a service, into something that drives engagement, which in Facebook and Instagram's case means finding the maximum amount of times they can interrupt you before you close the app entirely. In Google's case, it means making changes to search that made advertisements and sponsored links kind of impossible to tell the difference between for most people, and making it so that users had to make more queries on Google.

13:52Now, I sound paranoid when I say that. I realized the idea that Google would have a metric that said, we need people to search for more stuff on Google. I am quoting Google saying this, emails from the antitrust lawsuit between them and the Department of Justice. Episode two, I'm going to go into it. Don't you worry. And really, it is kind of the government's fault here. They've taken this optimistic, respectful, and trustworthy approach to tech. They've said, well, tech is providing something for free, aren't they? So we really can't be too much of a bastard to them. And the result is, we've just got this internet riddled with decay and pain.

14:31It's an internet that incentivizes mining human beings like veins of ore. And in these next few episodes, I'm going to walk you through how big tech turned the internet into a multi-trillion dollar social experiment. I'm going to name the bastards responsible.

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16:59Underpinning these profitable torture machines is an online advertisement industry built off the back of fucking advertisers and users alike. In the mid-2010s, Facebook mistakenly told online publishers that their videos were receiving more engagement than they actually did, leading to multiple publishers pivoting to video, a disastrous industry movement that cost hundreds of reporters their jobs and led to a massive class action suit against Meta. Media companies based on Facebook's lies radically changed their operations, with MTV News cutting its entire writing team and shifting to short-form video in July 2017.

17:34Vocative did the same. The following month, Vice Media cut roughly 60 editorial roles and expanded its video production capabilities in response to this so-called growth. Mike, a much smaller company than MTV News or Vice Media, but quite beloved at the time, slashed 10 roles and shifted the rest of its output to video, going all in on a bet that, as you can guess, failed catastrophically, with the company eventually being sold off to Bustle Digital Group for a pittance. Those video roles were of course cut or vastly reduced when it was obvious that there really wasn't any engagement on these things.

18:09I have a whole episode on this. Please go back and listen to it. Meta is also currently the subject of a class action suit led by Metroplex Communications, which claimed that Meta's inflated metrics lured advertisers away from competing platforms, something that has been sued for before. When all of your incentives are aligned around bigger and more and growth, you'll take just about anybody's money. In Meta's case, this means getting advertisers who compare the COVID-19 vaccine to the Holocaust or quack doctors with phony cancer treatments, scammers selling counterfeit phishing equipment, scammers offering fake discounts for puzzles, and of course, cryptocurrency cons.

18:50An investigation from late last year found that a third of advertisements on Facebook Marketplace in the UK were scams. And earlier in the year, UK financial services authorities said it had banned more than 10 ,000 illegal investment ads across Instagram, Facebook, YouTube, and TikTok in 2022 alone, a 1500 % increase over the past year. And as these platforms begin to decay, things only get worse for the user. Elon Musk's acquisition of Twitter and his obvious outright hostility towards blue chip advertisers, and also his anti-Semitic posts, just there's a lot of bad stuff with Elon. They've turned Twitter into kind of the digital equivalent of downtown Vegas.

19:31Seemingly every post is replied to by a bot offering nudes in bio, or pussy in bio, or something in bio, or at the moment, quite literally just a picture of a fully nude woman. Which is pretty funny, until you realize that according to John Herman at New York Magazine, these bots are a front for a series of very big, nasty online dating scams that lose people tens of thousands of dollars. Elon Musk choosing to change the blue checkmark from something that was given by Twitter to say that you were the real person into a thing that you buy for$8 has allowed cryptocurrency scammers, according to Protos, to make millions by tricking users into connecting their wallets to fund drain their entire thing.

20:15It's somewhat technical, but you just click these websites and you say, yeah, sure, I'll connect my wallet. Then they take all of your money. And it seems like they're even buying ads on the platform to do so using stolen credit cards. Musk's desperation for ad revenue has even led Twitter to start pushing ads that don't actually say they're ads, leading to an advertising watchdog called Check My Ads to file a formal complaint with the FTC demanding that it investigates Twitter and enforces its truth in advertising standards. Also, right now on Twitter, there is something called the Creator Program, and if you have Twitter Blue, that's right, you have to pay them to get paid.

20:52You can make a little money off of advertising when other Twitter blue people reply. The significance of this is right now Twitter is posting tons of unlabeled ads for Mr. Beast videos so that Elon Musk can give money to Mr. Beast so that Mr. Beast will repost things from YouTube, allowing Elon Musk to pay him money. It's a very confusing thing. And Twitter's really bad. I won't call it X. I think X is a stupid name. It's terrible to search for. It sucks. The whole site kind of sucks. I'm on it until the end. It's like the Titanic. I can see the iceberg coming. But nevertheless, it's in a bad way.

21:33Yet it's foolish to act as if the sorry state of Twitter is really that different to the rest of the web. Instagram is flooded with porno bots. It has been for years. And what they do is they engage with regular posts enough times through likes and replies as a means of pretending they're real so that they can avoid Meta's flimsy automated content moderation. And that, by the way, is only quasi-automated. Meta also underpays, horribly underpays, I should add. People in other countries like Kenya, they make as little as$2.20 an hour to view what Wired referred to as the most hideous content on the internet.

22:12Because that's what's important to know. Meta is doing something. They're stopping you from seeing literal beheadings and child abuse and such. And they're doing that by paying basically prison labor rates in other countries. This is also something that OpenAI and AI companies do with training data. It's a disgusting practice. They should all be in a lot of trouble for this, and they never will be because no one ever holds them accountable. Much like every major tech platform, Meta is just half-arsing its approach to moderation. And they're committing human rights violations to do so, so that they can spend the smallest amount of money possible to stop the things it needs to stop you seeing.

22:49They need to make sure you don't see someone being stabbed to death on Facebook. They don't really need to stop pornography or scams. They should need to. There should be a government body that stops them, but there isn't, so they don't. As you'd expect, these standards have led to Facebook being flooded with generative AI content, spam. And a study came out of Stanford and Georgetown that revealed that Facebook's algorithm is now boosting spam content riddled with misinformation, and they're sending hundreds of millions of impressions to pages that direct people to WordPress sites crammed full of spammy and scammy ads.

23:24It's insane. It's actually really crazy. When you really look into this, you can see that the web is falling apart in front of us. And yet the most obvious sign of this decay is just visiting a website on your telephone. Go to IGN.com. A lot of people work at IGN. I feel bad for saying this, but they have over 300 million views. And you go on there and you're immediately hit with two giant ads, one that fills the top 30 page and auto-playing videos. And this happens on a lot of sites. ESPN, also another third for this. It's so weird. When I went on there earlier, I was hit with two giant ads that took up most of my screen.

24:03And on opening a story about the new Fallout TV show, which is very good, I'll give them that, it then covered the top quarter of my screen with another or a playing ad it's so weird it's so weird when you see this happening i feel like more people should be talking about this this feel it's like if the road was just full of used condoms it's like if there was trash everywhere this is the web now anyway anyway reach plc they're a publicly traded multi-million dollar business that dominates local journalism in the uk and they hold basically monopolies in several regions and also own three newspapers.

24:38Very depressing. They're notorious for this kind of aggressive approach to monetization. Their websites have been described as an over-monetized mess and impossible to navigate with a poor digital experience named as a partial contributor to the declining financial fortunes of one of the more loathsome companies in the world. If you open a local UK news website, especially one owned by Reach, with just Safari on your phone, for example, you'll be met with an endless deluge of page covering ads that appear in the middle of articles as you're scrolling and other ads that redirect you to an external website without any warning, all while you're on the page trying to read the thing that you went to the website for.

25:20Even the giants of journalism haven't resisted the temptation to fuck their users over. CNN, one of the most influential news publications in the world, by hundreds of millions of people. They host their own journalism and they splice in spammy content from something called a chum box company. And these companies make hundreds of millions of dollars driving clicks to everything from just scams to straight up disinformation. And you'll find them on CNN. You find them on NBC. You find them in tons of major media outlets. And all of them are these insane stories like two steps to tell when a slot is close to hitting the jackpot or the best hearing aid.

26:00It's really strange to see this in between Pulitzer Prize winning journalists and international conflicts. These chum box companies, they're ubiquitous because they pay well. And it makes them super attractive to cash-strapped media entities because you can just plug this bollocks in and you just get money, even if it makes your product suck. And they're awful. They're super horrible. They're ruining the web and they keep making more money. In 2018, the late great podcast Reply All, which by the way, was killed by the rot economy. Fuck you, Spotify. Anyway, Reply All had an episode that centered around a widower whose wife's death had been hijacked by one of these chumbox advertisers to push content that, using stolen family photos, implied she had been unfaithful to him.