More Zone Media. Hello, and welcome to Better Offline. I'm at Zetron. This 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. The 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 Emotion Training to dismiss an FTC anti monopoly lawsuit that Instagram made an astonishing thirty two point four billion dollars in advertising revenue in twenty twenty one. That figure becomes even more shocking when you consider Google's YouTube only made twenty eight point eight billion dollars during the same period. I'd argue YouTube is significantly more useful anyway. Bloomberg reports that Instagram made almost thirty percent of Meta's entire revenue in the early part of twenty twenty two. Ninety six percent of Meta's forty point one billion dollar fourth quarter twenty twenty three revenue came from advertising and It's made over one hundred billion dollars a year since twenty twenty one, a trend that's likely to continue based on the fact that the only thing these platforms care about is ducing as much revenue from these apps. Google made eighty six point three billion dollars in the fourth quarter of twenty twenty three, with forty eight billion dollars of that coming from Google Search and its related advertising, up thirteen percent from the previous quarter. According to Pew Research, in America, eighty three percent of adults use YouTube, sixty eight percent of the meuse Facebook, and forty seven percent of the mew's Instagram. Each platform both over two 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 blue I have not watched Bluey. This was then followed by a post from a friend, followed by another ad, followed by two posts and friends, followed by a suggestion to join a group called Aviation Meme Lords, followed by another ad. On 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 of followed by a person I followed posting something, and then another yested 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, micro transaction heavy games. When I went to YouTube, my first result was for an eleven 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 wort 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. I can't read. I can only speak and read of like 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. I'm talking about just a plaintext list. The state of Google's very worrying. A year long study from Leipzig University published last year and reported on by Jason Kobler of four or four Media found that the quality of good Google 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. If you're unfamiliar with affiliate marketing, it's when outlets run pieces about something, say top ten speakers or top ten laptops, and they have a bunch of links like Amazon or Walmart of best Buy, and they get a little bit of cash from the platform. When everyone 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 click things to make the money. To be clear, this is actually a perfectly normal business model in the right hands. The Wirecutter has done a great job of monetizing affiliate marketing while providing very thorough recommendations. The Verge has two 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. Now, to be clear, this content, the search optimized stuff, is done so with Google's approval. And there are people at Google who'll kind of nudge you in the right direction. They never really give full directions, but they they're okay with search engine optimization. You think they wouldn't be, you'd think they'd want to fight for like standards and quality, but no, they actively help these people gain 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 of 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 now. In March twenty twenty four, Google announced that it was making changes to its algorithm that would reduce spam and AI generated content by forty percent, 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 Kashmir wholesale steel articles, and 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. I briefly sparred with Danny Sullivan, who is the he's the search liaism for Google about this and tech gate has now disappeared as of doing this day. The 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, ah, I am I done. I want to do about it. Danny's a good bloke. Danny used to run search engine land, I believe, and yeah, 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 gonna be the search liaison, it's art to liaise with the search engine, it's time to promote the journalists saying oh, mate, we don't know how to fix the machine is not aloody excuse. Google, a company worth around two trillion dollars, is either unable or unwilling to fix the problem. 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 Ragavan. You're gonna hear that name a lot in the next episode. I'm not going to say it another time. I'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 really 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. No, 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 high for 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. And 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 the 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. Now 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 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. It's an Internet that incentivizes mining human beings like veins of awe. 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. And I'm going to name the bastards responsible underpinning these profitable torture machines. It's an online advertisement industry built off the back of fucking advertisers and users alike. In the mid twenty tens, 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. 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 rating team and shifting to short form video in July twenty seventeen. Vocative did the same. The following month, Vice Media cut roughly sixty editorial roles and expanded its video production capabilities. In response to this so called growth, Mike, a much smaller company than MTV newser Vice Media but quite beloved at the time, slashed ten rolls 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 the 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 that I 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 metas inflated metrics lwered 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 nineteen 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 An 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 ten thousand illegal investment ads across Instagram, Facebook, YouTube and TikTok in twenty twenty two alone. A fifteen hundred percent 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. Seemingly every post is replied to by a bot offering nudes in bio, or pussy in bio, 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 and New York Magazine, these bots are afront for a series of very big, nasty online dating scams that lose people tens of thousands of dollars. Elon Musk choosing to check the blue check mark from something that was given by Twitter to say that you are the real person into a thing that you buy for eight dollars has allowed cryptocurrency scammers, according to Protos, to make millions by tricking users into connecting their wallets to fund drain their entire thing like it's somewhat technical, but you just click these websites and you say, yeah, sure, i'll connect my whilet and 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 musks desperation for ad revenue has even led Twitter to start pushing ads that don't actually say their 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. You 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 mister Beast videos so that Elon Musk can give money to mister Beasts, so that mister Beast will repost things from YouTube, allowing Elon Musk to pay him money. It's a very confusing thing, and Twitter is 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. Yet 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 pornobots. 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 auto. Meta also underpays, horribly underpays. I should add people in other countries like Kenya, they make as little as two dollars and twenty cents an hour to view what Wired referred to as the most hideous content on the Internet. Because 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 open ai 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 eld them accountable. Much like every major tech platform, Meta is just half fastening 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. They 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 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 boasting 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. It'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 dot com lot could people work at Igana Feel bad for saying this, but they have over three hundred million views and you go on there and you immediately hit with two giant ads, one that fills the top thirty 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 I went on there earlier, I was hit with two giant acts. They took up most of my screen, and on opening a story about the new for that TV show, which is very good, I'll give them that, it then covered the top quarter of my screen with another or playing at It's so weird. It's so weird when you see this happening. I feel like more people should be talking about this. This field. 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 are publicly traded, multimillion dollar business that dominates local journalism in the UK and they hold basically monopolies in several regions and also own three newspapers. Very 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 new 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, or while you're on the page trying to read the thing that you went to the website for. Even 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 spice in spami content from something called a chumbox company. And these companies make hundreds of millions of dollars driving clicks to everything from just scams to straight up this information. 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. It's really strange to see this in the in between Pulitzer Prize winning journalists and like international conflicts. These chum box companies. They're ubiquitous because they pay well, and it makes them super attractive to cash strap media entities because you can just plug this bollocks in and you just get money, even if it makes your products suck. And they're awful. They're super horrible. They're ruining the web, and they keep making more money. In twenty eighteen, 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. The title of the episode and add for the worst day of your life was fitting, and it was only until a massively popular podcast intervene that any of these networks ban the advert. These networks outbrain taboola, evil companies run by evil people. They're harmful, They're harmful to the Internet, They're harmful to users, and they're harmful to the news brands that host them. If I was working for a major news company, I'd be absolutely humiliated to see my work put next to this nonsense, this celebrity bullshit, these diet scams, these get rich quick schemes, Tommy Chong's fucking CBD chews. I apologize swearing, but it's just so frustrating. Are these outlets so unprofitable that they just have to sell out like this? I refuse to believe that I just reviews. The modern Internet was built on a social contract that said the big tech gave us services for free in exchange for some sort of nebulous concept of data, which largely took the form of content and connections we made between people and the things that we posted. As a result, this social contract was both assumed and extremely easy to enter into because all of these sites were free, which meant that there was really never any attempt to regulate the terms of it. There are terms and conditions, but that's really it, and you what you're gonna do. You're gonna barter with meta And there were never conditions set for what can't be done to a user, what can be done with the data. Look at Cambridge Analytica, look at all of the different ways that Facebook hads hurt people. None of that matters to them because it doesn't have to. They don't care. There's nobody stopping them. The FDC won't stop them, lawyers won't stop them. It's very depressing when you say it out loud anyway. As a result, these platforms were are a form of bait and switch, which underpins coreytor else very good but annoying to say in shitification theory, where platforms have built these massive monopolies based off for in good, useful services and then turn them into something terrible but very profitable. But as I've noted before and shertification kind of misses one point, these companies are not doing this out of a lack of profitability or some sort of failure in their business model. They're doing so because the Internet has become something between a social experiment and a mining operation. They're doing it because they can. Nobody's stopping them. And doctor Oo has upgraded his theory to the insure to see now he has brought in some of these things. I think I'm just tired of people responding to the Rock economy and saying in citification Corey Rock's I'm gonna have him on the podcast Jesus. But seriously, though, it's not because they're suddenly left hand hand. They've just kept turning the screw because who's going to stop them? What's you're going to do? Not use Google, not use Facebook, not use Instagram anyway, Charlie Warsall, who I've given a lot of shit. Charlie did a good thing there. He framed this well in a recent piece in the Atlantic published in the middle of April that described the overall techscape as a form of hostage negotiation. Interactions with tech companies are no longer a purchase or a two way contract, but kind of a trade of information long after you've purchased the product itself. Every interaction with tech now requires us to share our email address or our phone number, to accept a kind of subtle tracking. Don't worry it's anonymous, or of course, to share your personal information that will probably be leaked. It's try it at this point to say that human beings themselves are the product, but it's kind of impossible to avoid saying when you look at the state of the Internet now. Tech companies have found every imaginable way to monetize every imaginable thing we do, all based on the idea that they're providing us with something in return, and when you really think about it, haven't really provided a service at all. Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Google. They're platforms that only have as much utility as the content they host, which is created by billions of mostly unsupported and unpaid users. This kind of shitty trade off was meant to be something that was rewarded, with these platforms creating and hosting this content in a way that was easier to find and use and to help either surface to a wider audience or quickly get it to people we cared about, all while making sure the conditions we created it under and posted it under were interesting and safe, something that I think we can all agree is no longer the case now. The state of the Internet's now far simpler. The cost of using free platforms is a constant war, a war with the incentives and intentions of the platforms themselves. We're constantly negotiating with Instagram or Facebook to see content from people that we chose to follow. Because these platforms are no longer built to show us things that we want to see. We no longer search Google, but barter with the seedy little search box to try and coax out result that isn't either search engine optimized half answer, or an attempt to trick us into clicking an ad. Twitter in its prime succeeded by connecting real people to real things at a time when the Internet actively manufactures or experience in interactions with others. Now, Twitter is mostly ads and pornobots. Great stuff, but the core problem lies in the fact that these platforms don't really create anything, and their only value exists in making an internet of billions of people small enough to comprehend. Like seemingly every goddamn problem with capitalism, the Internet has become dominated by forces that don't contribute to the product that actually enriches them, and as a result, they have no concept or interest in quality. They only care about more, and this makes them extremely poor. Arbiters of what good looks like. Inevitably, this leads to products that suck as they become more and more profitable, because the machine they've built is a profit excavator dressed up as a god service. I know, I hate the whole we're the product thing. I've always thought it was very cheesy, but we are literally the product. We are the content creator that makes Google money while also the thing that makes Google money by search and Google, it's very annoying. Look. By allowing and encouraging search engine optimization, Google has handed matches to fucking arsonists and pointed them on the most flammable parts of the Internet. The existence of SEO is inevitable. People are going to try and game any system. But Google should never have encouraged these people. They should have terrified them. They should have set clear standards about what to do and what not to do, and heavily punished those who failed to comply. Except doing so would mean less content on Google, because there'd be less articles that say things like what time is the Super Bowl or best televisions to buy. Google actually would fully have the ability to make most of these problems go away. They should treat SEO people like scam artists, and they should run them out of town with pitchforks. Instead, they pat him on the ass and they say, good job, buddy. I'd argue that the state of search makes Google and by extension, executives like Sundhar Peshaian Google Search lead Prabhakar Ragavan, some of the greatest villains in business history. Well, one can't forget about the damage done by Meta and Mark Zuckerberg's failure, outright failure to maintain any kind of quality standards on Instagram and Facebook. Allowing Google Search to decay so severely for any reason, let alone one that involves profits, is actively damaging to society and was an entirely intentional act perpetrated by people like Ragavan, the former head of Google's Ads division, who took over search not long after his predecessor was burdened by the bullshit demands of the ads department, led by Ragavan himself. And I'm going to get into that in episode too, don't you worry. It's not enough though, for me to just say how bad the web has got. It's not enough. The web is too bad right now for me to just sit here and say, oh it sucks. It's so bad. You all know that. I hope I've helped you find out a little bit more about it. But this phenomenon, it didn't come out of nowhere, and it has a cause, and that cause is the rise of managers and the managerial class in tech. These assholes have largely supplanted the voices of actual technologists, coders, engineers, people who work in software and hardware, actual innovators, and replace them with this kind of zero sum McKinsey s loser, and all they care about is profit. All they care about is growth, sometimes growth that destroys profit, and they're actively hostile to workers and consumers and the actual products they're making. In the next two episodes, we're going to take a closer look at these managers and how they're destroying innovation. And we're going to start with the tale of Prabakar Ragavan, a man who has spent his entire life failing up overseeing Yahoo during its period of terminal client jumping ship to Google in twenty twelve. In twenty nineteen, Ragavan used this political influence to push out the head of Search, a guy called Ben Gomes. A hero, a hero who fought to protect Search from a man trying to turn it into a growth machine even when it was still very profitable. That's what's really crazy. While far from our household name, Ragavan is emblematic of every single thing I've written and podcasted about. He personifies this horrifying decline and the short term thinking that's destroying the products we use every day. He and people like him are destroying companies that we used to respect. And as I'll explain, Ragavan's influence times exactly with the deterioration of Google Search as a product. After that, we're going to look at the managerial class more broadly and how some people, such as Instagram's Adamisari and of course open Ai CEO Sam Altman, have been able to disguise their true intent and ineptitude through the clothing of innovation disruption. It's a facade, one that doesn't withstand even the slightest bit of scrutiny, and I can't wait to tell you all about it. Thank you for listening to Better Offline. The editor and composer of the Better Offline theme song is Matasowski. You can check out more of his music and audio projects at Matasowski dot com M A T T O S O W s KI dot com. You can email me at easy at better offline dot com or check out better offline dot com to find my newsletter and more links to this podcast. Thank you so much for listening. Better Offline is a production of cool Zone Media. For more from cool Zone Media, visit our website cool Zonemedia dot com, or check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

More Zone Media. Hello, and welcome to Better Offline. I'm at Zetron. This 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. The 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 Emotion Training to dismiss an FTC anti monopoly lawsuit that Instagram made an astonishing thirty two point four billion dollars in advertising revenue in twenty twenty one. That figure becomes even more shocking when you consider Google's YouTube only made twenty eight point eight billion dollars during the same period. I'd argue YouTube is significantly more useful anyway. Bloomberg reports that Instagram made almost thirty percent of Meta's entire revenue in the early part of twenty twenty two. Ninety six percent of Meta's forty point one billion dollar fourth quarter twenty twenty three revenue came from advertising and It's made over one hundred billion dollars a year since twenty twenty one, a trend that's likely to continue based on the fact that the only thing these platforms care about is ducing as much revenue from these apps. Google made eighty six point three billion dollars in the fourth quarter of twenty twenty three, with forty eight billion dollars of that coming from Google Search and its related advertising, up thirteen percent from the previous quarter. According to Pew Research, in America, eighty three percent of adults use YouTube, sixty eight percent of the meuse Facebook, and forty seven percent of the mew's Instagram. Each platform both over two 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 blue I have not watched Bluey. This was then followed by a post from a friend, followed by another ad, followed by two posts and friends, followed by a suggestion to join a group called Aviation Meme Lords, followed by another ad. On 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 of followed by a person I followed posting something, and then another yested 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, micro transaction heavy games. When I went to YouTube, my first result was for an eleven 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 wort 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. I can't read. I can only speak and read of like 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. I'm talking about just a plaintext list. The state of Google's very worrying. A year long study from Leipzig University published last year and reported on by Jason Kobler of four or four Media found that the quality of good Google 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. If you're unfamiliar with affiliate marketing, it's when outlets run pieces about something, say top ten speakers or top ten laptops, and they have a bunch of links like Amazon or Walmart of best Buy, and they get a little bit of cash from the platform. When everyone 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 click things to make the money. To be clear, this is actually a perfectly normal business model in the right hands. The Wirecutter has done a great job of monetizing affiliate marketing while providing very thorough recommendations. The Verge has two 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. Now, to be clear, this content, the search optimized stuff, is done so with Google's approval. And there are people at Google who'll kind of nudge you in the right direction. They never really give full directions, but they they're okay with search engine optimization. You think they wouldn't be, you'd think they'd want to fight for like standards and quality, but no, they actively help these people gain 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 of 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 now. In March twenty twenty four, Google announced that it was making changes to its algorithm that would reduce spam and AI generated content by forty percent, 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 Kashmir wholesale steel articles, and 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. I briefly sparred with Danny Sullivan, who is the he's the search liaism for Google about this and tech gate has now disappeared as of doing this day. The 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, ah, I am I done. I want to do about it. Danny's a good bloke. Danny used to run search engine land, I believe, and yeah, 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 gonna be the search liaison, it's art to liaise with the search engine, it's time to promote the journalists saying oh, mate, we don't know how to fix the machine is not aloody excuse. Google, a company worth around two trillion dollars, is either unable or unwilling to fix the problem. 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 Ragavan. You're gonna hear that name a lot in the next episode. I'm not going to say it another time. I'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 really 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. No, 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 high for 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. And 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 the 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. Now 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 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. It's an Internet that incentivizes mining human beings like veins of awe. 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. And I'm going to name the bastards responsible underpinning these profitable torture machines. It's an online advertisement industry built off the back of fucking advertisers and users alike. In the mid twenty tens, 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. 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 rating team and shifting to short form video in July twenty seventeen. Vocative did the same. The following month, Vice Media cut roughly sixty editorial roles and expanded its video production capabilities. In response to this so called growth, Mike, a much smaller company than MTV newser Vice Media but quite beloved at the time, slashed ten rolls 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 the 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 that I 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 metas inflated metrics lwered 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 nineteen 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 An 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 ten thousand illegal investment ads across Instagram, Facebook, YouTube and TikTok in twenty twenty two alone. A fifteen hundred percent 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. Seemingly every post is replied to by a bot offering nudes in bio, or pussy in bio, 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 and New York Magazine, these bots are afront for a series of very big, nasty online dating scams that lose people tens of thousands of dollars. Elon Musk choosing to check the blue check mark from something that was given by Twitter to say that you are the real person into a thing that you buy for eight dollars has allowed cryptocurrency scammers, according to Protos, to make millions by tricking users into connecting their wallets to fund drain their entire thing like it's somewhat technical, but you just click these websites and you say, yeah, sure, i'll connect my whilet and 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 musks desperation for ad revenue has even led Twitter to start pushing ads that don't actually say their 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. You 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 mister Beast videos so that Elon Musk can give money to mister Beasts, so that mister Beast will repost things from YouTube, allowing Elon Musk to pay him money. It's a very confusing thing, and Twitter is 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. Yet 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 pornobots. 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 auto. Meta also underpays, horribly underpays. I should add people in other countries like Kenya, they make as little as two dollars and twenty cents an hour to view what Wired referred to as the most hideous content on the Internet. Because 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 open ai 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 eld them accountable. Much like every major tech platform, Meta is just half fastening 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. They 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 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 boasting 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. It'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 dot com lot could people work at Igana Feel bad for saying this, but they have over three hundred million views and you go on there and you immediately hit with two giant ads, one that fills the top thirty 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 I went on there earlier, I was hit with two giant acts. They took up most of my screen, and on opening a story about the new for that TV show, which is very good, I'll give them that, it then covered the top quarter of my screen with another or playing at It's so weird. It's so weird when you see this happening. I feel like more people should be talking about this. This field. 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 are publicly traded, multimillion dollar business that dominates local journalism in the UK and they hold basically monopolies in several regions and also own three newspapers. Very 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 new 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, or while you're on the page trying to read the thing that you went to the website for. Even 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 spice in spami content from something called a chumbox company. And these companies make hundreds of millions of dollars driving clicks to everything from just scams to straight up this information. 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. It's really strange to see this in the in between Pulitzer Prize winning journalists and like international conflicts. These chum box companies. They're ubiquitous because they pay well, and it makes them super attractive to cash strap media entities because you can just plug this bollocks in and you just get money, even if it makes your products suck. And they're awful. They're super horrible. They're ruining the web, and they keep making more money. In twenty eighteen, 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. The title of the episode and add for the worst day of your life was fitting, and it was only until a massively popular podcast intervene that any of these networks ban the advert. These networks outbrain taboola, evil companies run by evil people. They're harmful, They're harmful to the Internet, They're harmful to users, and they're harmful to the news brands that host them. If I was working for a major news company, I'd be absolutely humiliated to see my work put next to this nonsense, this celebrity bullshit, these diet scams, these get rich quick schemes, Tommy Chong's fucking CBD chews. I apologize swearing, but it's just so frustrating. Are these outlets so unprofitable that they just have to sell out like this? I refuse to believe that I just reviews. The modern Internet was built on a social contract that said the big tech gave us services for free in exchange for some sort of nebulous concept of data, which largely took the form of content and connections we made between people and the things that we posted. As a result, this social contract was both assumed and extremely easy to enter into because all of these sites were free, which meant that there was really never any attempt to regulate the terms of it. There are terms and conditions, but that's really it, and you what you're gonna do. You're gonna barter with meta And there were never conditions set for what can't be done to a user, what can be done with the data. Look at Cambridge Analytica, look at all of the different ways that Facebook hads hurt people. None of that matters to them because it doesn't have to. They don't care. There's nobody stopping them. The FDC won't stop them, lawyers won't stop them. It's very depressing when you say it out loud anyway. As a result, these platforms were are a form of bait and switch, which underpins coreytor else very good but annoying to say in shitification theory, where platforms have built these massive monopolies based off for in good, useful services and then turn them into something terrible but very profitable. But as I've noted before and shertification kind of misses one point, these companies are not doing this out of a lack of profitability or some sort of failure in their business model. They're doing so because the Internet has become something between a social experiment and a mining operation. They're doing it because they can. Nobody's stopping them. And doctor Oo has upgraded his theory to the insure to see now he has brought in some of these things. I think I'm just tired of people responding to the Rock economy and saying in citification Corey Rock's I'm gonna have him on the podcast Jesus. But seriously, though, it's not because they're suddenly left hand hand. They've just kept turning the screw because who's going to stop them? What's you're going to do? Not use Google, not use Facebook, not use Instagram anyway, Charlie Warsall, who I've given a lot of shit. Charlie did a good thing there. He framed this well in a recent piece in the Atlantic published in the middle of April that described the overall techscape as a form of hostage negotiation. Interactions with tech companies are no longer a purchase or a two way contract, but kind of a trade of information long after you've purchased the product itself. Every interaction with tech now requires us to share our email address or our phone number, to accept a kind of subtle tracking. Don't worry it's anonymous, or of course, to share your personal information that will probably be leaked. It's try it at this point to say that human beings themselves are the product, but it's kind of impossible to avoid saying when you look at the state of the Internet now. Tech companies have found every imaginable way to monetize every imaginable thing we do, all based on the idea that they're providing us with something in return, and when you really think about it, haven't really provided a service at all. Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Google. They're platforms that only have as much utility as the content they host, which is created by billions of mostly unsupported and unpaid users. This kind of shitty trade off was meant to be something that was rewarded, with these platforms creating and hosting this content in a way that was easier to find and use and to help either surface to a wider audience or quickly get it to people we cared about, all while making sure the conditions we created it under and posted it under were interesting and safe, something that I think we can all agree is no longer the case now. The state of the Internet's now far simpler. The cost of using free platforms is a constant war, a war with the incentives and intentions of the platforms themselves. We're constantly negotiating with Instagram or Facebook to see content from people that we chose to follow. Because these platforms are no longer built to show us things that we want to see. We no longer search Google, but barter with the seedy little search box to try and coax out result that isn't either search engine optimized half answer, or an attempt to trick us into clicking an ad. Twitter in its prime succeeded by connecting real people to real things at a time when the Internet actively manufactures or experience in interactions with others. Now, Twitter is mostly ads and pornobots. Great stuff, but the core problem lies in the fact that these platforms don't really create anything, and their only value exists in making an internet of billions of people small enough to comprehend. Like seemingly every goddamn problem with capitalism, the Internet has become dominated by forces that don't contribute to the product that actually enriches them, and as a result, they have no concept or interest in quality. They only care about more, and this makes them extremely poor. Arbiters of what good looks like. Inevitably, this leads to products that suck as they become more and more profitable, because the machine they've built is a profit excavator dressed up as a god service. I know, I hate the whole we're the product thing. I've always thought it was very cheesy, but we are literally the product. We are the content creator that makes Google money while also the thing that makes Google money by search and Google, it's very annoying. Look. By allowing and encouraging search engine optimization, Google has handed matches to fucking arsonists and pointed them on the most flammable parts of the Internet. The existence of SEO is inevitable. People are going to try and game any system. But Google should never have encouraged these people. They should have terrified them. They should have set clear standards about what to do and what not to do, and heavily punished those who failed to comply. Except doing so would mean less content on Google, because there'd be less articles that say things like what time is the Super Bowl or best televisions to buy. Google actually would fully have the ability to make most of these problems go away. They should treat SEO people like scam artists, and they should run them out of town with pitchforks. Instead, they pat him on the ass and they say, good job, buddy. I'd argue that the state of search makes Google and by extension, executives like Sundhar Peshaian Google Search lead Prabhakar Ragavan, some of the greatest villains in business history. Well, one can't forget about the damage done by Meta and Mark Zuckerberg's failure, outright failure to maintain any kind of quality standards on Instagram and Facebook. Allowing Google Search to decay so severely for any reason, let alone one that involves profits, is actively damaging to society and was an entirely intentional act perpetrated by people like Ragavan, the former head of Google's Ads division, who took over search not long after his predecessor was burdened by the bullshit demands of the ads department, led by Ragavan himself. And I'm going to get into that in episode too, don't you worry. It's not enough though, for me to just say how bad the web has got. It's not enough. The web is too bad right now for me to just sit here and say, oh it sucks. It's so bad. You all know that. I hope I've helped you find out a little bit more about it. But this phenomenon, it didn't come out of nowhere, and it has a cause, and that cause is the rise of managers and the managerial class in tech. These assholes have largely supplanted the voices of actual technologists, coders, engineers, people who work in software and hardware, actual innovators, and replace them with this kind of zero sum McKinsey s loser, and all they care about is profit. All they care about is growth, sometimes growth that destroys profit, and they're actively hostile to workers and consumers and the actual products they're making. In the next two episodes, we're going to take a closer look at these managers and how they're destroying innovation. And we're going to start with the tale of Prabakar Ragavan, a man who has spent his entire life failing up overseeing Yahoo during its period of terminal client jumping ship to Google in twenty twelve. In twenty nineteen, Ragavan used this political influence to push out the head of Search, a guy called Ben Gomes. A hero, a hero who fought to protect Search from a man trying to turn it into a growth machine even when it was still very profitable. That's what's really crazy. While far from our household name, Ragavan is emblematic of every single thing I've written and podcasted about. He personifies this horrifying decline and the short term thinking that's destroying the products we use every day. He and people like him are destroying companies that we used to respect. And as I'll explain, Ragavan's influence times exactly with the deterioration of Google Search as a product. After that, we're going to look at the managerial class more broadly and how some people, such as Instagram's Adamisari and of course open Ai CEO Sam Altman, have been able to disguise their true intent and ineptitude through the clothing of innovation disruption. It's a facade, one that doesn't withstand even the slightest bit of scrutiny, and I can't wait to tell you all about it. Thank you for listening to Better Offline. The editor and composer of the Better Offline theme song is Matasowski. You can check out more of his music and audio projects at Matasowski dot com M A T T O S O W s KI dot com. You can email me at easy at better offline dot com or check out better offline dot com to find my newsletter and more links to this podcast. Thank you so much for listening. Better Offline is a production of cool Zone Media. For more from cool Zone Media, visit our website cool Zonemedia dot com, or check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.