The Human-Centered Lie, the End of the Usable Web, and, I Guess, AI
All of these annoying things are related, I'm sad to say.
In May, The Verge’s Nilay Patel spoke to Sundar Pichai on his Decoder podcast, and they covered a lot of ground. Most of the conversation was about AI and the future of Search. Patel asked many important questions, including a few that hinted at an increasingly useless web and Search’s influence on bad content. Importantly, they discussed bad content that’s spam or born from content farms, and they also discussed bad content that’s just wrong or dangerous, specifically when it’s AI-generated.
It was hard to ignore how often Pichai said something like, “We want to get it right.” Dozens of times, I think, though I didn’t count. Patel pressed him on this in several different ways, but I didn’t hear a practical strategy—just acknowledgment of the challenge.
You can listen to the whole conversation with Pichai here.
Many of these concerns stem from AI’s recent content boom, but as with everything else tech-related, there are adjacent matters that are, in some ways, more important. A great example is Avram Piltch’s argument that the tools we know of seem more like error-duplicating shit factories.
Patel gets this better than almost anyone and used the ‘bad content’ conversation as an opportunity to discuss the general "enshitification” of the web. That link, btw, is a meta example in itself, between ads, site takeovers, 1/3 cookies disclaimers, and more. For more on Enshitification, read this Wired piece about TikTok.
It’s not just that content is unreliable, fake, or stupid; it’s that it’s almost completely inaccessible.
Useful Platforms are Killing Themselves
Alex Pareene points out in his Defector piece “The Last Page of the Internet” that Reddit and Wikipedia represented two of the last useful web experiences because they were “volunteer run and donation based.” We know this is true because of how much more useful web searches are when we add the words “reddit” or “wiki.”
Reddit is suffering due to many self-inflicted wounds (read: the CEO’s clamp down on third-party APIs), but it’s hard to think about this implosion without also considering Patel’s conversation with Pichai about “bad content.” We use Reddit and Wiki as search terms because Search has been awful for a long time, AI-generated garbage didn’t introduce the problem; it’s just adding a new shitty dimension to it.
The internet’s best resources are almost universally volunteer run and donation based, like Wikipedia and The Internet Archive. Every time a great resource is accidentally created by a for-profit company, it is eventually destroyed, like Flickr and Google Reader. Reddit could be what Usenet was supposed to be, a hub of internet-wide discussion on every topic imaginable, if it wasn’t also a private company forced to come up with a credible plan to make hosting discussions sound in any way like a profitable venture.
And then there’s Google’s new “Perspectives.” They say, “We’ve added new ways to find and explore diverse perspectives on Search.” What they are doing is scraping social media sites. In theory, this addresses Bad Content, but the theory isn’t good enough. What’s actually happening is another walled garden in which Google controls search results and has the ability to rank and reveal content based on its interests only. It’s actually much more likely to become a misinformation booster than anything else.
And Design Has Become a Joke
Designers are still horny-posting about user experience, human-centered design, and best practices, but we’re so far in our niche we don’t even care about what those things mean. Instead of adding our voices to these kinds of conversations, we’re still arguing about “10 ways I know ur not a real UI designer (hint: you didn’t mention UX” bullshit.
The saddest thing about design Twitter in 2023 is that it’s just design Twitter in 2010.
Platforms don’t care about users, except (maybe) those platforms that are still made possible by users. Search, Reddit, and Twitter are all failing in slightly different ways at this.
“Google is a guest on the web, as we all are. Guests don't make the rules.”
🔖 Related, Extended
Dirt: An excellent, thoughtful piece about why Tim Robinson’s “I Think You Should Leave” is so therapeutic
Airbnb Stuff: CEO Brian Chesky said some things at the Figma thing
Axios: I didn’t even get to Facebook’s issues in this newsletter but you won’t be surprised to hear how awful their content moderation (still) is
New York Times: Some of 2022’s highest-paid CEOs seem even less deserving than others
New York Times: Who could have predicted that AI-powered facial recognition tech leveraged to stop theft could go awry?
Embedded: Nilay Patel shares his Internet
Instagram: The doomed Titanic-seeking submersible’s janky controller survived
Faine Greenwood: Facebook’s “Terrible Uncle” strategy has failed
Etsy: Pre-order your end-times Floof pocket
🫶 Until Next Time!
