Retroactive penalties absolutely are a thing. I've known people who have gotten bit by that when tax laws change retroactively. Also, Google hasn't yet blocked anything, but implementing a block like that doesn't happen overnight. So yes, they do need to start writing the and testing the code to do the blocking now, not at the last minute. The announcement is also part of their negotiation, making it clear that this is in fact a possible outcome.
terath
joined 1 year ago
I have no sympathy for ad driven businesses. Let me buy access to ad free news and I'll be interested. Fundamentally this is because the traditional news business model stopped working and they never bothered to update to a model that does work. Instead, they want to legislate that they get paid without even trying to adapt or improve.
Yes, which is literally why Google said they are preparing to remove links. They are not going to incur completely unknown penalties. In Australia Meta and others also pulled links for the same reason. It was only after they negotiated a price that worked for both sides that they came back. If I ran Google or Meta I'd do exactly the same thing.
It’s called negotiation. What Canada is doing is not that. They are demanding unbounded amounts of money.
In Australia they ended up negotiating a price that worked for both sides. No doubt a predictable among each year too.
Hopefully we change this law. Trying to charge people for links is incredibly bad. There is no need for any law. If the news sites want to get money for links they can just put all their articles behind a login gate and make them not scrapable.
Good luck, I think others have tried and the response is that you must delete the data yourself, which... is hard.
From a legal standpoint, I can also scramble and delete that data depriving them of it.
The purpose of scrambling my comments is to take that valuable donated content away from Reddit. And yes it affects people doing google searches too. That is the exact point.
ArsTechnica has been particularly negative towards Reddit in their recent coverage. I don’t see any bias myself.
I think you’ve nailed it here, though perhaps a bit cynical. I personally wanted to see scientists and journalists, but few were on mastodon at the time. It’s a tiny bit better now but still not good.
Compounding problems is mastodons hate for indexing and search. This made it nearly impossible to actually find the few people I would have been interested in on mastodon.
The decentralization and poor UX I think was also a big factor for many. Apps like Ivory have helped the UX a lot but it’s still not as easy to use and discover new people as twitter.
Many of the things posted there were objectively awful in terms of data presentation. It’s really too bad as the original premise was good.
Apparently there are a lot of temperance league members on this site.