As someone who worked (briefly) as a freelance writer online, the tl;dr bot is my enemy and I want it dead.
As someone who worked (briefly) as a freelance writer online, the tl;dr bot is my enemy and I want it dead.
The tl;dr bot that pops up on every link to an article on Lemmy is depriving those websites of clicks, which deprives them of ad revenue.
The only thing that will accomplish is forcing those websites to do the very thing that we rail about; replacing their writers with crappy A.I because they can't afford to pay for actual content.
We rail against the enshitification of the internet, but when there's a legitimate way to fight back by giving these websites a page view/read/click etc... so that they can attract advertisers, we would rather have a bot summarize it for us, giving them nothing.
The tl;dr bot that pops up on every link to an article on Lemmy is depriving those websites of clicks, which deprives them of ad revenue.
For me its the opposite. Without the summary bot I wouldn't even bother going to the site to read the whole article. Clickbait headlines are so ubiquitous I'm not going to go to sites without at least a decent change the content advertised is as described. The bot does that, and I click through to the site to read the whole article as the author intended it to be consumed.
Some bot summaries are blocked by a front end CDN. Usually skip those lemmy posts entirely.
Yeah it's the same for me. Most of the time I don't open links to third parties, and when I do it's often to skim the introduction to see if the information is worth the read. But TLDRs are like trailers; they let me know what's going on and can sell me on the full thing if it's interesting.
I don't like the tldr bot because the summaries are awful. Too much context is removed, quotes are partially copied... It's doing a bad job.
I agree it does a bad job of providing a whole summation of the article, and the key context is removed on occasion. This is why I never depend on just the bot summary. It tells me enough that I should investigate further or skip the article.
Oddly, in this case this makes the bot better for the point that @Adderbox76@lemmy.ca is making. If the summary to TOO good, there wouldn't be a need to click through to the article. However the bot is just good enough that you can tell there is real thought the author of the article put in, and some of the jarring cuts the bot makes me interested to click through to see what the article author is actually saying.
I love the tl;dr; bot because it:
- doesn’t pop up a ‘read our newsletter’ prompt that receives an auto-close click anyway
- doesn’t pop up a separate prompt to subscribe to the news site using payment methods I simply don’t have because I’m not a credit card addicted American
- doesn’t throw a consent form at me in yet another popup, in which I need to manually click away 308 vendors to which I do not want to sell my soul
- doesn’t include useless Facebook-Like buttons that collect data about me even though I don’t even have a fucking Facebook account
- doesn’t need 8 seconds of JavaScript execution to render fucking text
- doesn’t load a 8000×6000px image that contains absolutely zero information, but only serves to make me to scroll by one screen to get to the information I actually want
- relieves me of the burden to follow a link just to find that that content isn’t available ‘because you’ve already met your quota.
- provides the information concisely instead of using a truck load of unnecessary fill words just to meet an arbitrary 4000 word minimum.
Don't forget the unclosable and stoppable auto playing video built into the page that you don't want from a text article!
Or the autoplay video that you CAN stop, but when you scroll down the page it moves to the corner and starts playing again.
I fully agree. Mainstream media sites have become as unpleasant to use as the sites they taught us to avoid back in the 90s. If they want clicks, then the responsibility is on them to make their site a valuable, worthwhile experience.
Also, I'll add one to your list:
- Sites that forcibly disable the accessibility setting to zoom on mobile. I will go out of my way to make sure I don't give such sites a click. People who prioritize attractive web design over accessibility can take a leap into a volcano.
- browser popup asking if you would like to receive notifications from random-site.c om
If the articles didn't
A. Have to hit a minimum word count so they use weird language and spend a great deal talking about nothing and
B. Didn't wall more than the first paragraph off to subscribers
I wouldn't need or want the summarization. But also mostly because I use an ad blocker anyway so the page is readable. If I didn't have the adblocker, the page is usually so full of banners and full page ads that it's impossible to read.
You can blame the bot for decreased ad revenue all you’d like but it’s malarkey.
Websites have poisoned the well, so to say. It is simply not smart to browse these sites without ad blockers. Constant popups, cookie banners with 100s of toggles, flashing ads for random junk, and so on were driven by greed originally and are now driven by survival. If the greed could have subsided just a bit and website owners not tried to make all the money, people wouldn’t need to use tldr bots or adblockers.
Sorry not sorry, fuck your ad supported content.
Yeah, gotta agree. Sites got greedy. One or two out of the way ads on the top or side? Didn't care, show them. Go to any news site or article now and you get top, bottom, every paragraph, flashing, pop up, when you go top left to close, and also accept cookies plz.
No, they're the ones to blame for making the web like this. They ruined ad revenue themselves, they can figure out a new way.
The problem is that people hate pay walls even more than ads.
Give me a site that is readable and I will read it on the site. But I haven't encountered a site that wasn't bloated with enshitified web 2.0 BS in years. The instant I click on a link and I have to click off 5 pop ups and have an autoplaying video following me as I scroll then I'm gone. And that's with an ad blocker. I can't imagine how much more nightmarish most modern sites would be without one. As it is typically when I click a link I a shown to a moist dumpster where if I hunt around it enough I might find all the pieces of an article someone wrote. Even then the article is usually written for SEO not to be readable by people.
Give me a site where I can just click the link and read the article and I will hapily do so. I don't care about your newsletter. I don't care obout your cookie policy (read my browser settings). I don't care about the 10 unrelated celebrity gossip articles you are sticking in the middle of the one I am trying to read. Don't make me "click to continue reading". And that stupid video you have following me around is only driving me away.
We rail against the enshitification of the internet, but when there's a legitimate way to fight back by giving these websites a page view/read/click etc... so that they can attract advertisers,
You used these terms "legitimate" and "fight back" but I'm not sure they're being used correctly. These websites would rather pump more ads into a single page than have a coherent user experience. If a bot saves us that trouble, then that's just Free Enterprise™ working again, just that it isn't in your favor this time. You're a frustrated member of the working class like most of us, and it's okay to be upset or angry and I'm glad you shared your opinion.
Upvoted for being an unpopular opinion.
But I won't lie, I love the TL;DR bot.
Adapt or die off. 🤷🏼♂️ Same as it ever was.
Congrats on a truly unpopular opinion, seems like most people (me included) disagree with you.
I don't think think online article writers are providing services of value anymore.
It's an extension of advertising, and the shitty journalist practices of today's writers means I don't fear losing their services.
Realistically, an AI can take a 1 sentence piece of news and generate a full page of fluff just as well as a human already.
This is the only response that I feel obligated to respond to, because yeah ... I know it's an unpopular opinion and that websites suck. We're talking chicken and egg, do websites have to be that shitty because they need to milk as much as they can from the few people that still click? Or do fewer people click because it's that shitty.
Which came first...did ad-blocking lead to more aggressive advertisements, or did more aggressive advertisements lead to ad-blockers...
I get that. I don't take offense to any who disagree with me because I see that point.
What I DO feel the need to respond to is the notion that we don't need human writers anymore.
A.I. doesn't "produce" content. It aggregates it from other sources. If A.I. just aggregates from other A.I content, it's an ourobouros eating it's own tail; there's nothing new being added.
So when you say a "1 sentence piece of news", an A.I. can't collect that and add it to the internet. It has to already exist from a human writer in order for the A.I to actually have something to scrape.
I appreciate that people have differing opinions on the monetization of websites, but no offense, saying that human writers aren't providing a service anymore is the dumbest of dumb takes.
Let's see how much news gets shared when A.I.s are just scraping from other A.I.s...
Which came first…did ad-blocking lead to more aggressive advertisements, or did more aggressive advertisements lead to ad-blockers…
I know this is rhetorical, but I'm gonna bet that advertisers led to ad blockers. I don't mind mild ads, but mild ads don't generate sales. Heck, I'll watch the right ad if it's amusing. I watched a 30 minute ad for Surfshark because TomSka made it funny. When it's noises, popups, security issues all to drive sales, then I'm gonna block it.
What I DO feel the need to respond to is the notion that we don’t need human writers anymore.
I think we do need human writers. In my experience, though, the TLDR bot cuts thru the fluff. It's like those recipe blogs that have to add "jump to recipe" button. That button exists because I don't need 1,000 words about the author's childhood. Sure, there are some people who do, but I don't, and that option is great. Most other kinds of blogs/essays don't have that. If there was a TLDR section, and then a "would you like to know more" after that, then the TLDR bot wouldn't need to exist. Too many articles need to get to the damn point.
You assume people would click the link if there wasn't a summary. I bet most people wouldn't.
They don't measure profit by counting the number of jobs they are providing for people, they measure it with dollars. If it's cheaper for them to replace a real human with AI, they are going to do regardless how many ad impressions they've made.
I find too often that the bot skips too much and then items don’t have proper context, as in starting quoting one person, the article switches to another but the bot doesn’t state that. Then it doesn’t make sense and you have to read the full story for the correct version anyway.
Yep. People will criticize it when rich people try to get others to do things for free "for exposure", but will ask that their media be given to them for free.
No, I was okay when it was a couple unintrusive ads. Now it's 32 ads with popups and reminders, and notifications and it's all garbage.
I sub to a few creators I support, but I block every ad I come across. Sites got greedy.