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!
If these websites offered their articles in good faith I’d have no problem giving them a click, but the reality is that even just visiting these sites, users can get exposed to incredibly invasive trackers, data collectors, and an uncomfortable amount of stimuli (which some people are very sensitive to). I do sympathize with the points you bring up, but people don’t prefer tl;dr bots for no reason.
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.
