@ewen @jwcph

Oh, exactly. Get a little successful and they'll offer to boost your posts for payment. No? Then you get algorithmically downranked. Hey, it does work for some people. IG is a major networking tool for most people in the outdoor/adventure photo/video world and I know others who got their start via their Facebook page.

But it's just so barftastic to work for free for sociopathic billionaires. I have a blog post on my site about the site itself where I talk about that and why even if I do work for free, it makes me feel icky.
https://www.mikaljakubal.com/a-website-of-ones-own/

@jwcph

Oh, you couldn't pay me to send those people money. I intend to invest zero in terms of formal advertising, and not even much in terms of time.

But blocking Google from indexing my site and completely refusing to participate in slop sites like Instagram means there is very little left beyond in-person craft fairs and the fediverse and random in-person encounters that lead to people directly typing in my site's URL and deciding to order a print.

So, the real question is how much compromise am I willing to make, just in terms of giving the bastards free material to scrape.

@jwcph

Oh, 100%. I haven't looked at my Plausible analytics dashboard lately, but Google usually doesn't drive that much traffic anyway. But to block it entirely seems like foot-shooting over principles (which I've been known to do).

If I do manage to sell any prints, it will be through word of mouth or direct online connections like on here, and maybe a little through other social media.

That's the thing I have to grapple with: how many compromises am I willing to add? I'm already planning to maintain my minimal presence on IG and FB, even though that is handing my work over to them on a silver platter. What's a little light Google scraping on top of it?

Cloudflare CEO confirms what I'd been wondering about: blocking Google's scrapers also blocks their search crawlers. Google and Bingbot are the only two I left unblocked in my Cloudflare dashboard, but only hesitantly, until I found out more.

Normally, I wouldn't care, but I'm about to hesitantly launch an attempt to sell photos online, so showing up in the search monopoly's results becomes more important.

https://www.wired.com/story/big-interview-event-matthew-prince-cloudflare/

#AI #Google #FuckGoogle #FuckAI #KillItWithFire #NukeItFromOrbit