this is an interesting article on the difficulties of running anything as SEO makes everything worse, AI proliferates, and things generally get worse for journalism. probably best summarized by this paragraph:

The long answer is that, through our own reporting, we are realizing that in order to combat the fracturing of social media platforms, a Google discoverability crisis fueled by AI generated spam and AI-fueled SEO, and a media business environment that is in utter freefall, we need to be able to reach our readers directly using a platform that we own and control. To do that, we need your email address.

but it’s a very good read in general, and i’d encourage you to read the whole thing.

  • Is there a better solution? I don’t know. But it’s not this.

    If people were still interested in discussions of in-depth knowledge on a close cluster of topics, webrings could come back.

    In a way that’s kind of what Lemmy does, lets communities share links of interest, and a human curator has ALWAYS been better than any results google provides, even back when it was still good.

    And, tinfoil hat time: I think google actively worked to kill rss to increase searches.