All About Berlin

All About Berlin helps people move to Germany. Find all guides here: allaboutberlin.com/guides

@web_sem_dev @yashasvigirdhar Confidently wrong

@yashasvigirdhar @aboutberlin Adsense. Now Adsense for many areas are plainly dead.

AI is killing All About Berlin. When you Google something, you used to get a link to my website, but now you get an AI-generated answer trained on my work. This has a devastating impact on traffic.

@joyfulmarce I made some changes to mitigate the drop, but yes, roughly.

@aboutberlin Did your revenues follow the same curve?

@indexsy An algo penalty?

@aboutberlin Been a while! Looks like you got hit with the perfect storm, an algo penalty + ai overviews The days of well monetized sites like yours are numbered unfortunately It's a shame because your site was one of the best in the country and helped me lots

@Lewis_R_W In this case, they expect the knowledgeable staffers to keep feeding the industry that is replacing them, for free. I wouldn't mind a better technology rendering my work useless, but in this case, it's still necessary. It's just artificially devalued by a monopoly.

@aboutberlin When I went to college in the 1980's, there were several music stores near the campus. I could walk in, talk to a knowledgeable staffer, and leave with an album I liked. After Napster came out > 90% of these stores died. They never returned.

@LVRenoan It's mandatory in Berlin. It's a bit like the TV tax: it's deemed important, so everyone needs to chip in whether they need it or not. In practice, the outcome is the same: they lose the need to produce something their captive user base actually wants.

@aboutberlin Membership to the local chamber of commerce is mandatory? What's the philosophy behind that? I had my business join for a few years but eventually let it lapse, questioning the value. I take it you don't get that option?

The Berlin chamber of commerce (IHK) has started a massive, cryptic advertising campaign: "WTF is IHK?" I've been paying the mandatory membership fee for 8 years and I ask myself the same question.

@AndyCMDE These workflow improvements do not increase my income. I will keep the website useful, neutral and free. I don't want to compromise on quality or abandon principles to keep the lights on. I will find other ways to pay rent. Something is in the works.

@aboutberlin Thanks for sharing stories of AI impact on you. Your site is a middleware between the user and the data. As user visits drop due to search engines turning into answer machines, will your own AI automizations make up for it (probably needs scale over multiple sites) or wwyd?

AI on All About Berlin? Yes, but not like that. I am releasing a tool that updates the website when certain facts change. If the minimum wage goes up, it updates it everywhere on the website. (1/2)

@HSB_Forum Ich verdiene meinen Lebensunterhalt mit dieser Website, also ja. Sie wurde vom Finanzamt rückwirkend als Gewerbe eingestuft.

@aboutberlin Seit acht Jahren ist Dein Gewinn so hoch (> 5K), dass Du 64 Euro im Jahr zahlen musst, oder wieviel? Und wieso agierst Du nicht als Freiberufler, geht das bei einer beratenden Tätigkeit nicht? ich würde das gern verstehen.

@dmfilipenko @HLSIII Because they're a few disparate clicks to random URLs.

@aboutberlin @HLSIII Why can't you create these pages? If chat gpt forwarding people in this direction why swim against current?

If you are trusting the ai results Google spews back at you, you are stupid because they’re unreliable dogshit. Click through, read the source, you may find something useful. Or Google could just cut out the ai bullshit. ffs

@pranesh @librarythingtim Again with the technical-legalistic approach. It's cool that they are working on an opt-out mechanism two years after the plundering took place, but it's too late for any objection to be meaningful.

@librarythingtim @aboutberlin Google (which is the OP's tweet was about), for what it's worth, does obey robots.txt. It also (now at least) has a separate user-agent string for the AI crawler: Google-Extended. There's also work going on at the IETF for indicating AI prefs. #googlebot" target="_blank" rel="nofollow noopener">developers.google.com/crawling/docs/…

The problem here is that current copyright law is very specific--it protects expression only. It doesn't protect facts, ideas or opinions. It doesn't protect hard work. So long as AI isn't parroting AAB's exact words, it's probably in the clear. I don't know AAB, but the author surely "stole" such things too--they read articles, books and museum signs, learned stuff and put it in their writings. AI is doing nothing different here. But in another sense AI is doing everything different. It's the scale, the ruthlessness. It breaks the moral intuitions of copyright without breaking copyright.

@pranesh @librarythingtim And I'm just a regular guy getting wrecked by a megacorp. I am not asking about my chances against Google in court, but more practical questions like "how will I buy groceries in a year?" In other words, read the room?

@aboutberlin @librarythingtim I've worked on copyright issues for 20+ years, so it's neither a case of being deliberately obtuse nor one of me being a Twitter troll. Having your site available to crawlers is also voluntary: robots.txt can be used to prevent Google from indexing your site.

@pranesh @librarythingtim These conversations are voluntary and their scope is clear. The journalists sell their research and writing. Isn't the difference obvious to you? Are you being deliberately obtuse or is Twitter always like that?

@librarythingtim @aboutberlin And even with journalism: journalists call me all the time. They have extended conversations (sometimes upwards of an hour!) in which I often have to explain the basics of a topic. They write it up. They get paid for writing the article, but I don't. Do I have a moral claim?

@pwnxt Some yes, many no. A lot of that information comes from a LOT of private conversations, interviews with experts and reader feedback. A prime example: allaboutberlin.com/guides/immigra… - The immigration office themselves started using my data.

@aboutberlin I like your website, but honest question: Would AI be able to find the answers without you? Most of the content seems not that hard to find otherwise, like the list of public holidays?

This thread has reached context collapse size, so I'll mute it and move on with my day. My email is on the website this post is about. Feel free to reach out. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Context_c…

@colindotfun @sometimesfrunny Colin, I have never charged a cent for my content. I have open-sourced the entire tech stack this year. You have never visited my website, have you?

@aboutberlin @sometimesfrunny no, you write for money

@aiob_me All About Berlin runs on its own domain, server and tech stack. I own the land, but name one road that isn't owned by big tech.

@aboutberlin Owned media > earned media > paid media hope you learnt a lesseon here

@waxoman That's a problem for the next CEO

@aboutberlin many such cases, what is the end goal for google here? where are they gonna get new information if it's all gobbled up by the ai?

@manavmade Thanks man, hearing stuff like that kept me going for the last 9 years.

@aboutberlin hey man i just moved to berlin and thank u so much for everything u do its helped me so much to figure out germany as a whole! that being said this sucks to see. the changes being made are definitely scary and i can only hope resources like these aren't lost to ai summaries

@Marty0112379 I have a newsletter! allaboutberlin.com/newsletter It's not really the right format for content that solves a specific problem when you encounter it.

@aboutberlin Paterson and substack ! You deserve it

@Marty0112379 Then I'd be a platform worker for YouTube. The main reason I chose text is that I update guides all the time. I'm constantly gathering feedback, asking experts, monitoring communities and refining my advice.

@aboutberlin You need to go all in on video and start becoming a video blogger with all the vs Berlin where AI can't hurt you too much yet. Sorry man, you do great work. But this tech is coming for all of us.