this post was submitted on 17 Dec 2025
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Today I went to check the films available at the cinema at my local website and found that the website is going to be closed in a few days.

The website owners said that ads (served by google) do not get enough money to compensate the maintenance. It also cites the problem with Google search in which Google, when offering the results of searching for films, hijacks the top of the results with their own previews of available movies. The results are often wrong and sometimes missing movies shown a cinemas.

I’m kinda bummed, now I have to check 4 differente sites to get all the info.

Has anyone seen something similar to this to other website?

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[–] Beaver@hexbear.net 23 points 1 day ago (1 children)

We desperately need more small static websites that are mostly just some text and a few pictures.

[–] AernaLingus@hexbear.net 4 points 14 hours ago (1 children)

Absolutely. You can still make some pretty beautiful looking static websites using well-crafted HTML and CSS instead of making the user download and execute 10 MB of JavaScript bullshit.

Not exactly the same thing, but I listened to a really interesting podcast featuring the founder of Neocities who went into great detail about how he was able to save massively on infrastructure costs by not just blindly tossing everything onto AWS or Azure (link below, transcript included):

https://www.softwaresessions.com/episodes/bringing-geocities-back-with-kyle-drake/

[–] SevenSkalls@hexbear.net 1 points 14 hours ago

Had no idea people have been trying to bring geocities back under a different name. That's awesome. Bring back the old web!

[–] tombruzzo@hexbear.net 13 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Google has been killing websites for years. They tried to kill off RSS and they forced everyone to flood the internet with 'content' to stay at the top of rankings long before AI slop came along to make the job easier

SEO is a never ending mistake.

[–] EatPotatoes@hexbear.net 21 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Municipalities should just run websites with this information on simple flat html tables and rss feeds.

[–] chgxvjh@hexbear.net 3 points 1 day ago (1 children)
[–] EatPotatoes@hexbear.net 2 points 22 hours ago
[–] plinky@hexbear.net 27 points 1 day ago

it has killed the printed media shrug-outta-hecks

feel like local cinemas should just expose their schedule via api and have millions of websites bloom

[–] hello_hello@hexbear.net 17 points 1 day ago

Things like this sort of give me hope that socialist reconstructions of the web will be better. Web peaked 20 years ago and everything else after is rent-seeking because there were no more problems to solve.

[–] KnilAdlez@hexbear.net 22 points 1 day ago (1 children)

There should be a way for websites to charge Google to scrape that data. A lot of blogs and news websites have that problem as well.

[–] chgxvjh@hexbear.net 14 points 1 day ago (1 children)

That doesn't work. The websites are loosing traffic that is coming from Google in the first place. If the websites don't let Google scrape, they would have even less visitors.

https://developers.google.com/search/docs/appearance/featured-snippets?rd=1#how-can-i-opt-out-of-featured-snippets might actually work if you don't want your website content to be spoiled.

[–] KnilAdlez@hexbear.net 2 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Sure, but instead of opting out, Google pays the site for using their data in a snippet

[–] chgxvjh@hexbear.net 5 points 1 day ago

They've been through this in Germany over a decade ago. German press got their dumb law passed. Google wouldn't pay for scraped content and unlisted the German press instead, with exception of Springer who were the loudest demanding the law and the fastest to agree to give Google a free license. In the end most of the German press gave Google exclusively a free license to use their content to show their articles on Google News so Google has even more of a monopoly.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ancillary_copyright_for_press_publishers