Is Google Prioritizing YouTube and X Over News Publishers on Discover?

Earlier this month, the media site Press Gazette reported that now Google "is increasingly prioritising AI summaries, X posts and Youtube videos" on its "Discover" feed (which appears on the leftmost homescreen page of many Android phones and the Google app's homepage).

"The changes could be devastating for publishers who rely heavily on Discover for referral traffic. And it looks set to accelerate a global trend of declining traffic to publishers from both Google search and Discover." Xavi Beumala from website analytics platform Marfeel warned in a research update: "Google Discover is no longer a publisher-first surface. It's becoming an AI platform with YouTube and X absorbing real estate that once went to newsrooms..." [They warn later that "This is not a marginal UI experiment. It is a reallocation of feed real estate away from links and toward inline Youtube plays and generated summaries."] Google says it prioritises "helpful, reliable, people-first content". Unlike Google News, there is no requirement that Google Discover showcases bona fide publisher websites.

In recent months fake news stories published by fraudulent website publishers have been promoted on Google Discover, reaping tens of millions of clicks. Google said it was working on a "fix" for this issue...

Facebook, Instagram and Tiktok content may also start flowing into the Discover feed in future. When Google announced the addition of posts from X, Instagram and Youtube Shorts in September, it said there would be "more platforms to come".

Well, duh.

[spaceman375]

They already own all the data on Youtube. Using other sources requires a lot of time, money, and compute power. Of course they are going to prioritize already crunched data over fresh, timely info. Those summaries take $$$ to produce, and google makes a lot of them every second. In many cases, like wikipedia, this is fine, but must always be verified, not trusted. The financial impact on the ultimate sources of data is a serious problem: The long term impact of this short-sighted profit and eyeball grab is sabotaging their trustworthiness..

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[Hamidgeabee]

When you throw a fit about Google using your content with it's AI and then prohibit them from using it, you lose the right to whine about the AI not pushing your content. Can't have your cake and eat it too MSM. Looks like you're just getting what you asked for.

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[snowshovelboy]

Google is going to use youtube comments on news videos to train their AI? God help us all.

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[TheWho79]

and this is any worse than Reddit? I find many youtube comment threads to be better than the majority of reddit a-non-sense.

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[tlhIngan]

YouTube makes sense, but X? X is just annoying and I want to disable it on my discover feed. Because everytime you click on it just wants you to log in. At least with other news sources, you get the rest of the headline before logging in so you can decide. With X you just get half of a thought.

Plus the whole Elon Musk thing makes it a lot more irrelevant for my day to day use. But X is special and I can't seem to disable it from my feed. I can block other sites entirely, but X only lets me block one by one.

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[gweihir]

On the plus side, Musk is a stellar example that money cannot even buy you a somewhat acceptable personality. "Pathetic" and "mountains of money" do rarely go that strongly together.

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[gweihir]

The long term impact of this short-sighted profit and eyeball grab is sabotaging their trustworthiness..

Indeed. And there is already not much of it left at this time.

Youtube is mostly AI junk now

[Ritz_Just_Ritz]

It used to be a place to quickly get content on things from home improvement, to news, documentaries, music, etc. Now it's inundated with inane AI-generated clickbait. When you spend more time filtering the junk than consuming the content you were searching for, it's a loss.

Yuck.

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[Anonymous Coward]

yep - can't not even close to being true.....
I see no AI anything - all the usual channels I'm subscribed to appear with new content.... no stupid shit even appears.

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[Luckyo]

It's the recommendation algorithm. If you keep watching AI clickbait, it will feed you more AI clickbait.

My recommended is still my interests with only AI content being AI I actually consume. Music videos of a specific genre. Every once in a while my feed contains "try this new thing" single video, and it's sometimes AI slop.

Do you know why my timeline is free of it? I don't click on that link and watch that video.

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[Luckyo]

You are having the same problem that parent has.

Don't click on them, they go away.

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[Tablizer]

Clickbaiters are taking specific topics, using AI to generate 100's of variations of the same topic (with lots of inaccuracies), then posting them under a hundred different user names. One can no longer usefully search on that topic because the click-baiter flooded the topic space with AI slop.

If you can, set the date parameters to search for stuff older than 2022, when flooders had to hand-build click-bait like God intended.

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[gweihir]

Indeed. I recently opened it without login on a different browser, and it really is 99% worthless trash now. Even logged in, it gets hard to find anything new that is worthwhile.

I guess they are in the process of slaughtering the goose now. And nothing of value will be lost when they are gone.

Remember when Elon bought Twitter and ruined it?

[jfdavis668]

He seems to have gotten his money back.

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[ZorroXXX]

like he was advocating violence

Trump has been advocating violence for a long time already [youtube.com], it is not like that is something new. Like a lot of times [theatlantic.com]. Even back in the 80s he was advocating for killing innocent children in the Central Park Five case.

The BBC clip was not fake despite what Trump cultist claim. It was just a normal collection of excerpts of a longer speech he gave, condensed down to something shorter for consumption in a news program. That is what all TV news programs does all the time, every single day, thousands of times a

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[gweihir]

Seriously, at this time you are just torturing yourself. Well deserved, admittedly, but it is somewhat hard to watch you fu***** yourself with a wire brush. Can you do it a little less public?

You mean that annoying thing I disable?

[Lando242]

You mean that annoying thing I disable and every phone I find it on? The thing that every single person I have disabled it for has thanked me? The thing that everyone already hates? Oh no, its getting worse? Boohoo. How about instead of porting a 'no duh' article about how garbage it is you mention how to disable it instead? You know, like actually be helpful about the problem. 'Cause if everyone turns it off, maybe Google will fix it. I mean, that is a long shot, but at least if it is disabled it won't act

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[Lando242]

Oh, and for those that need it:

Open the Google app on your phone
Tap your profile picture
Tap Settings
Tap the search bar and type "Discover" without quotes
Tap the slider to disable it.

YMMV depending on what version of Android you have, what vendor made your phone, how old it is, the phases of the moon, and if the 49ers make it to the post season.

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[ucho]

This description is accurate. The only sad thing is in previous versions it actually removed that screen, and now shows empty screen with single "re-enable Discovery" button.

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[gweihir]

Interestingly, my Fairphone apparently came with an "off" default for that. GDPR at work?

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[TwistedGreen]

Oh is that what this is, that annoying "I accidentally swiped the wrong way and now I'm seeing ads"-feature? Jesus H, yes, just disable it.

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[dargaud]

I too have never heard of this. Maybe it's the crap that's on the 'Left 1st page' or whatever it's called, that I disable first on any phone I own or get my hands on.

Ah. That is why YouTube is going to crap

[gweihir]

I noticed the increase in slop and really bad content recently. I basically have stopped looking for new creators besides the about 10 I was following long-term already. There is almost nothing new there now that is worthwhile watching. Late-stage enshittification. I guess Google has an expiry date too, after all.

It has ruined the app

[AeroSC]

I used Discover for years to get quick news about topics of interest but now it's mostly AI summaries and X slop. I've now turned it off and hope everyone else does the same. Just like the other story on user protests on AI content in video games, it's the best way to protest the 'enshitification' going on.

Probably

[whitroth]

I do not own a "smart" phone. However, in the last month or so, google news in the top "latest news", has started putting crap from entertainment and sports.

Even that gets slightly (very slightly) better when I change the URL to https://news.google.com/ [google.com] -ai

Recency is King

[omnichad]

Google has always prioritized rapidly changing content, above relevancy or quality. It makes sense that social media would rise to the top of an environment like that. It doesn't make it good as news, though technically they did call it "Discover" rather than News.

Paywalls and clickfarms

[KowboyKrash]

I am a regular user of the discover feed, most of the legacy media posts are paywalled or end up just being garbage AI click farm articles. any anytime I am hit with either I tell it to never show me stuff from there again. I get better reporting faster without the lies from independent journalist on X and YouTube.

It's almost as if

[Rosco P. Coltrane]

Monopolies gonna monopolize.