donkeyd

The only thing you find on social media is influencers showing expensive cars. Good luck planning a holiday based on that.

We made this site for people who search. We were those people, searching Google for where to watch cars racing on the Nürburgring and then getting nothing but cryptic route descriptions on forums.

So we created a map with actual walking routes and people were finding them. Now they're not finding them and they're back to lots of searching.

We get some traction on social media too. But it's people who already go there and know a lot of what we provide already. People don't search Instagram for walking routes to POIs.

You can write a web site about Coca Cola if you want. If it's just factual information that's all within fair use.

As long as we don't use the trademarked name 'Nürburgring' or their logo or an outline of the track in branding, it's all fair game. If we were to start selling t-shirts it would be a bit more tricky and we'd have to be pretty careful.

Definitely. All of them were affected equally, pretty much.

We have a single list with affiliate links on there. Which happened because a company proactively approached us to share their link on our site because they liked the content.

Edit: I do see how it may have seemed like we had a lot of referral links due to the setup of outgoing links. Changed that now, so there is pretty much just the one left.

Last year a friend and I made a website about the Nurburgring. It provided basic info for first time visitors that we were missing on our first visit. My friend spent a lot of time creating a UI with a custom map for displaying locations and routes. I wrote a bunch of content that was thoroughly researched.

At a certain point we ended up being invited by one of the largest rental companies to see whether we could work together. They invited us because the content was incredibly useful for their visitors and they preferred our calendar over the official one for ease of use.

So clearly, our site was adding value for the target audience we had in mind. We were also consistently getting visitors through different search engines that were looking for the info we provided. The number of visitors was growing consistently and pretty much all the feedback we got was positive.

In March, Google rolled out a new algo which all but completely removed us from search results. Out visitors dropped about 80% and growth has disappeared. What was a fun project that we spent many hours on is now a waste of computing resources.

I hate that Google gatekeeps the internet.

There really is none. A smart company would work with the 4 eyes principle though (still no guarantee).

However, if a company does find an unrelated e-mail they want to use against you (which is what most people fear), that makes them liable.

> Europe isn't a single country

Correct, but it does have a single ECHR. Even though some countries still ignore them.

> The rules on this vary across Europe

Not really, ECHR has already ruled on this.

It's pretty much only allowed if there's an important reason for it. For example, to recover something invaluable (contract, code, report) that isn't available somewhere else and cannot be replaced. In that case that's also the only thing that them employer can look for. They can't open obviously unrelated e-mails. So before talking to legal, make sure you have a valid reason.

Or, you know, pay for the content you consume.

Same with Optery shared below. I wonder if there are any European/International counterparts to these services.

I worked as a detective in the Netherlands and we had a single task; 'waarheidsvinding', which means 'finding the truth'. We didn't have the task of convicting someone or finding a crime, we had the task of finding the truth. So in a case like this, that meant finding out exactly why someone jumped or fell from a balcony.

Maybe not, but some cooling means less servers to shut down.

I feel like this one is impossible to do right. On one side, it's people like you saying: 'government oversight is hurting our innovation'. Directly opposed is: 'AI Companies are growing too fast and something bad will happen if oversight doesn't come soon.'

I agree with both and really don't have a clue what's the wise thing to do. I think it's probably the oversight thing, but since other countries will definitely compete without this oversight, someone will eventually release SkyNet. But do we want to be the first?

I don't know...

Yeah, technically it's a pretty cool concept, but 'privacy risk' is way ahead of the real world.