I may be an optimist but I think it's just one swing of the pendulum. The web was riding a wave of monetized eyeballs, and the value extraction from it has bec

I may be an optimist but I think it's just one swing of the pendulum. The web was riding a wave of monetized eyeballs, and the value extraction from it has become incredibly … bad. With people having gotten used to the internet, ads gotten more aggressive, more people using adblock etc etc the "free content" industry is in a race to the bottom, they long since reached the bottom and are now fighting over shovels. The LLM explosion is the spark in the powder keg. Now those companies with broken business models have execs pressured by investors seeing the end of the free ride. A lot of money is riding away from this model purely based on (reasonably justified) fear. What's next? Well, predicting the future is difficult, but IMO it's reasonable to think that high quality human content will now come at a premium. For example, subscriber-only communities (be it pay-gated, or gated in some other way… login-only won't cut it for long IMO). The pendulum will swing the other way until someone once again finds and popularizes a push for free and open content, and the cycle will begin anew.