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A visit is a human reader. At the very least they get exposed to your website name. Notice your product/service if you get lucky. Become a customer at a late

by baxtr 2y ago

A visit is a human reader. At the very least they get exposed to your website name. Notice your product/service if you get lucky. Become a customer at a later visit. We are talking about cutting the first step off so that everything which may come afterwards is cut off as well.

lolinder 2y ago
The behavior that TFA is complaining about is that when the user drops a link to a site into Perplexity it is able to summarize the content of that link. This isn't about the discoverability aspect of Perplexity, they're specifically complaining that the ad hoc "summarize this post" requests don't respect robots.txt [0]. That's what I'm arguing in favor of and that's the behavior that TFA is attacking. [0] Which, incidentally, is entirely normal. robots.txt is for the web crawler that indexes, not for ad hoc requests.
TeMPOraL 2y ago
In other words, content is bait, reward is a captured user whose attention - whose sanity, the finite amount of life - can be wasted or plain used against them. I'm more than happy to see all the websites with attention economy business models to shut down. Yes, that might be 90% of the Internet. That would be the 90% that is poisonous shit.
- baxtr 2y ago
  The attention economy will never die. Attention will only shift. From websites to aggregators like perplexity.
  - TeMPOraL 2y ago
    Perplexity isn't playing in the attention economy unless they upsell you, advertise to you, or put any other kind of bullshit between you and your goal. Attention economy is (as the name suggests) about monetizing attention; it does so through friction.
    - baxtr 2y ago
      I didn’t write they would. I said “like”. The next perplexity will show ads. The attention economy will not die. Because it’s hasn’t for the last 100 years. The profits just shift to where the attention is now.
      - TeMPOraL 2y ago
        Fair enough, I agree with that. Hell, we may not need a next Perplexity, this one may very well enshittify couple years down the line - as it happens to almost any service offered commercially on the Internet. I was just saying it isn't happening now - for the moment, Perplexity has arguably much better moral standing than most of the websites they scrape or allow users to one-off browse.
Dylan16807 2y ago
There was a human reader on the other side of the summarization feature. And they did get exposed to the website name. Is that not enough? Would it be different if equivalent summarization was being done by a browser extension?

by baxtr 2y ago

lolinder 2y ago

The behavior that TFA is complaining about is that when the user drops a link to a site into Perplexity it is able to summarize the content of that link. This isn't about the discoverability aspect of Perplexity, they're specifically complaining that the ad hoc "summarize this post" requests don't respect robots.txt [0]. That's what I'm arguing in favor of and that's the behavior that TFA is attacking. [0] Which, incidentally, is entirely normal. robots.txt is for the web crawler that indexes, not for ad hoc requests.

TeMPOraL 2y ago

In other words, content is bait, reward is a captured user whose attention - whose sanity, the finite amount of life - can be wasted or plain used against them. I'm more than happy to see all the websites with attention economy business models to shut down. Yes, that might be 90% of the Internet. That would be the 90% that is poisonous shit.

baxtr 2y ago
The attention economy will never die. Attention will only shift. From websites to aggregators like perplexity.
- TeMPOraL 2y ago
  Perplexity isn't playing in the attention economy unless they upsell you, advertise to you, or put any other kind of bullshit between you and your goal. Attention economy is (as the name suggests) about monetizing attention; it does so through friction.
  - baxtr 2y ago
    I didn’t write they would. I said “like”. The next perplexity will show ads. The attention economy will not die. Because it’s hasn’t for the last 100 years. The profits just shift to where the attention is now.
    - TeMPOraL 2y ago
      Fair enough, I agree with that. Hell, we may not need a next Perplexity, this one may very well enshittify couple years down the line - as it happens to almost any service offered commercially on the Internet. I was just saying it isn't happening now - for the moment, Perplexity has arguably much better moral standing than most of the websites they scrape or allow users to one-off browse.

Dylan16807 2y ago

There was a human reader on the other side of the summarization feature. And they did get exposed to the website name. Is that not enough? Would it be different if equivalent summarization was being done by a browser extension?