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AI is killing the web – can anything save it?

• eboynyc32 1y ago
  Shit happens. A new shift is upon us
• worik 1y ago
  Am I the only person who thinks the exact opposite? I use Duckduckgo, and it has been finishing in quality along with the rest of the web, drowning in SEO rubbish But their AI "search assist" cuts through the BS and offers direct links to useful sights Mēh scary headlines are "ruining the Economist"
• deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
• sylware 1y ago
  Start to regulate the technical protocols to access the AI prompts. Like regulated noscript/basic (x)html interop. Or 'curl' based simple APIs. Basically, if the whatng cartel web engines are not anymore required to access and use "AIs", things will start to significantly move.
• input_sh 1y ago
  https://archive.is/nhrYS https://archive.is/nhrYS
• pknerd 1y ago
  I don't get why the articles behind paywalls are shared here.
  • aw4y 1y ago
    they killed the web, not the AI.
    • keyringlight 1y ago
      One of the things I've been wondering about with the 'digital detox' trends or one of the younger generations getting dumbphones instead of smart, is why haven't the papers found some way of turning back the clock to explore capitalizing on that when it's supposedly hard to sell news now. 24 hour news is decades old at this point and the constant firehose of events from every location on the globe is tiring especially if only a tiny fraction is directly relevant to you. I'd be interesting if they could make a more attractive 'news/analysis product' like a newspaper or the evening news broadcast which is distinct from what is readily available from all the other sources.
      • charcircuit 1y ago
        So a recommendation engine hooked up to news articles. Google News already exists.
      • vonunov 1y ago
        Any day now some smartass is going to start selling analogue newspapers like hotcakes. Speaking of, I wonder how much I can get neohipsters to pay for hotcakes on the street. Slapjacks, I'll call them . . .
    • janice1999 1y ago
      It's the other way around. Paywalls are a result of the web and the Ad companies which power it killing the revenue models of publishers. AI, which steals even more and repackages their content, will make it worse.
      • spjt 1y ago
        What I don't understand is why nobody has actually figured this out. I read a lot of different news sources. I'd have no problem paying a reasonable amount of money to read an article I came across in the Podunk Picayune that looked of interest, but no, I have to sign up for a subscription. So they get nothing.
  • ElisaChemy 1y ago
    Totally agree, here is something is use to read without paywalls https://archive.ph/2021.09.10-164025/https://www.bostonglobe.com/business/?p1=BGHeader_MainNav https://archive.ph/2021.09.10-164025/https://www.bostonglobe...
  • kikokikokiko 1y ago
    Because paywalls are optional, at least for a crowd such as the HN crowd. Information wants to be free.
  • mdavid626 1y ago
    Yeah, just share the archive link directly.
    • aspenmayer 1y ago
      Canonical links are preferred, per guidelines. Paywalled sites that are otherwise on topic with a workaround are usually allowed. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html
• sharpfuryz 1y ago
  [flagged]
  • deleted 1y ago
    [deleted]
  • lmpdev 1y ago
    The thing that stops me pursing this idea though is how do you verify contributors to this new internet aren’t platforms/businesses? Where do you draw the line? Who gets to draw the line?
    • xyzzy123 1y ago
      Even if you could do it perfectly (distinguish "authentic people" from slop merchants) the same old actors will do the same old things as long as the incentives are there. They will just wear "real people" like skin suits. Almost worse :/
    • sircastor 1y ago
      This is an incomplete thought, but a friend of mine has this idea around reputation built through a sort-of key signing. You get a key, your friend gets a key, you sign each other's keys. The key can serve as an indicator of trust, or validity that an individual's contributions are meaningful (or something). And if your friend suddenly turns into a corporate shill, you could revoke that trust. And if the people haven't established their own trust with that person, their trust goes when yours does. Transitive trust. It obviously has some flaws, and could be gamed in the right circumstances, but I think it's an interesting idea.
      • moron4hire 1y ago
        Sounds like following people on a social media platform and only reading posts from in your network. Which is exactly how most people I know use Bluesky. It works better than Twitter's algorithmic feed but it's still not foolproof because not everyone has the same idea of what sort of content they are willing to trust/ track.
• nonvibecoding 1y ago
  This didn’t just start now. It’s been fading for over a decade. I remember when every forum had its own look, strange layouts, unique colors, and a vibe you couldn’t really describe but you felt it. Now everything feels the same. Same layout, same font, same clean boxy design. Sites copy each other. AI just made it more obvious, but the soul started slipping away long before that
  • thom 1y ago
    I remember usenet where every forum was exactly the same and it was still better than today, so I’m not convinced this is a fundamental symptom of our current problems. To me it’s more that the internet has lost any sort of physical, spatial, kinetic quality. There’s no time or place, no nooks and crannies to disappear into with friends. Just an unyielding cacophony. I agree it’s all undifferentiated but it’s not the aesthetics that are the problem for me.
    • nonvibecoding 1y ago
      Yeah, maybe you’re right. Could be nostalgia playing tricks on me. I just remember how exciting it felt to join a new forum, or discover something like eMule, Sababa DC, or random p2p tools. Everything felt raw and full of possibility. Even if a lot of it looked the same, it didn’t feel the same. There was this sense of exploring something alive.
      • thom 1y ago
        It's possible that various Discord servers, or obscure streamer chatrooms still feel like this, and we're just old. But it definitely feels like the default has become very top-down and public instead of bottom-up and intimate.
        • spacemadness 1y ago
          I think the difference there is streamers are just there to get money from their audiences. Doing something they like sure, but a vast majority are trying to make a living. That has a different context entirely.
• alganet 1y ago
  I know it sounds counter-intuitive, but I think we need less collaboration, less competition, and less team dynamics in general. Anything that does cross-pollination should be opaque. More individuals cultivating personal points of view drastically different from homogenized masses. That extends way beyond the web though.
  • nine_k 1y ago
    Pafnuty Chebyshev, a Russian mathematician who discovered a bunch of important things, deliberately limited his intake of other mathematicians' works, in order to force himself think in original ways, not ways suggested by others' works. This medicine needs to be taken in moderation though, else one can end up reinventing some key wheels instead of speeding forward on these wheels, like https://fliptomato.wordpress.com/2007/03/19/medical-researcher-discovers-integration-gets-75-citations/ https://fliptomato.wordpress.com/2007/03/19/medical-research...
    • alganet 1y ago
      That is quite interesting, but it is a personal choice of his. If just a bunch of math wizards and weirdos do it, they'll be seen as isolated and it won't take effect in the dynamics of the web. I'm talking about everyone doing it.
    • lazyasciiart 1y ago
      I read somewhere that the explanation for the integration article was citation restrictions on some other paper, where the easiest solution was to get the method published in an existing relevant journal to create the citation needed.
• austin-cheney 1y ago
  I thought social media killed the Web 20 years ago. RIP
• anilgulecha 1y ago
  Making it federated (so it's a true network of people's sites) is what can theoretically save things. But given under 0.001% can self-host, I don't see how that can work .. the centralized services are slated to win. Perhaps some global law could help - significantly disincentivizing for centralization and network effects.
  • IanCal 1y ago
    I feel like the barrier for self hosting could be so much lower. The resources required to host a static site are tiny and even a dynamic one with comments accessed by all the people I actually know could easily run on a cheap router.
    • jen729w 1y ago
      I think self-hosting is a distraction. You can make your own site using Astro and deploy it for free to Netlify and still get 99% of what we're talking about here. If that was less scary maybe more people would do it!
      • JKCalhoun 1y ago
        Welcome to MySpace!
  • zer00eyz 1y ago
    > But given under 0.001% can self-host, I don't see how that can work The place where the web is still great is where you have to be invested to be a real participant. Everyone can yell about politics in a text box on twiter/FB/reddit/HN or post photos to IG/Dataing site Or videos to twitch/YouTube. If you can host something, even for a small number of people your one of the rare few. If your "into" something where there is a focused community then your back into one of those 1% pools where people vibe and participate. To make an analogy of it: The web is now a tourist town. Everyone is interested in making money off the visitors with the flashy lights and signs luring them into the over priced tourist traps. The locals, the natives, the REAL .01% know where the cheap places with great food and local flavor are.
• tobyhinloopen 1y ago
  The web was already dead. > We care about your privacy. Can we please put a camera in your toilet seat for a personalized experience? > > [ ACCEPT ] Browsing the web is a nightmare these days, I rarely visit "new" websites > Subscribe to our spam for a 10% off coupon > > [ ] [SEND] It is just a pain to visit any website these days... anyone involved creating these modern monstrosities should just fire themselves and go on a hike or something. > We rely on invasive, tracking ads! Please enable your adblocker so we can get 0.00001 USD, please. > > [IVE DISABLED MY FIREWALL AND ANTI-VIRUS] [PAY 999 USD A MONTH FOR AN AD-FREE EXPERIENCE]
• casey2 1y ago
  It's still not as annoying as the assorted influencers who repeat The Economist headlines and articles back at me Anyway this article is about AI replacing web search, not "killing the web" which I would take as it somehow deleting or overwriting content on existing webpages. Or generating so much spam as to make the web unusable for the average person. Large sites that can't exist without "traffic" already killed the web a long time ago. A paywall is the proper solution, not ads in content and content in ads. That means you will have lower traffic, it doesn't mean you are being killed. It just means you stopped assaulting passersby who are linked to your site.
  • rambambram 1y ago
    > Anyway this article is about AI replacing web search, not "killing the web" Indeed, exaggerating title. But we all have to get the idea the web is really dying, so we give up working on it. We have to get that idea because the genie of the web is already out of the bottle for 30+ years. That stuff is going nowhere. The open web is a hindrance for big businesses. Big business wants to keep internet infrastructure to push apps, AI and what not, but does not want to keep the open web.
  • fifticon 1y ago
    the standardized web we have had until now, was policed by google so they could harvest ad revenue from us. with no gorilla to encorce such standard, the web will balkanize as it's done before.
• mmcconnell1618 1y ago
  I just read Technofeudalism by Yanis Varoufakis which has an interesting perspective that "cloud capitalism" is replacing traditional capitalism and competition. A few players are assembling their own fiefdoms inside dominant web/mobile platforms. https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/751443/technofeudalism-by-yanis-varoufakis/ https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/751443/technofeudal... The internet doesn't have a clear, simple, micro-payment system that would allow people to reward value, so instead we have an attention based system where the number of likes and followers grants social status and financial opportunity.
  • jrexilius 1y ago
    When cryptocurrency first started getting attention (2010,2011-ish?) I was so excited that a potential micropayments system would come out of it and solve this problem. Sadly it did not go that way..
    • egypturnash 1y ago
      god fr real, everyone making shit and selling it online is still paying their tithe to Visa/MC and working under their rules as to what you can and can't sell, and possibly another tithe to Paypal or Square or Stripe or whoever on top of that. Crypto's just a giant sucker trap and the amount of stuff you can buy with it without paying your tithe to Visa/MC to turn it into real money is infinitesimal.
    • deleted 1y ago
      [deleted]
  • deleted 1y ago
    [deleted]
  • perilunar 1y ago
    Yes, I'm more and more convinced that this is the root problem. All advertising-driven media turn to shit eventually, and the web is no exception. Micro-payments could have prevented it, and it's a real shame it never happened.
• medion 1y ago
  No. All great things come to an end - artistic movements, cultural, nations, etc etc - the end of the internet is now.
  • asadotzler 1y ago
    The internet is cables and other hardware, and protocols, none of which is going anywhere. The Web, an internet application, seems to be dying, and certainly newsgroups and other internet applications have also died, but the internet itself isn't dead or dying. In fact, it's growing as the global rollout of broadband continues and the unconnected get connected.
    • fifticon 1y ago
      the protocols are going if they are not enforced by a google. google was the "US" that gave you the post-WW2 "peace" on the web. The big players only follow "your" standards when it suits them.
      • fifticon 1y ago
        consider mobile apps on android and apple. they are an example of internet without browser. you only get widely used standard browsers if big money sees a moneymaking point in having them.
• _nalply 1y ago
  AI is one sharp tool cutting slices from the old internet. But perpetrators have used different tools from the start: SEO spam, algorithmic feeds, embrace/extend/extinguish, building moats, the attention economy, and many others. AI is just the next newfangled sharp tool. In other words, I don't think that AI is killing the web. It's being profit-oriented and running amok in an unleashed way. It's prisoner's dilemma. You know, if you don't do it then someone else will do it and you lose. Enshittification is one consequence. The internet experienced it from the beginning. But only about fifteen years ago companies learnt how to squeeze the last drop out and, like in the tragedy of the commons, everybody is worse off. And what's the most catastrophic? People are confused. They look at the tools but not at some famous people behind these rampages. Of course as leaders they just optimize the hell out of the internet with the target that their companies thrive. But in doing so they cause heavy damage.
• dankobgd 1y ago
  paywall can surely save it
• noiv 1y ago
  I think, the web was killed before by human slob search engines can't or won't filter. Now we find out, a little longer prompt in an AI chat returns better results. So what?
  • JKCalhoun 1y ago
    But for the existence of YouTube, I think the ad business killed the internet.
• SalariedSlave 1y ago
  The "web" is already just business infrastructure. It already was, much prior to AI. I would challenge the assumption that there is anything worth saving.
  • JKCalhoun 1y ago
    Yeah, the sentiment I was looking for in this thread. I could get over the death of the Web pretty quickly, I think.
• deadbabe 1y ago
  Web is obsolete. Going forward AI is the first and maybe last step to getting information about a topic. No need to sift through ads, forum drama, clickbait blog posts, comments etc… just straight compiled information into your brain as quickly as possible. Yea sometimes it’s wrong, but sometimes things you find on the wild web are wrong anyway, just deal with it. I find that when people pine for the old web, what they’re really asking for is some way to connect to other people and see things that people have written or made just for fun in a genuine way, without it being performative, derivative or for other motivations. In theory social media should have been this, but people’s constant need to accumulate validation or tendency to produce meme-like content adversely affects the quality of their output, giving it a machined style feel that rarely feels genuine or true to their human nature. Instead of seeing people’s true personalities, you see their “masks”. Thus the issue is not rooted in a technical problem but rather a cultural one: people no longer naively share things that don’t fuel their ego in the most perfect way.
  • _hao 1y ago
    Until that same AI starts shilling ads and certain viewpoints peddled by their owners in the output... This will happen 100% (ads, the other bit has already happened). The economics of all of these models doesn't work as is. There will be a major squeeze down the line.
    • deleted 1y ago
      [deleted]
    • JKCalhoun 1y ago
      Some of us have dipped our toes in local LLMs. To be sure, the ones I can run on my hardware always pale when compared to the online ones. But perhaps in time the ones you can run locally will be good enough. Or perhaps an Apple or Kagi will host an LLM with no built-in monetization skewing its answers.
      • fifticon 1y ago
        you csn run the model, but someone with vastly bigger resources need to train it.
• jillesvangurp 1y ago
  At the same time, apps are also a bit in decline. People still make them but the whole race for making it to the top 10 in the app stores seems to have faded away. And a lot of them are simple web page wrappers. People still install some apps but more on a need to have basis than that they are constantly adding/removing apps. So, I don't buy this "the web is in decline" framing. Change is a constant on the web. Things were very different in 1995 (plain html, no good search engines), 2005 (no widespread web capable smart phones usage yet, Google, AJAX), 2015 (peak social media and app hype), and 2025 (social media has shifted to new apps and lots of people are disengaging entirely, AI is starting to threaten Google, content aggregators serve most web content). For 2035, I would predict that AI will drive a need for authenticity. Existing platforms don't provide this because they lack content signatures. We've had the tools to reliably sign content for decades. But we don't use those a lot except for DRM content behind paywalls (for commercial reasons). So, you can't really tell apart the AI generated propaganda, marketing, misinformation, etc. from authentic human created content by individuals you care about. And that might be contributing to people disengaging a bit. But you can see the beginnings of this on platforms like bluesky and signal which push end to end encryption and user verification. People might share AI nonsense via these platforms. But they seem to be less about that as say X, Tik Tok or Instagram are. We sometimes watermark our images. We don't digitally sign them. Why is that? Just speculating here but the web could use a big upgrade here and do more than just certify domain name ownership. Which is fairly meaningless if the domain is some big network with many millions of users. What about certifying content itself? Reliably tie content to their creators in a way that can't be forged. IMHO this is long overdue and the related UX challenges are there but solvable in principle. DRM is a prime example of a fairly usable implementation. Just works if you paid for the content. Signed content would make it very challenging to pass off AI gibberish as authentic if it's not signed by a reputable private key. And if it happened anyway, that would damage the reputation of that key. I don't exclude the possibility of reputable AIs emerging. How would you tell those apart from the disreputable ones?
  • fifticon 1y ago
    I recognise the need you describe, but there will be very strong incentives to forge anyway (ie spew ai-generated "not made by AI!" slop)
• OfficeChad 1y ago
  [dead]
• amelius 1y ago
  Maybe start a new movement, similar to the Amish. And have a completely separated version of the internet.
  • mcosta 1y ago
    How are you going to prevent that history repeat itself?
    • somethingreen 1y ago
      Invite only, laws, law enforcement, exile. Federated sovereign clusters. Digital nations, ultimately. Except you don't need weapons and a piece of land to establish a new one. (We already have these, we just let corporations run them)
• bell-cot 1y ago
  Problem #1 - to "save it", you first have to define the idealized and/or snapshot-in-time web that you want to save. Don't expect much agreement here, especially on the details. Problem #2 - if you aren't the Emperor of Earth or some such, how could you make your ideal web stable over time, in today's world?
• kkfx 1y ago
  We are many, search engines are the mean to discover things because even with usenet it's impossible for a human to discover via URLs and links enough information on the web, that's the real revolution: links are useful but not enough. Search engines are the best tool we have had so far to find knowledge around the web, now LLMs try to surpass traditional search engines milking knowledge from web contents, like we have many articles about wildfires in a region, but let's say not one about wildfire trends in that region, an LLM could try to spot a trend milking all articles in a significant timeframe. The Conrad Gessner's Biblioteca Universalis dream. So well, LLMs do not kill the web, eat it. We are still almost the sole valid source of data for LLMs. What really killed the web are social networks as proprietary walled gardens instead of an open Usenet with a web companion for stuff to be preserved for posterity or too long/complex for a mere post. What killed the web is the fact that ISPs do not offer an open homeserver instead of a closed box called "router" even if it's a limited homeserver. With an open version, with IPv6, anyone could buy a domain name and publish from his/shes own iron a blog with a ready-to-write software, with automatic RSS feeds, newsletters etc. If we give such tool to the masses the original web will be back but it would mean free speech and giants/politicians etc have free speech preferring ways to master public topics through their platforms to hide from most stuff they dislike and push ideas they like...
  • salawat 1y ago
    Search engine indexes being turned into copyright enforcement levers also significantly killed the net as it created scarcity in info dissemination for the sake of maintaining info asymmetry. Go ahead and try to find JLG equipment/service manuals on the open net anymore. I'll wait.
    • kkfx 1y ago
      they are anyway needed and we also have YaCy as an example, and other distributed search solution. The point is that most do not participate so only commercial one get enough resources to be useful.
    • vonunov 1y ago
      Those rental boom lifts and so on? Are these it? https://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Acsapps.jlg.com+filetype%3Apdf+service https://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Acsapps.jlg.com+filety... https://www.google.com/search?q=site:csapps.jlg.com+filetype:pdf https://www.google.com/search?q=site:csapps.jlg.com+filetype...
• senectus1 1y ago
  I think the economics will save it. AI isnt cost effective. The investors are going to want their money back very soon due to outside economic influences... they wont get it back and many of these AI pop ups are going to fold. the rest are going to scale back and jack up prices.
  • vannucci 1y ago
    Personally this is what I’m hoping for. Stories I read about services sold as AI turning out to be minimum wage workers tells me that as much as everyone thinks this is the dawn of a new age of hyperintelligent machines we haven’t gotten as far as we wanted to as fast as we wanted, or hoped.
  • theshackleford 1y ago
    Given that incredibly capable models can be run on fairly low cost hardware, how will this really change anything?
  • protocolture 1y ago
    >AI isnt cost effective. The investors are going to want their money back very soon due to outside economic influences... they wont get it back and many of these AI pop ups are going to fold. the rest are going to scale back and jack up prices. Nothing stopping us from having cake and eating. Open AI could fall over, and we would still have all the publicly available models kicking around.
    • senectus1 1y ago
      its not the I/O that is costing.. its the hardware to push them, and the power to push the hardware... oh and the companies themselves that are pulling in mountains of debt to build themselves...
• kristianc 1y ago
  A huge chunk of online content (especially what ranked on Google )was already SEO churned sludge, and I'm not I buy the argument that elite publishers and creators like the New York Times, The Economist, and The Atlantic have ever really depended on Google. When the Economist sells itself to advertisers it doesn’t talk about its web traffic numbers, it talks about the fact that it's read by CEOs. You're likely to see content creators pull their work behind access-controlled spaces (which might actually work out better than the current bargain of it being free but unreadable, recipes buried by long winding stories, etc). You might see the weird web emerge again as search engines are able to discover it under a pile of SEO sludge.
  • sofixa 1y ago
    The Economist and FT no, but a lot of the other more mainstream (read by a wider audience) media like Guardian, NY Times, Washington Post, Le Monde, Le Figaro, etc. depend a lot on Google traffic. There were numerous legal disputes over this dependence, how Google circumvented it for users (the quick answers that made it so a lot of queries were resolved without even needing to visit the source website), and profit sharing.
    • kristianc 1y ago
      You see I even disagree with that. People don't accidentally discover the Guardian, NY Times, Washington Post, Le Monde, Le Figaro via Google, their muscle memory is trained to these publications because that's where they go to get their opinions and worldview validated. Of course they can get that from ChatGPT too, but it hits different when you realise ChatGPT validates everything you say anyway.
      • sofixa 1y ago
        > You see I even disagree with that. People don't accidentally discover the Guardian, NY Times, Washington Post, Le Monde, Le Figaro via Google, their muscle memory is trained to these publications because that's where they go to get their opinions and worldview validated That's for daily news reading. If you search for news (like what happened with the Spanish/Iberian grid), you'd use Google. And you shouldn't use ChatGPT because it wastes a ton of resources to just hallucinate anyways, whereas a Google search gets you the direct links to the sources.
• dspillett 1y ago
  Complex (if you want to completely opt out, opting in is so quick & easy that you can do it accidentally of course) tracking permission boxes¹ and other annotances aren't helping. I use archive.today and other tools to work around that, others ask an online LLM (presumably those skip the pop-overs and such just like a search engine would) for a summary. -------- [1] No, the EU with GDPR and other governments with relevant legislation are not to blame, it is the sites chosing to implement all the dark patterns to try subvert those regs that are the issue.
• ChiMan 1y ago
  Seems possible that one possible unintended consequence of AI could be a rebirth of the Web as something closer to what we knew. Because why use search at all for general inquiry when AI can satisfy much of that? More critically, it’s not hard to imagine that, with AI-boosted boosted coding, a thousand bespoke search engines and other platforms being just around the corner, radically changing the economics of platform lock-in. When you can build your own version of Google Search with the help of AI and do the same with social media or any other centralizing Internet force, then platforms cease to be platforms at all. With AI, the challenges of self-hosting could become quite manageable as well. And while we’re at it, some version of the same, individual-centered computing economics on your own devices seems possible. In these senses, it’s quite possible that Jobs’s vision of computing as extensions of individuals rather than individuals being extensions of computing is again at hand, with the magic of self-curated order from a chaotic Net not far behind.
• dehrmann 1y ago
  > With fewer visitors, Stack Overflow is seeing fewer questions posted on its message boards When you operate a community that's hostile to questions that have already been answered, are poorly researched, or are homework, don't be surprised when people start taking those questions elsewhere, and don't be surprised when they start asking their good questions elsewhere, too.
  • insane_dreamer 1y ago
    Elsewhere where? SO is still the best place for obscure coding questions.
  • BrenBarn 1y ago
    But if you operate a community that isn't hostile to those things, don't be surprised if it gets flooded with the same few questions 10 million times.
  • kmfrk 1y ago
    Yeah, asking a programming question without some bitter old coder tut-tutting you is very much a selling point with AI chatbots, regardless of my reservations with the overall trend.
    • jay_kyburz 1y ago
      The sarcastic enthusiasm and fake humanity from the LLMs is wearing thin as well if you ask me.
      • theshackleford 1y ago
        The difference is I can instruct an LLM (and have) to knock that shit off.
        • bilbo0s 1y ago
          True. Humans don’t take direction very well.
• bilsbie 1y ago
  Someone should make a new internet modeled off of around 2002.
  • chasd00 1y ago
    Bind to port 81 and go for it.
• JKCalhoun 1y ago
  > Openai is soon expected to launch a browser of its own. Is that right? I'm not sure how I feel about that. Actually, I think I know how I feel about it.
• PaulHoule 1y ago
  AI inference can save it because it can be used to make tools that reverse "enshittification" Cloudflare slams the door in the the face of this "exit".
• ppqqrr 1y ago
  the web died years ago, for a different reason: labor monopoly. The web, and software in general, stopped reflecting or serving users, when the ruling class started pouring massive capital to dismantle any paradigm for major web/software development other than ones vetted by pedigree VCs and planned for obsolescence by acquisition. Gen AI is actually the only thing that could’ve punctured their hold on world software - the vague air of confidence they maintain when they talk about “their future of AI” is a facade. There’s already a new Web (or Webs) coming that will dwarf the current one, and it won’t be coming from them - so they’re clinging to their only means of control: the AI token infra.
  • righthand 1y ago
    > There’s already a new Web (or Webs) coming that will dwarf the current one Care to elaborate? What is this new web if no one is incentivized to publish, only consume?
    • ppqqrr 1y ago
      there's always people who go against the incentives - all they need to win is for the status quo to become so rigid and fragile to a point where all it takes to create a promising independent alternative is like one guy determined to be "based"
    • adrianwaj 1y ago
      There's something here: https://www.reddit.com/r/oasisnetwork/comments/1m5bu1y/what_if_your_evm_could_keep_secrets_reading_about/n4blbny/ https://www.reddit.com/r/oasisnetwork/comments/1m5bu1y/what_... Basically, provide incentives and a framework for publishing great works via blockchain that would otherwise be ignored, stolen, shelved or suppressed.
      • righthand 1y ago
        The “old web” works because it’s nearly free to publish and no strings attached. Now you want to give everyone online a coupled bank account.
• joegahona 1y ago
  “Yet as Google does the Googling, humans no longer visit the websites from which the information is gleaned. ” Can you blame them? These publishers’ content is buried under paywalls, logins, screen-engulfing ads, deceptive headlines, the list goes on forever. Publishers created such user-hostile experiences that people are desperate for a user interface that’s barely there and gives them what they want, and will gladly pay $20 per month for it.
• weinzierl 1y ago
  I might well be killing the ad financed web and that is good. I wouldn't be surprised if Google dies with it. I do not see traditionally paid and paywalled content suffer. The discoverability in that segment already suffered from how Google treated it and AI only sped up the inevitable. Good content behind paywall will be fine. The small sliver of the web that is popular on HN and that is, let's call it altruistically free, will only benefit. Less competition from ad supported content. As long as you only care about your content being read and not where and under which name, you will be good.
  • fishcrackers 1y ago
    [dead]
• Havoc 1y ago
  Think it’s a done deal. I have a little bit of hope for semi independent operations though. Things like hn or lemmy that were never really ad supported anyway and have some distance from the enshitification trend
• julienmarie 1y ago
  I think we need to look at it per type of use. The beauty of the web is its versatility. - It's an ever evolving information repository - the initial use - from Wikipedia to blogs to newspapers. - It's a debate space - forums ( used to be newsgroups ) - It's a transaction space - ecommerce, marketplaces - It's a social space – from keeping in touch to meeting new people – social media, dating websites. used to be irc - It's an entertainment space - tiktok, youtube, netflix, etc... AI will have the harshest initial impact on the information repository use. It will cannibalize it but also needs it to feed itself. The transaction space will be affected. Protocols like MCPs once strengthened will need to support transactions. Payment infrastructure will need to be built for this. Then, the social space will be the weirdest. AI Companions will become ubiquitous, naturally filling the void left by the weakening of the social fabric and loneliness epidemic. For the debate space, 99% of it doesn't play the role of debate, but more of the role of echo chamber and social validation. It's AI Companionship but by community. These spaces will stay. AI is one to one, not one to many. But they will drastically lose appeal. AI will perfectly play this role of validation and echo chamber. Finally, entertainment is already being disrupted. The question will be how the industry as a whole ( it's more than purely content creation, it's the whole mythos creation around it ) will adapt to the possibility of on the fly content creation. AI will become the main human-machine interface, and the role of machines will grow exponentially in our daily lives. The capitalistic concentration that will ensue will be never seen before. The company who will win AI will be the most powerful company in history. They will dominate not only tech, but culture, economics, world view. Remember, GPT2 was only released 6 years ago.
• freeopinion 1y ago
  AI might be killing search. But there is more to the web than search. The aspect of thee web where you could look up the answer to any question or find some piece of a long tail seemed miraculous. And those parts are taking a big hit. But the part where I can see if my child is missing any assignments is still great. And the aspect where I can order a part for my bicycle from the one supplier I trust half a continent away? That still works. The web is still capable of being a better Sears catalog than the Sears catalog. Even without using Amazon or some other unreliable vendor. And it is still a great way to check your bank statement. AI is going to kill a lot of things about the web, but many of those things should probably be killed anyway. There is a lot of good stuff that is going to survive just fine. It remains to be seen if killing off some bad stuff will outweigh killing off some of the good stuff.
  • asdff 1y ago
    All of the stuff you listed that are great about the web are commercial things fwiw. If the community side of the web dies out, all thats left is a tool for business or government interests. Sure you get some benefits but consider what is really being lost. A powerful way to learn independently, to communicate with other people, to organize, to share ideas and opinions. What happens to our society when these sort of things are silenced? Who benefits from that happening? I think we know it isn't you and me.
    • freeopinion 1y ago
      "Independent study" is an interesting phrase. You can still browse MIT courses despite AI. You can still read the translated works of Friedman. This is a commonly used meaning of independent study. But it isn't quite the same as Curie's independent study. If Stackoverflow is experiencing a steep dropoff it suggests that people are more satisfied with AI. Presumably they are still learning independently with the help of web-based AI. You should see the damage AI is doing to classroom instruction. People who are trying to learn can benefit from AI just like they could from the massive human effort of Wikipedia. People who are trying to dodge can hurt themselves with AI in the same way people hurt themselves with Wikipedia. None of that means the web is dying.
• throwpoaster 1y ago
  I hope not! The web sucks now. Talking to LLMs is way, way better.
  • northhnbesthn 1y ago
    Sadly HN has never been of much value to me despite my first account being almost of drinking age. Yes, having people like Nagle (animats) and other hardcore experts who know what they’re talking about is great. But they’re an extreme rarity in a sea of absolute shit. You want to talk about enshittification? Just take a look at the nosedive of HN. So yeah, for me it’s usually more insightful to do a deep dive with an LLM. Before that, of course, the Wikipedia rabbit holes were I think a staple of the internet. LLMs for me to a large degree satisfy the “hacker curiosity” that HN guidelines wank over but betray with every bullshit upvoted and gamed clickbait post. It’s a search engine that flattens rabbit holes for me and makes traversing the corpus of information out there very enjoyable. People complaining about a LLMs being scrapers is to me just amusing to the point of nonsensical. The entire point is to use it as a discovery engine that brought the most common and the most obscure on the same level of accessibility.
• superkuh 1y ago
  It's not AI. It's corporations, a much more dangerous form of non-human person. The actual AI bots aren't doing this abusive HTTP request spamming that causes services to be infeasible to run due to resource usage. It's coming from normal HTTP request software with no AI. And it's happening due to the perverse incentives of corporations and their intrinsic lack of liability. They truly are the worst legal persons.
• idiotsecant 1y ago
  I think the even bigger problem is that what AI is doing to the Internet now, it will do to personal knowledge on a generational scale. It will get good, startling good, to the point that going through the heavy effort of really learning things becomes old fashioned, and positively antiquated. I am afraid of what happens to the march of progress when that happens.
• midtvu 1y ago
  I think we are in the timeline where AI tales over. Look at Elon's tesla robots. I don't think AI will become sentient and rule/kill humans, more like corrupt rulers using AI to generate videos of people they don't like commiting a crime, and using it as proof the victim did the crime.
• iamzubin 1y ago
  AI didn’t kill the internet; it was already going downhill. Articles were mostly fluff, reviews were just affiliate links, and SEO race had already ruined a lot of stuff.
• eximius 1y ago
  AI is just a one more tool that increasing wealth inequality and over monetization/unregulated capitalism are exploiting that makes everything it touches worse. It's not the first tool, it won't be the last.
• sameerds 1y ago
  I am not entirely sure that this is a bad thing. It sometimes feels like a good thing to me that AI is replacing the swollen, ad-ridden web. Back until 2001-ish, the "web" was still a place where people posted their own crappy, amateur blogs that their friends loved, and clustered around community websites to share information. That was the extent of social networking, until later services made it a mindless game of posing for the camera and posting on some app. Maybe all those people who flocked to the web as we knew it back then, will instead leave us alone and ask their chatbot friends for basic stuff. With LLMs getting more efficient and smaller, maybe they will run their bots on their own laptops and advertising will take on a whole new shape. Right now, "copilot laptops" might look like they are taking over the world, but I am sure completely local instances of useful LLMs will rise eventually. Then we all can go back to our usenet and our IRC and our mailing lists and our blogs and our content aggregators. And no, not sarcasm. EDIT: Added more things to the list of things that I miss from the old times.
  • anton-c 1y ago
    Wow. I'm dealing with too many mental health problems to have that optimistic an idea even form in my head. Awesome take. I miss those days. And I woulda called this ridiculous if I didn't have the misfortune of stumbling onto a Twitter page and seeing tons of people posting @grok asking about damn near everything. I didn't realize it had gone that far. I hope you're right!
  • lucasyvas 1y ago
    AI will be ridden with ads - just disguised as answers. And without the web there is no new datasets for AI so it’ll grind to a halt.
    • UberFly 1y ago
      That first sentence gave me shivers because I know it's true. I don't think we realize the extent of the subtle but constant manipulation we'll all get to experience.
      • 1y ago
• jlarocco 1y ago
  The web has been terrible for 20 years. Advertising killed it, not AI.
  • i_niks_86 1y ago
    As AI tools shift how people search, the old tricks no longer work. Clickbait collapses. Content mills go silent. And in their place, there is a chance to build something better- something rooted in quality, not quantity.
    • jlarocco 1y ago
      Sorry, but I just don't believe it when Google, Facebook and Microsoft are the major players in AI. It'd be the foxes protecting the hen house, to say the least.
    • ykonstant 1y ago
      I admire your optimism.
    • studentik 1y ago
      What stops AI to lead users by the nose? To the benefit of owners and advertisers, with quality/quantity of manipulations individually rooted into user's psychological profile...
• travisgriggs 1y ago
  I liked SO back in the day. And then I didn’t. Felt that way about ARS community in the early days. And the didn’t. I loved for slashdot info for a while, and then didn’t. Reddit seems to be passing the same zenith. I remember originally loving comp.lang._____. In each case, some form of Pournelles iron law of beauracracy seems to take over. Enshitification just feels like an economic abstraction over Pournelles law. It’s the way that crap acretes on to good. I’ve come to believe it’s inevitable. And just look for where the next cycle is occurring at. Ride the wave while it works.
• deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
• DustinBrett 1y ago
  Help us AI! Save us from AI.
• nichochar 1y ago
  I literally cannot read this article because of a paywall. The title is deeply ironic.
• hollerith 1y ago
  Some people here maintain that what ruined the web is the consolidation of the web into a few huge web properties. Others say it is advertising. Others, VCs or the profit motive. In contrast, my big beef is with the browser, which I see as a frustrating barrier between me and the information (and the people) on the internet that I want to access. I've felt that way for about 20 years. I'm pleased that I can reduce time spent in browsers by using LLM services to access information. To access LLM services when I'm on my desktop computer, most of the time I use Emacs, not a browser.
  • edg5000 1y ago
    Why since ~2005? Browsers still function the same, just with more features. I can create a website with some HTML and tables and it will work fine. Many sites are still very simple (such as HN!) and are browsed just like it would be pre-2005??
    • deleted 1y ago
      [deleted]
    • hollerith 1y ago
      I've written about it in comments here more than once or twice over the years, but I'm not interesting in writing about it anymore. I spent many hours configuring Emacs to talk to my favorite LLM services so that I don't need to use a browser or an app built with web tech to talk to those services. I am very pleased with the result. I am interested in learning how to get an LLM to read a web page and tell me what it says (basically, extracting the text passages of interest to me) eliminating the need for me to look at the page or to interact with the page. I wouldn't sic such an LLM on HN because as you correctly guessed, the way HN looks and works does not annoy me the way most web sites do.
• snickerbockers 1y ago
  I sure hope not. Internet is fine but the web is more of a virtualized app platform than a hypertext platform by this point, as evidence by the fact that I can't read TFA without giving them money or looking it up on a third party archive. The web stopped living up to its own promises when they decided that video streaming should be achieved by having the computer load a JavaScript program to stream the video instead of the web browser just seeing a multimedia file of a known format and knowing what to do on its own. Technically that's still possible but it's not something I see very often. Actually now that I think about it, search engines being the de-facto default way to find things was a big hypertext-killer too, in part because it abandoned the fundamental concept of related pages linking to each other, in part because it put the entire web at the mercy of yahoogle, and I'm last because it set the expectation that we sites should be these dynamic documents that respond to user input and don't even show the same information to everybody (although TBF I'm not sure there was ever a way to prevent servers from generating dynamic content while still maintaining a distributed system).
• keithnz 1y ago
  Maybe AI is killing some people's corners of the web. The web itself is just fine. From what I can tell, it's mostly hitting the ad-sponsored parts. Online stores now actually need to focus on creating good content for their products rather than forcing themselves into people’s browsing. Now you need to be matched to consumers based on how relevant you are to what they want as expressed to their AI agent. I actually see it wiping out the big content gatekeepers. While the AI agents will in themselves be gatekeepers, they seem really replaceable. But they have a fantastic ability to aggregate content, such that eventually, we won't need gateway content platforms like youtube etc because you don't need that front end anymore.
  • inferiorhuman 1y ago
    it's mostly hitting the ad-sponsored parts Nah. AI means that everything is getting put behind anti-bot captchas and other nonsense. Everything from retail sites like DigiKey and Mouser to issue trackers for Wine. Search (both Google and DDG) has gotten comically bad with largely irrelevant AI slop at the top. I use Sourcehut for code hosting and AI means that Drew and crew are combating AI DDOS bots instead of filling out features for the site. Youtube now promotes foreign language videos with terrible auto-dubs. Even Wikipedia and Github are suffering. Forums get peppered with answers along the lines of "here I asked AI for you, this is what I got." I can't think of a single part of the internet that AI isn't enshittifying. I actually see it wiping out the big content gatekeepers. Nah. With everything behind anti-bot crap now, control has been handed over to companies like CloudFlare.
    • Roark66 1y ago
      >Nah. With everything behind anti-bot crap now, control has been handed over to companies like CloudFlare. It's impossible for the "anti bot crap" to work. And why would we want it anyway? Why does a website owner care if I'm clicking on his link or is it my bot searching for me on my behalf. We're very close to having our own personal bots deal with the shit part of the experience for us. For example take this query "I need to paint a bare steel railing using RAL 7016 color, buy me some paint and brushes". The bot already knows my price preferences and my location because it's my bot. Likewise my shipping preferences. So he just asks "How big is the railing?" and you answer "Tiny, 6m long and 4cm wide", the bot asks "any special instructions?" and you say "yes, no hammerite, I want the brushes to be cleaned with water, I also want a paint I can use when it might be raining soon". And the bot goes and finds you exactly what you need. It shows you the product page and asks, should I buy a small 250ml can of this?" you say yes, and the transaction is made. Contrast this with the usual user story today. Type "water resistant, straight on rust paint" in Google. You get inundated with products unavailable in your local market. You find something that might be what you need, but it's not in stock or the only seller has 2 week lead time. Eventually you find it after wasting 2h of your life. Tell me this AI use is not an improvement of the Web.
• johnnienaked 1y ago
  The internet has been dead for a few years now.
• h4kunamata 1y ago
  Wrong, Google did that when ADs and profit were more important than returning what the users were searching for. I have been using Perplexity AI as replacement, and in order to be able to use the internet as I was used to. Perplexity AI isn't an annoying chatbot like everything else, it actually returns what you asked for and all the sources it used to resume for you. Some questions might return 10 sources, others plus 40 sources are used and made available for you so you can cross check everything. No other AI tool does that coz they are a chatbot. Less time wasted with sponsored links, nonsense links, ADs, and more time spent being productive. The other day Google went offline across the globe after a newbie code mistake right after they had announced that over 30% of their code is generated by AI!! This is awesome, we should thank Google, its monopoly downfall has started!!
  • Abishek_Muthian 1y ago
    How often do you click the source to read further?
• fedeb95 1y ago
  most ai tools run on the web, so the question is ill-posed. Not worth opening the article.
• exodust 1y ago
  The web is obviously not dead. If "boring information gathering" takes a hit, it's no biggie. Long live the creative web, or the good quality products and services web. AI is great, but so is reading a dedicated article written by someone as a published piece of work. Like the "papers please" article about Australia's Orwellian digital ID regime. I liked that piece. AI could write something on the topic, but it wouldn't have the same punch or original expression. AI is not great with subtle nods or cheeky references to other topics. It tries but lands with an awkward thud mostly. So I use AI for "boring information" gathering, which it excels at. The web will be fine.
• sillyboi 1y ago
  I'd say nothing kills the web more than hiding the “reject all cookies” button and covering the whole page with a popup until you accept. So I think we’re safe for now.
• benjaminclauss 1y ago
  I personally found this somewhat exciting. While small publishers getting screwed isn’t great, I think it’s fascinating that these tools are challenging the traditional SEO landscape. There was a lot of hype around this with “Web 3”. If I ask ChatGPT for a recipe, I’m not going to have to read a story about someone’s grandparent first.
  • klabb3 1y ago
    > If I ask ChatGPT for a recipe, I’m not going to have to read a story about someone’s grandparent first. You are walking into a trap. This is an apples-to-oranges comparison. Google and the downstream content farm and affiliate industry is mature and near optimally enshittified to extract value out of every interaction. Chat bots are ad free because they are in the expansion phase. You have no idea what they will pull, and probably they don’t know either. But the value must be extracted. And the more the operational cost, and the more dependent their users are, the worse they will push the experience to make bank. The fundamental business model hasn’t changed. In fact, it’s become even more cynical in every iteration.
    • rchaud 1y ago
      > Chat bots are ad free because they are in the expansion phase. It is remarkable how many people do not understand this. We just had this conversation re: Netflix. 10 years ago, everyone was happy to spit on the grave of cable TV for daring to bundle channels together without an a la carte option AND throw in ads on top. That's what every streaming service is now doing, because there's not enough money to be made in "giving consumers what they want".
  • frainfreeze 1y ago
    The story part is exactly what I appreciate though. The recipe, on most modern sites, is kinda separated, usually at the bottom, and often printable, anyway.
  • whywhywhywhy 1y ago
    Personally YouTube completely replaced written recipes for me, way easier to understand how a thing should look and the process and they rarely have the "story" thing and the preamble is easily skipped if there is.
• poulpy123 1y ago
  AI is not killing the web, it's the final nail in the coffin (OK a bit more than that). It was going to shit even before the first gpt became public thanks to SEO that were hemoraging pure crap and google which let them do it.
• nielsbot 1y ago
  In the future will web pages for humans be mostly obsolete? Will almost no one surf the web manually anymore and instead use browsing agents or AI (assuming we reach sufficient quality) to answer questions? Just a thought experiment
• franze 1y ago
  Is it worth saving? ( looking at you social media, fake news and echo chambers)
• Roark66 1y ago
  So the main claim of the article is people are searching less and they are asking questions of AI instead. Why? Because search has sucked extremely hard for last dozen of years if not longer. I still remember the times when you could put something like "ham radio" +amplifier +diy +mosfet and you would get 20 pages of amazing results from Google you could get lost in for days. I remember in early 2000x when I'd put a substring of an error from some software, further refine the query with boolean logic and I'd find exactly what I wanted. A mobile phone with Google was my main tool in my job back then. Then it all went to shit. Oh, are you perhaps searching for this? No, I'm searching for exactly what I typed! Also, the fact Google is now limited to few pages of results on even most popular topics is insane. You'll never find a personal blog of some guy that has 30 views a month. That guy may have printed his writing and put it in his drawer as far as Google is concerned. No AI is not killing the Web. Google has done long ago. Who is actually browsing the Web like we used to decades ago? Finding cool sites from search pages? No one. We just type the same set of addresses into our browsers. AI is actually something that may revive the Web by cutting through all the shit and just giving us the right links.
  • whywhywhywhy 1y ago
    It's disgusting how Google has treated search the past few years, the fact you can type a term and it will straight up pretend it has 0 results for it or less than 10 results is baffling. What's worse is now the mantle is just there for the taking no one seems interested in picking it up anymore.
    • pixl97 1y ago
      I'd think that mantle is going to be much harder to pick up than you expect. So much of the web is optimized around google behaviors breaking in is near impossible.
• deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
• ddmichael 1y ago
  Yes. Heavy curation and high quality content and journalism, from humans to humans.
• jb-wells 1y ago
  Links to paywall sites should be banned!
• jb-wells 1y ago
  Paywall sites are what is killing the web
• inopinatus 1y ago
  Like pre-atomic steel, content now has a watershed event, and anything from 2022 onwards is potentially radioactive.
  • briangriffinfan 1y ago
    I gotta say, I feel pretty happy having been an active artist prior to the 2020s. I feel like I have a certificate of authenticity on my back.
• joduplessis 1y ago
  AI is killing advertising and social media, not the web. And I'm sure these LLM products are going to start introducing some form of advertising soon anyways.
• nexgen123 1y ago
  [dead]
• hopelite 1y ago
  I am still having a hard time seeing how “content” creating companies really have anything legally to stand onto on, short of the system simply making it up on the fly to keep the whole system from collapsing. If the arguments of content creators is valid, as I understand them being made, then those content creating entities should also have been paying the people who created the content some form of “royalties” too every time someone sees their content, right? Further extending that argument, the likes of artists and authors and even anyone who went to a university, especially a private one, should owe those entities “royalties” for the knowledge they keep reusing all their life, right? Short of people doing already illegal things like hack servers instead of simply paying for a service to gain access to the “content”, I don’t see any way this is a legitimate argument unless we want to upend the whole foundation of the whole system of society, or at least create an unsustainable inconsistency and conflict in the system that will eventually destroy itself. To preempt a counter; if scrapping is illegal and not allowed, what if an AI company simply employs an army of humans to copy paste the information into new files, you know, like many university students may do for notes? What am I missing?
• jona-f 1y ago
  Sure, hate AI all you want, you are going to be the ones left behind. What you call "the web" has been dead for a long time.
  • apples_oranges 1y ago
    I am having an experience that sort of supports this view. Getting into photography I am finding it difficult to find good tutorials and guides which are not videos. But everybody wants some of the YouTube money I guess so that’s where creators focus their efforts..
    • flr03 1y ago
      This might be a sign of things to come, the quality of the virtual world is decreasing at record speed, that's opening the door to a return to the analogical world - aka books in your case.
      • apples_oranges 1y ago
        Yes. But I already have shelves filled with books wishing half of them were digital.. but I agree we can have both..
• artyom 1y ago
  "The web" is full of ads. Google search is unusable. Ad-blocking is fought against. Content is tailored to be as long as possible to render more ad impressions. Mobile views have 3% content and the rest is ads. 27 compliance popups about cookies and tracking and offers would show on top of the information that you're looking for, all of them rigged so you click the option that they want. Is that the web you want to save? Let it die. Because this romantic view of the web as this "ocean of free information" has been dead for a very long time. I wonder why someone would even be surprised that people just moves naturally to something better? Something that's not even remotely so hostile to the user? And yes: when VC capital dries up, AI will become equally hostile. Then people will move to the better thing and we'll have articles about "Better thing is killing AI".
  • vlod 1y ago
    This has been said previously, but it's worth repeating. Use Firefox (w/ ublock-origin) and Firefox on android. Or use one of the alternative Chrome browsers. I don't remember the last time I saw an advert.
    • whamlastxmas 1y ago
      Brave for iOS for ad blocking which Firefox doesn’t provide
    • artyom 1y ago
      But I've been doing that for years. The whole point is beyond you or me.
  • empath75 1y ago
    Advertising killed the web long before AI did. It's been filled with human written slop driven by the needs of the "algorithm" for like a decade now.
    • yubblegum 1y ago
      This is true and hardly a secret and the fact the Economist is being forgetful here is itself information. So the actual question here is what are the (financial, geopolitical, social engineering) incentives for the stakeholders of the Economist (please spare me "journalism" tropes) to poo poo AI in this manner.
• swayvil 1y ago
  To use a physical metaphor. Walled cities. Guarded wagon trains. Keep the barbarians at arm's length.
• kees99 1y ago
  It's not just SO. Pretty much every site running git-scm, has caved under pressure from AI bots and is now inaccessible without javascript - kernel, openwrt, etc, etc... https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/stable/linux.git https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/stable/linux... https://openwrt.org/ https://openwrt.org/
• freejazz 1y ago
  Good riddance Internet, you did not really make anything better.
  • krapp 1y ago
    Hot take - even given all of its downsides the internet (really, web) did make a lot of things better for a lot of people. Yes, even social media. And it's unfortunate that HN's native cynicism and misanthropy make it impossible for most people here to see any value in what we're losing.
    • freejazz 1y ago
      I don't disagree it did. But... does it do? Will it does? Was mostly being silly. But for sure there's a grain of truth as to the feeling. I don't think it's wrong to have a love hate relationship. And sure, maybe I'd cry when it goes. But would I need it to come back? So many things about our society today seem to rely on them. But I remember a time when that was not the case, or certainly not to this extent. So with that in mind, maybe there's a happy medium? Not an Internet but just some nets? A smidge of the good stuff?
• drnick1 1y ago
  Maybe this wouldn't have happened if the Internet wasn't an ocean of ads, trackers, compliance pop ups, and, ironically, more and more AI-generated slop. In this context, getting a quick straight answer from GPT (anonymously and for free) does not seem as bad as the article pretends. The web has long become been cesspool of trackers and ads and this predates AI. I now run a DNS sinkhole, a browser with hardened settings (Arkenfox and Fingerprint Resist), and an ad-blocker just to make the Internet somewhat usable and prevent the most obvious forms of tracking. I wouldn't be sad if all of the most visited websites in the world (where the lion's share of profits go) disappeared overnight.
• woadwarrior01 1y ago
  I'm building an app called "Slop Or Not"[1] that uses on-device transformer models, and metadata (in images) to detect AI generated images and text. It's been stuck in App Store review for over a week now, so I suppose the Apple reviewers don't quite know how to deal with something as novel. I keep reading stories about OpenAI wrapper apps getting reviewed in less than a day. [1]: https://slopornot.ai/ https://slopornot.ai/
• ptrb25 1y ago
  The article nails it, AI-generated noise is drowning out quality. We need better signal‑to‑noise management: stronger curation, anti‑spam tools, and incentives for real creators to stick around.
• j45 1y ago
  It feels like human curation is going to continue to increase in value if everything renders to the average of what AI's training content is as output.
• j45 1y ago
  Maybe some people want to see social media go down with synthetic content. Still, I wonder if there's a way humans can make content for the actual web.