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Ads are a problematic business model, and I think your point there is kind of interesting. But AI companies disintermediating content creators from their users
by yojo 1y ago
Ads are a problematic business model, and I think your point there is kind of interesting. But AI companies disintermediating content creators from their users is NOT the web I want to replace it with.
Let’s imagine you have a content creator that runs a paid newsletter. They put in lots of effort to make well-researched and compelling content. They give some of it away to entice interested parties to their site, where some small percentage of them will convert and sign up.
They put the information up under the assumption that viewing the content and seeing the upsell are inextricably linked. Otherwise there is literally no reason for them to make any of it available on the open web.
Now you have AI scrapers, which will happily consume and regurgitate the work, sans the pesky little call to action.
If AI crawlers win here, we all lose.
- fxtentacle 1y agoMaybe, on a social level, we all win by letting AI ruin the attention economy: The internet is filled with spam. But if you talk to one specific human, your chance of getting a useful answer rises massively. So in a way, a flood of written AI slop is making direct human connections more valuable. Instead of having 1000+ anonymous subscribers for your newsletter, you'll have a few weekly calls with 5 friends each.
- account42 1y agoI'm not sure what experiences you are basing this optimism on but I'm happy for you.
- hansvm 1y agoOfttimes people are sufficiently anti-ad that this point won't resonate well. I'm personally mostly in that camp in that with relatively few exceptions money seems to make the parts of the web I care about worse (it's hard to replace passion, and wading through SEO-optimized AI drivel to find a good site is a lot of work). Giving them concrete examples of sites which would go away can help make your point. E.g., Sheldon Brown's bicycle blog is something of a work of art and one of the best bicycle resources literally anywhere. I don't know the man, but I'd be surprised if he'd put in the same effort without the "brand" behind it -- thankful readers writing in, somebody occasionally using the donate button to buy him a coffee, people like me talking about it here, etc.
- blacksmith_tb 1y agoSheldon died in 2008, but there's no doubt that all the bicycling wisdom he posted lives on!
- wulfstan 1y agoHe's that widely respected that amongst those who repair bikes (I maintain a fleet of ~10 for my immediate family) he is simply known as "Saint Sheldon".
- vertoc 1y agoBut even your example gets worse with AI potentially - the "upsell" of his blog isn't paid posts but more subscribers so there will be thankful readers, a few donators, people talking about it. If the only interface becomes an AI summary of his work without credit, it's much more likely he stops writing as it'll seem like he's just screaming into the void
- yojo 1y agoI agree that specific examples help, though I think the ones that resonate most will necessarily be niche. As a teen, I loved Penny Arcade, and watched them almost die when the bottom fell out of the banner-ad market. Now, most of the value I find in the web comes from niche home-improvement forums (which Reddit has mostly digested). But even Reddit has a problem if users stop showing up from SEO.
- bombela 1y ago> Sheldon Brown (July 14, 1944 – February 4, 2008)
- bee_rider 1y agoI think it’s basically impossible to prevent AI crawlers. It is like video game cheating, at the extreme they could literally point a camera at the screen and have it do image processing, and talk to the computer through the USB port emulating, a mouse and keyboard outside the machine. They don’t do that, of course, because it is much easier to do it all in software, but that is the ultimate circumvention of any attempt to block them out that doesn’t also block out humans. I think the business model for “content creating” is going have to change, for better or worse (a lot of YouTube stars are annoying as hell, but sure, stuff like well-written news and educational articles falls under this umbrella as well, so it is unfortunate that they will probably be impacted too).
- yojo 1y agoI don’t subscribe to technological inevitabilism. Cloudflare banning bad actors has at least made scraping more expensive, and changes the economics of it - more sophisticated deception is necessarily more expensive. If the cost is high enough to force entry, scrapers might be willing to pay for access. But I can imagine more extreme measures. e.g. old web of trust style request signing[0]. I don’t see any easy way for scrapers to beat a functioning WOT system. We just don’t happen to have one of those yet. 0: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_of_trust https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_of_trust
- Spivak 1y agoIt is inevitable, not because of some technological predestination but because if these services get hard-blocked and unable to perform their duties they will ship the agent as a web browser or browser add-on just like all the VSCode forks and then the requests will happen locally through the same pipe as the user's normal browser. It will be functionally indistinguishable from normal web traffic since it will be normal web traffic.
- skeledrew 1y agoThen personal key sharing will become a thing, similar to BugMeNot et al.
- 1y ago
- shadowgovt 1y ago> Otherwise there is literally no reason for them to make any of it available on the open web This is the hypothesis I always personally find fascinating in light of the army of semi-anonymous Wikipedia volunteers continuously gathering and curating information without pay. If it became functionally impossible to upsell a little information for more paid information, I'm sure some people would stop creating information online. I don't know if it would be enough to fundamentally alter the character of the web. Do people (generally) put things online to get money or because they want it online? And is "free" data worse quality than data you have to pay somebody for (or is the challenge more one of curation: when anyone can put anything up for free, sorting high- and low-quality based on whatever criteria becomes a new kind of challenge?). Jury's out on these questions, I think.
- yojo 1y agoAny information that requires something approximating a full-time job worth of effort to produce will necessarily go away, barring the small number of independently wealthy creators. Existing subject-matter experts who blog for fun may or may not stick around, depending on what part of it is “fun” for them. While some must derive satisfaction from increasing the total sum of human knowledge, others are probably blogging to engage with readers or build their own personal brand, neither of which is served by AI scrapers. Wikipedia is an interesting case. I still don’t entirely understand why it works, though I think it’s telling that 24 years later no one has replicated their success.
- SoftTalker 1y agoWikipedia works for the same reason open-source does: because most of the contributors are experts in the subject and have paid jobs in that field. Some are also just enthusiasts.
- ndriscoll 1y agoOpenStreetMap is basically Wikipedia for maps and is quite successful. Over 10M registered users and millions of edits per day. Lots of information is also shared online on forums for free. The hosting (e.g. reddit) is basically a commodity that benefits from network effects. The information is the more interesting bit, and people share it because they feel like it.
- skeezyboy 1y agothere are companies that already do this, and the ONE thing none of them do is place the information they are selling on THE PUBLIC INTERNET. so your point is moot
- account42 1y agoA agree with your first line but the rest sounds like a similar argument to the ridiculous damages video game companies used to claim due to piracy when most of those pirates never would have bought the game in the first place. Ultimately the root issue is that copyright is inherently flawed because it tries to increase available useful information by restricting availability. We'd be better off by not pretending that information is scarce and looking for alternative to fund its creation.