3 ms·

Don't be surprised if there is no more free information in the next 10 years.

skeledrew 1y ago
There will always be people putting information out there with 0 expectation of any kind of return. What will happen is there will be far fewer websites enforcing return, as they'll be automatically deranked for that enforcement.
- integralid 1y ago
  I am tech blogging for free, and my expected return is people reading my content, recognition, attribution, social media attention and people discussing my content. I have zero interest in providing free labor for LLM companies with no human actually reading my words. I don't think I'm alone in that stance. Similarly, I used to help people on forums for free. My reward was getting respect of my peers, the feeling of helping another human being and sometimes them being grateful, rare side job opportunities thanks to people finding my specialist posts. That was fun, being anonymous question-answering bot for AI to scrape is not.
  - skeledrew 1y ago
    > recognition, attribution, social media attention Expectation of these in particular makes your blogging a product. > with no human actually reading my words But it - or at least the idea - is being ultimately read by humans, as long as some article is in the top results for relevance to some LLM prompts. It just may be summarized, or particular parts extracted first, or reworded for clarity (like I may ask for an "eli5" if I encounter something that's interesting but I find concepts going over my head), or otherwise preprocessed in order to fulfill the prompt parameters. All actions which the very human users may have to do manually anyway in order to efficiently consume your content (or give up and move on if they can't be bothered), is now automatically done by LLM agents.
- AlienRobot 1y ago
  The number of people who have the privilege to publish content for free for others (or spend their free time contributing to open source) is minimal. And now they will feel like they're being disrespected and exploited by LLM's and its users who think of the authors not as people but as just as the source of content. You can be sure most of the content will be gone because nobody wants to be just a content cow for LLM's.
  - skeledrew 1y ago
    Why do you think they'll feel disrespected? They literally have no expectations; they're just putting content out there for others to do as they wish with. Several here have weighed in to say they don't care about LLMs accessing and morphing their content. Of course they won't be nearly as many as those who publish with expectations, but also history has shown that whenever there's a gap, someone tends to fill it just because. I'm not worried about content gaps at all. What I see is an overall increase in quality as no-expectation sources float to the top of search results.
    - nicbou 1y ago
      Well I'm one such person so you can hear it from me instead of guessing. I feel disrespected. I can also confirm that I will do a lot less of it since it's threatening the parts of my business that supported me and gave me so much free time to release things for free. It almost halved my audience, so I have to do the same amount of work for nearly half the pay, half the community, and half the credit.
      - skeledrew 1y ago
        You do have expectations though. You expect to grow and maintain an audience, gain credit, which makes what you're releasing a product, not something free.
        nicbou 1y ago
        Free as in beer, not as in public domain.

There will always be people putting information out there with 0 expectation of any kind of return. What will happen is there will be far fewer websites enforcing return, as they'll be automatically deranked for that enforcement.

integralid 1y ago
I am tech blogging for free, and my expected return is people reading my content, recognition, attribution, social media attention and people discussing my content. I have zero interest in providing free labor for LLM companies with no human actually reading my words. I don't think I'm alone in that stance. Similarly, I used to help people on forums for free. My reward was getting respect of my peers, the feeling of helping another human being and sometimes them being grateful, rare side job opportunities thanks to people finding my specialist posts. That was fun, being anonymous question-answering bot for AI to scrape is not.
- skeledrew 1y ago
  > recognition, attribution, social media attention Expectation of these in particular makes your blogging a product. > with no human actually reading my words But it - or at least the idea - is being ultimately read by humans, as long as some article is in the top results for relevance to some LLM prompts. It just may be summarized, or particular parts extracted first, or reworded for clarity (like I may ask for an "eli5" if I encounter something that's interesting but I find concepts going over my head), or otherwise preprocessed in order to fulfill the prompt parameters. All actions which the very human users may have to do manually anyway in order to efficiently consume your content (or give up and move on if they can't be bothered), is now automatically done by LLM agents.
AlienRobot 1y ago
The number of people who have the privilege to publish content for free for others (or spend their free time contributing to open source) is minimal. And now they will feel like they're being disrespected and exploited by LLM's and its users who think of the authors not as people but as just as the source of content. You can be sure most of the content will be gone because nobody wants to be just a content cow for LLM's.
- skeledrew 1y ago
  Why do you think they'll feel disrespected? They literally have no expectations; they're just putting content out there for others to do as they wish with. Several here have weighed in to say they don't care about LLMs accessing and morphing their content. Of course they won't be nearly as many as those who publish with expectations, but also history has shown that whenever there's a gap, someone tends to fill it just because. I'm not worried about content gaps at all. What I see is an overall increase in quality as no-expectation sources float to the top of search results.
  - nicbou 1y ago
    Well I'm one such person so you can hear it from me instead of guessing. I feel disrespected. I can also confirm that I will do a lot less of it since it's threatening the parts of my business that supported me and gave me so much free time to release things for free. It almost halved my audience, so I have to do the same amount of work for nearly half the pay, half the community, and half the credit.
    - skeledrew 1y ago
      You do have expectations though. You expect to grow and maintain an audience, gain credit, which makes what you're releasing a product, not something free.
      - nicbou 1y ago
        Free as in beer, not as in public domain.