6 ms·

The argument seems flawed to me: by "killing the web", they refer to the example of a company adding SEO'd information to their website to lure in traffic from

by kleiba 1y ago

The argument seems flawed to me: by "killing the web", they refer to the example of a company adding SEO'd information to their website to lure in traffic from web searches. However, me personally, I don't want to be lured into some web store when I'm looking for some vaguely related information. Luckily, there's tons of information on the web provided not by commercial entities but by volunteers: wikipedia, forum users (e.g. StackOverflow), blogs. (Sure, some people run blogs as a source of income, but I think that's a small percentage of all bloggers.) Have you ever looked for a specific recipe just to end up on someone's cooking website where they first tell your their life story before - after scrolling for a half a day - you'll finally find what you've actually come there for (the recipe!) at the bottom of their page? Well, if that was gone, I'd say good riddance! "But you don't get it", you might interject, "it's not that the boilerplate will disappear in the future, the whole goddamn blog page will disappear, including the recipe you're looking for." Yeah, I get it, sure. But I also have an answer for that: "oh, well" (ymmv). My point is, I don't mind if less commercial stuff is going to be sustainable in a future version of the web. I'm old enough to have experience the geocities version of the early web that consisted of enthusiasts being online not for commercial interests but for fun. It was less polished and less professional, for sure, but less interesting? I don't think so.

dmortin 1y ago
> Luckily, there's tons of information on the web provided not by commercial entities but by volunteers The question is: is there content which is useful, but not provided by volunteers? We see more and more content behind paywalls, and it is a loss for many people who can't pay, because they won't be able to access the same content for free supported by ads. So the result is poor people are going to lose access to certain contents, while well to do people will still have access.
- pixl97 1y ago
  As the world always has been. There is no human right that we must have free content supported by ads. And ad supported content has tons of its own issues.
- carlosjobim 1y ago
  The answer to that question is absolutely yes. Investigative journalism, which is some of the most useful content in existence can not sustainably be provided by volunteers. > many people who can't pay Everybody is already paying for Spotify and for Netflix. They can pay for mass syndication of textual content. But it needs to be like Spotify or YouTube, where everything and anything goes. Poor people always had access to read newspapers.
MangoToupe 1y ago
Sadly, i think the future is more crap. It is simply too easy to generate text you think people might want to read (even if it is not).
- pixl97 1y ago
  The future is already here, and it's already crap. The web has been concentrated and filled with spam for a decade if not more.
  - MangoToupe 1y ago
    Yes. I'm saying we're about to see another few orders of magnitude of it. Recently i've noticed google is even less effective than normal because it's turning up ad-filled pages that vaguely relate to the query but are clearly entirely generated by an LLM that also doesn't know what you're looking for. So, we went from 95% crap to 100% crap over the course of about two years. There is obviously still stuff out there worth finding, but I can't imagine LLMs are going to get us there.
ben_w 1y ago
On the one hand, I agree with what you've said. On the other, I think it's unlikely the fun old geocities era comes back. We'll probably get stuff that looks like it, but it's hawking nationalist revisionist propaganda instead of occult shapeshifting magic lifted from Sabine Baring-Gould, and a thousand Temple OS-inspired clones instead of python.
- cuu508 1y ago
  I fear we will get more walled gardens like FB because AI bots will have harder time scraping them.
jayd16 1y ago
The same amount of quality content might still exist even when the advantages to providing it dry up further.... But good luck finding in an ever growing sea of slop. We might see a resurgence in curated content but I have my worries. Google gets worse and worse but also traditional curated sites have started simply repost what's trending on Twitter.
watwut 1y ago
AI will kill the volunteers run websites and blogs faster then it will kill corporate ones. It will kill free information first. It will basically finish the process google search engine started when it started to require seo to find stuff. People will have less or no motivation to create them, because well, why would they? It will be just a food for AI of some corporation. And more importantly, people won't be finding and joining communities that produce the websites like stack overflow. It was nice while it lasted, but likely it will be something that existed only for one generation.
- conradkay 1y ago
  I doubt search engines are primarily what helped most blogs and sites grow. It's forums/word of mouth/social media
- panstromek 1y ago
  I have no intention to stop writing on my blog for AI reasons and I don't even see why I should. I suspect a majority of people who post here are the same.
  - watwut 1y ago
    Google making blogs impossible to find if you dont do SEO already started that process. There is less of this kind of activity then it used to be. Some people who write mostly for themselves will continue, but most wont. They won't even become aware that such option exists. Monkey see monkey do where people start these activities because they see others doing them will disappear entirely.
  - beej71 1y ago
    Same. And my logs say that AI crawls my pages roughly 1.2 bazillion times per day.
- cube00 1y ago
  > It will be just a food for AI of some corporation. Food that said corporation makes a profit off while paying the author nothing.
wongarsu 1y ago
Another commonly ignored group are those that publish information because they want others to know about that information. Even in a worst-case situation where websites are only crawled by bots and get no human visitors at all anymore, government and company websites won't disappear. Any tourist board worth their salt will increase the amount of content they publish compared to current levels. The local conspiracy nut will have an incentive to continue their blog, as will any university researcher. Press releases about new scientific discoveries will continue. Your personal blog might die, but lots of current "linkedin influencers" will start blogs to ensure LLMs think positively about their skills. And that's assuming a world where people only ask LLMs and don't care about the provenance or trustworthiness of information at all. Which seems unlikely, even conspiracy nuts have some sources they trust more than others. The web will be fine. It will change drastically with the death of click-based advertising, but I don't see a future where it disappears
- sebastiennight 1y ago
  > And that's assuming a world where people only ask LLMs and don't care about the provenance or trustworthiness of information at all. Which seems unlikely, even conspiracy nuts have some sources they trust more than others. They will just have one model that they trust more because (a) it aligns with their views, or (b) it's a sycophant and agrees with anything and everything. They definitely are not the people most likely to care about clicking "source links".
  - Terr_ 1y ago
    Option (C) users railroaded into using a given model by a company or government with the power to make it a default or requirement.
- stevage 1y ago
  Yes, this is key. Business models based on generating low quality information and using SEO to monetise it will die and that's a good thing. But unfortunately also sites that generate high quality information (eg independent research, reviews, journalism) will also struggle and be more reliant on paywalls and subscriptions.
insane_dreamer 1y ago
People create content for free but not to be sucked into some machine that funds a $T company who mixes it up and spits it out without attribution. You want to share info for the sake of it but you also care deeply about how it’s presented and would like people to come read it on your site. So all that volunteer stuff will be killed along with all the recipe sites because those people aren’t going to put in the time and effort without some financial return (the pages of ads we detest but put up with). In the short term it will feel liberating; in the long term it will kill the web.
- cube00 1y ago
  > In the short term it will feel liberating They won't feel so liberated when they find ads embedded in the model's response in ways that make it difficult to uBlock.
  - adithyassekhar 1y ago
    Incoming uAIBlock. uBlockAi? The taglines write themselves.
    - cube00 1y ago
      Hopefully we have local AI by then, big tech will no doubt put filters in to stop you using their service to filter their own ads.
jaynate 1y ago
Often, that off-topic content was garbage anyway. Not really deep or helpful or expert in any way. Not always, but often.
pests 1y ago
The recipe thing is because recipes are not copyrightable and many duplicates exist around the internet. The padded length makes the content unique / not penalized as a duplicate and as a secondary benefit avoids penalties for short content. Not saying this is good, but it’s the reason behind it.
fabian2k 1y ago
But AI is also going to kill some of your positive examples. Stack Overflow for example is in a steep decline, only a small fraction of questions are posted today compared to the peak. And the effects are more than financial, so even non-profit examples like forums would be hit. If new people don't discover your site with useful user-created content, they won't contribute to it. You're also cutting off the pipeline for recruiting new users to your forum or Q&A site.
- JustExAWS 1y ago
  Stack overflow was a shit show way before LLMs became popular.
- verdverm 1y ago
  Stuck overflow may not be the greatest example. I have switch to using GitHub discussions and Discord on the "where to get help for my projects" side of things. I ignore SO when it comes to support. Lots of other open source projects doing similar. This trend was happening before LLMs entered the arena.
  - roblh 1y ago
    Discord is just absolutely worthless for this. Any question that gets asked gets buried in days if not hours. It pretty much guarantees the same basic garbage gets repeated over and over and over forever. Basically the exact opposite of stack overflow.
    - natebc 1y ago
      Inevitably too you'll get someone scolding you to "check the pins" which you then do and get introduced to that hellish nightmare. Discord is great for chatting with your friends, gaming, etc. but man it's a horrible knowledge repository.
      - verdverm 1y ago
        > horrible knowledge repository I don't disagree, but that does not change the fact that people have moved from sites like SO to Discord for this purpose. There are Q&A channels, so not everything is chat, but Discord search is abysmal Slack is another place where former SO content / answers are happening. Discourse too. The tl;dr is that it has become more fragmented, for better or worse SO has a related problem to Reddit. Some mods high on their status and power
deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
creata 1y ago
> the geocities version of the early web that consisted of enthusiasts being online not for commercial interests but for fun LLMs are making many of the enthusiasts who were online just "for fun" feel sick for contributing to their training set. > someone's cooking website where they first tell your their life story before I haven't seen a recipe page without a "Jump to Recipe" page button in forever.
p3rls 1y ago
at this point, i've built a massive platform for ten years and watching the seoers die might be worth it losing it all for. it'll at least kill off all the indians that have been scamming in my niche for three and half years with impunity
dolphinscorpion 1y ago
Bottom line, you will always get content, whatever that may mean. But great content creators will want to be rewarded one way or another. Book writers get paid, movie makers as well, so why shouldn't those who share their wisdom in a blog post? If someone is making money off your content and you aren't, you will not be happy. When it's not even attributed to you, it's even worse. SEO is a response to Google's incentives, and Google can fix it if it wants.
rainsford 1y ago
I suppose wanting to kill the commercial web is a valid position, although it feels more like grumpy old man yells at kids to get off his lawn than a considered analysis of relative value and impact, but even then I think you're underestimating the impact the AI problem will have on the non-commercial web as well. Lots of people might be willing to run websites for fun or personal satisfaction or whatever, but how many people will continue to be willing to do so when they don't actually get to present the content to visitors and it's instead just regurgitated by AI? Half the fun of hosting your own website is personalizing it and choosing how to share the content. Even people blogging for fun put a lot of thought into their posts on how to phrase an argument or tell a story. But what's the point when nobody will ever see your actual post, just your thoughts rearranged and presented by AI? Maybe some people only care about the information being out there in any form, but I'd be willing to bet that's yet a smaller subset of even the people who would contribute in a return to geocities version of the web.

by kleiba 1y ago

dmortin 1y ago

> Luckily, there's tons of information on the web provided not by commercial entities but by volunteers The question is: is there content which is useful, but not provided by volunteers? We see more and more content behind paywalls, and it is a loss for many people who can't pay, because they won't be able to access the same content for free supported by ads. So the result is poor people are going to lose access to certain contents, while well to do people will still have access.

pixl97 1y ago
As the world always has been. There is no human right that we must have free content supported by ads. And ad supported content has tons of its own issues.
carlosjobim 1y ago
The answer to that question is absolutely yes. Investigative journalism, which is some of the most useful content in existence can not sustainably be provided by volunteers. > many people who can't pay Everybody is already paying for Spotify and for Netflix. They can pay for mass syndication of textual content. But it needs to be like Spotify or YouTube, where everything and anything goes. Poor people always had access to read newspapers.

MangoToupe 1y ago

Sadly, i think the future is more crap. It is simply too easy to generate text you think people might want to read (even if it is not).

pixl97 1y ago
The future is already here, and it's already crap. The web has been concentrated and filled with spam for a decade if not more.
- MangoToupe 1y ago
  Yes. I'm saying we're about to see another few orders of magnitude of it. Recently i've noticed google is even less effective than normal because it's turning up ad-filled pages that vaguely relate to the query but are clearly entirely generated by an LLM that also doesn't know what you're looking for. So, we went from 95% crap to 100% crap over the course of about two years. There is obviously still stuff out there worth finding, but I can't imagine LLMs are going to get us there.

ben_w 1y ago

On the one hand, I agree with what you've said. On the other, I think it's unlikely the fun old geocities era comes back. We'll probably get stuff that looks like it, but it's hawking nationalist revisionist propaganda instead of occult shapeshifting magic lifted from Sabine Baring-Gould, and a thousand Temple OS-inspired clones instead of python.

cuu508 1y ago
I fear we will get more walled gardens like FB because AI bots will have harder time scraping them.

jayd16 1y ago

The same amount of quality content might still exist even when the advantages to providing it dry up further.... But good luck finding in an ever growing sea of slop. We might see a resurgence in curated content but I have my worries. Google gets worse and worse but also traditional curated sites have started simply repost what's trending on Twitter.

watwut 1y ago

AI will kill the volunteers run websites and blogs faster then it will kill corporate ones. It will kill free information first. It will basically finish the process google search engine started when it started to require seo to find stuff. People will have less or no motivation to create them, because well, why would they? It will be just a food for AI of some corporation. And more importantly, people won't be finding and joining communities that produce the websites like stack overflow. It was nice while it lasted, but likely it will be something that existed only for one generation.

conradkay 1y ago
I doubt search engines are primarily what helped most blogs and sites grow. It's forums/word of mouth/social media
panstromek 1y ago
I have no intention to stop writing on my blog for AI reasons and I don't even see why I should. I suspect a majority of people who post here are the same.
- watwut 1y ago
  Google making blogs impossible to find if you dont do SEO already started that process. There is less of this kind of activity then it used to be. Some people who write mostly for themselves will continue, but most wont. They won't even become aware that such option exists. Monkey see monkey do where people start these activities because they see others doing them will disappear entirely.
- beej71 1y ago
  Same. And my logs say that AI crawls my pages roughly 1.2 bazillion times per day.
cube00 1y ago
> It will be just a food for AI of some corporation. Food that said corporation makes a profit off while paying the author nothing.

wongarsu 1y ago

Another commonly ignored group are those that publish information because they want others to know about that information. Even in a worst-case situation where websites are only crawled by bots and get no human visitors at all anymore, government and company websites won't disappear. Any tourist board worth their salt will increase the amount of content they publish compared to current levels. The local conspiracy nut will have an incentive to continue their blog, as will any university researcher. Press releases about new scientific discoveries will continue. Your personal blog might die, but lots of current "linkedin influencers" will start blogs to ensure LLMs think positively about their skills. And that's assuming a world where people only ask LLMs and don't care about the provenance or trustworthiness of information at all. Which seems unlikely, even conspiracy nuts have some sources they trust more than others. The web will be fine. It will change drastically with the death of click-based advertising, but I don't see a future where it disappears

sebastiennight 1y ago
> And that's assuming a world where people only ask LLMs and don't care about the provenance or trustworthiness of information at all. Which seems unlikely, even conspiracy nuts have some sources they trust more than others. They will just have one model that they trust more because (a) it aligns with their views, or (b) it's a sycophant and agrees with anything and everything. They definitely are not the people most likely to care about clicking "source links".
- Terr_ 1y ago
  Option (C) users railroaded into using a given model by a company or government with the power to make it a default or requirement.
stevage 1y ago
Yes, this is key. Business models based on generating low quality information and using SEO to monetise it will die and that's a good thing. But unfortunately also sites that generate high quality information (eg independent research, reviews, journalism) will also struggle and be more reliant on paywalls and subscriptions.

insane_dreamer 1y ago

People create content for free but not to be sucked into some machine that funds a $T company who mixes it up and spits it out without attribution. You want to share info for the sake of it but you also care deeply about how it’s presented and would like people to come read it on your site. So all that volunteer stuff will be killed along with all the recipe sites because those people aren’t going to put in the time and effort without some financial return (the pages of ads we detest but put up with). In the short term it will feel liberating; in the long term it will kill the web.

cube00 1y ago
> In the short term it will feel liberating They won't feel so liberated when they find ads embedded in the model's response in ways that make it difficult to uBlock.
- adithyassekhar 1y ago
  Incoming uAIBlock. uBlockAi? The taglines write themselves.
  - cube00 1y ago
    Hopefully we have local AI by then, big tech will no doubt put filters in to stop you using their service to filter their own ads.

jaynate 1y ago

Often, that off-topic content was garbage anyway. Not really deep or helpful or expert in any way. Not always, but often.

pests 1y ago

The recipe thing is because recipes are not copyrightable and many duplicates exist around the internet. The padded length makes the content unique / not penalized as a duplicate and as a secondary benefit avoids penalties for short content. Not saying this is good, but it’s the reason behind it.

fabian2k 1y ago

But AI is also going to kill some of your positive examples. Stack Overflow for example is in a steep decline, only a small fraction of questions are posted today compared to the peak. And the effects are more than financial, so even non-profit examples like forums would be hit. If new people don't discover your site with useful user-created content, they won't contribute to it. You're also cutting off the pipeline for recruiting new users to your forum or Q&A site.

JustExAWS 1y ago
Stack overflow was a shit show way before LLMs became popular.
verdverm 1y ago
Stuck overflow may not be the greatest example. I have switch to using GitHub discussions and Discord on the "where to get help for my projects" side of things. I ignore SO when it comes to support. Lots of other open source projects doing similar. This trend was happening before LLMs entered the arena.
- roblh 1y ago
  Discord is just absolutely worthless for this. Any question that gets asked gets buried in days if not hours. It pretty much guarantees the same basic garbage gets repeated over and over and over forever. Basically the exact opposite of stack overflow.
  - natebc 1y ago
    Inevitably too you'll get someone scolding you to "check the pins" which you then do and get introduced to that hellish nightmare. Discord is great for chatting with your friends, gaming, etc. but man it's a horrible knowledge repository.
    - verdverm 1y ago
      > horrible knowledge repository I don't disagree, but that does not change the fact that people have moved from sites like SO to Discord for this purpose. There are Q&A channels, so not everything is chat, but Discord search is abysmal Slack is another place where former SO content / answers are happening. Discourse too. The tl;dr is that it has become more fragmented, for better or worse SO has a related problem to Reddit. Some mods high on their status and power

deleted 1y ago

[deleted]

creata 1y ago

> the geocities version of the early web that consisted of enthusiasts being online not for commercial interests but for fun LLMs are making many of the enthusiasts who were online just "for fun" feel sick for contributing to their training set. > someone's cooking website where they first tell your their life story before I haven't seen a recipe page without a "Jump to Recipe" page button in forever.

p3rls 1y ago

at this point, i've built a massive platform for ten years and watching the seoers die might be worth it losing it all for. it'll at least kill off all the indians that have been scamming in my niche for three and half years with impunity

dolphinscorpion 1y ago

Bottom line, you will always get content, whatever that may mean. But great content creators will want to be rewarded one way or another. Book writers get paid, movie makers as well, so why shouldn't those who share their wisdom in a blog post? If someone is making money off your content and you aren't, you will not be happy. When it's not even attributed to you, it's even worse. SEO is a response to Google's incentives, and Google can fix it if it wants.

rainsford 1y ago

I suppose wanting to kill the commercial web is a valid position, although it feels more like grumpy old man yells at kids to get off his lawn than a considered analysis of relative value and impact, but even then I think you're underestimating the impact the AI problem will have on the non-commercial web as well. Lots of people might be willing to run websites for fun or personal satisfaction or whatever, but how many people will continue to be willing to do so when they don't actually get to present the content to visitors and it's instead just regurgitated by AI? Half the fun of hosting your own website is personalizing it and choosing how to share the content. Even people blogging for fun put a lot of thought into their posts on how to phrase an argument or tell a story. But what's the point when nobody will ever see your actual post, just your thoughts rearranged and presented by AI? Maybe some people only care about the information being out there in any form, but I'd be willing to bet that's yet a smaller subset of even the people who would contribute in a return to geocities version of the web.