3 ms·

The man who keeps predicting the web's death

56 points by thm 11mo ago

krater23 11mo ago
And that someone who sayd years over years that the web will die now says again that the web will die means that the other people which say the web will die are wrong? Most content is now on <10 big platforms. nearby no one has a website just to tell other people some stuff or what he has done for fun. only reason to have a website today is profit. active websites write in the first part of a article only bullshit to get found by google. Sites that are really like in 1999, just fun sites would never been found via google anymore. And now AI crawls all this and steals traffic from this sites without giving credits until no one beside of bot's will reads them anymore. The web is not dying, the web is already dead! A commercialized part of the money making machine, nothing more anymore. Next step: AI is dying because there are no new data to learn because it makes no sense anymore to create websites. Welcome to the stone age.
- XorNot 11mo ago
  Its weird how people keep saying the rise of AI generated content will "kill AI" as though the companies training models don't have complete archives of all the data they already scraped from the Internet. It doesn't take all the text of the public Internet for someone to learn to talk, and all these companies are much more in the data curation business for the purposes of teaching models. Scraping is to make them up to date on current events (and has obvious alternative sources), or the actions of the start up space which don't already have such datasets.
  - kykat 11mo ago
    I can't wait to see how the coding performance will start to drop on with newer tools and versions, as people no longer discuss them in the same detail and quantity as they used to. People using LLMs will be stuck in the pre-2023 tools, using new stuff is an uphill battle already (you have to give it the correct docs manually)
- simonh 11mo ago
  > The web is not dying, the web is already dead! Says he on a web site.
  - James_K 11mo ago
    And the fact this remains a Web site is truly remarkable. The reason it is popular with a niche group of technically minded-users is because Web sites are so hard to come by these days that you need a special place to collect them.
    - andsoitis 11mo ago
      > Web sites are so hard to come by these days that you need a special place to collect them. When the web was nascent sites like Lycos, AltaVista, Yahoo!, and others created indexes you could browse by category, right?
      - James_K 11mo ago
        Yes. The front page of the internet used to consist of websites. Now you need to go to a special niche place to find the websites.
        andsoitis 11mo ago
        > The front page of the internet There was never “the” frontpage.
        PaulDavisThe1st 11mo ago
        For a very brief period, the netscape whats new page(s) did function in this way, but that didn't last very long.
    - PaulDavisThe1st 11mo ago
      > Web sites are so hard to come by these days and yet day after day, HN is flooded with links to ... wait for it ... web sites (more specifically, content on web sites thought to be potentially interesting to the HN crowdf). what are you talking about?
deleted 11mo ago
[deleted]
deadbabe 11mo ago
I'm just surprised there is still only one web after all this time. Why isn't there a multiverse of "webs", each with different cultures or rules for whatever their niche is? There could be a web where its only personal websites, and using different protocols besides TCP, HTML markup and even DNS. Or have we forgotten how to simply even build a web from scratch? Didn't CERN do this in a lab like 40 years ago?
- amarant 11mo ago
  What's wrong with TCP, HTML and DNS? Why spend time to build an alternative solution? Why use the inferior solution someone built as a hobby project? Honestly there kinda is a new web, they call it web 3 and it's only crypto scams. I'll stick to TCP and html for now I think.
  - msla 11mo ago
    > What's wrong with TCP, HTML and DNS? The Company doesn't own them. The Company doesn't control them. People can use them for things contrary to The Company's interests. The Company must protect itself, its brand, and its Intellectual Property! > Why use the inferior solution someone built as a hobby project? Hobby project? The Company is not a hobby. The Company is a Major Corporation with Interests, Investments, Shareholders, and Vision. The Company is The Future! For "The Company" read "CompuServe" or "The Source" or any of a few other "online services" that existed before the Internet was opened up and the World Wide Web wiped everything clean. They were The Future of the not-so-distant past. As for why they didn't survive, well, Metcalfe's Law is a good first-cut explanation: The value of a network is proportional to the square of the number of users, because that's the number of connections it can have, and value comes from connections, inherently. What good is a network that can't connect you to what you want? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metcalfe%27s_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metcalfe%27s_law
    - antod 11mo ago
      I got up to the compuserve bit before realising you were talking about the past rather than the (very corporate) present web.
James_K 11mo ago
The Web is dead. Most people access the internet through one of perhaps ten popular applications that do not contain Web content (semantic XML documents hyperlinked together).
- zdragnar 11mo ago
  HTML was an application of SGML, and precedes XML. HTML is a markup language, and not all of the elements and features are semantic in nature. The "span" tag literally exists to provide a way of affecting a bit of text where no tag with more semantic meaning applies.
yunnpp 11mo ago
Plot twist: he's dead.
evolighting 11mo ago
The web of every age has certainly died, but only to be replaced by a new form of "web". We have had Web1.0, web2.0, or even web3.0, and waht more -- the AI; The web that people were familiar with and loved back then had already died at that time. The new web is fundamentally different in both underlying technology and business models.
- barbazoo 11mo ago
  Did the crypto one ever happen or is it straight to AI?
  - evolighting 11mo ago
    No. Web 3.0 is still far away—much like the so-called metaverse. But AI stuff is everywhere, and AGI-generated material is growing rapidly. If this continues, traditional search engines will soon be overwhelmed by AI-produced content. In that case, you’ll have already stepped into the so-called “AI world.” After all, AGI-generated content is so cheap, and at some level it does satisfy certain simple needs — so it’s inevitably going to be overused. And we haven’t even begun to address the logic behind things like AI web crawlers, data aggregation, and the entire backend ecosystem. In the past, your users and their data were just “data.” But now, real human data can actually command a price — because it represents genuine, authentic human behavio. Something has definitely changed — perhaps we could even call it the death of the traditional web. The old operational logic hasn’t disappeared, but it no longer seems competitive. Users may still like it or feel nostalgic about it, but it no longer creates the kind of appeal or value that companies need in the capital market.
nwhnwh 11mo ago
The graveyard: https://doublespeed.ai https://doublespeed.ai
nwhnwh 11mo ago
Did it actually say "I, for one, think the Web will do what it always does: Democratize knowledge."? Wow. Did you ever read anything from the communication and media studies field? This sea of information does more damage than good.

56 points by thm 11mo ago

And that someone who sayd years over years that the web will die now says again that the web will die means that the other people which say the web will die are wrong? Most content is now on <10 big platforms. nearby no one has a website just to tell other people some stuff or what he has done for fun. only reason to have a website today is profit. active websites write in the first part of a article only bullshit to get found by google. Sites that are really like in 1999, just fun sites would never been found via google anymore. And now AI crawls all this and steals traffic from this sites without giving credits until no one beside of bot's will reads them anymore. The web is not dying, the web is already dead! A commercialized part of the money making machine, nothing more anymore. Next step: AI is dying because there are no new data to learn because it makes no sense anymore to create websites. Welcome to the stone age.

XorNot 11mo ago
Its weird how people keep saying the rise of AI generated content will "kill AI" as though the companies training models don't have complete archives of all the data they already scraped from the Internet. It doesn't take all the text of the public Internet for someone to learn to talk, and all these companies are much more in the data curation business for the purposes of teaching models. Scraping is to make them up to date on current events (and has obvious alternative sources), or the actions of the start up space which don't already have such datasets.
- kykat 11mo ago
  I can't wait to see how the coding performance will start to drop on with newer tools and versions, as people no longer discuss them in the same detail and quantity as they used to. People using LLMs will be stuck in the pre-2023 tools, using new stuff is an uphill battle already (you have to give it the correct docs manually)
simonh 11mo ago
> The web is not dying, the web is already dead! Says he on a web site.
- James_K 11mo ago
  And the fact this remains a Web site is truly remarkable. The reason it is popular with a niche group of technically minded-users is because Web sites are so hard to come by these days that you need a special place to collect them.
  - andsoitis 11mo ago
    > Web sites are so hard to come by these days that you need a special place to collect them. When the web was nascent sites like Lycos, AltaVista, Yahoo!, and others created indexes you could browse by category, right?
    - James_K 11mo ago
      Yes. The front page of the internet used to consist of websites. Now you need to go to a special niche place to find the websites.
      - andsoitis 11mo ago
        > The front page of the internet There was never “the” frontpage.
        PaulDavisThe1st 11mo ago
        For a very brief period, the netscape whats new page(s) did function in this way, but that didn't last very long.
  - PaulDavisThe1st 11mo ago
    > Web sites are so hard to come by these days and yet day after day, HN is flooded with links to ... wait for it ... web sites (more specifically, content on web sites thought to be potentially interesting to the HN crowdf). what are you talking about?

deleted 11mo ago

[deleted]

deadbabe 11mo ago

I'm just surprised there is still only one web after all this time. Why isn't there a multiverse of "webs", each with different cultures or rules for whatever their niche is? There could be a web where its only personal websites, and using different protocols besides TCP, HTML markup and even DNS. Or have we forgotten how to simply even build a web from scratch? Didn't CERN do this in a lab like 40 years ago?

amarant 11mo ago
What's wrong with TCP, HTML and DNS? Why spend time to build an alternative solution? Why use the inferior solution someone built as a hobby project? Honestly there kinda is a new web, they call it web 3 and it's only crypto scams. I'll stick to TCP and html for now I think.
- msla 11mo ago
  > What's wrong with TCP, HTML and DNS? The Company doesn't own them. The Company doesn't control them. People can use them for things contrary to The Company's interests. The Company must protect itself, its brand, and its Intellectual Property! > Why use the inferior solution someone built as a hobby project? Hobby project? The Company is not a hobby. The Company is a Major Corporation with Interests, Investments, Shareholders, and Vision. The Company is The Future! For "The Company" read "CompuServe" or "The Source" or any of a few other "online services" that existed before the Internet was opened up and the World Wide Web wiped everything clean. They were The Future of the not-so-distant past. As for why they didn't survive, well, Metcalfe's Law is a good first-cut explanation: The value of a network is proportional to the square of the number of users, because that's the number of connections it can have, and value comes from connections, inherently. What good is a network that can't connect you to what you want? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metcalfe%27s_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metcalfe%27s_law
  - antod 11mo ago
    I got up to the compuserve bit before realising you were talking about the past rather than the (very corporate) present web.

James_K 11mo ago

The Web is dead. Most people access the internet through one of perhaps ten popular applications that do not contain Web content (semantic XML documents hyperlinked together).

zdragnar 11mo ago
HTML was an application of SGML, and precedes XML. HTML is a markup language, and not all of the elements and features are semantic in nature. The "span" tag literally exists to provide a way of affecting a bit of text where no tag with more semantic meaning applies.

yunnpp 11mo ago

Plot twist: he's dead.

evolighting 11mo ago

The web of every age has certainly died, but only to be replaced by a new form of "web". We have had Web1.0, web2.0, or even web3.0, and waht more -- the AI; The web that people were familiar with and loved back then had already died at that time. The new web is fundamentally different in both underlying technology and business models.

barbazoo 11mo ago
Did the crypto one ever happen or is it straight to AI?
- evolighting 11mo ago
  No. Web 3.0 is still far away—much like the so-called metaverse. But AI stuff is everywhere, and AGI-generated material is growing rapidly. If this continues, traditional search engines will soon be overwhelmed by AI-produced content. In that case, you’ll have already stepped into the so-called “AI world.” After all, AGI-generated content is so cheap, and at some level it does satisfy certain simple needs — so it’s inevitably going to be overused. And we haven’t even begun to address the logic behind things like AI web crawlers, data aggregation, and the entire backend ecosystem. In the past, your users and their data were just “data.” But now, real human data can actually command a price — because it represents genuine, authentic human behavio. Something has definitely changed — perhaps we could even call it the death of the traditional web. The old operational logic hasn’t disappeared, but it no longer seems competitive. Users may still like it or feel nostalgic about it, but it no longer creates the kind of appeal or value that companies need in the capital market.

nwhnwh 11mo ago

The graveyard: https://doublespeed.ai https://doublespeed.ai

nwhnwh 11mo ago

Did it actually say "I, for one, think the Web will do what it always does: Democratize knowledge."? Wow. Did you ever read anything from the communication and media studies field? This sea of information does more damage than good.