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I've written high-quality technical how-tos for many years, starting with PC World magazine articles (supported by ads), a book that helped people learn Ruby on

I've written high-quality technical how-tos for many years, starting with PC World magazine articles (supported by ads), a book that helped people learn Ruby on Rails (sales via Amazon), and more recently a website that's good for queries like "uninstall Homebrew" or "xcode command line tools" (sponsored by a carefully chosen advertiser). With both a (small) financial incentive and the intrinsic satisfaction of doing good work that people appreciate, I know I've helped a LOT of people over four decades. A year ago my ad-supported website had 100,000 monthly active users. Now, like the article says, traffic is down 40% thanks to Google AI Overview zero clicks. There's loss of revenue, yes, but apart from that, I'm wondering how people can find my work, if I produce more? They seldom click through on the "source" attributes, if any. I wonder, am I standing at the gates of hell in a line that includes Tower Records and Blockbuster? Arguably because I'm among those that built this dystopia with ever-so-helpful technical content.

mvieira38 1y ago
Unfortunately for you this kind of content does seem to be going the way of Blockbuster. But the writing was on the wall for years now with how much Google Search became useless due to over-SEOification of every website, LLMs were just the dagger
lofaszvanitt 1y ago
The pattern repeats itself. Come, use our services, it's free, it will be good for you. Users elevate the service to a monopoly. And then the behemoth thinks that the users - who gave their blood so the behemoth could grow - are now more like a nuisance and kills those that are the most vulnerable. Every year they put the threshold higher and it results in more and more people getting burned. Of course the big, established brands are protected. So they don't want the average joe's opinion. And they don't want to funnel money to you, now that you have fulfilled your purpose.
- boringg 1y ago
  What you describe is more like the traditional VC structure for most businesses. Provide low cost services while they need to grow user base -- as user base is established the model now needs to extract value from the users - quality drops and the costs increases. It happens for all VC based products since the drive on returns of invested capital is so high. Put another way -- early stage products that every uses and love (in most not all cases) should not be assumed to be the end product.
  - lofaszvanitt 1y ago
    What do I care what it's called. It's EVIL.
BSOhealth 1y ago
Novel content will continue to require human creators. So, if you are at the frontier of some idea space, whether that’s using Homebrew or baking brownies, your input will be rewarded to some extent. But, we won’t need 1000 different Medium blogs about installing Rails or 1000 baking websites pitching the same recipe but with a different family story at the top. Yes, maybe a small amount of people ultimately contributing but if their input is truly novel and “true” then what’s the downside?
Aurornis 1y ago
> and more recently a website that's good for queries like "uninstall Homebrew" or "xcode command line tools" (sponsored by a carefully chosen advertiser). With both a (small) financial incentive and the intrinsic satisfaction of doing good work that people appreciate, I know I've helped a LOT of people over four decades. Simple content that can be conveyed in a few succinct lines of text (like how to uninstall Homebrew) is actually one of the great use cases for AI summaries. I’m sorry that it’s losing you revenue, but I’d much rather get a quick answer from AI than have to roll the dice on an ad-supported search result where I have to parse the layout, dodge the ads, and extract the relevant info from the filler content and verbiage
- KittenInABox 1y ago
  I mean, then what happens when there isn't enough money in producing answers but technology continues to move forward? There isn't any more content for the AI to summarize to answer with...
  - chasd00 1y ago
    Then we all start buying O'Reilly books again i guess, i use to have dozens.
go_elmo 1y ago
Just a question how content is produced & ingested. Utopian fantasy: interact with the ai - novel findings are registered as such and "saved" and made available to others. Creative ideas are registered as such, if possible, theyre tested in "side quests" ie the ai asks - do you have 5min to try this? You unblock yourself if it works & see in the future how many others profited as well (3k people read this finding). Its all a logistics question
dahart 1y ago
> am I standing at the gates of hell in a line that includes Tower Records and Blockbuster? Maybe, but there’s a big difference - Netflix doesn’t rely on Blockbuster, and Spotify doesn’t need Tower Records. Google AI results do need your articles, and it returns the content of them to your readers without sending you the traffic. And Google is just trying to fend off ChatGPT and Meta and others, who absolutely will, if allowed, try to use their AI to become the new search gateways and supplant Google entirely. This race will continue as long as Google & OpenAI & everyone else gets to train on your articles without paying anything for them. Hopefully in the future, AI training will either be fully curated and trained on material that’s legal to use, or it will license and pay for the material they want that’s not otherwise free. TBH I’m surprised the copyright backlash hasn’t been much, much bigger. Ideally the lost traffic you’re seeing is back-filled with licensing income. I guess you can rest a little easier since we got to where we are now not primarily because of technical means but mostly by allowing mass copyright violation. And maybe it helps a little to know that most content-producing jobs in the world are in the same boat you are, including the programmers in your target audience. That’s cold comfort, but OTOH the problem you (we) face is far more likely to be addressed and fixed than if it was only a few people affected.
- altcognito 1y ago
  I mean, there's always been a grey area even when it came to tiny snippets in the results, though those actually encouraged you to click through when you found the right result. The beginning of the end was including Wikipedia entries directly in the search results, although arguably even some of the image results are high quality enough to warrant skipping visiting the actual website (if you were lucky enough to get the image at the target site in the first place) So maybe it goes back sooner than that.
- rurp 1y ago
  The recent taking of people's content for AI training might be the most blatant example of rich well connected people having different rules in our society that I've ever witnessed. If a random person copied mass amounts of IP and resold it in a different product with zero attribution or compensation, and that product directly undercut the business of those same IP producers, they would be thrown in jail. Normal people get treated as criminals for seeding a few movies, but the Sam Altmans of the world can break those laws on an unprecedented scale with no repercussions. As sad as it is, I think we're looking at the end of the open internet as we've known it. This is massive tragedy of the commons situation and there seems to be roughly zero political will to enact needed regulations to keep things fair and sustainable. The costs of this trend are massive, but they are spread out across many millions of disparate producers and consumers, while the gains are extremely concentrated in the hands of the few; and those few have good lobbyists.
fantasizr 1y ago
Netflix didn't steal from Blockbuster mailing you their pirated DVDs.
deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
DudeOpotomus 1y ago
You never should have made any money to begin with... That's the reality. The entire ad floated universe is a farce in time and space.
amradio1989 1y ago
It will just be different. No profit train lasts forever. Google is about to be made utterly irrelevant after 20+ years or so as a company. And they were the best. If you still have a connection to your readers (e.g. email) you can still reach them. If they've formed a community, even better. If not, its a good time to work on that. Google doesn't really have that. I have zero sense of community with Google. And that's why they'll die if something doesn't change.
boringg 1y ago
Sorry to hear that -- thats sounds painful. It does speak to one of the core problems with AI is the one time productivity boost from using all historical data created by humans is no longer going to be as useful going forward since individual contributors will no longer build and provide that information unless the incentive models change.
akomtu 1y ago
Most of your monthly active users don't want to read your articles. They want to get their questions answered with as little effort as possible. This is what Google's Overview is doing: it's transforming your articles into a form-factor that the users want. This is what you could be doing as well: rather than creating food for AI, create a mini-AI yourself that answers user questions. It doesn't have to fabricate answers, rather it can quote your memos in a format tailored to users, while your memos will remain private. This will also stonewall Google's AI, for now it would have to interrogate your mini-AI.

mvieira38 1y ago

Unfortunately for you this kind of content does seem to be going the way of Blockbuster. But the writing was on the wall for years now with how much Google Search became useless due to over-SEOification of every website, LLMs were just the dagger

lofaszvanitt 1y ago

The pattern repeats itself. Come, use our services, it's free, it will be good for you. Users elevate the service to a monopoly. And then the behemoth thinks that the users - who gave their blood so the behemoth could grow - are now more like a nuisance and kills those that are the most vulnerable. Every year they put the threshold higher and it results in more and more people getting burned. Of course the big, established brands are protected. So they don't want the average joe's opinion. And they don't want to funnel money to you, now that you have fulfilled your purpose.

boringg 1y ago
What you describe is more like the traditional VC structure for most businesses. Provide low cost services while they need to grow user base -- as user base is established the model now needs to extract value from the users - quality drops and the costs increases. It happens for all VC based products since the drive on returns of invested capital is so high. Put another way -- early stage products that every uses and love (in most not all cases) should not be assumed to be the end product.
- lofaszvanitt 1y ago
  What do I care what it's called. It's EVIL.

BSOhealth 1y ago

Novel content will continue to require human creators. So, if you are at the frontier of some idea space, whether that’s using Homebrew or baking brownies, your input will be rewarded to some extent. But, we won’t need 1000 different Medium blogs about installing Rails or 1000 baking websites pitching the same recipe but with a different family story at the top. Yes, maybe a small amount of people ultimately contributing but if their input is truly novel and “true” then what’s the downside?

Aurornis 1y ago

> and more recently a website that's good for queries like "uninstall Homebrew" or "xcode command line tools" (sponsored by a carefully chosen advertiser). With both a (small) financial incentive and the intrinsic satisfaction of doing good work that people appreciate, I know I've helped a LOT of people over four decades. Simple content that can be conveyed in a few succinct lines of text (like how to uninstall Homebrew) is actually one of the great use cases for AI summaries. I’m sorry that it’s losing you revenue, but I’d much rather get a quick answer from AI than have to roll the dice on an ad-supported search result where I have to parse the layout, dodge the ads, and extract the relevant info from the filler content and verbiage

KittenInABox 1y ago
I mean, then what happens when there isn't enough money in producing answers but technology continues to move forward? There isn't any more content for the AI to summarize to answer with...
- chasd00 1y ago
  Then we all start buying O'Reilly books again i guess, i use to have dozens.

go_elmo 1y ago

Just a question how content is produced & ingested. Utopian fantasy: interact with the ai - novel findings are registered as such and "saved" and made available to others. Creative ideas are registered as such, if possible, theyre tested in "side quests" ie the ai asks - do you have 5min to try this? You unblock yourself if it works & see in the future how many others profited as well (3k people read this finding). Its all a logistics question

dahart 1y ago

> am I standing at the gates of hell in a line that includes Tower Records and Blockbuster? Maybe, but there’s a big difference - Netflix doesn’t rely on Blockbuster, and Spotify doesn’t need Tower Records. Google AI results do need your articles, and it returns the content of them to your readers without sending you the traffic. And Google is just trying to fend off ChatGPT and Meta and others, who absolutely will, if allowed, try to use their AI to become the new search gateways and supplant Google entirely. This race will continue as long as Google & OpenAI & everyone else gets to train on your articles without paying anything for them. Hopefully in the future, AI training will either be fully curated and trained on material that’s legal to use, or it will license and pay for the material they want that’s not otherwise free. TBH I’m surprised the copyright backlash hasn’t been much, much bigger. Ideally the lost traffic you’re seeing is back-filled with licensing income. I guess you can rest a little easier since we got to where we are now not primarily because of technical means but mostly by allowing mass copyright violation. And maybe it helps a little to know that most content-producing jobs in the world are in the same boat you are, including the programmers in your target audience. That’s cold comfort, but OTOH the problem you (we) face is far more likely to be addressed and fixed than if it was only a few people affected.

altcognito 1y ago
I mean, there's always been a grey area even when it came to tiny snippets in the results, though those actually encouraged you to click through when you found the right result. The beginning of the end was including Wikipedia entries directly in the search results, although arguably even some of the image results are high quality enough to warrant skipping visiting the actual website (if you were lucky enough to get the image at the target site in the first place) So maybe it goes back sooner than that.
rurp 1y ago
The recent taking of people's content for AI training might be the most blatant example of rich well connected people having different rules in our society that I've ever witnessed. If a random person copied mass amounts of IP and resold it in a different product with zero attribution or compensation, and that product directly undercut the business of those same IP producers, they would be thrown in jail. Normal people get treated as criminals for seeding a few movies, but the Sam Altmans of the world can break those laws on an unprecedented scale with no repercussions. As sad as it is, I think we're looking at the end of the open internet as we've known it. This is massive tragedy of the commons situation and there seems to be roughly zero political will to enact needed regulations to keep things fair and sustainable. The costs of this trend are massive, but they are spread out across many millions of disparate producers and consumers, while the gains are extremely concentrated in the hands of the few; and those few have good lobbyists.

fantasizr 1y ago

Netflix didn't steal from Blockbuster mailing you their pirated DVDs.

deleted 1y ago

[deleted]

DudeOpotomus 1y ago

You never should have made any money to begin with... That's the reality. The entire ad floated universe is a farce in time and space.

amradio1989 1y ago

It will just be different. No profit train lasts forever. Google is about to be made utterly irrelevant after 20+ years or so as a company. And they were the best. If you still have a connection to your readers (e.g. email) you can still reach them. If they've formed a community, even better. If not, its a good time to work on that. Google doesn't really have that. I have zero sense of community with Google. And that's why they'll die if something doesn't change.

boringg 1y ago

Sorry to hear that -- thats sounds painful. It does speak to one of the core problems with AI is the one time productivity boost from using all historical data created by humans is no longer going to be as useful going forward since individual contributors will no longer build and provide that information unless the incentive models change.

akomtu 1y ago

Most of your monthly active users don't want to read your articles. They want to get their questions answered with as little effort as possible. This is what Google's Overview is doing: it's transforming your articles into a form-factor that the users want. This is what you could be doing as well: rather than creating food for AI, create a mini-AI yourself that answers user questions. It doesn't have to fabricate answers, rather it can quote your memos in a format tailored to users, while your memos will remain private. This will also stonewall Google's AI, for now it would have to interrogate your mini-AI.