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No clicks, no content: The unsustainable future of AI search

• bradt 1y ago
  AI companies are causing a content drought that will eventually starve them.
  • poisonborz 1y ago
    Who cares about them, it will starve society
  • _DeadFred_ 1y ago
    AI is an entropy machine. It sucks out all momentum and stagnates/ossifies everything it touches.
• djoldman 1y ago
  > ChatGPT, Google, and its competitors are rapidly diverting traffic from publishers. Publishers are fighting to survive through lawsuits, partnerships, paywalls, and micropayments. It’s pretty bleak, but unfortunately I think the situation is far worse than it seems. > The article focuses mainly on the publishing industry, news and magazine sites that rely primarily on visits to their sites and selling ads. I'm not sure where this comes from. The way forward for publishers of content like newspapers is subscription fees and has been for a long time. The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and The Economist revenues are subscription fee dominant, for example.
  • tensor 1y ago
    Yes. And as someone who wants to see the ad model of funding gone, I think this is great. Force them to figure out a business model that doesn’t rely on harvesting my data and using it to feed me propaganda.
  • add-sub-mul-div 1y ago
    Who will pay for a subscription fee for journalism if people get trained to receive their information from an opaque tl;dr machine rather than primary sources?
    • tensor 1y ago
      People want realtime news. AI models don’t have up to the minute information. They need to search for that just like the rest of us, and would be subject to the same paywalls.
      • add-sub-mul-div 1y ago
        https://apnews.com/article/grok-4-elon-musk-xai-colossus-14d575fb490c2b679ed3111a1c83f857 https://apnews.com/article/grok-4-elon-musk-xai-colossus-14d... There you go, realtime. As soon as the people you want it to parrot have posted about it.
    • djoldman 1y ago
      Americans already, and increasingly, report getting a good chunk of their news from social media: https://www.pewresearch.org/journalism/fact-sheet/social-media-and-news-fact-sheet/ https://www.pewresearch.org/journalism/fact-sheet/social-med... Folks who want more traditional journalism will pay for it.
      • giantrobot 1y ago
        > Folks who want more traditional journalism will pay for it. If that is a tiny minority of people then there won't be a critical mass available to pay real journalists. No journalist can afford to work on long form investigative stories on minimum wage. Even relatively straightforward legwork on a completely local story requires some driving around doing interviews. A whistleblower isn't going to just do a Zoom call with a journalist. A journalist can't get a first-hand account of an event from watching a webcam. Good journalism isn't cheap. It doesn't have to be lavishly expensive but it's definitely not cheap. If only the New York Times can pay to hire journalists there won't be any meaningful journalism because they simply cannot scale to cover the world let alone the country.
        • djoldman 1y ago
          Ok. If Americans don't value traditional journalism enough to pay what it may cost, it will go away.
  • bradt 1y ago
    The large outlets seem to be making subscriptions work, though it does seem to be challenging for them. Ironically, the NYT is constantly running ads in The Daily podcast to subscribe to the NYT to support their journalism. It seems the smaller publishers really struggle to make subscriptions work.
  • jsnell 1y ago
    It's a business with odd scaling. You can find examples of national papers of record having successful subscription models for text content. If you're only subscribing to one paper, it'll be one of those. And you can find 1-5 person outfits with strong personal brands (often built in other media) and a loyal following, who specially want a given person's take on things and want to read everything they write. Basically financials that resemble the "1000 true fans" model. But between those extremes it is a lot harder to make subscriptions work.
  • insane_dreamer 1y ago
    Yes but it also means journalism will be reduced to a few voices who can grow their subscription base large enough to survive. That is not a good thing.
    • bgwalter 1y ago
      Yes, for example the Miami Herald is still accessible without a subscription and was the prime investigative newspaper in the case of a Palm Beach resident (not Trump!) who cannot be mentioned here. They did excellent work.
• oedemis 1y ago
  the first thing when i open my browser is lookup at https://news.ycombinator.com/ https://news.ycombinator.com/ :)
• api 1y ago
  The previous model isn’t sustainable either. It leads to enshittification. Content can’t be free if you want it to be of any quality.
  • kleiba 1y ago
    I disagree, lots of volunteers have provided tons of high quality information since the inception of the web. Wikipedia is written entirely by people that didn't get any compensation for it. People answer questions on forums for free. Likewise, a lot of content produced with commercial interest in mind is total garbage (this is e.g. where the term "click-bait" originates from). There's always quality stuff and crap, no matter whether it's been produced for free or not.
    • _Algernon_ 1y ago
      Wikipedia continued existence is not dependent on ads or clicks.
      • quectophoton 1y ago
        You just made me imagine if Wikipedia had titles like "Is the Heliocentric model wrong?" or "The third planet of the Solar System has a generic name! Learn everything about it", and half of it behind a paywall. Or worse, if its content were distributed in short videos: "What to know what's that giant fire ball on the sky? Watch until the end!", with a like-and-subscribe animation covering the bottom 20% of the video every 5 seconds.
        • kleiba 1y ago
          10 shocking secrets about the solar system!
          • balder1991 1y ago
            “the last one will turn your brain upside down”
• _Algernon_ 1y ago
  If AI kills the ad-funded business model of the internet, it will be one of the few good outcomes from AI. Good riddance.
  • add-sub-mul-div 1y ago
    I cannot believe you people. The only difference between the status quo and the future is that the promotional messaging will be seamlessly and undisclosedly delivered with the conversational output. Ads are not going anywhere. We can be forgiven for not seeing how social media was going to become weaponized against us, how streaming's promise of no ads was only temporary. There's no excuse for not seeing it coming this time.
    • _factor 1y ago
      Local AI searching for me and filtering the ads is my future. You can speak for yourself.
      • bostik 1y ago
        Just wait until the foundational models are all fed with increasing amounts of ads. After all, it will be the one remaining source of ongoing, if not human generated, at least human curated content. Ad exchanges will offer firehoses for a hefty fee, and the advertisers themselves will pay the exchanges extra to push their ads more frequently in there to gain a higher share of repetition. The AI companies in turn will hoover in the deluge because they need something new to train their models with, embedding the ad copy deeply into the model itself. Your local AI of the future will be just as ad-riddled.
        • LegionMammal978 1y ago
          Yep, 'dataset poisoning' is what I like to call it. If all newly-trained models mostly reflect the Internet, then the strategy is to shove your ad copy into such a large fraction of the Internet that models will accept it as true. Like today's SEO slop, but turned up to 11, since it's not even aiming for human clicks.
• 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.
    • 1y ago
• zb3 1y ago
  "Content" that is made for clicks is precisely what I'd want to disappear from the universe.
  • CharlesW 1y ago
    You'll still see it, but in laundered form, indistinguishable from non-placed content. We just won't be able to block it, because its origin will be hidden in the system. I think I'm going to miss the world where I could more easily trace the provenance of information.
    • cout 1y ago
      I'm hoping the in the future there will be an LLM that can somehow map text back to its source. Current LLMs can kinda pull it off if you ask them, but afaik they aren't trained specially for this task.
• nextworddev 1y ago
  This take is wrong. What’s really going to happen is that content creators will still create content, despite the economics making less and less sense. .. mainly that’s because that’s the only game left
  • insane_dreamer 1y ago
    Not if they can’t afford to pay the bills.
    • argentinian 1y ago
      There are a lot of artists and creators that create while they work in a job not related to what they create. Money is not the only motivation to create.
      • Ekaros 1y ago
        I might even prefer those that make content for love of the thing and not for profit. I am not against them making a living. But There is enough of examples that in long run jus ending up worse. Maybe with higher "production quality". But worse in other ways that matter.
        • deleted 1y ago
          [deleted]
• VladStanimir 1y ago
  I use copilot for search, in one of two ways. The first is as an advanced search where i use the answer to gauge if it found what i am looking for then follow the links for details. The second is when i am looking for some information i once knew and i remember some details, like the title of a book i remember the plot points too, then when i find it i go do something with that information.
  • quectophoton 1y ago
    A fuzzy search engine with a better "semantic index"[1] than classic search engines, but the trade-off is that instead of returning links it returns a generated soup of words that are semantically close to your "query". Mostly useful when you're only looking for the presence of words or terms in the output (including the presence of related words), rather than a coherent explanation with the quality of human-written text. Sometimes the response is accidentally a truthful statement if interpreted as human text. The quality of a model is judged by how well-tuned they are for increasing the rate these accidents (for the lack of a better word). [1]: EDIT: In the sense of "semantic web"; not in the sense of "actually understanding meaning" or any type of psychological sense.
    • verdverm 1y ago
      > the trade-off is that instead of returning links it returns a generated soup of words that are semantically close to your "query". I get links in my responses from Gemini. I would also not describe the response as soup, the answers are often quite specific and in the terms of my prompt instead of the inputs (developer queries are a prime example)
      • quectophoton 1y ago
        I call them a "soup" because AFAIK there's no intent behind them: I'll stop calling them a soup when the part that generates a human-readable response is completely separate from the knowledge/information part; when an untrained program can respond with "I don't know" due to deliberate (/debuggable) mapping of lack of data to a minimal subset of language rules and words that are encoded in the program, rather than having "I don't know" be a series of tokens generated from the training data.
• johnnyApplePRNG 1y ago
  I can't bring myself to "Google" anything anymore. Every single time I open up google and try searching for the information... I get frustrated being forced so do the agentic work and sift through the crap... and I fall back on ChatGPT or Gemini.
  • mola 1y ago
    Interesting. When I Google I always get the AI summary which does it for me.
    • whimsicalism 1y ago
      the google search AI is trash and wrong very often, and I’m a big fan/early adopter of LLMs
• visarga 1y ago
  The content is now created in private chats with AI, probably a trillion tokens per day flow between humans and LLMs. When new AI models are made they will incorporate some experience from past usage. This dataset might be the most valuable source for training AI and solving our tasks. So in case humans decide to abandon publishing, there is a new experience flywheel spinning up.
  • 8organicbits 1y ago
    I assume that AI chat is a lot of questions being asked by people unfamiliar with the subject matter. Would that training dataset have any information from experts?
    • whimsicalism 1y ago
      any? yes, i chat about things i am expert in
    • visarga 1y ago
      Question answering and learning are just a corner of LLM usage, but they have learning signals for the AI. Say a user asks about Pythagoras, the LLM provides an explanation, the user doesn't get it. The LLM tries again. Repeat this loop a million times with diverse students and you get a distribution of what kind of explanations work. The model gets better at explaining through its own experience.
      • 8organicbits 1y ago
        Sounds like you'd end up with pop science. The loop stops when the explanation is satisfying, not when it's correct. Vibe science isn't based in reality.
  • nicbou 1y ago
    Where will the experience come from?
    • 1y ago
• epolanski 1y ago
  > ask Google for something and it responds with links to the best content This hasn't been the case for more than a decade. It's been seo crap from a long time.
• eric-burel 1y ago
  "Businesses produced and maintained quality content, Google rewarded the businesses with visitors while diverting some to their ads" that's idealistic, I am happy to see Google algorithm losing its monopoly, even if AI seach ends up being a bubble. When search engines will stop reducing website sorting to some stupid algorithm picked because of scalability while neglecting quality, I will start pity them. By the way this is, again, a low quality short opinion article about AI going to HN front page while not deserving it, it's really an annoying trend.
• 8organicbits 1y ago
  I'm curious what the overlap is between people who use AI tools and people who use ad blockers. Personally, I've been a leech on the ad-funded web my entire adult life; I always block ads. I haven't adopted AI tools. They only seem to work well for content that's readily discoverable anyway, otherwise the risk of hallucination has been far too high in my testing. If I care about the answer, why risk it? I believe there's strong overlap between technically minded people and ad blockers. Maybe the challenge is that AI search appeals to less technically-minded people, who would have otherwise been exposed to ads?
  • pixl97 1y ago
    Eh, I block every ad I can and use AI. That said most of my AI searches are ones that are in depth and use thinking models. With that said there are some queries AI does better than search engines. If I have something I'm trying to remember from the distant past with poorly refined definitions I can iterate to a solution much better than reading spam filled sites.
• dang 1y ago
  The Economist article was discussed here: AI is killing the web – can anything save it? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44623361 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44623361 - July 2025 (448 comments) Other related threads?
• UltraSane 1y ago
  The Web has become completely unusable without uBlock Origin.
  • ryukoposting 1y ago
    Whenever I have to use someone else's computer, or stand up a new one myself, I am reminded of this reality. If LLMs ruin the economic viability of corporate blogspam, that's a net positive for society in my eyes. One of the few net positives we can expect from the AI bubble, as far as I can tell. Of course, the new problem is that we have a bunch of LLMs trained on corporate blogspam, producing low-quality information that only feels plausible because of its correct grammar and neutral voice.
    • rightbyte 1y ago
      > If LLMs ruin the economic viability of corporate blogspam What would be the mechanism for that? If anything LLMs make SEO spam almost free to make.
      • ryukoposting 1y ago
        By reducing click-through rate, as is the point of the article. If it isn't profitable, it doesn't matter if it's cheap to make.
  • uncircle 1y ago
    Sadly, uBlock Origin doesn't block my Kagi/Google search results which are 50% AI-generated spam.
• Waterluvian 1y ago
  If we can streamline the generalized information seeking process, that part of the web can dry up and disappear. And then we’d be left with more of the early era web, where you’re visiting websites not because you have a specific question to answer, but because you’re engaging in a social or interactive or otherwise deeper activity. When it comes to “I have a specific question I need answering and then I’m done” the Web feels horribly clumsy and full of absolute garbage to wade through because they don’t want you to get the answer and go away. They want to milk your eyeballs for impressions and attention.
  • gmueckl 1y ago
    Social interactions are subject to network wffects and have all but captured by social media companies. This part of the web is dead and won't come back.
  • carlosjobim 1y ago
    The early era of the web was an exclusive club for well-paid computer engineers and other computer specialists with a lot of spare time. Which was reflected in information being heavily focused on certain topics and perspectives heavily tilted to certain types of people with a narrow band of ideologies and beliefs. Just like Hacker News is today. I prefer a million times today's web, which serves everybody and where I can find all kind of thoughts and ideas, without restriction. You just need to make an effort to find it. I prefer a million times a well stocked supermarket with all the ingredients I need to make anything I want, rather than a restaurant which serves only one meal made perfectly.
• danielfalbo 1y ago
  We just need to go back at reading books in libraries
  • znort_ 1y ago
    books will be around for a while. but i wouldn't mind getting back to the internet of the 80/90s where you could easily find more genuine content and less aggregators, replicators, marketeers and clickfarms. if that's "killing the internet" then it couldn't happen soon enough (i guess marketeers will not go away no matter what, that's a given). the fear of decline of original content doesn't seem serious. much of what there is now is endless regurgitation anyway. while most of the free stuff nowadays is indeed just noise, the most valuable, original and quality stuff is free, has always been, and it's there. people have been contributing interesting stuff for multiple reasons and in multiple ways for decades, and still do; it is just buried under tons of rubbish. i see no reason why they would stop. if anything, a less noisy internet could be an incentive, and if gaps in knowledge form that will be even more reason to share and contribute, and things like stackoverflow will come back once llms become obsolete enough.
  • sebastiennight 1y ago
    I've written a 125,000-word book a year before GPT-3 was a thing. If this book came out today, in 2025, how would you know that the 420 pages are actually worth your time and not just a bunch of hallucinated LLM slop? I've been wondering whether Wikipedia and libraries in 2030 will be in a better overall place quality-wise, or will just be overrun. The last few times I looked for information on YouTube (by typing a keyword phrase or question instead of looking up a specific channel/creator), most of the top results were AI-narrated presentations. Some of those were filled with comments of people correcting obvious mistakes in the content (which as a layperson I would not have seen as mistakes)
    • vadias 1y ago
      Wikipedia would probably have to deal with its internal politics and frequent-contributor culture before 2030. Wikipedia pages are not too shabby, in expectation. The Wikipedia meta on the other hand is something much less pleasant.
• p_ing 1y ago
  Injecting ads into answers will be the next step for the search market. Reddit is doing it already. And unlike reddit post or comment ads, it may be very difficult to block.
  • duncanfwalker 1y ago
    Oh god, this has just made me reflect that we're in the golden age of generative AI - not in technology terms, in user experience terms. We're in the period where the major products are competing against each other before they switch into enshitfication mode. You're certainly right, there's going to be ads in the answers and probably worse. I'm imagining companies paying to introduce ideas as subtle subtexts to millions of unrelated answers or platforms deliberately engineering the ux to maximise understanding of our drives and preferences purely so it can be sold.
    • aftergibson 1y ago
      Of course. Were in the burning VCs cash by the truckload phase. And inference isn't getting cheaper. I'd argue this is the worst its ever been in terms of over extending a business and they might not be able to enshitificate fast enough.
      • justahuman74 1y ago
        Inference will get much much cheaper. We're paying $30000 for a top of the line gpu right now, but that's only because everyone insists on buying nvidia, so nvidia has full incentive to charge the absolute maximum. Long term that vendor lock in will go away and prices will go down to something reasonable. Long ago CPUs were super expensive too, now they're so cheap we put them in toothbrushes
        • ares623 1y ago
          > Long ago CPUs were super expensive too, now they're so cheap we put them in toothbrushes Long ago GPUs were already affordable. We used to buy them to play _games_!
• JustExAWS 1y ago
  > The article focuses mainly on the publishing industry, news and magazine sites that rely primarily on visits to their sites and selling ads. This is what killed the web - ads. The web is unusable without ad blockers.
• tehjoker 1y ago
  I don't understand why all these companies want to replace links to human curated high quality information with slightly more convenient to access AI hallucinations. Whenever I have an important question, the AI generated answer is only useful to the extent that it provides links (i.e. search).
  • kingstnap 1y ago
    Human curated high quality information on google is getting rare, its as simple as that. There is a renaissance of extremely high quality YouTube videos from creators with very few subscribers. Particularly in Math and Science content. But the general web is full of a lot really bad websites that effectively just waste people's time.
  • verdverm 1y ago
    Most of the high quality human content has already been drowned out by the low quality human content for clicks. AI does the filtering process for me now. I'm using AI because greedy humans already made it bad and it's a really good tool to have in the current environment
  • Nasrudith 1y ago
    Have you heard the economic maxim that bad forces out good? Because that basically already happened to high quality human curated content. Just look at reviews. The good ones are buried under floods of crap. Professional reviewers (in the qualtity sense) were already displaced long before the plague of sponsored influencers.
• ankit219 1y ago
  Calling SEO content high quality is overestimating the nature and level of an SEO article. The other aspect that it implies is businesses are the reason we get so much high quality content. That is provably wrong. The moment people saw that some kinds of links got them high ranking on google, it resulted in an industry of producing SEO garbage where businesses would publish 1000s of words to answer something which could have been answered in a single word. (usual caveats exist) People want signal and answers, not the 10 blue links as this post tries to argue. The other thing is this: most high quality and valuable content can now be produced by individuals and finds distribution on social networks where they can occasionally charge for it as well. The drawback to google indexing those links was also that SEO-companies started targeting these mediums (eg: reddit, medium, forums). We needed an early regulation to minimize the needless hacking of SEO, but we let the market play it out, so it should still play out.
• jondwillis 1y ago
  The obvious incentives that’ll reform the market I think will result in more and more “toxic” content. AI agents are user agents. Like users using browsers. Mix ads into your content so hard that you end up getting the AI to use your brand, etc. It won’t be quite that simple, but I think that’s where this will inevitably lead. Just an evolution of the same old same old.
• deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
• BinaryIgor 1y ago
  Interesting take on the future of web incentives; even before LLMs, I was often wondering how sustainable the ads model is - it obviously has a ton of tradeoffs. Maybe we will just go back to pay content as it was before the Internet era? Magazines and such
  • krupan 1y ago
    Magazines and such had a lot of ads too
  • vertigolimbo 1y ago
    Perhaps. My worry is that magazines will be full of AI generated content. I enjoy reading some very niche magazines and, at the moment, I cannot tell if it's AI generated or not. So, as long as the reader is entertained, magazines will do just fine. Either that, or we will develop some sort of proof that the content is human generated, not AI.
• deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
• firefoxd 1y ago
  Am experiencing this with my blog. This year, I've been contributing more than ever. Several post going viral. But my google traffic has been steadily declining despite impressions being up. For the first time, I'm receiving more direct traffic and referrals than google traffic. Note this is a personal blog without any seo incentives.
• ChiMan 1y ago
  This gets to the heart of why we have copyrights. They’re not to make writers rich. They’re to make us all rich with the content they produce. The modern abuse of copyrights by the likes of Disney does not negate this otherwise wonderful institution.
  • _DeadFred_ 1y ago
    It blows my mind people here don't understand this. Copyright is a huge benefit to society. And under copyright, people that don't want to use it are free to release their rights to the world, so you get two approaches. Which one do we see contributing the most to modern thought? To modern entertainment? To education? Imagine if all text books were open, the only authors would be overworked grad students assigned to update them for next quarter.
    • fragmede 1y ago
      > Copyright is a huge benefit to society. Is it? We don't have the technology to duplicate the Earth in, say, 1776 but without copyright, and run an experiment, so all we can point at is a logic argument that we need to incentivize writer and artists and creators. Which I mean, sure. I want to write the next great American novel and not have to work for the rest of my life. and for my children and their children to not have to work either. Is that really for the betterment of society though? You can give some additional logic arguments in favor of that, but without Earth duplication technology, there's nothing that really constitutues real actual proof. The closest comparison we have that I know of is to look at China, which has far weaker intellectual property laws, and, well, they haven't fallen into lawless anarchy.
      • _DeadFred_ 1y ago
        Yes, having the incentive so that people create and release works is better than people not releasing the works. If people want to release free they can under out current system. It's not lawless anarchy, it's just less of the works that copyright rewards (you get more of what you reward). So all those free books/music/movies that are made each year you still have, but you have less professionals taking a year off to go write their book. You have less decent funding for educations books. You have less sharing of knowledge and ideas, and I would say that makes society worse. If people were going to release it for free, they would be doing that today. People just don't work like that.
• neehao 1y ago
  As Tyler Cowen says, solve for the equilibrium. "Many widely used machine-learning models rely on copyrighted data. For instance, Google finds the most relevant web pages for a search term by relying on a machine learning model trained on copyrighted web data. But the use of copyrighted data by machine learning models that generate content (or give answers to search queries than link to sites with the answers) poses new (reasonable) questions about fair use. By not sharing the proceeds, such systems also kill the incentives to produce original content on which they rely. For instance, if we don’t incentivize content producers, e.g., people who respond to Stack Overflow questions, the ability of these models to answer questions in new areas is likely to be lower. The concern about fair use can be addressed by training on data from content producers who have opted to share their data. The second problem is more challenging. How do you build a system that shares proceeds with content producers?" https://www.gojiberries.io/generative-ai-and-the-market-for-creators/ https://www.gojiberries.io/generative-ai-and-the-market-for-...
  • observationist 1y ago
    Content producers that publish their "content" to the public web aren't entitled to dictate what's done with that material. There's a simple solution. People that publish things can put up a paywall and people can pay what the content is worth. The thing that AI endangers is not valuable content, it's the SEO clickbait cashcow, and as far as I'm concerned, the faster AI kills that off, the better. That monetization model is corrupt as hell, produces all sorts of perverse incentives, and is the epitome of the enshittification of the web. Burn, baby, burn.
    • bgwalter 1y ago
      Of course they are entitled. They have the copyright, so you cannot reproduce it anywhere by default and the "fair" use issue is not settled. Valuable content is endangered because writers feel demotivated it their material is just stolen by overfunded big corporations. Paywalls only work for known publications and not for someone who writes the perfect tutorial on how to solve boot issues in Debian. Why would anyone write that if it's just stolen and monetized without attribution?
    • 1y ago
• Ms-J 1y ago
  Interesting sites without ads will always get humans while the rest will fade away to be eaten alive by AI scrapping.
• homeonthemtn 1y ago
  I dunno, this sounds like a good thing to me.
• p3rls 1y ago
  let me tell you briefly how search works in my main's niche of kpop, where i had about 3m monthly sessions last month for august on my platform (kpopping.com) for 20 years, websites that released idol nudes dominated (https://www.change.org/p/allkpop-com-shut-down-allkpop https://www.change.org/p/allkpop-com-shut-down-allkpop ) then the first wave of slop that figured out you can buy links (https://x.com/paulkimio/status/1550532282288508929 https://x.com/paulkimio/status/1550532282288508929) and now for the past three and a half years it's been indian news websites that dominate good riddance to the search-powered internet and seoers, i don't mind bleeding-- i've been bleeding this whole time :)
• whimsicalism 1y ago
  yes, i use LLM search specifically to avoid the sort of SEO crap that this articles describes as the lifeblood of the internet. you do not have to be too old to remember how the internet got on perfectly fine without this model (and in my view, largely better)
• Gud 1y ago
  The new web will be not be powered by corporate AI chatbots but word of mouth. Link is in my profile
• egberts1 1y ago
  AI: oh you want to know more about the closed-jar chemical flashpoint of sodium bromide? Our NextGen Midland LLC sponsor can supply you with all your chemical needs. Here's the flashpoint, there is no chemical flashpoint of sodium bromide closed-jar or not, just plasma flashpoint. So safe, NextGen Midland can supply all your chemical needs: click here for more info <insert hyper-hyper-grabby-link>