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.
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.
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.
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.
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
The move has happened because SEO rotted out The Internet to the point there’s been a “theory” that the Internet died a decade ago. If the current Internet is unsustainable under new technology trends then the new parts need to and will evolve to thrive inside the new ecosystem.
I hate that about Discord. It is a fun comms application, but it is severely lacking as a community.
Once, before I realized this, I recommended users of a forum use Discord. The impact was severe and fortunately brief. We all realized we would not be leaving the usual, often high value info for others, and ourselves to benefit from in the future.
We unwound that mess and now carry on in the usual way.
Discord has carved out a huge chunk of discussion people will wish was available in the future.
It depends very much on the discord. I'm in several discords which are excellent communities. They're really good places to hang out, get to know people interested in the same hobby, build a subculture etc.
I haven't really tried one as a QA or knowledge sharing site, perhaps they're much less good at that.
That brings up the unstated part of the original comment. There's this obsession with ossifying the Internet because we're so afraid of losing something like SO.
The people who made SO are not going anywhere, there will always be a SO, a wikipedia, a search engine. Let it evolve to the next thing.
Especially with main SO I really wonder if accepting natural cycle of online platforms would be best. When culture gets to point that there is enough negative views on platform, maybe it is time to let it be replaced.
Surely part of that is because most tech related questions have already been asked and answered on SO. I'd say a decline in new question is stack overflow working as designed. A large part of what makes SO so good is the searchability of old questions. There will always be new questions to ask, as new technologies confuse Devs in new ways, but to expect new questions to be asked at the same rate as peak is to misunderstand what SO is at it's core.
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.
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.
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
> 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".
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> People will have less or no motivation to create them
Not sure if we surf the same internets... In the web I am surfing, the more "motivation" (trying to get ad revenue) the author has, the crappier the content is. If I want to find high quality information, invariably I am seeking authors with no "motivation" whatsoever to produce the content (wikipedia, hacker news, reddit with a heavy filter etc.) I'm pretty sure we would be better off if the whole ad industry vanished.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
I had lunch with an entrepreneur with a "big idea" to convince major LLM platforms to feature ads in their answers, using businesses that they specify.
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.
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.
> 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)
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.
Those are called Agents and already exists today. I've been prompted for more information when the agent realized it didn't have all the context it needs
Don't agents still depend on LLMs to produce a human-readable response, rather than as a source of information/knowledge? And aren't they still vulnerable to prompt injection attacks, due to being unable to separate the information/knowledge part vs the prompt, because their prompt "parsing" is coupled to an LLM?
If you give them a fair and reasonable go, you'll discover more than asking leading questions on HN. In example, there are many things you are unaware of as possibilities, like how easy it is to undo code changes to the last checkpoint (copilots chat checkpoint, not git or vcs). They can also make use of all the external tools, knowledge repositories, and search engines we use.
My personal experience has led me to increase my monthly spend, because the ROI is there, the UX is much improved
Hallucinations will never go away, but I put them in the same category as clicking search results to outdated or completely wrong blog posts. There's a back button
Yeah that has been on my backlog. I admit that I haven't given them too much priority, but at some point I want to try an AI agent that works offline and is sandboxed.
The frontier models like Gemini are so much better than the open weight models you can run at home, night and day difference. I have yet to try the larger open models on H100s
I'm keen to build an agent from scratch with copilot extension being open source and tools like BentoML that can help me build out the agentic workflows that can scale on a beefy H100 machine
"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?"
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.
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?
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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)
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
"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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
Social media doesn’t provide news. It provides regurgitation of actual news by journalists (who need to eat) and a lot of hot takes and commentary on the actual news by journalists. Take away the journalism and you’re left with Reddit hot air.
Everyone needs to eat. Lots of jobs have gone away and lots have been created. Just because industries shrink doesn't mean they should be bailed out or supported.
> 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.
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.
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.
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).
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
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.
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.
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.
> Just wait until the foundational models are all fed with increasing amounts of ads.
Which foundational models?
Not all model providers are in the ad business and while the chances of building a supercomputer in your basement to train such a model are zero, some of the companies that build such models aren't exactly huge. Mistral for example is (according to Wikipedia) 150 people - this means that a company that can make their own model from scratch doesn't need to be some giant corporation. Which in turn means that it is possible for new companies to pop up, if there is a need for them - in this case, if some models become ad-infested, chances are other models will use their ad-free status as a feature.
And this is assuming only companies make such models. But some days ago i was reading here in HN about a new foundational model being trained by ETH Zurich and somehow i doubt a public university will inject ads in it.
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.
Is this is a joke? Of course it's not going to kill ad-funded anything, ads will still be there 100% in some form, except now all the ad money will go to 1-2 companies instead of the whole world of web publishers. Very smart cheering that on!
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
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.
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.
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.
No it’s dependent on donations, either monetary or content. It’s not really free. It has an economic model. You can get away with one that minimal for Wikipedia because serving mostly static content is incredibly cheap.
Wikipedia can also only work because the upstream scientific and academic work to produce what gets posted there is largely subsidized. Wikipedia posters and maintainers do not have to pay the true cost of the content they are posting and very little of it is original.
This model won’t work for, say, journalism, which is very expensive. It won’t work for difficult polished software products. It won’t work for truly original artistic or literary work which takes tremendous amounts of time to produce. If, for example, authors can’t charge for a novel, then only people with trust funds or who are independently wealthy can afford to invest the time it takes to write a book.
The people pointing out how bad ad supported content is are proving my point, which was that there must be some kind of economic model. If there is no working one, content producers default to ads which leads to enshittification.
> Content can’t be free if you want it to be of any quality.
There are lots smaller local websites which can produce useful local content because of ad support. Those may not have enough subscribers to continue behind a paywall.
What I notice here in Brazil is that most local news channels get the bulk of their money from TV ads. They all have a badly done website-blog with news that are very superficial (like 2 paragraphs) just to fill them with ads up and down and try to get something from it.
The big channels nowadays usually have 2 websites: one that is free and full of ads and pop-ups with very superficial news (seemingly written by interns) and one with actual quality analysis, journalism etc. that allow you access of 3 articles a month before you need to pay or something of that sorts.
I think the “serving ads” business hasn’t worked for a while.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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
The move has happened because SEO rotted out The Internet to the point there’s been a “theory” that the Internet died a decade ago. If the current Internet is unsustainable under new technology trends then the new parts need to and will evolve to thrive inside the new ecosystem.
I hate that about Discord. It is a fun comms application, but it is severely lacking as a community.
Once, before I realized this, I recommended users of a forum use Discord. The impact was severe and fortunately brief. We all realized we would not be leaving the usual, often high value info for others, and ourselves to benefit from in the future.
We unwound that mess and now carry on in the usual way.
Discord has carved out a huge chunk of discussion people will wish was available in the future.
It depends very much on the discord. I'm in several discords which are excellent communities. They're really good places to hang out, get to know people interested in the same hobby, build a subculture etc.
I haven't really tried one as a QA or knowledge sharing site, perhaps they're much less good at that.
There are question/answer channels, not everything is chat on Discord
Those are not easily searchable either
Oh I know, it's one of my top 3 complaints. Information gardening is hard
That brings up the unstated part of the original comment. There's this obsession with ossifying the Internet because we're so afraid of losing something like SO.
The people who made SO are not going anywhere, there will always be a SO, a wikipedia, a search engine. Let it evolve to the next thing.
Especially with main SO I really wonder if accepting natural cycle of online platforms would be best. When culture gets to point that there is enough negative views on platform, maybe it is time to let it be replaced.
Surely part of that is because most tech related questions have already been asked and answered on SO. I'd say a decline in new question is stack overflow working as designed. A large part of what makes SO so good is the searchability of old questions. There will always be new questions to ask, as new technologies confuse Devs in new ways, but to expect new questions to be asked at the same rate as peak is to misunderstand what SO is at it's core.
But that's just like, my opinion, dude.
That explanation totally fails to account for SO's usage suddenly falling off a cliff as soon as ChatGPT arrived on the scene.
Stack overflow was a shit show way before LLMs became popular.
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.
> 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.
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.
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
> 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".
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.
Often, that off-topic content was garbage anyway. Not really deep or helpful or expert in any way. Not always, but often.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Same. And my logs say that AI crawls my pages roughly 1.2 bazillion times per day.
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.
> People will have less or no motivation to create them
Not sure if we surf the same internets... In the web I am surfing, the more "motivation" (trying to get ad revenue) the author has, the crappier the content is. If I want to find high quality information, invariably I am seeking authors with no "motivation" whatsoever to produce the content (wikipedia, hacker news, reddit with a heavy filter etc.) I'm pretty sure we would be better off if the whole ad industry vanished.
I doubt search engines are primarily what helped most blogs and sites grow. It's forums/word of mouth/social media
> It will be just a food for AI of some corporation.
Food that said corporation makes a profit off while paying the author nothing.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
The Economist article was discussed here:
AI is killing the web – can anything save it? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44623361 - July 2025 (448 comments)
Other related threads?
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.
It's just a new era in the ad-block wars where my ad-block LLM tries to excise the ads from their ad-generating LLM.
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.
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.
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
> 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_!
You better believe I’m going full self-hosted AI the moment I get a whiff of sponsored content in an AI response I paid for.
I had lunch with an entrepreneur with a "big idea" to convince major LLM platforms to feature ads in their answers, using businesses that they specify.
It was a very short lunch.
I'd guess you paid for both meals but they asked for the receipt to claim it as a business expense.
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.
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.
> 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)
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.
Those are called Agents and already exists today. I've been prompted for more information when the agent realized it didn't have all the context it needs
Don't agents still depend on LLMs to produce a human-readable response, rather than as a source of information/knowledge? And aren't they still vulnerable to prompt injection attacks, due to being unable to separate the information/knowledge part vs the prompt, because their prompt "parsing" is coupled to an LLM?
If you give them a fair and reasonable go, you'll discover more than asking leading questions on HN. In example, there are many things you are unaware of as possibilities, like how easy it is to undo code changes to the last checkpoint (copilots chat checkpoint, not git or vcs). They can also make use of all the external tools, knowledge repositories, and search engines we use.
My personal experience has led me to increase my monthly spend, because the ROI is there, the UX is much improved
Hallucinations will never go away, but I put them in the same category as clicking search results to outdated or completely wrong blog posts. There's a back button
Yeah that has been on my backlog. I admit that I haven't given them too much priority, but at some point I want to try an AI agent that works offline and is sandboxed.
The frontier models like Gemini are so much better than the open weight models you can run at home, night and day difference. I have yet to try the larger open models on H100s
I'm keen to build an agent from scratch with copilot extension being open source and tools like BentoML that can help me build out the agentic workflows that can scale on a beefy H100 machine
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-...
AI companies are already paying for content to train on.
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.
Publishing publicly doesn't surrender copyright…
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?
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
AI companies are causing a content drought that will eventually starve them.
Who cares about them, it will starve society
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.
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?
Where will the experience come from?
I dunno, this sounds like a good thing to me.
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.
Interesting. When I Google I always get the AI summary which does it for me.
Interesting sites without ads will always get humans while the rest will fade away to be eaten alive by AI scrapping.
We just need to go back at reading books in libraries
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.
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)
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.
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
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.
Magazines and such had a lot of ads too
"Content" that is made for clicks is precisely what I'd want to disappear from the universe.
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.
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.
"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.
the first thing when i open my browser is lookup at https://news.ycombinator.com/ :)
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
Americans already, and increasingly, report getting a good chunk of their news from social media:
https://www.pewresearch.org/journalism/fact-sheet/social-med...
Folks who want more traditional journalism will pay for it.
Social media doesn’t provide news. It provides regurgitation of actual news by journalists (who need to eat) and a lot of hot takes and commentary on the actual news by journalists. Take away the journalism and you’re left with Reddit hot air.
Americans don't care.
Journalism and news compete with entertainment.
Everyone needs to eat. Lots of jobs have gone away and lots have been created. Just because industries shrink doesn't mean they should be bailed out or supported.
Eh, in that case most 'news' doesn't provide news but opinions and commentary.
Conversely a lot of 'news' in its raw form is posted to social media.
What you're talking about is long form journalism which is expensive and not popular with the 30 second soundbite population we've grown.
> 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.
Ok.
If Americans don't value traditional journalism enough to pay what it may cost, it will go away.
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.
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.
The Web has become completely unusable without uBlock Origin.
Sadly, uBlock Origin doesn't block my Kagi/Google search results which are 50% AI-generated spam.
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.
> 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.
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).
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.
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
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.
If AI kills the ad-funded business model of the internet, it will be one of the few good outcomes from AI.
Good riddance.
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.
Local AI searching for me and filtering the ads is my future. You can speak for yourself.
Yes, I'm sure your "local AI" running on 8 gb of ram will be able to filter the ads added by the super computer AI just fine.
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.
> Just wait until the foundational models are all fed with increasing amounts of ads.
Which foundational models?
Not all model providers are in the ad business and while the chances of building a supercomputer in your basement to train such a model are zero, some of the companies that build such models aren't exactly huge. Mistral for example is (according to Wikipedia) 150 people - this means that a company that can make their own model from scratch doesn't need to be some giant corporation. Which in turn means that it is possible for new companies to pop up, if there is a need for them - in this case, if some models become ad-infested, chances are other models will use their ad-free status as a feature.
And this is assuming only companies make such models. But some days ago i was reading here in HN about a new foundational model being trained by ETH Zurich and somehow i doubt a public university will inject ads in it.
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.
Is this is a joke? Of course it's not going to kill ad-funded anything, ads will still be there 100% in some form, except now all the ad money will go to 1-2 companies instead of the whole world of web publishers. Very smart cheering that on!
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
Not if they can’t afford to pay the bills.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
Wikipedia continued existence is not dependent on ads or clicks.
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.
10 shocking secrets about the solar system!
“the last one will turn your brain upside down”
No it’s dependent on donations, either monetary or content. It’s not really free. It has an economic model. You can get away with one that minimal for Wikipedia because serving mostly static content is incredibly cheap.
Wikipedia can also only work because the upstream scientific and academic work to produce what gets posted there is largely subsidized. Wikipedia posters and maintainers do not have to pay the true cost of the content they are posting and very little of it is original.
This model won’t work for, say, journalism, which is very expensive. It won’t work for difficult polished software products. It won’t work for truly original artistic or literary work which takes tremendous amounts of time to produce. If, for example, authors can’t charge for a novel, then only people with trust funds or who are independently wealthy can afford to invest the time it takes to write a book.
The people pointing out how bad ad supported content is are proving my point, which was that there must be some kind of economic model. If there is no working one, content producers default to ads which leads to enshittification.
> Content can’t be free if you want it to be of any quality.
There are lots smaller local websites which can produce useful local content because of ad support. Those may not have enough subscribers to continue behind a paywall.
What I notice here in Brazil is that most local news channels get the bulk of their money from TV ads. They all have a badly done website-blog with news that are very superficial (like 2 paragraphs) just to fill them with ads up and down and try to get something from it.
The big channels nowadays usually have 2 websites: one that is free and full of ads and pop-ups with very superficial news (seemingly written by interns) and one with actual quality analysis, journalism etc. that allow you access of 3 articles a month before you need to pay or something of that sorts.
I think the “serving ads” business hasn’t worked for a while.
> 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.