Show HN: Cut the crap – remove AI bullshit from websites

There’s an interesting hypothetical situation here:

Let’s say that use of AI generated SEO to game search and recommendation algorithms become very widespread. This drives adoption of summarizers because reading these articles is a chore.

The result is that there a whole big chunk of “shadow-text” going unread by users BUT is still being used to drive ranking and discoverability.

There’s essentially a divorce between “content used to rank” and “content delivered to the user”, which could result in a couple different outcomes:

- search is forced to adapt in a way that brings these into alignment, so ranking is driven by the content people want to see and isn’t easily gamed

- SEO is allowed to get really, really weird because you can throw whatever text you want in there knowing that users will never see it

> Isn't this shortsighted in the sense that it removes all incentive for the creators to create?

When I was young and naive, I learned guitar so I could make tunes, not realizing I'd failed to search engine optimize narratives about my journey for ad placement to fund my spotify pay for play to get myself concert gigs to sell hats and t-shirts until I could land sponsors.

I'm sad to think in my naïveté I might have encouraged future children to create music for themselves and put it out there to see if it resonates with others, instead of enroll the kids into creator influencer classes teaching how to content mill for the idiocracy.

I'm ashamed I thought personal joy and fulfillment was a valid incentive, taking away their drive to generate and grow rich.

Let’s also add the fact that most sites cannot afford AI.

> Instead of trying to win a game I believe is illegitimate, I prefer not to play.

We were given this advice way back in 1985 with "the only winning move is not to play. how about a nice game of chess?"

I can't tolerate the web without an ad blocker, and it's not just ads. Pressure from ad networks to build sites that match advertising friendly structure makes every site overly verbose. Social media sites encourage cover images, so every blog post has an image (often unrelated, creepy, uncanny valley gen-AI). So cut-the-crap is valuable tool.

A different solution is to avoid content discovery mechanisms that funnel you to AI slop and other disfunction. I'd really like a search engine that could filter out sites with ads and affiliate links, because those sites have competing interests that lead to low quality or even harmful content.

Thankfully there's a sea of independent bloggers who don't care about revenue and just want to write. They build websites that are reader friendly and aren't painful to interact with.