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> My cofounder and I think the rise of AI has put the free web at risk To paraphrase Upton Sinclair, “When your paycheck depends on you thinking something, it will be very hard to get you to not think it.”
Getting rid of ad supported content and SEO optimizations? Nothing of value will be lost. There is nothing “free” about the tracking and evilness of adtech. I have been paying $20/month for ChatGPT with web search just so I could avoid sites like yours. The first thing I see when I go to your site is a half page cookie banner that wants me to accept tracking.
What site are you referring to? Ours doesn't have a cookie banner
Getting rid of ad supported content and SEO optimizations? Nothing of value will be lost. There is nothing “free” about the tracking and evilness of adtech. I have been paying $20/month for ChatGPT with web search just so I could avoid sites like yours. The first thing I see when I go to your site is a half page cookie banner that wants me to accept tracking.
Who, me? Haha What site are you referring to? Ours doesn't have a cookie banner
Getting rid of ad supported content and SEO optimizations? Nothing of value will be lost. There is nothing “free” about the tracking and evilness of adtech. I have been paying $20/month for ChatGPT with web search just so I could avoid sites like yours. The first thing I see when I go to your site is a half page cookie banner that wants me to accept tracking.
But you still have to visit websites (or use apps) to do tasks online like booking tickets, getting stuff delivered, or paying bills. They are all tracking us. Do you also plan to pay for AI agents that do these chores on your behalf?
Getting rid of ad supported content and SEO optimizations? Nothing of value will be lost. There is nothing “free” about the tracking and evilness of adtech. I have been paying $20/month for ChatGPT with web search just so I could avoid sites like yours. The first thing I see when I go to your site is a half page cookie banner that wants me to accept tracking.
But you still have to visit websites (or use apps) to do tasks online like booking tickets, getting stuff delivered, or paying bills. They are all tracking us. Do you also plan to pay for AI agents that do these chores on your behalf?
Of course I have an ad blocker. All of my bills are auto pay.
I think human written, compelling, deep content will survive. Fluff content sites will likely be squashed by search engines favoring brands and authority over linkage stats because there is so much AI generated content that's mediocre, the search engines have to weed thru that to have relevant results. Often now though before you see results, you see AI summaries. This is perfectly fine if someone is casually searchi…
Yeah I mean the salad example is great because in that case it feels ridiculous to have to look at ads. Maybe we don’t need to protect websites that rely on advertised content? Maybe it makes a better internet? Based on what you’re saying here it sounds like good content will inevitably go behind paywalls in this case, and the number of paid subs people need to have will only continue to explode. Aka no free internet…
I think human written, compelling, deep content will survive. Fluff content sites will likely be squashed by search engines favoring brands and authority over linkage stats because there is so much AI generated content that's mediocre, the search engines have to weed thru that to have relevant results. Often now though before you see results, you see AI summaries. This is perfectly fine if someone is casually searchi…
Remember what we all see now is the worst LLMs will ever be. They are only getting better now and that might even mean there will be a thousand different versions of a given article, each tailored for a give user bracket according to how compelling they predict the version will be to that specific cohort.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yeah I mean the salad example is great because in that case it feels ridiculous to have to look at ads. Maybe we don’t need to protect websites that rely on advertised content? Maybe it makes a better internet? Based on what you’re saying here it sounds like good content will inevitably go behind paywalls in this case, and the number of paid subs people need to have will only continue to explode. Aka no free internet…
And him and his cofounder created a service that scrapes websites and uses AI for something or other… https://www.goharvest.ai/
We recognize it as an unrewarding, tedious, and time-consuming thing humans have had to do until the latest abilities of browser agents.
As we built and learnt more about the industry we started to understand the underlying problems. For 99% of web sites web scraping isn’t the problem, the lack of compensation is.
We think there’s actually a better way to do this. If there’s enough demand, we can facilitate a rev share between agent scrapers and websites. Scrapers will pay less than what they pay for proxies and websites get a new revenue stream.
These are our thoughts at least so far. We aren’t ashamed of what we’ve built by any means in the way your comment implies lol. We want to see if we can benefit both parties in a win-win marketplace.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
And him and his cofounder created a service that scrapes websites and uses AI for something or other… https://www.goharvest.ai/
We built Harvest to reduce the pain of gathering web data by clicking through websites to copy data into excel sheets, databases, and CRMs. Something millions of people do everyday. We recognize it as an unrewarding, tedious, and time-consuming thing humans have had to do until the latest abilities of browser agents. As we built and learnt more about the industry we started to understand the underlying problems. For…
How is what you’re doing any better than what you are complaining about?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
We built Harvest to reduce the pain of gathering web data by clicking through websites to copy data into excel sheets, databases, and CRMs. Something millions of people do everyday. We recognize it as an unrewarding, tedious, and time-consuming thing humans have had to do until the latest abilities of browser agents. As we built and learnt more about the industry we started to understand the underlying problems. For…
So what you are doing is scraping the data without asking permission and using AI so people won’t have to go to the original site. How is what you’re doing any better than what you are complaining about?
2) We aren’t complaining. We’re curious how others view this topic and space because it’s a contentious topic. We recognize that we might be able to address the larger issue of lack of compensation for websites being scraped by facilitating a win-win marketplace (only loser is proxy providers).