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AI is killing some companies, yet others are thriving – let's look at the data

elenaverna.com

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Re: AI is killing some companies, yet others are thriving – let's look at the data

#61

Post by 0xffff2 »

mvdtnz wrote: post #48
_benj wrote: post #26

I’ve seen this shift in my own usage. I find myself appending “Reddit” to the end of my searches a lot more often, I have pinned Wikipedia to the top of my search results (in kagi) and I haven’t visited stackoverflow in months, although I see that perplexity quotes it quite often when I ask it coding questions… I’m just a sample of one, but it’s certainly interesting to see how apparently I’m just one of many

It's shocking to me that people would intentionally seek Reddit threads. The quality of the discussion on that site is absolutely appalling beyond belief.

Particularly for product reviews/information, it's the least biased (note: NOT unbiased) source I know of. If you're looking for information on what model of (to pick a recent personal example) toaster isn't complete junk, where do you look?

Re: AI is killing some companies, yet others are thriving – let's look at the data

#62

Post by [deleted] »

mvdtnz wrote: post #48
_benj wrote: post #26

I’ve seen this shift in my own usage. I find myself appending “Reddit” to the end of my searches a lot more often, I have pinned Wikipedia to the top of my search results (in kagi) and I haven’t visited stackoverflow in months, although I see that perplexity quotes it quite often when I ask it coding questions… I’m just a sample of one, but it’s certainly interesting to see how apparently I’m just one of many

It's shocking to me that people would intentionally seek Reddit threads. The quality of the discussion on that site is absolutely appalling beyond belief.

[deleted]

Re: AI is killing some companies, yet others are thriving – let's look at the data

#63

Post by gruez »

dougb5 wrote: post #58
pestaa wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you use a CDN in front of it? Would something like Cloudflare help with bot detection?

I'm on AWS and use their WAF service to do some rudimentary bot blocking, but CDNs (their Cloudflare equivalent, Cloudfront) have been too expensive in the past and the bot control mechanisms they offer have too many false positives. Perhaps I should check it out again. Part of the problem is the economics of it -- I've chosen to self-fund a high traffic site without ads, and that's on me. But it was possible to do t…

>and the bot control mechanisms they offer have too many false positives. Perhaps I should check it out again.

Cloudflare no longer does CAPTCHAs so even if users get flagged as bots, the user experience isn't terrible. You just have to click on a box and you're on your way. It adds maybe 3s of delay, far better than anti-bot solutions that require you to solve an captcha, or imperva's (?) challenge that requires you to hold a button for 5-10s seconds.

Re: AI is killing some companies, yet others are thriving – let's look at the data

#64

Post by rchaud »

dougb5 wrote: post #34

AI is killing my website but in a different way than what's discussed in the article: Content scrapers are completely out of control, spiking my serving costs and degrading performance for human users. There seem to be hundreds of them and they've gotten very good at looking like human users so they're hard to block or throttle. I can't prove they're all AI-related scrapers, but I've been running the site for 25 year…

Even my barely visited personal website is using almost 10GB bandwidth per month according to Digital Ocean. My website is 90% text with no video, so I imagine it's just bots and scrapers hitting it all day. I'm very close to password protecting the whole thing aside from the homepage.

Re: AI is killing some companies, yet others are thriving – let's look at the data

#65

Post by rchaud »

staticautomatic wrote: post #14
corentin88 wrote: post #2

Content marketing is dead. AI has killed it. One of our main marketing channels was writing SEO-oriented articles on our company’s blog. The traffic has steadily decreased over the last year despite huge efforts. That doesn’t mean SEO is dead though.

Disagree. The old way of doing SEO blogspam is dead, and good riddance. Well curated, high quality content written by humans, with information and insights you can’t get from LLMs, will reign. Long live curation.

No it won't. Well curated info is paywalled everywhere besides Wikipedia and Internet Archive. SEO is still serving up content mill blogspam at an unstoppable rate.

Re: AI is killing some companies, yet others are thriving – let's look at the data

#66

Post by rchaud »

mvdtnz wrote: post #48
_benj wrote: post #26

I’ve seen this shift in my own usage. I find myself appending “Reddit” to the end of my searches a lot more often, I have pinned Wikipedia to the top of my search results (in kagi) and I haven’t visited stackoverflow in months, although I see that perplexity quotes it quite often when I ask it coding questions… I’m just a sample of one, but it’s certainly interesting to see how apparently I’m just one of many

It's shocking to me that people would intentionally seek Reddit threads. The quality of the discussion on that site is absolutely appalling beyond belief.

As opposed to what, Yelp? Quora? A Wirecutter article bursting at the seams with affilliate links?

Re: AI is killing some companies, yet others are thriving – let's look at the data

#67

Post by theamk »

echelon wrote: post #32
bluedino wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Nor does ChatGPT ban you from the entire network because you answered a Palestine question on the politics sub-section. (Happened to me.) Some Reddit subs (as well as web forums/messageboards) have the same problem. If your views don't align with the majority (or the minority, if they run the sub), you're likely to get banned or lose the ability to post.

We need P2P social media where bigoted, power hungry mods can't enforce their unilateral views on everyone else.

Plenty of such things exist, and I (and everyone I know) generally avoid visiting them. There is simply too much spam, trolling, hate speech, wrong information, ads, off-topic conversations..

Turns out moderation is actually useful if you want to have interesting conversations.

Re: AI is killing some companies, yet others are thriving – let's look at the data

#68

Post by bluefirebrand »

layer8 wrote: post #60
RandallBrown wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn't that because ChatGPT is trained on those QA platforms? If real humans aren't answering questions on the Internet, how will LLMs learn the answers to those questions?

While true, this doesn’t change the problem that Q&A platforms have a hard time competing with LLMs, and I don’t see how that is likely to change.

It is frankly absurd that they should be expected to

These LLMs could not exist without them, but now they're expected to compete?

If all of the Q&A platforms die off, how are LLM training datasets going to get new information?

This whole AI boom is typical corporate shortsightedness imo. Kill the future in order to have a great next quarter

I hope I'm wrong. If I am right, then I hope we figure this out before AI has bulldozed everything into dust

Re: AI is killing some companies, yet others are thriving – let's look at the data

#69

Post by nitwit005 »

staticautomatic wrote: post #14
corentin88 wrote: post #2

Content marketing is dead. AI has killed it. One of our main marketing channels was writing SEO-oriented articles on our company’s blog. The traffic has steadily decreased over the last year despite huge efforts. That doesn’t mean SEO is dead though.

Disagree. The old way of doing SEO blogspam is dead, and good riddance. Well curated, high quality content written by humans, with information and insights you can’t get from LLMs, will reign. Long live curation.

I'm sure I can make a couple of surprising or insightful articles for my current industry, and then I'll run dry.

Most topics require data or information in some form, which requires time to accumulate. You end up rate limited. Even at the scale of a decent sized company, you often can only produce interesting content occasionally.

Re: AI is killing some companies, yet others are thriving – let's look at the data

#70

Post by Legend2440 »

RandallBrown wrote: post #40
whiplash451 wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

True, but Q&A platforms were the prime collateral damage for ChatGPT. I am not sure that quality content on a Q&A platform would help you much. You’d have to pivot significantly.

Isn't that because ChatGPT is trained on those QA platforms? If real humans aren't answering questions on the Internet, how will LLMs learn the answers to those questions?

Not entirely. LLMs are smart enough to answer questions from documentation or from other sources, even if the exact question wasn't asked anywhere.

But Q&A websites do contain information that might not be in other sources, so there would be some loss.

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