Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

elenaverna.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

141–150 of 318 posts

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

#141

Post by radium3d »

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…

Blocking AI content bots is the name of the game. Luckily most of the big hitters stick with a unique user agent string and/or IP.

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

#142

Post by chii »

bluefirebrand wrote: post #68
layer8 wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ha…

> It is frankly absurd that they should be expected to

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

Yea, those damn tractor makers - they ate the food that the hand farmers used to make! How are hand farmers expected to compete with tractors now, when it's so much more efficient and can do 100x the work!?

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

#144

Post by tayo42 »

pipes wrote: post #75
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.

Reddit is awful now. Some sub reddits are so anal about following new post guide lines every question I ask is automatically removed. And I've tried really hard to follow the rules. I have given up asking. Also who thought it was a good idea to put a wall of rules text at the top of every thread. It is a pain to scroll past and I'm pretty certain no one except crazy people read them.

I think i post in like 2 smaller subreddits now because its impossible to participate in anything. automod and eventually real mods are always deleting stuff because of some seemingly random interpretation of a rule

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

#145

Post by caminante »

edgarvaldes wrote: post #130
gcanyon wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'll never forget when I read the question, "Who is the mayor of San Jose?" on Quora, and the answer was "Joe Bloe is the mayor of San Jose. Source: I'm Joe Bloe, mayor of San Jose." Reading that defined Quora in my mind for the next few years.

>Reading that defined Quora in my mind for the next few years. Because he was an impersonator? Or because he really was Joe Bloe?

Appears there was never a Joe Bloe. [0]

It's also whimsical of Quora because there are many "San Jose" locations.

[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mayor_of_San_Jose,_California

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

#146

Post by jsemrau »

joelthelion wrote: post #8

The ones that struggle had pre-existing issues : - quora pivoted from quality content to cheap clickbait - SO has overbearing moderation. Chatgpt doesn't close your question the second you've submitted it. And so on. In short, quality platforms are fine.

Wasn't poe.com supposed to be the quora replacement since its run by the same guy who also sat on the OpenAI board?

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

#147

Post by tayo42 »

Terr_ wrote: post #82
_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

> I find myself appending “Reddit” to the end of my searches a lot more often And even then, Reddit's "new" design is shit for usability, sine the actual text you were searching for is nowhere on the page. It's hidden somewhere behind one of a hundred "click to see more" interactions, some of which are nested, and some will cause a completely new new page load that erases your progress and makes you start over. (But…

Just switch to old.reddit.com

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

#148

Post by Terr_ »

tayo42 wrote: post #147
Terr_ wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I find myself appending “Reddit” to the end of my searches a lot more often And even then, Reddit's "new" design is shit for usability, sine the actual text you were searching for is nowhere on the page. It's hidden somewhere behind one of a hundred "click to see more" interactions, some of which are nested, and some will cause a completely new new page load that erases your progress and makes you start over. (But…

Just switch to old.reddit.com

Oh, I am extremely aware.

The problem is that many links (i.e. from Google) do not go there, most people won't know that's an option, and even if you do it means additional friction. (Yes, putting on a browser plugin to redirect also counts as friction. )

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

#149

Post by johnfn »

joelthelion wrote: post #8

The ones that struggle had pre-existing issues : - quora pivoted from quality content to cheap clickbait - SO has overbearing moderation. Chatgpt doesn't close your question the second you've submitted it. And so on. In short, quality platforms are fine.

Hm, not sure I agree with you about SO. The experience I have with SO 99%+ of the time is that I google my question, get a result on SO which has a correct and decent quality answer, and I'm back to work. That's a pretty great experience, and I certainly wouldn't say that it misses the bar to be a 'quality platform'. I do agree the moderation is overbearing at times, but let's not throw the baby out with the bathwater here. The utility of SO - getting answers to questions - is basically unmatched websites that aren't LLM wrappers.

While you won't hear me bemoaning the death of Quora, I'm quite a bit more concerned about SO. After all, where is GPT 5 going to scrape the next set of answers for new libraries and frameworks..?

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

#150

Post by ok_dad »

ehnto wrote: post #129
inetknght wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think it implies that at all.

It depends on your medium, many platforms require a lot of throughput in order to rank highly in their algorithms and reach people. If your business requires volume not high value customers then you need to play the volume game. But if you have high lifetime value customers, you could get away with fewer articles of higher value, authoritive, trust and reputation building content.

Eventually, under the barrage of AI spam, the sites which "uprank" using "posting volume" metrics will lose users who will see the quality of the content drop like a rock. Other sites, which have better algorithms which are tuned for quality not quantity, will take over and you will be able to post quality content there instead. I think HN is one such place, I often see companies post high-quality content just once or twice a year and it reaches here pretty well.
Post reply on HN