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

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

#151

Post by 3vidence »

ForTheKidz wrote: post #84
darth_avocado wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Quora has sucked for a while now. When the second answer on every question is completely unrelated to the question asked, in some weird attempt to make you look up more content on the site, the site starts losing its usefulness.

Quora has never, in my memory, provided any value to the internet. The answers it seems to provide to google are seemingly inaccurate and also seem completely unmoderated. Furthermore you seemingly have to pay to even ask answers to get updated.

The early days of Quora was incredibly high quality content from experts in all sorts of fields.

Was probably my favorite website, then they decided to start paying people for questions / answers and it all went to shit so incredibly quickly. The site today is completely unrecognizable from it's origins, really sad.

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

#152

Post by 1R053 »

johnfn wrote: post #149
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 bathwate…

I think it depends a lot on how research AI generated traffic counts towards these stats.

Also, if there is no answer yet on the web the AI may also not know it. Then these questions should still end up on SO.

I might add, that SO also could build their own chat / research UI. It would need to have some benefit over others, but I guess the community aspect of it alone would suffice...

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

#153

Post by rixed »

immibis wrote: post #89
lcampbell wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you're given a button to click, your browser has successfully passed the environment integrity checks and you have not been flagged as a bot. You'll be flagged as a bot if your browser configuration has something "weird" (e.g. webrtc is disabled to reduce your attack surface) and you will be completely unable to access any site behind cloudflare with the anti-bot options turned on. You'll get an infinite redirect…

Note that Google's version of this was determined to be checking whether you had a 9-day-old tracking cookie. The researcher who discovered this was able to generate 60,000 "I am not a bot" cookies per day, and use them up about 15 times each in a bot before it started getting captchas. That was in 2016 though.

Couldn't the content of that cookie be used to validate its actual age? Like, just signing the date of generation?

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

#154

Post by dumbledoren »

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.

> - quora pivoted from quality content to cheap clickbait

Huh? If you follow the right people and only interact content that you like, Quora is still as good. Just like any other social network.

People click stuff they don't like and they end up getting the same kind of thing served for 2-3 days and then think that its 'site gone bad'. No my good man.

Its just how the social network engagement algorithms work. You gotta watch what you interact with. Even if you drop a comment to correct someone, it still counts as an engagement and you'll get more of it. So the best thing to do when you see content you don't like is to ignore it.

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

#155

Post by dumbledoren »

francisofascii wrote: post #31
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.

um, I would argue overbearing moderation is positive for overall "quality" of content. But not as useful as ChatGPT that will spoon feed you answers and not care about misspellings, bad English, asking the same question, etc. It is truly remarkable how good it is.

Nope. Stack mods close questions related to major programming debates because the moderator and his clique decided that one practice is 'the best' etc.

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

#156

Post by rixed »

Thorentis wrote: post #86
mitthrowaway2 wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

After some experience and testing, I've become well aware not to use LLMs to ask questions like "who did X" and "what is company Y's policy about Z", because they tend to hallucinate responses (even for well-known people). What I've not yet figured out how to deal with is how to handle being surrounded by a society of people who go ahead and trust LLMs for their factual answers anyway. I think even if I'm careful abo…

People used to criticise Wikipedia for being bad due to being crowdsourced (at least in school they did). Now, Wikipedia looks like one of the best antidotes to LLMs.

Technically, I see no reason why Wikipedia would stay immune very much longer, unfortunately.

The best antidote is printed books.

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

#157

Post by dumbledoren »

jgalt212 wrote: post #127

> Yet, despite the challenges, Quora still pulls in just under 1 billion visits a month. Man, those a big numbers. I would have bet two orders of magnitude lower.

That's because Quora is still very good if you ignore content you don't like and just engage with content that interests you.

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

#158

Post by julianeon »

crote wrote: post #52
immibis wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Disagree. The new way of doing SEO blogspam, which involves LLMs, is the way forward. Sadly, downvoting this comment won't make it not be true.

I've personally been seeing an overall shift in the direction of a strong dislike for any kind of low-effort content. People are pretty hostile towards AI-generated content, so any platform wanting to remain relevant is going to have to take measures to keep out AI-generated content. If you allow it in, it'll quickly become 99% of your overall content and all the human consumers will leave. As a side effect I'm seein…

If you look at the revenue numbers creators of SEO-optimized websites are doing using LLMs, it's hard to believe they're losing. The AI slop website may look subpar when placed next a handcrafted niche website, but by the time that handcrafted website is done, the LLM-using creator has created 10 more. And the reality is they seem to get 80% of the traffic the handcrafted website owners make anyway. They are absolutely winning this war and, for economic reasons, everyone else will eventually have to fall in line.

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

#159

Post by BrenBarn »

johnfn wrote: post #149
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 bathwate…

> After all, where is GPT 5 going to scrape the next set of answers for new libraries and frameworks..?

From its own incorrect answers that got parroted around the web.

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

#160

Post by tokioyoyo »

lz400 wrote: post #109
mvdtnz wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That's not true for the kind of searches we're talking about here. If you are looking for "best mechanical keyboard" or "reviews of shimano bicycle gearsets", reddit will regularly be of higher quality than the median google first page.

The problem with reviews is that on Reddit, it’s almost guaranteed that you’re reading a PR company’s post. Starting 2020, marketing agencies have been openly advertising that they game Reddit threads for product placements. If you know anyone working in those departments, just ask around.

Then guru-influencer-like people started selling growth hack tactics. Pretty much, again, openly discussing purchasing old Reddit accounts, how to make posts that are not obvious product placements and etc. Like if you see a list of suggested products, it’ll be:

1. Competitor 2. Your product 3. Competitor

With some pros/cons listed with the hopes to skew the result towards the second choice.

There are exceptions, like very hardcore tiny moderated subreddits, but I really wouldn’t take product recommendations from Reddit very seriously.

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