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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

#181

Post by astennumero »

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…

Can't you use Captcha services? If the big tech captcha services are too costly, one could create a rudimentary captcha defense against these bots pretty easily. Am I missing something?

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

#182

Post by begueradj »

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.

You need moderation to reduce low quality content.

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

#183

Post by maximus-decimus »

tokioyoyo wrote: post #160
lz400 wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

And you think the top google results are not gonna be PR astroturf too? SEO is the whole reason I append Reddit in the first place, it just killed google.

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

#184

Post by tokioyoyo »

maximus-decimus wrote: post #183
tokioyoyo wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

And you think the top google results are not gonna be PR astroturf too? SEO is the whole reason I append Reddit in the first place, it just killed google.

Not at all! Google sucks even more. All I’m saying is I wouldn’t trust Reddit either.

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

#185

Post by moffkalast »

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…

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

The bottom line is that it doesn't matter as long as you have a large enough sample to learn the format, which is already there with existing data. There isn't an SO answer for everything anyone needs even about current tech, and the reason models can still answer well in novel cases is because they can generalize based on the actual source and implementations of the frameworks and libraries they were trained on.

So really, you only need to add the docs and source of any new framework during pretraining and bob's your uncle, cause the model already knows what to do with it.

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

#186

Post by moffkalast »

astennumero wrote: post #181
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…

Can't you use Captcha services? If the big tech captcha services are too costly, one could create a rudimentary captcha defense against these bots pretty easily. Am I missing something?

If you throw a captcha in actual users' faces they'll most likely just leave for a competitor that doesn't harass them with busywork, and you'll be left with only bots patiently trying to get past it.

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

#187

Post by wouldbecouldbe »

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…

Yeah SO was great. Despite all the complaining, all developers I know used it daily. Of course now it's obsolete since GPT extracted it's entire dataset & provides a much better way of finding what you need. They should honestly sue the hell out of them, they deserve at least some royalties for the developer subscriptions from Claude & OpenAI.

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

#188

Post by acdha »

begueradj wrote: post #182
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.

You need moderation to reduce low quality content.

Yes, but moderation comes in many flavors. SO’s moderation culture famously deterred newcomers from becoming part of the community and that long-term trend was worrisome even before the LLM scrapers showed up.

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

#189

Post by Ekaros »

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.

It ranks very very highly in Google's SEO... It is generally one of the results you get when you search for most questions. So to me it sounds pretty reasonable number.

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

#190

Post by cynicalpeace »

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…

You're describing SO experience 3 years ago. I don't use SO at all now lol
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