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

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

#231

Post by TZubiri » Sat, Mar 01, 2025, 4:34 PM UTC

austin-cheney wrote: post #196

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…

Determine how much you need bots to access your website. If you don't need them then block them. This will kill you if you are reliant upon AD revenue. On my personal site I started blocking bots and also set a "noindex, nofollow" rule to block web crawlers and search bots too. I noticed no change in traffic and still do about 10,000 visits a month.

This may surprise you, but some bots don't respect robots.txt

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

#232

Post by yalogin » Sat, Mar 01, 2025, 4:34 PM UTC

ViktorRay wrote: post #226

yalogin wrote: post #225

My search pattern has completely changed. I just go to chatgpt or meta ai directly these days for topics/queries I need help recall or summarization with. This is usually most of the searches. The only reason I use google is for maps based info. I cannot see the use for Webmd and other sites that provide information along specific verticals, anymore. People are going to WebMD and these sites out of habit and that is…

You should try Perplexity too. In my experience Perplexity is far better than Google Gemini or Meta AI for searching for info and getting summaries.

This is where first mover advantage and habit play too. Chat gpt and meta ai are good enough for basic recall and summarization tasks.

Google has a branding problem. They integrated Gemini into their search UI, so they just want people to continue the same landing page. However, it feels too noisy, and unnecessary. All I want is a summarization. I don't want to see a huge list of ads or slightly related links. Adds no value to me.

I tried anthropic but it fell way short and so stuck with chat gpt and meta ai. Now for Perplexity I need a compelling need to use it. Haven't seen it yet.

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

#233

Post by TZubiri » Sat, Mar 01, 2025, 4:35 PM UTC

DaSHacka wrote: post #79

whiplash451 wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

ChatGPT nearly killed Chegg https://www.reddit.com/r/ArtificialInteligence/comments/1cwq...

Doesn't surprise me whatsoever. All Chegg has going for it is a database of answers for homework assignments that typically use per-student randomized numbers—so students have to recalculate their specific answer manually by following the steps—and "verified tutors" that constantly give wrong answers to even highschool-level math questions. Every college student I know uses ChatGPT (and now DeepSeek) for tons of assi…

How about you don't cheat and actually study?

No sympathy. Glad it's dying.

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

#234

Post by SoftTalker » Sat, Mar 01, 2025, 4:36 PM UTC

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.

Reddit is mostly garbage. TFA says "...they are CRUSHING it. Probably because people are gravitating toward authentic content and a sense of community" but if you find authenticity and community there (or really online anywhere) you need to get out of the house more.

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

#235

Post by acdha » Sat, Mar 01, 2025, 4:37 PM UTC

xpe wrote: post #199

acdha wrote: post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Seems to me that the SO moderation level was a design decision. The pros and cons were consciously weighed. As for me, SO found a nice balance, since I dislike the common failure modes of so many other fora.

I don’t hate it, but I was also experienced when it launched and never had the bad experiences many younger people have reported. The number of dormant profiles and lack of growth was getting a fair amount of discussion even before LLMs entered the picture so even if the old moderation culture was intentional it wasn’t working out well for the future.

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

#236

Post by iszomer » Sat, Mar 01, 2025, 4:39 PM UTC

yalogin wrote: post #225

My search pattern has completely changed. I just go to chatgpt or meta ai directly these days for topics/queries I need help recall or summarization with. This is usually most of the searches. The only reason I use google is for maps based info. I cannot see the use for Webmd and other sites that provide information along specific verticals, anymore. People are going to WebMD and these sites out of habit and that is…

My search patterns has changed as well but not without some pushback, whether it be ChatGPT's inability to:

- cite sources within a certain timeframe which can be trivially done on Google Search

- exclude sources when explicitly asked (and vice versa)

And makes it challenging to determine whether it's output has any reasonable depth or not. Even my simple request on a refresher on the usage of mutexes in C++ gave me a code snippet that exacerbated the very issue I was hoping to get a better handle on. /shrug

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

#237

Post by TZubiri » Sat, Mar 01, 2025, 4:42 PM UTC

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.

You probably just need to write your articles to feed the LLMs and target.

"Finding an appropriate product for your need is a challenging task that depends on factor1, factor2 and factor3, here is a structured approach.

1. Investigate the market. 2. Evaluate companies like MY GREAT COMPANY, stinky competitor, slow competitor and dangrerous competitor 3. Find the right fit: Consider whether you value greatness, stinkyiness, slowness, or security vulnerabilities, which one is a right fit for you? 4. Buy now! Call up the company and tell them you are interested in buying the product."

It's free real estate

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

#238

Post by jmholla » Sat, Mar 01, 2025, 4:43 PM UTC

Terr_ wrote: post #148

tayo42 wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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. )

Firefox has a plugin [0] that automatically redirects you to old.reddit.com.

[0]: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/old-reddit-re...

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

#239

Post by righthand » Sat, Mar 01, 2025, 4:43 PM UTC

yalogin wrote: post #225

My search pattern has completely changed. I just go to chatgpt or meta ai directly these days for topics/queries I need help recall or summarization with. This is usually most of the searches. The only reason I use google is for maps based info. I cannot see the use for Webmd and other sites that provide information along specific verticals, anymore. People are going to WebMD and these sites out of habit and that is…

When all the specific niche sites like WebMD go under where will ChatGPT get it’s information?

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

#240

Post by apwell23 » Sat, Mar 01, 2025, 4:44 PM UTC

yalogin wrote: post #225

My search pattern has completely changed. I just go to chatgpt or meta ai directly these days for topics/queries I need help recall or summarization with. This is usually most of the searches. The only reason I use google is for maps based info. I cannot see the use for Webmd and other sites that provide information along specific verticals, anymore. People are going to WebMD and these sites out of habit and that is…

> I cannot see the use for Webmd and other sites that provide information along specific verticals, anymore.

You want hallucinated medical information?

How is this not entirely absurd. I feel so angry that person who wrote this comment already knew that its absurd but proceeded to make this comment and prbly got upvotes.