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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

#241

Post by aeve890 »

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 you like, run your content in JS only and mine crypto if you detect the visitor is a bot?

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

#242

Post by skeeter2020 »

arp242 wrote: post #223
joelthelion wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. You and I are talking about different things. Before these great questions and answers ended up in your search result, someone asked them, and someone else provided a good answer. I used to be one of these people. I got 50k+ SO karma, mostly by asking g…

> SO moderators don't even read your questions anymore before closing them for a random reason Note that most of these are just regular people with close-to-vote powers, not elected or appointed moderators with special powers. I think one major problem is that there is an entire class of people who rarely or never ask or answer questions, or even comment, and all they do is "moderate" the site by closing questions. L…

funny how their original prime directive was to fix expert sex change, and they were so successful they caused experts-exchange to (somewhat) improve their game, and at the same time needed to enshitify SO to hit VC-fueled objectives that had nothing to do with building the best place for developers to ask questions and get durable answers.

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

#243

Post by skeeter2020 »

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.

OG Quora feels a lot like ChatGPT: some wierd mix of good info with a lot of garbage, all delivered with 100% confidence. The difference is ChatGPT still makes it relatively easy to ask a question and view the results.

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

#244

Post by flessner »

darth_avocado wrote: post #15
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 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.

For the past 3 years one of the top answer has always been advertising, rambling on about an absurd story with whacky characters.

Yet I just want StackOverflow for "life" questions.

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

#245

Post by skeeter2020 »

wouldbecouldbe wrote: post #187
johnfn wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The SO data was always licensed as CC-attr (I think?) so LLMs could and should use it. The SO value was never supposed to be the data; it was the platform and community, and this is the part SO (VC-fueled version) has destroyed.

I'm just glad Jeff and Joel got their payday. Jeff really deserved to win the internet lottery, and on the whole Joel was a net positive for the internet and my career personally.

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

#246

Post by brookst »

ForTheKidz wrote: post #217
dredmorbius wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is incidentally an endemic problem of online discussion sites. There is only one possible quality flow gradient, and that is downwards. If a site begins well , with high-quality and relevant content, then those who wish to exploitatively extract value from that factor will be attracted to it. Eventually the clue up and leaves. If a site begins poorly , with low-quality and irrelevant content, and quite often, ab…

Yes. This also holds for my favorite community on the internet, /r/AskHistorians on reddit. It's the mod team that holds it all together despite the rest of the site being a general dumpster fire. (Curiously, the least competent moderation I've ever witnessed on the internet is on the front page of reddit, specifically /r/worldnews)

/r/AskHistorians is a case study in well-managed community at scale. Sadly I don’t think it would work for standalone business that had to pay the bills.

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

#247

Post by austin-cheney »

TZubiri wrote: post #231
austin-cheney wrote: post #196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

No, but you can identify and block them by other means, such as redirecting bots to an empty page on your web server or blocking them from your router.

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

#248

Post by skeeter2020 »

dredmorbius wrote: post #175
3vidence wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

This is incidentally an endemic problem of online discussion sites. There is only one possible quality flow gradient, and that is downwards. If a site begins well , with high-quality and relevant content, then those who wish to exploitatively extract value from that factor will be attracted to it. Eventually the clue up and leaves. If a site begins poorly , with low-quality and irrelevant content, and quite often, ab…

Not just online discussion sites; any community system. It feels like the typical growth & decay function of a lot of systems, just at internet speed.

My experience: the only way to stay good is to stay small and exclusive, but the internet attacks this defense directly and destroyed it, and at the same time destroyed itself. You need to find the "golden age" of all these systems, enjoy them while you can, try and protect them but recognize their transient nature, and then aggressively cull and move on. Hold onto values not manifestations.

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

#249

Post by brookst »

dingnuts wrote: post #91
pipes wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In my experience, they do seem to be very good at synthesizing answers from docs. However I don't know if that will work for edge cases which is one of the things SO is good at.

it won't work for anything that requires a novel synthesis of ideas because Gen AI is incapable of novelty

Why do people keep repeating this falsehood? Is it wishful thinking, or a genuine technical misunderstanding, or intentional disinformation?

LLMs absolutely can create novel syntheses. It’s very easy to test this yourself. From creating sentences that do not appear in Google to creating unique story outlines, it’s super easy to prove this wrong.

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

#250

Post by brookst »

chii wrote: post #142
bluefirebrand wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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!?

Not to mention the CS teachers who have to compete with the students they taught!
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