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A New Internet Business Model?

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Re: A New Internet Business Model?

#11

Post by coldpie »

falcor84 wrote: post #6

But what is this new business model, and how do we transition to it? There's so little actual detail there.

Yeah, I was waiting for "how are they going to shove AI into this?" and boom there it is halfway down the page. No content here (obvious problem: how does paying Reddit Inc to allow scraping result in money going to the person who created the content? shrug). Just more AI hype to get investor cash before the bubble bursts. Woopie.

Edit: Re-read it and just noticed this:

> assuming the AI companies are willing to step up, support the ecosystem, and pay for the content that is the most valuable to them

Lolllllll. Y'all are gonna love my pitch for an airline startup. It begins, "assuming we can turn off gravity..."

Re: A New Internet Business Model?

#12

Post by falcor84 »

xeonmc wrote: post #5

tldr, surely this article needs an ai summary at the top.

> Hardin threw himself back in the chair. “You know, that's the most interesting part of the whole business. I admit that I thought his Lordship a most consummate donkey when I first met him – but it turned out that he is an accomplished diplomat and a most clever man. I took the liberty of recording all his statements.” ... “When Houk, after two days of steady work, succeeded in eliminating meaningless statements, vague gibberish, useless qualifications—in short all the goo and dribble—he found he had nothing left. Everything canceled out. Lord Dorwin, gentlemen, in five days of discussion didn't say one damned thing, and said it so that you never noticed.”

- "Foundation", Isaac Asimov

Re: A New Internet Business Model?

#13

Post by psadri »

grahameb wrote: post #3

I hope that the next big shift will be to undo the asymmetry that crept into the internet quickly after it first became popular. Let us host stuff at home. Let us run odd and strange and great systems wherever we are. Undo the cloud, undo the capture of the net – I'm old enough to remember when we just had a bunch of boxen under a desk somewhere, and it was pretty great.

The problem is always discovery. There are lots and lots of little sites out there but without a search engine or directory you don’t know about them. Even back in the day Yahoo had a directory. And once you need such an aggregator, it will naturally create a choke point.

Re: A New Internet Business Model?

#14

Post by ritzaco »

I guess this is the 'meat' of the article. Interesting that they regard reddit as a 'niche' quirky corner of the internet. To me they are well over the peak of their enshittification journey with mainly bots and overzealous mods and pay-to-play accounts. Just like digg and others before something else will take their place soon enough as the place where enthusiasts share valuable content before businesses poke their nose in and we repeat the cycle again.

> What's most interesting is what content companies are getting the best deals. It's not the ragebait headline writers. It's not the news organizations writing yet another take on what's going on in politics. It's not the spammy content farms full of drivel. Instead, it's Reddit and other quirky corners that best remind us of the Internet of old. For those of you old enough, think back to the Internet not of the last 15 years but of the last 35. We’ve lost some of what made that early Internet great, but there are indications that we might finally have the incentives to bring more of it back.

> It seems increasingly likely that in our future, AI-driven Internet — assuming the AI companies are willing to step up, support the ecosystem, and pay for the content that is the most valuable to them — it’s the creative, local, unique, original content that’ll be worth the most. And, if you’re like us, the thing you as an Internet consumer are craving more of is creative, local, unique, original content. And, it turns out, having talked with many of them, that’s the content that content creators are most excited to create.

Re: A New Internet Business Model?

#15

Post by btbuildem »

Colour me cynical mauve, but you would have to pry the current business model out of advertisers' cold dead hands.

What is most likely to happen is the so called Answer Engines will embed advertising into their results -- except in a more insidious, subtle, hard to detect and filter out manner.

The Open Letter reads naive at best, asking us to imagine an Internet where creators are rewarded for "filling the holes in human knowledge". We all know that is not what sells, and that the opposite of this will continue to inundate the infosphere.

Re: A New Internet Business Model?

#16

Post by nojs »

falcor84 wrote: post #6

But what is this new business model, and how do we transition to it? There's so little actual detail there.

Charge site owners to protect the site from aggressive crawlers, charge crawlers/agents to bypass the protection. Like a good old fashioned protection racket

Re: A New Internet Business Model?

#17

Post by fine_tune »

falcor84 wrote: post #6

But what is this new business model, and how do we transition to it? There's so little actual detail there.

Its cloudflare trying to enshittify the internet with micro transactions[0] and take their N% cut (of course it will start at like 2% but ask any uber driver how thats going).

The problem is the arguments they make for why this should happen are quite compelling, especially to those running sites (you'll see plenty of complaints on this forum about it), but theres also a large group of people who think information / code / data should be "free" (see open source code/maps/anything you can think off). So really its just a moral debate that will be lost in the interest of profit (which is ya know good n bad, if AI companies did more caching we probably wouldn't need this, but here we are).

[0] https://blog.cloudflare.com/introducing-ai-crawl-control/

Re: A New Internet Business Model?

#18

Post by tofuziggy »

nojs wrote: post #16
falcor84 wrote: post #6

But what is this new business model, and how do we transition to it? There's so little actual detail there.

Charge site owners to protect the site from aggressive crawlers, charge crawlers/agents to bypass the protection. Like a good old fashioned protection racket

Charge crawlers and pay site owners, and take a cut of course
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