The Web has become completely unusable without uBlock Origin.
Sadly, uBlock Origin doesn't block my Kagi/Google search results which are 50% AI-generated spam.
No clicks, no content: The unsustainable future of AI search
101–110 of 190 posts
Re: No clicks, no content: The unsustainable future of AI search
#102The argument seems flawed to me: by "killing the web", they refer to the example of a company adding SEO'd information to their website to lure in traffic from web searches. However, me personally, I don't want to be lured into some web store when I'm looking for some vaguely related information. Luckily, there's tons of information on the web provided not by commercial entities but by volunteers: wikipedia, forum us…
But AI is also going to kill some of your positive examples. Stack Overflow for example is in a steep decline, only a small fraction of questions are posted today compared to the peak. And the effects are more than financial, so even non-profit examples like forums would be hit. If new people don't discover your site with useful user-created content, they won't contribute to it. You're also cutting off the pipeline f…
That brings up the unstated part of the original comment. There's this obsession with ossifying the Internet because we're so afraid of losing something like SO.
The people who made SO are not going anywhere, there will always be a SO, a wikipedia, a search engine. Let it evolve to the next thing.
Re: No clicks, no content: The unsustainable future of AI search
#103Earlier quoted context omitted.
If you give them a fair and reasonable go, you'll discover more than asking leading questions on HN. In example, there are many things you are unaware of as possibilities, like how easy it is to undo code changes to the last checkpoint (copilots chat checkpoint, not git or vcs). They can also make use of all the external tools, knowledge repositories, and search engines we use. My personal experience has led me to in…
Yeah that has been on my backlog. I admit that I haven't given them too much priority, but at some point I want to try an AI agent that works offline and is sandboxed.
The frontier models like Gemini are so much better than the open weight models you can run at home, night and day difference. I have yet to try the larger open models on H100s
I'm keen to build an agent from scratch with copilot extension being open source and tools like BentoML that can help me build out the agentic workflows that can scale on a beefy H100 machine
Re: No clicks, no content: The unsustainable future of AI search
#104The argument seems flawed to me: by "killing the web", they refer to the example of a company adding SEO'd information to their website to lure in traffic from web searches. However, me personally, I don't want to be lured into some web store when I'm looking for some vaguely related information. Luckily, there's tons of information on the web provided not by commercial entities but by volunteers: wikipedia, forum us…
> the geocities version of the early web that consisted of enthusiasts being online not for commercial interests but for fun
LLMs are making many of the enthusiasts who were online just "for fun" feel sick for contributing to their training set.
> someone's cooking website where they first tell your their life story before
I haven't seen a recipe page without a "Jump to Recipe" page button in forever.
Re: No clicks, no content: The unsustainable future of AI search
#105The argument seems flawed to me: by "killing the web", they refer to the example of a company adding SEO'd information to their website to lure in traffic from web searches. However, me personally, I don't want to be lured into some web store when I'm looking for some vaguely related information. Luckily, there's tons of information on the web provided not by commercial entities but by volunteers: wikipedia, forum us…
But AI is also going to kill some of your positive examples. Stack Overflow for example is in a steep decline, only a small fraction of questions are posted today compared to the peak. And the effects are more than financial, so even non-profit examples like forums would be hit. If new people don't discover your site with useful user-created content, they won't contribute to it. You're also cutting off the pipeline f…
Surely part of that is because most tech related questions have already been asked and answered on SO. I'd say a decline in new question is stack overflow working as designed. A large part of what makes SO so good is the searchability of old questions. There will always be new questions to ask, as new technologies confuse Devs in new ways, but to expect new questions to be asked at the same rate as peak is to misunderstand what SO is at it's core.
But that's just like, my opinion, dude.
Re: No clicks, no content: The unsustainable future of AI search
#106Am experiencing this with my blog. This year, I've been contributing more than ever. Several post going viral. But my google traffic has been steadily declining despite impressions being up. For the first time, I'm receiving more direct traffic and referrals than google traffic.
Note this is a personal blog without any seo incentives.
Re: No clicks, no content: The unsustainable future of AI search
#107Earlier quoted context omitted.
Local AI searching for me and filtering the ads is my future. You can speak for yourself.
Just wait until the foundational models are all fed with increasing amounts of ads. After all, it will be the one remaining source of ongoing, if not human generated, at least human curated content. Ad exchanges will offer firehoses for a hefty fee, and the advertisers themselves will pay the exchanges extra to push their ads more frequently in there to gain a higher share of repetition. The AI companies in turn will…
Yep, 'dataset poisoning' is what I like to call it. If all newly-trained models mostly reflect the Internet, then the strategy is to shove your ad copy into such a large fraction of the Internet that models will accept it as true. Like today's SEO slop, but turned up to 11, since it's not even aiming for human clicks.
Re: No clicks, no content: The unsustainable future of AI search
#108Earlier quoted context omitted.
AI will kill the volunteers run websites and blogs faster then it will kill corporate ones. It will kill free information first. It will basically finish the process google search engine started when it started to require seo to find stuff. People will have less or no motivation to create them, because well, why would they? It will be just a food for AI of some corporation. And more importantly, people won't be findi…
I have no intention to stop writing on my blog for AI reasons and I don't even see why I should. I suspect a majority of people who post here are the same.
Google making blogs impossible to find if you dont do SEO already started that process. There is less of this kind of activity then it used to be. Some people who write mostly for themselves will continue, but most wont. They won't even become aware that such option exists.
Monkey see monkey do where people start these activities because they see others doing them will disappear entirely.
Re: No clicks, no content: The unsustainable future of AI search
#109Earlier quoted context omitted.
Local AI searching for me and filtering the ads is my future. You can speak for yourself.
Just wait until the foundational models are all fed with increasing amounts of ads. After all, it will be the one remaining source of ongoing, if not human generated, at least human curated content. Ad exchanges will offer firehoses for a hefty fee, and the advertisers themselves will pay the exchanges extra to push their ads more frequently in there to gain a higher share of repetition. The AI companies in turn will…
> Just wait until the foundational models are all fed with increasing amounts of ads.
Which foundational models?
Not all model providers are in the ad business and while the chances of building a supercomputer in your basement to train such a model are zero, some of the companies that build such models aren't exactly huge. Mistral for example is (according to Wikipedia) 150 people - this means that a company that can make their own model from scratch doesn't need to be some giant corporation. Which in turn means that it is possible for new companies to pop up, if there is a need for them - in this case, if some models become ad-infested, chances are other models will use their ad-free status as a feature.
And this is assuming only companies make such models. But some days ago i was reading here in HN about a new foundational model being trained by ETH Zurich and somehow i doubt a public university will inject ads in it.
Re: No clicks, no content: The unsustainable future of AI search
#110Earlier quoted context omitted.
Inevitably too you'll get someone scolding you to "check the pins" which you then do and get introduced to that hellish nightmare. Discord is great for chatting with your friends, gaming, etc. but man it's a horrible knowledge repository.
> horrible knowledge repository I don't disagree, but that does not change the fact that people have moved from sites like SO to Discord for this purpose. There are Q&A channels, so not everything is chat, but Discord search is abysmal Slack is another place where former SO content / answers are happening. Discourse too. The tl;dr is that it has become more fragmented, for better or worse SO has a related problem to…
The move has happened because SEO rotted out The Internet to the point there’s been a “theory” that the Internet died a decade ago. If the current Internet is unsustainable under new technology trends then the new parts need to and will evolve to thrive inside the new ecosystem.