As AI eats the web, the internet’s collective memory is disappearing

Post by spiderfarmer » Tue, Aug 11, 2026, 9:09 AM UTC

mschuster91 wrote: post #248

spiderfarmer wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's 100% correct. Since Google's "helpful content update" Webmasters get massive amounts of "Crawled, not indexed" reports for anything Google considers "more of the same" or "thin content". If you're not an authority on a subject, simply meaning: you already rank for similar content, or if you don't get links from more popular domains, your content is in the abyss. It's all under the guise of "We're fighting SPAM…

> We're watching the end of Google's hegemony for sure. Who is standing by to replace them though? OpenAI and Anthropic certainly not, they are burning money in a fire pit to stay alive. There is no way in hell they can afford the compute necessary to replace Google.

Post by goekjclo » Tue, Aug 11, 2026, 9:11 AM UTC

robocat wrote: post #255

hliyan wrote: post #213

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Recently, I had some ideas I would normally just put up on a blog, in the public domain for anyone to develop on top of. Now, I'm feeling slightly reluctant because an LLM will ingest it, remix it and serve it in response to a query by some unimaginative individual who will either conclude that they are smart, or that LLMs are capable of original thought, or both. And they will have no clue where the idea originated…

In modern times don't we all think that ideas are cheap: don't we all mostly regurgitate the same stock of them. Have we yet lost the open ideals of university sharing? The core of open source? The failure of the GPL is that you can't force anyone to collaborate and share if they don't really want to.

Post by dwayne_dibley » Tue, Aug 11, 2026, 9:13 AM UTC

paxys wrote: post #40

comrade1234 wrote: post #7

I spent the last three days (off and on) using Gemini to configure my edge router 4 with my iOS devices on a vpn and it's been awesome. In the past I'd do a google search and read a few sources of documentation, do another google search and read another set of documentation. Now, Gemini aggregates multiple pages together so all of the work of reading source docs from multiple locations is now n a single step. Oh, I s…

All the information Gemini surfaced was created with human effort and published on the internet with the expectation that humans would visit the website and the creator would get some reward - advertising dollars, bragging rights, popularity, subscribers or whatever else. If the only visitors to websites are now LLM training bots then what incentive is there to publish anything new? For how long can we continue to re…

Post by neysofu » Tue, Aug 11, 2026, 9:14 AM UTC

armchairhacker wrote: post #185

sgt wrote: post #153

Funny, I was just thinking this morning that Google searches are absolutely horrible these days. It's like it has amnesia, a lot of recent history seems to be just gone. Especially on non US specific sites too.

Kagi

Post by matkoniecz » Tue, Aug 11, 2026, 9:14 AM UTC

boredhedgehog wrote: post #191

pferde wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your thinking too narrowly about the reward. Sometimes, it's just about the getting the knowledge out there that's motivating the creator, not anything tangible for themselves.

> it's just about the getting the knowledge out there that's motivating the creator In that case the creator should welcome AIs with open arms; a human reader will forget eventually, but the AI will preserve the knowledge forever.