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No clicks, no content: The unsustainable future of AI search

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Re: No clicks, no content: The unsustainable future of AI search

#81

Post by roblh »

verdverm wrote: post #74
fabian2k wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Stuck overflow may not be the greatest example. I have switch to using GitHub discussions and Discord on the "where to get help for my projects" side of things. I ignore SO when it comes to support. Lots of other open source projects doing similar. This trend was happening before LLMs entered the arena.

Discord is just absolutely worthless for this. Any question that gets asked gets buried in days if not hours. It pretty much guarantees the same basic garbage gets repeated over and over and over forever. Basically the exact opposite of stack overflow.

Re: No clicks, no content: The unsustainable future of AI search

#82

Post by rightbyte »

ryukoposting wrote: post #67
UltraSane wrote: post #59

The Web has become completely unusable without uBlock Origin.

Whenever I have to use someone else's computer, or stand up a new one myself, I am reminded of this reality. If LLMs ruin the economic viability of corporate blogspam, that's a net positive for society in my eyes. One of the few net positives we can expect from the AI bubble, as far as I can tell. Of course, the new problem is that we have a bunch of LLMs trained on corporate blogspam, producing low-quality informati…

> If LLMs ruin the economic viability of corporate blogspam

What would be the mechanism for that? If anything LLMs make SEO spam almost free to make.

Re: No clicks, no content: The unsustainable future of AI search

#83

Post by quectophoton »

verdverm wrote: post #77
quectophoton wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A fuzzy search engine with a better "semantic index"[1] than classic search engines, but the trade-off is that instead of returning links it returns a generated soup of words that are semantically close to your "query". Mostly useful when you're only looking for the presence of words or terms in the output (including the presence of related words), rather than a coherent explanation with the quality of human-written…

> the trade-off is that instead of returning links it returns a generated soup of words that are semantically close to your "query". I get links in my responses from Gemini. I would also not describe the response as soup, the answers are often quite specific and in the terms of my prompt instead of the inputs (developer queries are a prime example)

I call them a "soup" because AFAIK there's no intent behind them:

I'll stop calling them a soup when the part that generates a human-readable response is completely separate from the knowledge/information part; when an untrained program can respond with "I don't know" due to deliberate (/debuggable) mapping of lack of data to a minimal subset of language rules and words that are encoded in the program, rather than having "I don't know" be a series of tokens generated from the training data.

Re: No clicks, no content: The unsustainable future of AI search

#84

Post by ankit219 »

Calling SEO content high quality is overestimating the nature and level of an SEO article. The other aspect that it implies is businesses are the reason we get so much high quality content. That is provably wrong. The moment people saw that some kinds of links got them high ranking on google, it resulted in an industry of producing SEO garbage where businesses would publish 1000s of words to answer something which could have been answered in a single word. (usual caveats exist)

People want signal and answers, not the 10 blue links as this post tries to argue.

The other thing is this: most high quality and valuable content can now be produced by individuals and finds distribution on social networks where they can occasionally charge for it as well. The drawback to google indexing those links was also that SEO-companies started targeting these mediums (eg: reddit, medium, forums). We needed an early regulation to minimize the needless hacking of SEO, but we let the market play it out, so it should still play out.

Re: No clicks, no content: The unsustainable future of AI search

#85

Post by natebc »

roblh wrote: post #81
verdverm wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Stuck overflow may not be the greatest example. I have switch to using GitHub discussions and Discord on the "where to get help for my projects" side of things. I ignore SO when it comes to support. Lots of other open source projects doing similar. This trend was happening before LLMs entered the arena.

Discord is just absolutely worthless for this. Any question that gets asked gets buried in days if not hours. It pretty much guarantees the same basic garbage gets repeated over and over and over forever. Basically the exact opposite of stack overflow.

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.

Re: No clicks, no content: The unsustainable future of AI search

#86

Post by verdverm »

roblh wrote: post #81
verdverm wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Stuck overflow may not be the greatest example. I have switch to using GitHub discussions and Discord on the "where to get help for my projects" side of things. I ignore SO when it comes to support. Lots of other open source projects doing similar. This trend was happening before LLMs entered the arena.

Discord is just absolutely worthless for this. Any question that gets asked gets buried in days if not hours. It pretty much guarantees the same basic garbage gets repeated over and over and over forever. Basically the exact opposite of stack overflow.

There are question/answer channels, not everything is chat on Discord

Re: No clicks, no content: The unsustainable future of AI search

#87

Post by jondwillis »

The obvious incentives that’ll reform the market I think will result in more and more “toxic” content. AI agents are user agents. Like users using browsers. Mix ads into your content so hard that you end up getting the AI to use your brand, etc. It won’t be quite that simple, but I think that’s where this will inevitably lead. Just an evolution of the same old same old.

Re: No clicks, no content: The unsustainable future of AI search

#88

Post by verdverm »

natebc wrote: post #85
roblh wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Discord is just absolutely worthless for this. Any question that gets asked gets buried in days if not hours. It pretty much guarantees the same basic garbage gets repeated over and over and over forever. Basically the exact opposite of stack overflow.

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 Reddit. Some mods high on their status and power

Re: No clicks, no content: The unsustainable future of AI search

#90

Post by verdverm »

quectophoton wrote: post #83
verdverm wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> the trade-off is that instead of returning links it returns a generated soup of words that are semantically close to your "query". I get links in my responses from Gemini. I would also not describe the response as soup, the answers are often quite specific and in the terms of my prompt instead of the inputs (developer queries are a prime example)

I call them a "soup" because AFAIK there's no intent behind them: I'll stop calling them a soup when the part that generates a human-readable response is completely separate from the knowledge/information part; when an untrained program can respond with "I don't know" due to deliberate (/debuggable) mapping of lack of data to a minimal subset of language rules and words that are encoded in the program, rather than ha…

Those are called Agents and already exists today. I've been prompted for more information when the agent realized it didn't have all the context it needs
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