81–90 of 177 posts
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These news sites run ads that are borderline gore, disturbing images promoting snake oil weight loss or skin care treatments, and wonder why nobody wants to click into their site.
But I love internet chum! Don't forget "new law thing"; that's an important category.
That parasite of a site still seems to rank high for many search queries, even tho their user experience is horrible (and their content too)
Now why would anyone publish for free? Publish or die is dead.
You can shape the AI responses for some niche topics relatively easily even on accident. I recently saw 2 people arguing on a forum on a very niche industry topic and one of them started to use Gemini as a source to argue and Gemini was already referencing their thread as a source. I'm imagining people could start doing that on purpose with their own astroturfed blogs and public social media accounts.
We need a variant of Godwins law to reflect (and prevent) the use of AI being used in internet squabbles.
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Franky, good riddance. The websites that had SEO optimized their way to the top of Google's search results for queries like "how to change DNS settings", "best free VPN", or "best wireless earbuds under $300" were generally terrible, and I can't say I'm sad that that creating that kind of "content" is no longer economically viable. There were large categories of information had become extremely difficult to search fo…
You'll just see it within AI responses instead.
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Yes the ads were always there but that was the most efficient way to get the content/information. That has changed and even with ad blockers, websites are no longer the most efficient way to get to that content/infomation. That is what has changed
Okay, I see what point you were trying to make. I misinterpreted your comment as saying LLMs weren't the catalyst but instead the ads were.
But it raises a potential counterpoint: are there sites with non-terrible user experiences that are staying stable?
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Ads in the AI results, obviously. Google is now the king of the the SEO spam website game: plagiarize the info from others, slap ads on it, and profit. That is the purpose of LLMs: end copyright law, but only for the 5 tech companies wealthy enough to run these massive models. The rest of us still have to follow the law, of course.
But they aren't doing this, are they? How can their ads revenue be constant (as per your sibling comment), while nearly 60% of the traffic is gone (as per the article), before such a scheme has rolled out?
If you’ve visited any of these sites recently it’s obvious that part of the issue is that you’re bombarded with pops, ads everywhere, autoplaying video, etc. It’s nauseating and a horrible user experience. If all I’m looking for is straightforward content/info then I’m naturally using the most efficient way to get that content/information and visiting a website is not the most efficient way anymore
If you’ve visited any of these sites recently it’s obvious that part of the issue is that you’re bombarded with pops, ads everywhere, autoplaying video, etc. It’s nauseating and a horrible user experience. If all I’m looking for is straightforward content/info then I’m naturally using the most efficient way to get that content/information and visiting a website is not the most efficient way anymore
Weren't those ads always there, though? The most obvious change is that a little AI popup appears on Google search providing a brief (even if hallucinated) overview of what the user queried. Unrelated, but I wouldn't expect this take on HN where I assumed everyone knew what an ad-blocker was.
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Okay, I see what point you were trying to make. I misinterpreted your comment as saying LLMs weren't the catalyst but instead the ads were.
I also read it that way. I guess the synthesis/charitable interpretation is that the negative ad experience meant it was ripe for disruption should an alternative come along. But it raises a potential counterpoint: are there sites with non-terrible user experiences that are staying stable?
Three things are probably true: 1. in the short term this development is great for users. LLMs trained for free on a universe of high-quality human stolen content, and returns relevant parts of it to resolve specific customer questions, without ads, an operation funded by VC. 2. with LLMs redirecting search from knowledge producers (webpages) to knowledge aggregators (LLMs) the incentive to create knowledge is gone,…