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137 points bradt | 2 comments | | HN request time: 0s | source
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kleiba ◴[] No.45084334[source]
The 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 users (e.g. StackOverflow), blogs. (Sure, some people run blogs as a source of income, but I think that's a small percentage of all bloggers.)

Have you ever looked for a specific recipe just to end up on someone's cooking website where they first tell your their life story before - after scrolling for a half a day - you'll finally find what you've actually come there for (the recipe!) at the bottom of their page? Well, if that was gone, I'd say good riddance!

"But you don't get it", you might interject, "it's not that the boilerplate will disappear in the future, the whole goddamn blog page will disappear, including the recipe you're looking for." Yeah, I get it, sure. But I also have an answer for that: "oh, well" (ymmv).

My point is, I don't mind if less commercial stuff is going to be sustainable in a future version of the web. I'm old enough to have experience the geocities version of the early web that consisted of enthusiasts being online not for commercial interests but for fun. It was less polished and less professional, for sure, but less interesting? I don't think so.

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MangoToupe ◴[] No.45084422[source]
Sadly, i think the future is more crap. It is simply too easy to generate text you think people might want to read (even if it is not).
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1. pixl97 ◴[] No.45085034[source]
The future is already here, and it's already crap. The web has been concentrated and filled with spam for a decade if not more.
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2. MangoToupe ◴[] No.45085169[source]
Yes. I'm saying we're about to see another few orders of magnitude of it.

Recently i've noticed google is even less effective than normal because it's turning up ad-filled pages that vaguely relate to the query but are clearly entirely generated by an LLM that also doesn't know what you're looking for.

So, we went from 95% crap to 100% crap over the course of about two years. There is obviously still stuff out there worth finding, but I can't imagine LLMs are going to get us there.