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

(bradt.ca)
137 points bradt | 15 comments | 31 Aug 25 15:37 UTC | HN request time: 0.001s | source | bottom
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kleiba ◴[31 Aug 25 16:17 UTC] 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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fabian2k ◴[31 Aug 25 17:51 UTC] No.45085243[source]▶
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 for recruiting new users to your forum or Q&A site.

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1. verdverm ◴[31 Aug 25 18:20 UTC] No.45085546[source]▶
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.

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2. roblh ◴[31 Aug 25 18:49 UTC] No.45085865[source]▶
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.
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3. natebc ◴[31 Aug 25 19:13 UTC] No.45086109[source]▶
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.

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4. verdverm ◴[31 Aug 25 19:14 UTC] No.45086118[source]▶
There are question/answer channels, not everything is chat on Discord
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5. verdverm ◴[31 Aug 25 19:16 UTC] No.45086147{3}[source]▶
> 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

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6. Den_VR ◴[31 Aug 25 21:05 UTC] No.45087086{4}[source]▶
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.
7. blharr ◴[31 Aug 25 21:49 UTC] No.45087420{3}[source]▶
Those are not easily searchable either
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8. ddingus ◴[31 Aug 25 22:23 UTC] No.45087645[source]▶
I hate that about Discord. It is a fun comms application, but it is severely lacking as a community.

Once, before I realized this, I recommended users of a forum use Discord. The impact was severe and fortunately brief. We all realized we would not be leaving the usual, often high value info for others, and ourselves to benefit from in the future.

We unwound that mess and now carry on in the usual way.

Discord has carved out a huge chunk of discussion people will wish was available in the future.

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9. stevage ◴[31 Aug 25 22:53 UTC] No.45087808{3}[source]▶
It depends very much on the discord. I'm in several discords which are excellent communities. They're really good places to hang out, get to know people interested in the same hobby, build a subculture etc.

I haven't really tried one as a QA or knowledge sharing site, perhaps they're much less good at that.

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10. verdverm ◴[31 Aug 25 23:50 UTC] No.45088147{4}[source]▶
Oh I know, it's one of my top 3 complaints. Information gardening is hard
11. Gud ◴[01 Sep 25 09:52 UTC] No.45091207{3}[source]▶
Frankly it’s not really great even for that, but they have captured the audience and now we are stuck with it.

Every time I boot into Manjaro to do some gaming, almost always there’s a new update for Discordavailable and guess what? The updates to Manjaro are always lagging behind a few days to a week, and Discord won’t run with a slightly out of date client.

The only way to get is working is using the snap, and who doesn’t want use some 3rd party package manager just to send some kbit/s voice data?

Additionally the interface sucks and is really bloated

12. 42lux ◴[01 Sep 25 12:14 UTC] No.45092106[source]▶
I am with you on this the amount of answers I got from people that actually have knowledge about the libraries I am working with was always overshadowed by some semantic questioning. Do really need to? This tool might be better etc.
13. 42lux ◴[01 Sep 25 12:15 UTC] No.45092116{3}[source]▶
That's why I still prefer IRC without retention there is more freedom for discussion.
14. ddingus ◴[01 Sep 25 17:03 UTC] No.45094481{4}[source]▶
They can be excellent, but only in the moment.

The excellent communities I have been a part of can be searched. People can read it and learn. The Discord ones, unless they publish to a wiki or something, just don't exist.

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15. stevage ◴[02 Sep 25 05:10 UTC] No.45099350{5}[source]▶
Interesting point. The main one I'm part of started out as a wiki and is now both. The wiki is kind of the long term memory of the community, but it's so painful to have conversations there.