←back to thread

137 points bradt | 2 comments | | HN request time: 0s | source
Show context
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.

replies(15): >>45084419 #>>45084422 #>>45084433 #>>45084480 #>>45084519 #>>45084613 #>>45084672 #>>45084873 #>>45085042 #>>45085243 #>>45086404 #>>45086803 #>>45089689 #>>45090282 #>>45092488 #
insane_dreamer ◴[] No.45084672[source]
People create content for free but not to be sucked into some machine that funds a $T company who mixes it up and spits it out without attribution. You want to share info for the sake of it but you also care deeply about how it’s presented and would like people to come read it on your site. So all that volunteer stuff will be killed along with all the recipe sites because those people aren’t going to put in the time and effort without some financial return (the pages of ads we detest but put up with).

In the short term it will feel liberating; in the long term it will kill the web.

replies(1): >>45087201 #
cube00 ◴[] No.45087201[source]
> In the short term it will feel liberating

They won't feel so liberated when they find ads embedded in the model's response in ways that make it difficult to uBlock.

replies(1): >>45089176 #
1. adithyassekhar ◴[] No.45089176{3}[source]
Incoming uAIBlock. uBlockAi? The taglines write themselves.
replies(1): >>45090818 #
2. cube00 ◴[] No.45090818[source]
Hopefully we have local AI by then, big tech will no doubt put filters in to stop you using their service to filter their own ads.