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137 points bradt | 1 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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1. rainsford ◴[] No.45092488[source]
I suppose wanting to kill the commercial web is a valid position, although it feels more like grumpy old man yells at kids to get off his lawn than a considered analysis of relative value and impact, but even then I think you're underestimating the impact the AI problem will have on the non-commercial web as well.

Lots of people might be willing to run websites for fun or personal satisfaction or whatever, but how many people will continue to be willing to do so when they don't actually get to present the content to visitors and it's instead just regurgitated by AI? Half the fun of hosting your own website is personalizing it and choosing how to share the content. Even people blogging for fun put a lot of thought into their posts on how to phrase an argument or tell a story. But what's the point when nobody will ever see your actual post, just your thoughts rearranged and presented by AI? Maybe some people only care about the information being out there in any form, but I'd be willing to bet that's yet a smaller subset of even the people who would contribute in a return to geocities version of the web.