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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.