- cross-posted to:
- hackernews
- cross-posted to:
- hackernews
Around the beginning of last year, Matthew Prince started receiving worried calls from the bosses of big media companies. They told Mr Prince, whose firm, Cloudflare, provides security infrastructure to about a fifth of the web, that they faced a grave new online threat. “I said, ‘What, is it the North Koreans?’,” he recalls. “And they said, ‘No. It’s AI’.”
Those executives had spotted the early signs of a trend that has since become clear: artificial intelligence is transforming the way that people navigate the web. As users pose their queries to chatbots rather than conventional search engines, they are given answers, rather than links to follow. The result is that “content” publishers, from news providers and online forums to reference sites such as Wikipedia, are seeing alarming drops in their traffic.
As AI changes how people browse, it is altering the economic bargain at the heart of the internet. Human traffic has long been monetised using online advertising; now that traffic is drying up. Content producers are urgently trying to find new ways to make AI companies pay them for information. If they cannot, the open web may evolve into something very different.
Archive : https://archive.ph/nhrYS
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sigh Here we go again with another “the web is dying” piece from the corporate propaganda machine.
Look, I get it - traffic numbers are down, ad revenue is tanking, and the surveillance capitalism model that’s been propping up the “free” web is finally showing cracks. But can we please stop pretending this is some unprecedented crisis?
The web has been “dying” since social networks, then mobile apps, now AI chatbots. Each time, the same voices cry about the end times while completely missing the actual structural problems. The issue isn’t that AI is “stealing” content - it’s that we built an entire internet economy on the absurd premise that eyeballs = money, and now we’re shocked when the eyeballs find more efficient ways to get information.
What’s really happening here is rent-seeking behavior disguised as innovation protection. These “licensing deals” between News Corp and OpenAI? That’s just the old gatekeepers trying to maintain their position in a shifting landscape. Meanwhile, the hundreds of millions of small domains that actually make the web interesting get left out entirely.
The technical solutions are way more promising than the legal theater. Cloudflare’s pay-as-you-crawl system? Now that’s thinking like an engineer instead of a lawyer. Set proper rate limits, charge for bot access, let humans browse free. Simple.
But here’s what The Economist won’t tell you: the web isn’t dying, it’s decentralizing. While everyone’s panicking about Google traffic, we’ve got ActivityPub, IPFS, self-hosted everything. The corporate web might be having an existential crisis, but the actual web - the one built by people who care about information sharing rather than ad impressions - is doing just fine.
Stack Overflow seeing fewer questions because AI answers coding queries? Good. Maybe now we’ll get better documentation instead of the same “how do I center a div” asked 50,000 times. Quality over quantity was always the point.
The funniest part is watching Google try to have it both ways - claiming the web is expanding by 45% while simultaneously building AI overviews that eliminate the need to visit those expanding sites. Peak corporate doublethink.
Want to save “the web”? Stop depending on centralized platforms for discovery. Self-host. Use RSS feeds. Support decentralized protocols. The technical infrastructure for a resilient, user-controlled web already exists. We just need to stop pretending that what’s good for Google’s shareholders is good for the internet.
Look, I appreciate your argument and generally agree with it, but it also kinda smells like an AI wrote it. If so, I appreciate the irony. Either way, have an upvote.
I appreciate reading comments that are well written. If an AI was used to create the argument in its entirety, or edit it, so be it. What matters is content and context. If it’s eloquent, without being obnoxiously verbose, that’s a bonus. It doesn’t feel like a lot of filler bullshit was added. ETA: I want to clarify, flooding the web with AI bots to astroturf agendas is not cool.
They just gonna put ads on chatbots
I thought they were the ads already
Not AI. Capitalism.
The web was well on its way to the hereafter long before generative AI came along.
AI is the tool that capitalism needed to actually kill it. Before that, the internet was never on any trajectory into unusability as long as you has money and fortitude to deal with ads and privacy invasions (or an ad blocker).
Now writing absolute garbage is so cheap that the internet is being flooded with it, diluting all the correct and useful information to the point that it can actually be hard to sift through and find it.
Terrible, we can’t track people with cookies and ads anymore, the internet is about to break!
If this is breaking the internet then please let it be broken.
So, it’s not killing the web, people are still using it, but it’s hurting the companies who relied on business astrology (ie SEO) to be effective.
That’s interesting because I think the SEO’d-to-shit web, where you search and get hundreds of results pointing to the same stupid site, is what “killed the web”. Big shrug.
Yeah I agree with that. SEO was the worst thing to happen to internet users, where authentic websites, blogs and forums were buried by slop websites.
Using the web before search engines were really a thing was way more wholesome, following interesting links and stumbling upon wonderful sites (and awful ones too of course). It was based on trust in which site was pointing you where.
Then along came Google and others who supplanted those trusted links and now they are reaping the whirlwind. I’m hoping we go back to curating our own strange collections of web gems.
Using the web with only hyperlinks and web rings or BBS links was good when it was just a place to waste time or ask and wait for an answer to a specific question, I think it would have stayed mostly that way without good search.
However, one of the most powerful and convenient features of computers is the ability to search for things, and we all wanted to be able to find something we didn’t know or couldn’t remember the location of. You could search bookmarks if you saved it, but half the pages were title “home” or other similarly useless names.
Alta vista was amazing when it first launched, and about a month later was fully of keyword stuffed garbage. We worked around it, but then google came around and fixed it. For a little bit.
There’s going to have to be another search solution, and it’ll have to learn how to ignore LLM slop, but since LLMs are going to also need to ignore their own slop if they want to train any more, it’s going to either solve itself, or we’re at it’s peak now.
Search is actually the thing I’m missing most in Lemmy. I haven’t been able to find posts even if I’ve just viewed them a day before unless I voted or bookmarked it.
there’s AEO (answer engine optimization) now though 🙃
why do you say it’s not killing the web? How many people are on lemmy because of the enshitiffication of privately owned social media?
Because this is what recipe sites used to look like, which was a person, posting recipes they had, in their words, so that you could get the information. Could the site look a bit better? Sure, there are accessibility issues, but it’s honest, to the point and gives you what you’re looking for.
This is the first result on Duckduckgo for “Garlic bread recipe”, which contains umpteen paragraphs of irrelevant information about Tony, a ton of great pictures of garlic bread, but holy fucking shit, they’re both the same content, one is just insufferable and ridiculous and the other one gives you what you’re looking for.
I’ve been in web design for as long as the web’s been around, basically. Obviously what would be nice is a better laid out site that gives access to some of the beautiful pictures that are in the 2nd article with the content of the 1st. But you can’t write an article with as few words in the first and ever hope to be ranked above another with “more content”. SEO has driven the web to extrude out content for attention that can be better dragged across advertisements.
For someone just looking to quickly understand how to make a good garlic bread, I miss the old web dearly.
re: enshittification of social media, social media isn’t the world wide web, so I am not understanding how that relates, but that said, I dearly also miss the forum-based internet and IRC as primary ways of communicating with each other. You were a lot less likely to run into all the giant personality conflicts that happen on Reddit/Lemmy because you weren’t aggregated in with literally everyone to comment on literally everything, you were organized around niche interests.
So I guess my question back to you would be, how many of us are on Lemmy/Reddit because that’s all that’s practically left for us?
as I understand it, you’re saying the web was attacked by SEO, and that sounds entirely correct, but I don’t follow how that means AI isn’t also killing the web.
tbh I don’t have the energy to contribute meaningfully to this conversation so I’ll stop before I say something silly
The two things are related is what I am saying. The SEO web resulted in inflating pages with nonsense content that is needed to better appeal for advertisement revenue. This results in the results of web searches being clogged with in-genuine content that is meant to appeal to google’s algorithm and not to/by/from actual people.
The idea of “the web is dying” would mean that the internet has gotten so clogged with this kind of junk that no one even bothers to use it anymore. That’s not what’s happening. Instead, for better or worseª, people are getting parsed LLM search results at the top of their query which is summarizing the “content-rich” articles that are built for google, and getting people to the answers they want faster.
What that’s doing is making the idea of putting together this elaborate peacock of a website to appeal to Google a lot of wasted effort, since no one is going to those pages if they can get the answer more quickly. Whether this sounds like a bad thing to you I suppose depends on how much you value the pre-AI but post-SEO period of the internet, which I guess I don’t have much nostalgia for.
FWIW I’ve gotten some fantastic help from search engine LLMs with respect to some broad coding tasks but i have always said i don’t think it’s taken any longer than it would have for me to go to StackOverflow and parse through answers on my own, especially after tweaking and working with the LLM to refine its answer. I don’t think LLMs are magic, I think they’re often slapped into poorly designed products and overly applied but can have some limited use.
ª (Often worse. I got an unasked-for LLM search result on DDG today for ‘What is my IP address’, a question an LLM could not possibly help or answer without being hooked into a lot of other things, and is just a colossal waste of time and energy, and is really bad design)
Because what is dying is one part of the web, or more specifically, a certain type of product that is served over the web.
Which I, for one, am very, VERY glad is dying. There’s an infestation of SEO driven sites with basically a lot of word diarrhea and metric tons of ads, and finally at the bottom, the single sentence you were looking for.
A pox on those sites, let them die.
it would be nice if you’re right. I don’t know enough to comment. But I don’t have confidence in market forces, for very good reason. My concern is that bad will be replaced by worse
Capitalism is killing the web. AI is just the latest problem.
As long as net neutrality exists, I don’t think capitalism can kill the web.
It can force it to change, evolve, shift. But that is exactly the web’s DNA, it has done so ever since the beginning, and that’s not a threat.
Guess what a court ruled against back in January?
Even gopher is still pretty much alive after being pronounced dead for a long, long time… so, I am not worried much
The web was here before greedy sacks of shit monetized everything and it’ll still be here after they go broke.
Right? If anything I think the web is having its renaissance moment with distributed/federated platforms like piefed, lemmy, kbin/mbin, bookwyrm, peertube, mastodon, pixelfed, misskey, matrix, XMPP, Deltachat, nostr, etc.
I wouldn’t call it “renaissance” but rather “decentralization”, “democratization” or “unshittification”
No.
Edit - I mean. We could get rid of all the techbro oligarchs. Break up their companies with antitrust. And heavily regulate AI. But that’s about as likely as everyone implicated in the Epstein files giving themselves up to the police.
I wrote this comment after only reading the headline. After reading the article, i recognize it doesn’t fully fit, but here it goes anyways:
The question is should anything save it?
Probably not. Widespread internet (Facebook, Shitter, …) are rapidly turning into a right-wing propaganda instrument. Musk bought Twitter to practice “social engineering”, and basically every bigger tech platform has flanked Trump at inauguration. At this point, i expect that most people get more propaganda from their feed than actual knowledge or news.
I guess it would be better to recognize that the internet is simply a dangerous tool if it can basically tell everybody what to think, and i’m worried that with the very low critical thinking skill that most people seem to have, that’s definitely a world we’re heading towards. (I’m searching for the 196 meme about the bald officer pretending to be an e-girl for people deployed to iran but i can’t find it).
That was entirely predictable. First, social media companies earned billions from other people’s content, and now AI companies are doing the same.
But hey, it’s all good as long as the bots generate ad clicks and the companies that place ads don’t realize that the traffic is generated by bots — since they usually rely unquestioningly on the KPIs of Meta, Google, and the like, this will certainly take a while.
/s, mostly.
what if consumerism goes down because people have less money and then companies realize that advertisement doesn’t pay off anymore?
Indeed. From a macroeconomic perspective, it can certainly become a problem if people no longer have enough money to buy anything. This then quickly affects the advertising industry since companies need to cut costs.
However you look at it, I don’t think there’s any angle from which it would seem sustainable to concentrate the majority of capital in the hands of just a few.
Since AI is ensuring that the already precarious earning opportunities of content creators are now being transferred even further to a few corporations, this technology will only contribute to the rich getting richer and the poor getting poorer.
I don’t think that this can go on forever – not economically and certainly not socially.
Why focus on the AI and not on implementing an uber-wealth tax?
No objections.
However, I think AI should also be regulated to compensate those who made all that possible in the first place - all those that contributed content to the underlying datasets or more like had their content put in those datasets without their consent.
Otherwise, in my opinion, there will be less and less high-quality content on the internet because it will simply no longer be possible to earn money from it. Of course, there will always be people who create content without monetary intentions, but there are also many people whose profession it is (writers, journalists, artists, people in the entertainment industry, and so on).
Nah
p e a c e
The web was built by people sharing things with each other, without expecting to get paid for it. That part of the web still exists, if you know where to look. Even before AI, hyper-aggressive SEO made it so those sites ended up on the fourth or fifth page of search results. Now those who used that SEO to get clicks are discovering what it’s like to get bypassed. Good.
I wish I knew where to look!
That’s the problem. Back in the day you could use a search engine to find this stuff. Not any more.
Ah cooked the golden goose and now complaining. It’s as bad as cinemas/Hollywood, they got greedy took advantage and when people moved away wondered why. Make a product people like and they will use it. They don’t care they are losing viewers. They care they arnt making money.
let it die.
