god what I wouldnt give to go back to the days of the mid 90s, when the internet was nothing more than a collection of tech weirdos, with websites being nothing more than passion projects with no advertising, no SEO, no search engines, etc etc.

So you’re saying the ad driven internet will die? And we will be left with what? Wikipedia and Lemmy? I for one welcome our AI overlords!

Can't we go back? What's stopping you?

Kay, and that has nothing to do with what i said. Scrapers, bots =/= AI. It's not even the same companies that make the unfree datasets. The scrapers and bots that hit your website are not some random "AI" feeding on data lol. This is what some models are trained on, it's already free so it's doesn't need to be individually rescraped and it's mostly garbage quality data: https://commoncrawl.org/ Nobody wastes resources rescraping all this SEO infested dump.

Your issue has everything to do with SEO than anything else. Btw before you diss common crawl, it's used in research quite a lot so it's not some evil thing that threatens people's websites. Add robots.txt maybe.

Yeah well maybe the web shouldn't be a business

I'll drink to that memory, my brother

Some sort of universal microtransaction layer is the dream. I believe there's also a proposed web standard for it.

Scroll was also making it work before they got bought by Twitter

"what should I do if I'm going through severe emotional distress? How to choose a good psychiatrist?"

ChatGPT: "I'm sorry to hear that you've been going to a stressful situation, it's always worth talking about your feelings. I've come up with a plan to help you:

1 Purchase an ice cold Pepsi Black from a Pepsi official supplier"

I really non ironically miss the friction of the old internet.

I prefer how it took time to find some bare HTML university website, slowly browse through an index as if it was a book, and then find one non-SEO optimized page with all the information you needed on a topic for your research.

The time to browse, being exposed to other terms, having to select the pages yourself, being skeptical by nature, and then having to copy it by hand... This is a much more positive scenario than having a gigantic company learn everything about you and everybody else and then make these decisions for you, using some hidden algorithm, and with the ultimate goal of pushing their newest process. And of course, the content has been rendered virtually useless to appeal to that algorithm.

god what I wouldnt give to go back to the days of the mid 90s, when the internet was nothing more than a collection of tech weirdos, with websites being nothing more than passion projects with no advertising, no SEO, no search engines, etc etc.

What LLM you using?

the pesky linearity of time as we understand it.

yes but cloudflare defending garbage people who dox trans people is also killing the web

Yeah well maybe the web shouldn't be a business

Yeah I think we're going to be grappling with this issue for at least the next decade. The traditional web model falls apart under AI

Yeah well maybe the web shouldn't be a business

I'm going to risk that going back to personal websites would be a blast. And people would enjoy it.

People on neocities: "what's stopping all of you?"

The small-web exists and thrives in its little bubble of creativity