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!

Nah, it’s saying that ad and AI-driven internet will prevail. People only use Google to find an answer and don’t dig deeper, and if they do, it’s often because the links are sponsored. People using GPT’s are even less likely to click a link. Currently no ads, but just wait.

Apologies if you were joking.

To be fair, the traditional web models were falling apart prior to AI as well. We’ve gone so far past “ad driven” that Everything has to be full of ads and clickbait to drive revenue just to run the infrastructure, let alone pay for the pages creation and upkeep. Journalists and developers, services and goods are all using adword soup to try to get anything close to a useful revenue stream and it’ll just keep getting worse until we figure out a better business model. We’re going to increasingly see paywalls to try to make up for that, but a large part of people on the internet won’t want to spend money on quality sources when they use to be able to get it for free. It’s been a race to the bottom for a while and it’s at a point that isn’t sustainable long term. AI just accelerates that to the next level.

Eh, Cloudflare provides a pretty good service for a very reasonable price.

But yeah, the web doesn't have a business model in the same way a town square doesn't, yet you can make a business work in both areas. Make a compelling product and people will pay you for it.

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!

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!

Eh, Cloudflare provides a pretty good service for a very reasonable price.

But yeah, the web doesn't have a business model in the same way a town square doesn't, yet you can make a business work in both areas. Make a compelling product and people will pay you for it.

For a glorious second, the entire world was able to communicate as one.

Then we catalogued every accessible reservoir of culture and knowledge, mined them bare, and refilled them with slop.

A global collective consciousness, hollowed out, replaced with static. No signal. Only noise.

Nah, it’s saying that ad and AI-driven internet will prevail. People only use Google to find an answer and don’t dig deeper, and if they do, it’s often because the links are sponsored. People using GPT’s are even less likely to click a link. Currently no ads, but just wait.

Apologies if you were joking.

What's challenging about paywalls and not wanting to spend money is not necessarily not wanting to spend, but convenience and cost. If it costs me 10 cents for each blog or tutorial or github page I look at while working on a project, or 1 cent for every funny video, that adds up. And do I have to put my credit card in for every site? Hope that every site has good enough security to prevent payment information leaks?

And I don't think anyone is interested in a Netflix-style internet that fractures into 6 different subscriptions to get every site you need on the web.

This is part of the larger problem that AI tools are trained on (and profit off of) content that is produced and hosted by others who are now seeing their traffic change from humans to bots. For content sources that pay for hosting with ads, this means a loss in revenue to pay for hosting. For content sources like Wikipedia, they are seeing their hosting costs increase significantly due to the increase in bot traffic. Even if you want every website that depends on ad revenue to fail (which I don't entirety agree with), AI is still damaging the open web in other ways. Websites like Wikipedia for example may soon be forced to lock content behind logins or leverage aggressive captchas just to fight the bot traffic, which makes things worse for those of us that still prefer to use actual websites over AI summaries.

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.

Nobody is scraping wikipedia over and over to create datasets for AIs, there are already open datasets and API deals. But wiki in particular has always had a data dump of the entire db bimonthly.

Wikimedia Downloads

(dumps.wikimedia.org)