Technology

web 1.0 was the last good era of the internet

Newsletters making a comeback were the last thing I thought of that could come back.

AI bots use existing search engines to get results, it just that the results are now told to you like a conversation instead of a list of links. LLM bots are not search engines and these AI companies are not building search engine bots, they are LLM bots that generate predictive text based on already existing search engines that actually do the indexing. They wouldn't work at all if it wasn't for Google and Bing. The referral source may have changed but the SEO strategy is still the same.

Just realized a whole generation of kids will have ai links to the web, so if they look for something theyll get the one sanitized link, think the whole skill of searching and sifting through links will be lost (it was thought in schools when I was a kid)

I liked the web a lot more when it didn't have a business model.

YOU KIDS GET THE FUCK OFF MY LAWN!

Web use is hard to measure, but by one estimate monthly traffic from search engines has fallen by 15% in the past year. Some of the loudest complaints have come from the news media, an industry in which we acknowledge an interest. But the drought is a wider problem. Science and education sites have lost a tenth of their visitors in the past year. Reference sites are down by 15% and health sites by 31%. Some big names are being gutted: Tripadvisor.com, which recommends the best hotels or beaches, is down by a third; Webmd, which offers reassurance (or alarm) to the poorly, has fallen by half.

...

As the old model buckles, the web is changing. It is becoming less open, as formerly ad-funded content is hidden from bots, behind paywalls. Content firms are reaching people through channels other than search, from email newsletters to social media and in-person events. They are pushing into audio and video, which are harder for ai to summarise than text. Big brands are striking content-licensing deals with ai companies. Plenty of other transactions and lawsuits are going on. (The Economist Group has yet to license its work for ai training, but has agreed to let Google use select articles for one of its ai services.) Hundreds of millions of small sites—the internet’s collectively invaluable long tail—lack the clout to do this.

No one should expect the web of the future to look just as it does today. ai-powered search will rightly shake up some services: business directories, for instance, face disintermediation as answer-bots field queries such as “emergency plumber” or “houses for sale”. But the evaporation of incentives to create content presents a fundamental problem. If human traffic is drying up, the web will need a new currency

...

Bringing a new business model to the web is daunting; it may take a shove from regulators to get started. Yet everyone has an interest in making content-creation pay. Publishers may be the ones complaining now, but if the content tap dries up, ai companies will suffer, too. Some are more vulnerable than others. Whereas Meta can draw on data posted to its social networks and Google owns YouTube, the world’s biggest video vault, Openai relies entirely on others for its content.

If nothing changes, the risk is of a modern-day tragedy of the commons. The shared resource of the open web will be over-exploited, leading to its eventual exhaustion. If that process is not stopped, one of the great common properties of humanity could be gravely diminished. The tragedy of the web would be a tragedy for everyone.

As others have commented, the economist is presenting this as a capitalist issue that requires a monetary fix. The most ironic element to me is that one of the elements of the tragedy of the commons is that is indicates the requirement of a public interest and it's regulatory interest so the commons can work. So another way to perceive this is that we need a non-capital framework to allow the web to persist. Say perhaps like roads are created as infrastructure to allow the free movement of it's citizens in a "safe" and organized way, perhaps we should change our perspective on the utility of the we and it's content. I'm not suggesting that we copy the transportation to the internet as it obviously breaks down, but the need to think outside the capitalist box is apparent. Libraries have been funded both publicly and privately as public interest, and have the capacity to work both for and nonprofit. This adaptation need not just be 'free' market driven. Especially as we do not actually live in a free market, but I'll let others drive down that hole.

For a publication based entirely on brainwashed capitalist pseudo-science… every problem is solved by more capitalism.

Such bullshit.

"AI is going to fix everything, so we need a new way to make money."

1. AI is nothing but a delusional and unwanted waste of energy.
2. The web doesn't need a business model, period. Money-grubbing billionaires are the only ones who need a business model.

Amusingly enough, The Economist illustrates what I believe to be the new business model that's already waiting in the wings for the internet.

With admittedly no direct evidence to support it, my theory at the moment is that the "AI" players plan to consolidate and to continue to expand their reach and continue to gain users who rely on the "AI" for information rather than following links to the originals, then, once the "AI"s have killed enough clicks to collapse the ad model and drive the websites out of business (and give them the opportunity to buy up the remains of the businesses, and more importantly, their databases), they'll put all of the information of which they're now in sole possession behind paywalls.

Broadly, the goal is to apply the most lucrative if least popular business model to information ,- to monopolize ownership of it in order to sit back and collect money as rent-seeking parasites.

Kagi’s model is working well for them. A traditional search engine where AI results are limited and optional, and they actively try to filter away slop, images, clickbait, and other low quality results.

I’ve been paying for 3 months and I’ll never go back. I hope they increase their market share as others ratchet up their enshittification cranks.

Can we please just pay a cent or half a cent for each page we vist. Its like 50x what the website would get from our view with ads and its not much. I'm sure it would encourage others to start their own website as well if you could get $1 from 100 page views.

There are so many things like this news article where they want to charge me a few dollars. Bro I cant afford to pay $5 a month for every single platform that would close me 1000s.

I loved the idea of Flattr.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flattr

The web needs a new web. The internet was never created for privacy and security. People trying to plug the holes isn’t enough.

Don't put AI in anything and everything because it's the new .com. That's the business model that will work