Tech

They just gonna put ads on chatbots

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.

Not AI. Capitalism.

The web was well on its way to the hereafter long before generative AI came along.

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.

Even gopher is still pretty much alive after being pronounced dead for a long, long time... so, I am not worried much

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.

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.

Capitalism is killing the web. AI is just the latest problem.

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).

The web was here before greedy sacks of shit monetized everything and it'll still be here after they go broke.

let it die.

Can anything save it? Yes: REGULATION. Regulate all this shit (AI, online advertising, webcrawlers) down to the pixel if needed. Fine the companies and their CEOs into 3 generations of bankruptcy.

But, since politicians are either too stupid, too old, too corrupt, or any combination thereof, nothing's gonna happen.

Nah

p e a c e

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.

Wow. When I think of all the things I've read about that were "killing" the web it's a wonder my browser even works. And yet here we are.

Perhaps if the major sites and search engines had not spent the last decade filling the results with ads and SEO'd click bait trash people wouldn't be embracing AI as a way around that mess. Of course it's only a matter of time before the AI results get "optimised" as well.

Edit: not to mention, cookie prompts, notification requests, newsletter sign up requests, pay walls, and a host of other nags.

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.

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 guess the difficulty of monetizing writing and news is similar to the difficulty of monetizing software development.

Somehow, for the last 20 years, monetizing software development has worked well enough. People worked for Google or Facebook or idk who and they earned wages that way. Around 2015, i could notice lots of programming jobs being outsourced to India. In 2022, all big tech firms have issues rounds of mass layoffs. Last week, i've seen numerous posts on various platforms saying that it's getting more difficult to find a job after graduating college in CS.

AI is threatening white-collar jobs. But it's not just AI that's a singular phenomenon here, rather you'd have to look at it in a wider context: AI basically copy-pastes what it has been trained on, while combining it into new material. This wouldn't be possible if there wasn't large amounts of training texts available. In a certain sense, once there's enough reference material available, AI can always copy these templates and generate works based on them. As such, only a finite training heap of material is ever necessary to produce by human's hands.

The situation is a bit different for news articles as they have to do research in the real-world, and that cannot simply be done by an AI. Still, monetizing texts is more difficult in a world where inflation is high and people have less money to spend on consumerism, ads are getting less effective, and newspapers struggle to be independent.

The internet was a mistake. We know that now. People have never been more connected yet never been more lonely. It's a trap, a false oasis. AI could kill it and I'd sleep happy. There has to be a way to make the tech work FOR us instead of AGAINST us.

I fully expect the return and rise of curated micro-webs full of paid human created content. Less quantity, higher quality.

Just look at This Week In Videogames. The only reason it exists is to bring back "the OG" gaming publication experience. There are others starting to go this route too, like 404 Media.

I honestly don’t care. There’s like five companies running the whole internet now and they’re all shit. Burn it down.

Perhaps some kind of fediweb that allows sites to rank other sites for trustworthiness. Then as a user you mark a few sites as trusted, and use their judgement to find more sites.