I am not entirely sure that this is a bad thing. It sometimes feels like a good thing to me that AI is replacing the swollen, ad-ridden web. Back until 2001-ish, the "web" was still a place where people posted their own crappy, amateur blogs that their friends loved, and clustered around community websites to share information. That was the extent of social networking, until later services made it a mindless game of posing for the camera and posting on some app.
Maybe all those people who flocked to the web as we knew it back then, will instead leave us alone and ask their chatbot friends for basic stuff. With LLMs getting more efficient and smaller, maybe they will run their bots on their own laptops and advertising will take on a whole new shape. Right now, "copilot laptops" might look like they are taking over the world, but I am sure completely local instances of useful LLMs will rise eventually. Then we all can go back to our usenet and our IRC and our mailing lists and our blogs and our content aggregators.
And no, not sarcasm.
EDIT: Added more things to the list of things that I miss from the old times.
That first sentence gave me shivers because I know it's true. I don't think we realize the extent of the subtle but constant manipulation we'll all get to experience.
Subtle manipulation maybe. Subtle ads do not exist. Theoretically it's possible, but I've yet to see one. Advertisement is blatant. Not that it doesn't work (on my as well), but it's blatant.
Why would you need to retrain the model or update the SFT? You could just dynamically update the system prompt to include things it should advertise.
You could even have something like an MCP to which the LLM could pass "topics", and then it would return products/opinions which it should "subtly" integrate into its response.
The MCP could even be system-level/"invisible" (e.g. the user doesn't see the tool use for the ad server in the web UI for ChatGPT/Claude/Gemini.)
Wow. I'm dealing with too many mental health problems to have that optimistic an idea even form in my head. Awesome take. I miss those days.
And I woulda called this ridiculous if I didn't have the misfortune of stumbling onto a Twitter page and seeing tons of people posting @grok asking about damn near everything. I didn't realize it had gone that far. I hope you're right!
I've had a similar idea before, though a bit less optimistic, which is that the people on the internet back then (of which I was one) were a tiny fraction of the population filtered for their nerdy love of promising new tech. It's entirely possible that there's another community type or service that's popular right now among a small nerdy group of people who love new tech that I am not privy to because I am now older and more burned out and less prone to chasing after cool new things.
Come on, it can't be that bad! If such small nerdy groups existed, what are the chances that their membership does not overlap with places like HN? It would only be a matter of time before we heard about them.
> I am now older and more burned out and less prone to chasing after cool new things.
Yeah, mostly true for me too. I hear about cool new things, but rarely choose to chase after them.
People having lived through one or more eternal Septembers are the reason you don't hear about them much. And also because there are few such places that haven't succumbed to the mainstream politics mind virus.
I think you've drawn the wrong conclusions from the history of the web.
The web started out idealistic, and became what it did because of underregulated market forces.
The same thing will happen to ai.
First, a cool new technology that is a bit dubious. Then a consolidation, even if or while local models proliferate. Then degraded quality as utility is replaced with monetization of responses, except in an llm you wont have the ability to either block ads or understand the honesty of the response.
> With fewer visitors, Stack Overflow is seeing fewer questions posted on its message boards
When you operate a community that's hostile to questions that have already been answered, are poorly researched, or are homework, don't be surprised when people start taking those questions elsewhere, and don't be surprised when they start asking their good questions elsewhere, too.
Yeah, asking a programming question without some bitter old coder tut-tutting you is very much a selling point with AI chatbots, regardless of my reservations with the overall trend.
It was bootstrapped from SO. Now there are third party data companies like Scale AI that pay gig workers to write code examples for LLM training. It's died down but I saw lots of spam for this (ie hiring) earlier in the year.
Sota LLMs didn't get that way by scraping the internet, it's all custom labeled datasets.
Plus, they're getting real world training data from everyone who either hasn't or doesn't have the ability to opt out of their stuff being used.
For my personal stuff, I don't opt out of training for this very reason. What's more, I resent Stack Overflow and Reddit etc. trying to gate-keep the content that I wanted to give to the community and charge rent for it.
I used to intentionally post question-answer style posts where I would both ask the question,wait for a while, then answer the question on both Reddit and Stack Overflow. I don't do that anymore because I'm not giving them free money if they're not passing some of the benefit on to the community
I'm afraid programming is going to be frozen at 2020s tech for the foreseeable future. New frameworks, libraries and languages will suffer from a chicken and egg problem where no one uses them because LLMs don't know how to answer questions about them and LLMs can't learn the new stuff because programmers aren't generating new samples for the LLMs to ingest.
This is why I've had to spend a huge amount of my free coding time this year documenting my canvas library[1][2] in a way that can (potentially[3]) be used as LLM training data instead of, well, developing my library with new and exciting (to me) features.
On the silver lining side, it's work that I should have been doing anyway. It turns out that documenting the features of the library in a way that makes sense to LLMs also helps potential users of the library. So, win:win.
[3] - Nothing is guaranteed, of course. Training data has to be curated so documentation needs to have some rigour to it. Also, the LLMs tell me it can take 6-12 months for such documentation to be picked up and applied to future LLM model iterations so I won't know if my efforts have been successful before mid-2026.
Sure, but the technology peels off the aggravation and delivers the content without the asshats.
If someone stuck an LLM between me and facebook, so I got all my facebook content without the flat earthers, moon landing deniers and tartarians, meta would never see me again.
That's not good enough. The AI has to give me updates on important events of my friends and family without showing me everything they ate at restaurants, funny cat videos they liked, or what movies they planned to watch.
Proving that AI is not just parroting back what it reads on the web, ChatGPT manages to correct my programming mistakes without making me feel bad. If it learned from Substack, I'm glad it learned selectively!
Which is good to some extent. We have people off the deep end sharing “unlock/jailbreak prompts” which turn LLMs in to schizophrenia machines affirming any psychosis. While a real person would push back and try to get you help.
ChatGPT can’t tell the difference between being given a harmless instruction / role play prompt, vs someone who is going insane. Probably explains why many of the most vocal AI users seem detached from reality, it’s the first time they have someone who blindly affirms everything they think while telling them they are so smart and completely correct all the time.
>Probably explains why many of the most vocal AI users seem detached from reality, it’s the first time they have someone who blindly affirms everything they think while telling them they are so smart and completely correct all the time.
I am glad I am not the only one that has noticed this. The one thing that is unsettling is how they keep talking about the Singularity as if it is this incoming event in our near future. I am somewhat sceptical that somehow the same humanity that is collectively down the Kardaschev scale is going to create a god like being with technology that is not that far advanced in the future.
It's an easy critique of stack overflow, sure, but the same applies to reddit tbh. It's quickly becoming far more worthwhile to chat with AI than get angry at stupid, predictably reactionary reddit comments - and you’re not reaching many people, you’re just used for training a model, or for advertising opportunities for sleazy subreddit owners
You'll see reason for the hate, mainly with people not bothering to spend any time searching before posting.
And it is getting worse, new people asking help: 'but chatgpt told me X', 'I followed chatgpt and it doesnt work, please help fix bug', or some idiots that might burn the house down and deserve yelling (li-ion batteries aren't a joke, ac current likewise)
Or... LLM generated stuff... which is equal to spam...
If some people like doing unappreciated tech support all power to them, others might fight through spam to find nice items, I mostly stopped bothering and looking for something else. (also yelling at idiots that might kill themselves)
If you block beginners questions and posts then the entire community becomes pretty hostile and annoying to be in.
If you don't block beginners then the entire community will leave and you end up with the /r/suggestALaptop type subreddit. A woodworking subreddit will have 3 daily "What's the best table saw for a beginner" and "Dewalt vs Milwakee?" threads and anyone who cares will leave and you're left with all the bots and people trying to sell you stuff.
The funny thing is that didn't use to be a problem in online communities back in the day. Every forum has a "New Users" section, a beginner section, maybe an intermediate section and an advanced section. There were forums I would hang out on in the beginners and common areas and only readonly the advanced area until I felt confident enough to participate in the conversation there intelligently or to even have a smart enough question to ask.
This doesn't work in a place like reddit or stackoverflow. Those places are simply too big to have a cohesive consistent "culture" (for lack of a better word). You can't turn newbies away from /r/3dprinting because no body is on /r/4dprinting_for_beginniers. And people on the former don't care about the latter because it's not part of "the community".
Back in the day it also used to be a problem and answer used to be 'get better' or 'rtfm' and general laughter.
That I used to find mean, now I see it as necessary but nobody does it anymore (lack of anonimity I guess)
If someone fails to do basic research that then it's on them. They lack basic grit or other skills that they should learn.
Also, someone asking the same basic question that, id typed in google would have led them to previous threads is a special type of idiocy or attention seekinf
> You'll see reason for the hate, mainly with people not bothering to spend any time searching before posting.
As a beginner at anything it’s hard to search. It’s the “you don’t know what you don’t know problem”. I see this all the time both as the expert and the beginner.
On topics I understand, I can craft a google query that will drop exactly what I’m looking for as the first result. On new topics I have to query and scan over and over until I start to hone in on some key words.
I still use SO out of habit, but they make it really difficult to use it. Everything on the web is gated behind ridiculous captchas now. More than the AI, the legacy websites will die because they are too busy trying to prevent AI companies from scraping the content and have ruined the product in the process.
Agreed, but SO was bad before LLMs showed up. Almost all expert communities seem to develop problems with gatekeepers and ego trippers past a certain size.
But gatekeeping is actually good if you care about quality, and I think we're going to discover that more with LLMs
They might democratize code but the code produced will be very low quality. Once coding communities start getting overrun with "Please help me fix my LLM generated code" we'll wish we did a bit more gatekeeping
Stack Overflow existed because it had a moat on specific bug-fix related coding information that wasn't available elsewhere, or the mechanisms/community to solicit that information wasn't available elsewhere. Its moat naturally dissolves when a chatbot can offer all that plus more. So we have to think, what other moats will dissolve as AI gets better, cheaper, more effectively and widely deployed?
Will law firms be a thing, or basically just a formality because laws still require humans to submit cases? Will therapists still exist when AI therapy could be scientifically and anecdotally shown to be 10x as effective and much less expensive? A lot of inertia will exist because of trust, people's bias towards "the way things have always been", but as the difference in utility between traditional services and AI-powered services grow, that inertia will not be able to resist the force of change.
I never ask questions on any SO site, and I'm a 30 year professional. It really feels like the only people that post are people who wish no one else would ever post.
My most souring experience on SO was posting a comment below an answer pointing out that it did not answer the question and merely repeated it.
The comment was deleted, and deleted again when I posted it again.
Then the author of the answer went on meta and complained about my behavior, from which came a barrage of downvotes on my answer.
Now think which answer has 4 times as many votes as his answer, years later? Mine. But why delete the comment? Why not just reply? I don't get it. It wasn't even a mod, it was just someone with 3k points, much less than I have.
I prefer Reddit communities over SO any day. SO, folks are so high headed, they will bash you with anything that doesn't suit their framework. I am sure with GPTs slowly they will lose traffic.
If the AI is capable of solving the problem quickly then it is usually the case that the question and answer are almost verbatim the first google search result from SO anyways
That's not really any faster
It might be faster for things that don't have a good SO answer, but tbh then it's usually much lower quality
That has been my experience as well, I would ask Chat GPT a question, and then I would also look on SO and both answers were more often than not basically the same.
I have been trying to reduce how much I use ChatGPT and I think I have made solid progress, I saw two noteable studies that have influenced my decision to go this way, one was the recent MIT study that showed that ChatGPT ruins your cognitive abilities (at least with regards towards coding) and the second was this study https://metr.org/blog/2025-07-10-early-2025-ai-experienced-o... that was able to produce results where their developers were actually slowed down by using LLMs and also more consequently these developers incorrectly believed that they were faster with these tools.
So at least in the current state of things I have decided it is better to not really engage with these tools.
Before I can even see a question or answer on this Q&A site, I get three overlays entirely covering anything useful. Log into Google. Join stack overflow! Cookie consent banner. Asinine.
And it's still just going to give me crappy syntax. The number of times I need to tell copilot to PLESE not use Optional[] typing syntax in Python is mind boggling.
This didn’t just start now. It’s been fading for over a decade. I remember when every forum had its own look, strange layouts, unique colors, and a vibe you couldn’t really describe but you felt it.
Now everything feels the same. Same layout, same font, same clean boxy design. Sites copy each other. AI just made it more obvious, but the soul started slipping away long before that
I remember usenet where every forum was exactly the same and it was still better than today, so I’m not convinced this is a fundamental symptom of our current problems. To me it’s more that the internet has lost any sort of physical, spatial, kinetic quality. There’s no time or place, no nooks and crannies to disappear into with friends. Just an unyielding cacophony. I agree it’s all undifferentiated but it’s not the aesthetics that are the problem for me.
I think the issue is optimization. As these sites have grown more efficient at gaining and exploiting (like a natural resource) users for money, they’ve optimized away mechanisms people used to form community and such. Moving to a feed of recommendations instead of a feed of people you follow is an easy example, but there must be a thousand little examples like that.
Fundamentally, if the goal is to make money, then that’s what will be optimized for, and in this case that goal appears to be in conflict with the formation and maintenance of community. It was just a matter of time.
I was thinking about this the other night - everything is more fun until it becomes professionalised too much. In this case, professionalisation is synonymous with optimisation for engagement.
Motorsports, video games, chatting online, working in a warehouse - all things that are loads more fun to do when someone isn't seeking to eke out more and more marginal gains.
Yeah, I see this all over. Every hobby becomes a question of how to get better at it, not of how to enjoy it more. Even if you enjoy your craft and growing your skills, the internet presents you with infinitely many well-trodden paths, completely robbing you of any sense of ownership. Instead of being here and now, possessing agency in a particular moment, you're just a dot in the bottom-left quadrant of some enormous scatter graph. It's the total perspective vortex.
Yeah, maybe you’re right. Could be nostalgia playing tricks on me. I just remember how exciting it felt to join a new forum, or discover something like eMule, Sababa DC, or random p2p tools.
Everything felt raw and full of possibility. Even if a lot of it looked the same, it didn’t feel the same. There was this sense of exploring something alive.
It's possible that various Discord servers, or obscure streamer chatrooms still feel like this, and we're just old. But it definitely feels like the default has become very top-down and public instead of bottom-up and intimate.
I think the difference there is streamers are just there to get money from their audiences. Doing something they like sure, but a vast majority are trying to make a living. That has a different context entirely.
I think there's an extremely long tail of streamers and associated chat communities that are untroubled by any form of financial rewards. When I speak to people in those communities it sounds to me like the closest thing to IRC in the 90s - tight-knit groups with regular comings together at specific times and places, being their whole selves with each other.
It's funny, I generally agree with you, but this reminds me of old people complaining about rock music. Maybe the cacophony is the point, it's not to our taste, and we don't get it. But maybe it's also less and less our world anymore.
I guess you didn't have a lot of friends that would make their text white, on a yellow background, with autoplaying music. Then sprinkle in some blinking and/or moving text to make it even harder to read.
I think there could have been a nice middle ground with more "tasteful" customization that would have still left plenty of room for individuality, but nobody built it before Facebook totally took over.
I sure hope not. Internet is fine but the web is more of a virtualized app platform than a hypertext platform by this point, as evidence by the fact that I can't read TFA without giving them money or looking it up on a third party archive.
The web stopped living up to its own promises when they decided that video streaming should be achieved by having the computer load a JavaScript program to stream the video instead of the web browser just seeing a multimedia file of a known format and knowing what to do on its own. Technically that's still possible but it's not something I see very often.
Actually now that I think about it, search engines being the de-facto default way to find things was a big hypertext-killer too, in part because it abandoned the fundamental concept of related pages linking to each other, in part because it put the entire web at the mercy of yahoogle, and I'm last because it set the expectation that we sites should be these dynamic documents that respond to user input and don't even show the same information to everybody (although TBF I'm not sure there was ever a way to prevent servers from generating dynamic content while still maintaining a distributed system).
Maybe AI is killing some people's corners of the web. The web itself is just fine. From what I can tell, it's mostly hitting the ad-sponsored parts. Online stores now actually need to focus on creating good content for their products rather than forcing themselves into people’s browsing. Now you need to be matched to consumers based on how relevant you are to what they want as expressed to their AI agent. I actually see it wiping out the big content gatekeepers. While the AI agents will in themselves be gatekeepers, they seem really replaceable. But they have a fantastic ability to aggregate content, such that eventually, we won't need gateway content platforms like youtube etc because you don't need that front end anymore.
I don't want to just stick to one or two little corners of the web, I want to peruse and find corners that interest me or have information/something that's useful to me. When too much of what I find is AI slop or part of some SEO-maxxed marketing funnel, I become less likely to search for stuff or take a chance on reading something in general.
Conversely, web operators generally feel differently about freely and openly serving actual human readers vs robots, both because of their differing motives (the robot might index me or just be learning from me, the human might actually talk to me or share me) and scale (I can afford to host a website serving all my real human readers but not all the robots on the Internet).
I actually think that gatekeepers benefit a lot from the erosion of trust in the web. They handle all the hard parts of keeping your shit up and accessible by real people without bots taking it down, and can actually verify that people are who they say they are.
Personally, to me the whole point of "the web" is that it's way bigger and more open than a little cozy corner of people I already trust, or a handful of walled gardens. And I think this problem is really quite hard to solve without just creating another walled garden.
Nah. AI means that everything is getting put behind anti-bot captchas and other nonsense. Everything from retail sites like DigiKey and Mouser to issue trackers for Wine. Search (both Google and DDG) as gotten comically bad with largely irrelevant AI slop at the top. I use Sourcehut for code hosting and AI means that Drew and crew are combating AI DDOS bots instead of filling out features for the site. Youtube now promotes foreign language videos with terrible auto-dubs. Even Wikipedia and Github are suffering. Forums get peppered with answers along the lines of "here I asked AI for you, this is what I got."
I can't think of a single part of the internet that AI isn't enshittifying.
I actually see it wiping out the big content gatekeepers.
Nah. With everything behind anti-bot crap now, control has been handed over to companies like CloudFlare.
Some people here maintain that what ruined the web is the consolidation of the web into a few huge web properties. Others say it is advertising. Others, VCs or the profit motive. In contrast, my big beef is with the browser, which I see as a frustrating barrier between me and the information (and the people) on the internet that I want to access. I've felt that way for about 20 years.
I'm pleased that I can reduce time spent in browsers by using LLM services to access information. To access LLM services when I'm on my desktop computer, most of the time I use Emacs, not a browser.
AI might be killing search. But there is more to the web than search. The aspect of thee web where you could look up the answer to any question or find some piece of a long tail seemed miraculous. And those parts are taking a big hit. But the part where I can see if my child is missing any assignments is still great. And the aspect where I can order a part for my bicycle from the one supplier I trust half a continent away? That still works.
The web is still capable of being a better Sears catalog than the Sears catalog. Even without using Amazon or some other unreliable vendor. And it is still a great way to check your bank statement.
AI is going to kill a lot of things about the web, but many of those things should probably be killed anyway. There is a lot of good stuff that is going to survive just fine. It remains to be seen if killing off some bad stuff will outweigh killing off some of the good stuff.
All of the stuff you listed that are great about the web are commercial things fwiw. If the community side of the web dies out, all thats left is a tool for business or government interests. Sure you get some benefits but consider what is really being lost. A powerful way to learn independently, to communicate with other people, to organize, to share ideas and opinions. What happens to our society when these sort of things are silenced? Who benefits from that happening? I think we know it isn't you and me.
I suppose people will have to connect in-person again. If this were to transpire, I think it would provide numerous benefits. Human health would improve. It would be more difficult to surveil peoples' offline communications. One thing that will change though is that we will probably be less connected to distant people.
"Independent study" is an interesting phrase. You can still browse MIT courses despite AI. You can still read the translated works of Friedman.
This is a commonly used meaning of independent study. But it isn't quite the same as Curie's independent study.
If Stackoverflow is experiencing a steep dropoff it suggests that people are more satisfied with AI. Presumably they are still learning independently with the help of web-based AI.
You should see the damage AI is doing to classroom instruction. People who are trying to learn can benefit from AI just like they could from the massive human effort of Wikipedia. People who are trying to dodge can hurt themselves with AI in the same way people hurt themselves with Wikipedia.
I know it sounds counter-intuitive, but I think we need less collaboration, less competition, and less team dynamics in general. Anything that does cross-pollination should be opaque.
More individuals cultivating personal points of view drastically different from homogenized masses.
Pafnuty Chebyshev, a Russian mathematician who discovered a bunch of important things, deliberately limited his intake of other mathematicians' works, in order to force himself think in original ways, not ways suggested by others' works.
I read somewhere that the explanation for the integration article was citation restrictions on some other paper, where the easiest solution was to get the method published in an existing relevant journal to create the citation needed.
As AI tools shift how people search, the old tricks no longer work. Clickbait collapses. Content mills go silent. And in their place, there is a chance to build something better- something rooted in quality, not quantity.
AI didn’t kill the internet; it was already going downhill. Articles were mostly fluff, reviews were just affiliate links, and SEO race had already ruined a lot of stuff.
the web died years ago, for a different reason: labor monopoly. The web, and software in general, stopped reflecting or serving users, when the ruling class started pouring massive capital to dismantle any paradigm for major web/software development other than ones vetted by pedigree VCs and planned for obsolescence by acquisition. Gen AI is actually the only thing that could’ve punctured their hold on world software - the vague air of confidence they maintain when they talk about “their future of AI” is a facade. There’s already a new Web (or Webs) coming that will dwarf the current one, and it won’t be coming from them - so they’re clinging to their only means of control: the AI token infra.
A huge chunk of online content (especially what ranked on Google )was already SEO churned sludge, and I'm not I buy the argument that elite publishers and creators like the New York Times, The Economist, and The Atlantic have ever really depended on Google. When the Economist sells itself to advertisers it doesn’t talk about its web traffic numbers, it talks about the fact that it's read by CEOs.
You're likely to see content creators pull their work behind access-controlled spaces (which might actually work out better than the current bargain of it being free but unreadable, recipes buried by long winding stories, etc). You might see the weird web emerge again as search engines are able to discover it under a pile of SEO sludge.
The Economist and FT no, but a lot of the other more mainstream (read by a wider audience) media like Guardian, NY Times, Washington Post, Le Monde, Le Figaro, etc. depend a lot on Google traffic. There were numerous legal disputes over this dependence, how Google circumvented it for users (the quick answers that made it so a lot of queries were resolved without even needing to visit the source website), and profit sharing.
You see I even disagree with that. People don't accidentally discover the Guardian, NY Times, Washington Post, Le Monde, Le Figaro via Google, their muscle memory is trained to these publications because that's where they go to get their opinions and worldview validated.
Of course they can get that from ChatGPT too, but it hits different when you realise ChatGPT validates everything you say anyway.
It has been many years, but there was a time when I was young, and I did not know about any of those publications other than the NYT (from seeing it on newstands). I did discover almost every other one via google, when looking for variety in my sources of news.
No matter how famous something is, for every individual, there is a first point of contact. The web has been the great filter for the last couple of decades until now, and it is extremely common to discover even main stream things that way.
> You see I even disagree with that. People don't accidentally discover the Guardian, NY Times, Washington Post, Le Monde, Le Figaro via Google, their muscle memory is trained to these publications because that's where they go to get their opinions and worldview validated
That's for daily news reading. If you search for news (like what happened with the Spanish/Iberian grid), you'd use Google. And you shouldn't use ChatGPT because it wastes a ton of resources to just hallucinate anyways, whereas a Google search gets you the direct links to the sources.
The "web" is already just business infrastructure.
It already was, much prior to AI.
I would challenge the assumption that there is anything worth saving.
I think we are in the timeline where AI tales over. Look at Elon's tesla robots. I don't think AI will become sentient and rule/kill humans, more like corrupt rulers using AI to generate videos of people they don't like commiting a crime, and using it as proof the victim did the crime.
I just read Technofeudalism by Yanis Varoufakis which has an interesting perspective that "cloud capitalism" is replacing traditional capitalism and competition. A few players are assembling their own fiefdoms inside dominant web/mobile platforms.
https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/751443/technofeudal...
The internet doesn't have a clear, simple, micro-payment system that would allow people to reward value, so instead we have an attention based system where the number of likes and followers grants social status and financial opportunity.
When cryptocurrency first started getting attention (2010,2011-ish?) I was so excited that a potential micropayments system would come out of it and solve this problem. Sadly it did not go that way..
god fr real, everyone making shit and selling it online is still paying their tithe to Visa/MC and working under their rules as to what you can and can't sell, and possibly another tithe to Paypal or Square or Stripe or whoever on top of that. Crypto's just a giant sucker trap and the amount of stuff you can buy with it without paying your tithe to Visa/MC to turn it into real money is infinitesimal.
I might well be killing the ad financed web and that is good.
I wouldn't be surprised if Google dies with it.
I do not see traditionally paid and paywalled content suffer. The discoverability in that segment already suffered from how Google treated it and AI only sped up the inevitable. Good content behind paywall will be fine.
The small sliver of the web that is popular on HN and that is, let's call it altruistically free, will only benefit. Less competition from ad supported content. As long as you only care about your content being read and not where and under which name, you will be good.
“Yet as Google does the Googling, humans no longer visit the websites from which the information is gleaned. ”
Can you blame them? These publishers’ content is buried under paywalls, logins, screen-engulfing ads, deceptive headlines, the list goes on forever. Publishers created such user-hostile experiences that people are desperate for a user interface that’s barely there and gives them what they want, and will gladly pay $20 per month for it.
Making it federated (so it's a true network of people's sites) is what can theoretically save things. But given under 0.001% can self-host, I don't see how that can work .. the centralized services are slated to win.
Perhaps some global law could help - significantly disincentivizing for centralization and network effects.
I feel like the barrier for self hosting could be so much lower. The resources required to host a static site are tiny and even a dynamic one with comments accessed by all the people I actually know could easily run on a cheap router.
I think self-hosting is a distraction. You can make your own site using Astro and deploy it for free to Netlify and still get 99% of what we're talking about here.
If that was less scary maybe more people would do it!
> But given under 0.001% can self-host, I don't see how that can work
The place where the web is still great is where you have to be invested to be a real participant. Everyone can yell about politics in a text box on twiter/FB/reddit/HN or post photos to IG/Dataing site Or videos to twitch/YouTube.
If you can host something, even for a small number of people your one of the rare few. If your "into" something where there is a focused community then your back into one of those 1% pools where people vibe and participate.
To make an analogy of it: The web is now a tourist town. Everyone is interested in making money off the visitors with the flashy lights and signs luring them into the over priced tourist traps. The locals, the natives, the REAL .01% know where the cheap places with great food and local flavor are.
AI is just a one more tool that increasing wealth inequality and over monetization/unregulated capitalism are exploiting that makes everything it touches worse. It's not the first tool, it won't be the last.
I liked SO back in the day. And then I didn’t. Felt that way about ARS community in the early days. And the didn’t. I loved for slashdot info for a while, and then didn’t. Reddit seems to be passing the same zenith. I remember originally loving comp.lang._____.
In each case, some form of Pournelles iron law of beauracracy seems to take over. Enshitification just feels like an economic abstraction over Pournelles law. It’s the way that crap acretes on to good.
I’ve come to believe it’s inevitable. And just look for where the next cycle is occurring at. Ride the wave while it works.
Seems possible that one possible unintended consequence of AI could be a rebirth of the Web as something closer to what we knew. Because why use search at all for general inquiry when AI can satisfy much of that?
More critically, it’s not hard to imagine that, with AI-boosted boosted coding, a thousand bespoke search engines and other platforms being just around the corner, radically changing the economics of platform lock-in. When you can build your own version of Google Search with the help of AI and do the same with social media or any other centralizing Internet force, then platforms cease to be platforms at all. With AI, the challenges of self-hosting could become quite manageable as well. And while we’re at it, some version of the same, individual-centered computing economics on your own devices seems possible.
In these senses, it’s quite possible that Jobs’s vision of computing as extensions of individuals rather than individuals being extensions of computing is again at hand, with the magic of self-curated order from a chaotic Net not far behind.
I think we need to look at it per type of use. The beauty of the web is its versatility.
- It's an ever evolving information repository - the initial use - from Wikipedia to blogs to newspapers.
- It's a debate space - forums ( used to be newsgroups )
- It's a transaction space - ecommerce, marketplaces
- It's a social space – from keeping in touch to meeting new people – social media, dating websites. used to be irc
- It's an entertainment space - tiktok, youtube, netflix, etc...
AI will have the harshest initial impact on the information repository use. It will cannibalize it but also needs it to feed itself.
The transaction space will be affected. Protocols like MCPs once strengthened will need to support transactions. Payment infrastructure will need to be built for this.
Then, the social space will be the weirdest. AI Companions will become ubiquitous, naturally filling the void left by the weakening of the social fabric and loneliness epidemic.
For the debate space, 99% of it doesn't play the role of debate, but more of the role of echo chamber and social validation. It's AI Companionship but by community. These spaces will stay. AI is one to one, not one to many. But they will drastically lose appeal. AI will perfectly play this role of validation and echo chamber.
Finally, entertainment is already being disrupted. The question will be how the industry as a whole ( it's more than purely content creation, it's the whole mythos creation around it ) will adapt to the possibility of on the fly content creation.
AI will become the main human-machine interface, and the role of machines will grow exponentially in our daily lives. The capitalistic concentration that will ensue will be never seen before. The company who will win AI will be the most powerful company in history. They will dominate not only tech, but culture, economics, world view.
The web as we knew it — open, chaotic, full of real voices already gone. Free speech isn't what it was 15 years ago; it's filtered, throttled, and buried under bots and algorithmic noise. But AI isn’t the root of the problem — it’s just another layer. The real issue is that the current internet model no longer serves people; it serves platforms.
Maybe it’s not about saving the old web. Perhaps it’s time to build a new one—one that puts users, privacy, and real expression first.
Just ignore the platforms. Use RSS on a body of self-curated websites/bookmarks. Click to read the articles and essays on their own domains (show the creators some love by doing that), and click around over there on that other domain.
I built my own system for that, but I know for sure this is possible with off-the-shelf (open source) software.
It takes some time to get used to this. No saturated video thumbnails, no infinite scrolling, no notifications. It's slower and feels more boring in the beginning. But it becomes a blessing very soon, when you go back to LinkedIn's feeds or Youtube's algo grid after a month and it feels like a punch in the stomach.
I used to be a heavy user of RSS, back in the Google Reader days. I loved it for following a wide array of different blogs. I'm not really sure why I stopped with rss - I switched to viable alternatives to Google reader when it died.
Recently I've been keen to get back into this way of using the web, because I have evidently been sucked into scrolling on the platforms until the algorithms give me something I want to see.
The other day, one of my favourite web dev blogs (and one of the only blogs I actually seek out) created this fantastic compendium of Web Performance resources and blog links, along with an associated rss opml file. Surely this is the push I needed to get back to the glory of the web.
I think OPML is underrated and the combination of RSS (Really Social Sites) and OPML (Other People's Meaningful Links) could give the open web a resurrection as the social media of choice for curious people.
Right now, I'm working on integrating more and more OPML functionality into my RSS software. I envision a quick way of exploring and discovering new links/feeds from sites/feeds that I already follow.
A ton of good discussion of things has left Reddit/Facebook/Twitter for all the obvious reasons and gone to Discord because of discoverability is low, so is discovery by trolls and AI scraper bots and plagiarists.
Which is great - if you have the invite and like the Discord UI.
It really sucks if you'd prefer to follow RSS or longer-form in general.
I am an RSS user but it is pretty frusterating these days being one. All of the I guess "first tier" sort of sites you'd really want an RSS feed for don't have one any more or offer a truncated one that forces you onto the platform (yes I roll my own morss, doesn't always get the content). You are left with sort of second tier news websites that pollute their feed with reposted AP content you might even see on several same feeds you follow.
And the biggest issue is that no one is starting a new site and implementing RSS. Seems like for a lot of RSS feeds I follow, the only reason they still exist is because the webmaster has not yet culled the service for whatever reason; like some of these links are found on vestigial web pages that look like 2007 internet whereas the rest of the site is modern.
And it makes sense why RSS is dying. It is a huge free bone tossed to the community. You don't see free bones tossed out anymore without a string attached to pull you back into some profit making angle. Everyone wants you on their site so they can serve you ads. They don't want you using a feed reader and getting that content without having to see an ad.
On one hand I think it's a shame and I do miss feeds on certain (big) websites, but on the other it makes me appreciate the small web or indie web or just open web more.
Feels like rehab after two decades of 'social media'. But the open web is the ultimate form of social media itself, if you'd ask me. I plea for a name change of RSS to Really Social Sites. I already started calling it like that in my own software.
Ignoring is not how it works. Internet is a basically huge social circle, if not enough people got on broad, a site can die out really quickly. I've observed quite few examples of small community closed down because no one was there anymore, some websites that I loved as a child no longer exists because of this reason too, gone with it is all the content they once hosted.
Here's the problem:
1. Software/Infrastructure have a cost: If you want to self-host, there's a consistent dread of maintaining things. It wears you down, slowly maybe, but eventually.
2. The problem of discovery: Back to the past, people used to sharing links and resource manually, often on a forum ("forum life", i call it). But now days people are more rely on platform recommendations (starts from "Just Google it"). If your content/link is not recommended, then you can't reach far. Also, people now days really hates registration (and memorizing/recording account/password), and they will not even try to use "strange" websites.
3. Government regulation: The government pushing laws upon laws that could restrict self-hosting content, by either making self-hosting difficult, or forcing websites to self-censor (which most personal sites just don't have enough admin to do).
4. Some people who has the capability and know-hows on solving the problem are "solving" it the wrong way. Instead of creating systems that modern users would love to use, they tries "being back the old way" so do speak, but not giving any consideration on why people abandoned "the old way" in the first place. The software they created maybe even quite hostile to regular non-tech-savoy people, but hey at least they themselves thinking it's cool.
There are few projects gets it right, like Mastodon, and maybe Blue Sky etc. But, then these project still don't earn a lot of money and political capital, meaning it still can't escape the point 1 above and maybe point 3 as well.
Over all, I think it's less that the platforms exploiting the Internet, it's mainly that most people just "moved on" to what could make their life easier. Internet is a tool after all.
P.S. If someone wants to solve the social media over-monopolization problem, I'd recommend that you make sure you're "user forced", user, user, user, regular old man/woman John/Marry Doe user. That's how you create social circle/network effect and that's how you grow and sustain.
I worry that AI/bot presents as a desincentive for proper RSS distribution. Authors may not don't want to provide easy access to their content by bots. Maybe paywalling? Maybe proof of work solves this?
You're using the wrong tools to browse the web if it seems that is the case.
The weird, creative, bordering on unhinged part of the web is still very much around and alive. It's just that you need to depart from the major social media sites and search engines if you want to find it again.
I’ve tried Marginalia about… probably 10 times, at this point? Every time I want niche search results. I haven’t found an interesting site through it, yet.
I love the concept and want it to work! I pay for Kagi; I value search.
The explore mode[1] is probably the tool you're looking for if you're just looking for something interesting / demonstration that the weird web still exists.
The problem of the pre-platform Web is the difficulty of discovery; your interesting content will have but a few readers.
The lure of platforms, like Twitter, or, well, HN, is that your content can potentially be seen by "everyone". Going viral is fun but not that important; being seen by the right people you never knew, or never had a hope to grab attention of, is much move valuable. This leads to much stronger cross-pollination.
(Spam is a problem here, but spam is also a problem in similar biological systems; blooming plants release tons of pollen, and then tons of seeds, most of them fruitless.)
Discoverability wasn't much of a problem for Google's first half decade. We had great content spread all over from millions of sources easily discovered with a simple search engine. Then Google IPO'd and Facebook showed up and everything went to shit. And that ignores other great discovery tools from directories all the way back to web rings. The web from 1995-2005 really was pretty good for content and discovery both. Today it's a few mega corporations with walled gardens who control all of the discovery and are loathe to let users engage with the web outside of their walls.
This is an incomplete thought, but a friend of mine has this idea around reputation built through a sort-of key signing. You get a key, your friend gets a key, you sign each other's keys. The key can serve as an indicator of trust, or validity that an individual's contributions are meaningful (or something). And if your friend suddenly turns into a corporate shill, you could revoke that trust. And if the people haven't established their own trust with that person, their trust goes when yours does. Transitive trust.
It obviously has some flaws, and could be gamed in the right circumstances, but I think it's an interesting idea.
Sounds like following people on a social media platform and only reading posts from in your network. Which is exactly how most people I know use Bluesky.
It works better than Twitter's algorithmic feed but it's still not foolproof because not everyone has the same idea of what sort of content they are willing to trust/ track.
A plug-in. Trusted users thumbs up/down sites and ratings are recorded in a database. The plug-in visually differentiates shite links (according to database) so others can avoid clicking on them (or they can hide them altogether).
Why that line in particular? It seems not to be about the quality of the content. Part of the issue is that businesses were advised to produce useful content, but the motivation for doing so is disappearing. A net negative, surely?
Even if you could do it perfectly (distinguish "authentic people" from slop merchants) the same old actors will do the same old things as long as the incentives are there. They will just wear "real people" like skin suits. Almost worse :/
It will never happen as long as Google is able to gatekeep the Internet with its search and browser. Even if you could find enough power users to break out and create something that hits critical mass, user-powered indexes don’t scale. Whomever swoops in to fix the problem immediately becomes the new Google.
Spams of groups of threes (open, chaotic, full of real voices - filtered, throttled, and buried - users, privacy, real expression)
It's not just X - it's Y type of sentence structure
Vapid marketing style writing that has no real substance (Maybe it’s not about saving the old web. Perhaps it’s time to build a new one)
Of course, there are emdashes too, they may not betray LLM alone as they exist in literature and a minority like to use them in internet comments but when they are present along with other signs of slop they are still a strong tell, particularly when they are numerous.
Is this satire? or trolling? it is concerning everyone replies to it as if there had been human thought behind this drivel.
Typically LLMs don't put spaces between em dashes and the words that surround them—which is the correct orthography, I should point out. Humans often put spaces around them when they shouldn't, like in the example you quoted. I don't know if it's AI or not, but if you ask an AI to use a sentence with an em dash in it, it won't include spaces.
I didn’t notice because I unconsciously skim over slop-looking comments without evaluating whether it’s human-written or not, and only read the more interesting comments.
Sadly HN has never been of much value to me despite my first account being almost of drinking age. Yes, having people like Nagle (animats) and other hardcore experts who know what they’re talking about is great. But they’re an extreme rarity in a sea of absolute shit. You want to talk about enshittification? Just take a look at the nosedive of HN. So yeah, for me it’s usually more insightful to do a deep dive with an LLM. Before that, of course, the Wikipedia rabbit holes were I think a staple of the internet.
LLMs for me to a large degree satisfy the “hacker curiosity” that HN guidelines wank over but betray with every bullshit upvoted and gamed clickbait post. It’s a search engine that flattens rabbit holes for me and makes traversing the corpus of information out there very enjoyable.
People complaining about a
LLMs being scrapers is to me just amusing to the point of nonsensical. The entire point is to use it as a discovery engine that brought the most common and the most obscure on the same level of accessibility.
I think the even bigger problem is that what AI is doing to the Internet now, it will do to personal knowledge on a generational scale.
It will get good, startling good, to the point that going through the heavy effort of really learning things becomes old fashioned, and positively antiquated.
I am afraid of what happens to the march of progress when that happens.
It's not AI. It's corporations, a much more dangerous form of non-human person. The actual AI bots aren't doing this abusive HTTP request spamming that causes services to be infeasible to run due to resource usage. It's coming from normal HTTP request software with no AI. And it's happening due to the perverse incentives of corporations and their intrinsic lack of liability. They truly are the worst legal persons.
AI is one sharp tool cutting slices from the old internet. But perpetrators have used different tools from the start: SEO spam, algorithmic feeds, embrace/extend/extinguish, building moats, the attention economy, and many others. AI is just the next newfangled sharp tool.
In other words, I don't think that AI is killing the web.
It's being profit-oriented and running amok in an unleashed way. It's prisoner's dilemma. You know, if you don't do it then someone else will do it and you lose. Enshittification is one consequence. The internet experienced it from the beginning. But only about fifteen years ago companies learnt how to squeeze the last drop out and, like in the tragedy of the commons, everybody is worse off.
And what's the most catastrophic? People are confused. They look at the tools but not at some famous people behind these rampages. Of course as leaders they just optimize the hell out of the internet with the target that their companies thrive. But in doing so they cause heavy damage.
I have a little bit of hope for semi independent operations though. Things like hn or lemmy that were never really ad supported anyway and have some distance from the enshitification trend
AI inference can save it because it can be used to make tools that reverse "enshittification" Cloudflare slams the door in the the face of this "exit".
AI isnt cost effective. The investors are going to want their money back very soon due to outside economic influences... they wont get it back and many of these AI pop ups are going to fold. the rest are going to scale back and jack up prices.
>AI isnt cost effective. The investors are going to want their money back very soon due to outside economic influences... they wont get it back and many of these AI pop ups are going to fold. the rest are going to scale back and jack up prices.
Nothing stopping us from having cake and eating. Open AI could fall over, and we would still have all the publicly available models kicking around.
Personally this is what I’m hoping for. Stories I read about services sold as AI turning out to be minimum wage workers tells me that as much as everyone thinks this is the dawn of a new age of hyperintelligent machines we haven’t gotten as far as we wanted to as fast as we wanted, or hoped.
Problem #1 - to "save it", you first have to define the idealized and/or snapshot-in-time web that you want to save. Don't expect much agreement here, especially on the details.
Problem #2 - if you aren't the Emperor of Earth or some such, how could you make your ideal web stable over time, in today's world?
At the same time, apps are also a bit in decline. People still make them but the whole race for making it to the top 10 in the app stores seems to have faded away. And a lot of them are simple web page wrappers. People still install some apps but more on a need to have basis than that they are constantly adding/removing apps. So, I don't buy this "the web is in decline" framing.
Change is a constant on the web. Things were very different in 1995 (plain html, no good search engines), 2005 (no widespread web capable smart phones usage yet, Google, AJAX), 2015 (peak social media and app hype), and 2025 (social media has shifted to new apps and lots of people are disengaging entirely, AI is starting to threaten Google, content aggregators serve most web content).
For 2035, I would predict that AI will drive a need for authenticity. Existing platforms don't provide this because they lack content signatures. We've had the tools to reliably sign content for decades. But we don't use those a lot except for DRM content behind paywalls (for commercial reasons). So, you can't really tell apart the AI generated propaganda, marketing, misinformation, etc. from authentic human created content by individuals you care about. And that might be contributing to people disengaging a bit. But you can see the beginnings of this on platforms like bluesky and signal which push end to end encryption and user verification. People might share AI nonsense via these platforms. But they seem to be less about that as say X, Tik Tok or Instagram are. We sometimes watermark our images. We don't digitally sign them. Why is that?
Just speculating here but the web could use a big upgrade here and do more than just certify domain name ownership. Which is fairly meaningless if the domain is some big network with many millions of users. What about certifying content itself? Reliably tie content to their creators in a way that can't be forged. IMHO this is long overdue and the related UX challenges are there but solvable in principle. DRM is a prime example of a fairly usable implementation. Just works if you paid for the content. Signed content would make it very challenging to pass off AI gibberish as authentic if it's not signed by a reputable private key. And if it happened anyway, that would damage the reputation of that key. I don't exclude the possibility of reputable AIs emerging. How would you tell those apart from the disreputable ones?
I think, the web was killed before by human slob search engines can't or won't filter. Now we find out, a little longer prompt in an AI chat returns better results. So what?
We are many, search engines are the mean to discover things because even with usenet it's impossible for a human to discover via URLs and links enough information on the web, that's the real revolution: links are useful but not enough. Search engines are the best tool we have had so far to find knowledge around the web, now LLMs try to surpass traditional search engines milking knowledge from web contents, like we have many articles about wildfires in a region, but let's say not one about wildfire trends in that region, an LLM could try to spot a trend milking all articles in a significant timeframe. The Conrad Gessner's Biblioteca Universalis dream.
So well, LLMs do not kill the web, eat it. We are still almost the sole valid source of data for LLMs.
What really killed the web are social networks as proprietary walled gardens instead of an open Usenet with a web companion for stuff to be preserved for posterity or too long/complex for a mere post. What killed the web is the fact that ISPs do not offer an open homeserver instead of a closed box called "router" even if it's a limited homeserver. With an open version, with IPv6, anyone could buy a domain name and publish from his/shes own iron a blog with a ready-to-write software, with automatic RSS feeds, newsletters etc. If we give such tool to the masses the original web will be back but it would mean free speech and giants/politicians etc have free speech preferring ways to master public topics through their platforms to hide from most stuff they dislike and push ideas they like...
Search engine indexes being turned into copyright enforcement levers also significantly killed the net as it created scarcity in info dissemination for the sake of maintaining info asymmetry.
Go ahead and try to find JLG equipment/service manuals on the open net anymore. I'll wait.
they are anyway needed and we also have YaCy as an example, and other distributed search solution. The point is that most do not participate so only commercial one get enough resources to be useful.
> We care about your privacy. Can we please put a camera in your toilet seat for a personalized experience?
>
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Browsing the web is a nightmare these days, I rarely visit "new" websites
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It is just a pain to visit any website these days... anyone involved creating these modern monstrosities should just fire themselves and go on a hike or something.
> We rely on invasive, tracking ads! Please enable your adblocker so we can get 0.00001 USD, please.
>
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One of the things I've been wondering about with the 'digital detox' trends or one of the younger generations getting dumbphones instead of smart, is why haven't the papers found some way of turning back the clock to explore capitalizing on that when it's supposedly hard to sell news now. 24 hour news is decades old at this point and the constant firehose of events from every location on the globe is tiring especially if only a tiny fraction is directly relevant to you. I'd be interesting if they could make a more attractive 'news/analysis product' like a newspaper or the evening news broadcast which is distinct from what is readily available from all the other sources.
It's the other way around. Paywalls are a result of the web and the Ad companies which power it killing the revenue models of publishers. AI, which steals even more and repackages their content, will make it worse.
What I don't understand is why nobody has actually figured this out. I read a lot of different news sources. I'd have no problem paying a reasonable amount of money to read an article I came across in the Podunk Picayune that looked of interest, but no, I have to sign up for a subscription. So they get nothing.
The internet is cables and other hardware, and protocols, none of which is going anywhere. The Web, an internet application, seems to be dying, and certainly newsgroups and other internet applications have also died, but the internet itself isn't dead or dying. In fact, it's growing as the global rollout of broadband continues and the unconnected get connected.
Web is obsolete. Going forward AI is the first and maybe last step to getting information about a topic. No need to sift through ads, forum drama, clickbait blog posts, comments etc… just straight compiled information into your brain as quickly as possible. Yea sometimes it’s wrong, but sometimes things you find on the wild web are wrong anyway, just deal with it.
I find that when people pine for the old web, what they’re really asking for is some way to connect to other people and see things that people have written or made just for fun in a genuine way, without it being performative, derivative or for other motivations.
In theory social media should have been this, but people’s constant need to accumulate validation or tendency to produce meme-like content adversely affects the quality of their output, giving it a machined style feel that rarely feels genuine or true to their human nature. Instead of seeing people’s true personalities, you see their “masks”.
Thus the issue is not rooted in a technical problem but rather a cultural one: people no longer naively share things that don’t fuel their ego in the most perfect way.
Until that same AI starts shilling ads and certain viewpoints peddled by their owners in the output... This will happen 100% (ads, the other bit has already happened). The economics of all of these models doesn't work as is. There will be a major squeeze down the line.
Some of us have dipped our toes in local LLMs. To be sure, the ones I can run on my hardware always pale when compared to the online ones. But perhaps in time the ones you can run locally will be good enough.
Or perhaps an Apple or Kagi will host an LLM with no built-in monetization skewing its answers.
It's still not as annoying as the assorted influencers who repeat The Economist headlines and articles back at me
Anyway this article is about AI replacing web search, not "killing the web" which I would take as it somehow deleting or overwriting content on existing webpages. Or generating so much spam as to make the web unusable for the average person.
Large sites that can't exist without "traffic" already killed the web a long time ago. A paywall is the proper solution, not ads in content and content in ads. That means you will have lower traffic, it doesn't mean you are being killed. It just means you stopped assaulting passersby who are linked to your site.
the standardized web we have had until now, was policed by google so they could harvest ad revenue from us. with no gorilla to encorce such standard, the web will balkanize as it's done before.
> Anyway this article is about AI replacing web search, not "killing the web"
Indeed, exaggerating title. But we all have to get the idea the web is really dying, so we give up working on it. We have to get that idea because the genie of the web is already out of the bottle for 30+ years. That stuff is going nowhere. The open web is a hindrance for big businesses. Big business wants to keep internet infrastructure to push apps, AI and what not, but does not want to keep the open web.
https://archive.is/nhrYS
I am not entirely sure that this is a bad thing. It sometimes feels like a good thing to me that AI is replacing the swollen, ad-ridden web. Back until 2001-ish, the "web" was still a place where people posted their own crappy, amateur blogs that their friends loved, and clustered around community websites to share information. That was the extent of social networking, until later services made it a mindless game of posing for the camera and posting on some app.
Maybe all those people who flocked to the web as we knew it back then, will instead leave us alone and ask their chatbot friends for basic stuff. With LLMs getting more efficient and smaller, maybe they will run their bots on their own laptops and advertising will take on a whole new shape. Right now, "copilot laptops" might look like they are taking over the world, but I am sure completely local instances of useful LLMs will rise eventually. Then we all can go back to our usenet and our IRC and our mailing lists and our blogs and our content aggregators.
And no, not sarcasm.
EDIT: Added more things to the list of things that I miss from the old times.
AI will be ridden with ads - just disguised as answers.
And without the web there is no new datasets for AI so it’ll grind to a halt.
It's already happening. [0]
This is so much worse than searching for something and getting ads which you can ignore (like we have been doing now forever...).
[0]: https://www.reddit.com/r/ChatGPT/comments/1kgz7m0/i_asked_ch...
There are no ads in that post, the guy is confused. Those are the search results he asked for.
At least in Germany this would be illegal.
There are no „disguised ads“ allowed in Germany at all.
When something is constantly happening everywhere, it becomes more of a question of whether the law is enforceable whether than if it is "allowed".
It’s even happening implicitly now when chat crawls some vendors site and proclaims their solutions as the answer to your question
That first sentence gave me shivers because I know it's true. I don't think we realize the extent of the subtle but constant manipulation we'll all get to experience.
Subtle manipulation maybe. Subtle ads do not exist. Theoretically it's possible, but I've yet to see one. Advertisement is blatant. Not that it doesn't work (on my as well), but it's blatant.
Isn't the whole point of these "subtle ads" exactly that you do not "see" them?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Product_placement
A new model will be trained for every new ad update?
Why would you need to retrain the model or update the SFT? You could just dynamically update the system prompt to include things it should advertise.
You could even have something like an MCP to which the LLM could pass "topics", and then it would return products/opinions which it should "subtly" integrate into its response.
The MCP could even be system-level/"invisible" (e.g. the user doesn't see the tool use for the ad server in the web UI for ChatGPT/Claude/Gemini.)
It seems a bit much to say AI will kill the web. Won't people just adapt and use search engines that doesn't rely entirely on AI?
You are assuming people actually want to inherently browse the web as opposed too the web just being a means towards a goal for people.
Wow. I'm dealing with too many mental health problems to have that optimistic an idea even form in my head. Awesome take. I miss those days.
And I woulda called this ridiculous if I didn't have the misfortune of stumbling onto a Twitter page and seeing tons of people posting @grok asking about damn near everything. I didn't realize it had gone that far. I hope you're right!
I've had a similar idea before, though a bit less optimistic, which is that the people on the internet back then (of which I was one) were a tiny fraction of the population filtered for their nerdy love of promising new tech. It's entirely possible that there's another community type or service that's popular right now among a small nerdy group of people who love new tech that I am not privy to because I am now older and more burned out and less prone to chasing after cool new things.
Come on, it can't be that bad! If such small nerdy groups existed, what are the chances that their membership does not overlap with places like HN? It would only be a matter of time before we heard about them.
> I am now older and more burned out and less prone to chasing after cool new things.
Yeah, mostly true for me too. I hear about cool new things, but rarely choose to chase after them.
People having lived through one or more eternal Septembers are the reason you don't hear about them much. And also because there are few such places that haven't succumbed to the mainstream politics mind virus.
I think you've drawn the wrong conclusions from the history of the web.
The web started out idealistic, and became what it did because of underregulated market forces.
The same thing will happen to ai.
First, a cool new technology that is a bit dubious. Then a consolidation, even if or while local models proliferate. Then degraded quality as utility is replaced with monetization of responses, except in an llm you wont have the ability to either block ads or understand the honesty of the response.
> The web started out idealistic, and became what it did because of underregulated market forces.
> The same thing will happen to ai.
Exactly! Let the AI market deal with that crap ... all I hope is that AI will get all these people off my lawn!
>The web started out idealistic, and became what it did because of underregulated market forces.
Is there any issue your idea of government can’t solve?
> With fewer visitors, Stack Overflow is seeing fewer questions posted on its message boards
When you operate a community that's hostile to questions that have already been answered, are poorly researched, or are homework, don't be surprised when people start taking those questions elsewhere, and don't be surprised when they start asking their good questions elsewhere, too.
Stack Overflow is a programming Q&A website where people get mad at you for asking programming questions the overwhelming majority of the time.
Yeah, asking a programming question without some bitter old coder tut-tutting you is very much a selling point with AI chatbots, regardless of my reservations with the overall trend.
Sure, but this is only possible because the LLM is trained on those answers.
It was bootstrapped from SO. Now there are third party data companies like Scale AI that pay gig workers to write code examples for LLM training. It's died down but I saw lots of spam for this (ie hiring) earlier in the year.
Sota LLMs didn't get that way by scraping the internet, it's all custom labeled datasets.
I guess that means AI isn't relieving us of our jobs then. Model must ingest ever more experimental data. Full circle.
No, at this point it can just ingest official library documentation and produce good SO-like answers.
Plus, they're getting real world training data from everyone who either hasn't or doesn't have the ability to opt out of their stuff being used.
For my personal stuff, I don't opt out of training for this very reason. What's more, I resent Stack Overflow and Reddit etc. trying to gate-keep the content that I wanted to give to the community and charge rent for it.
I used to intentionally post question-answer style posts where I would both ask the question,wait for a while, then answer the question on both Reddit and Stack Overflow. I don't do that anymore because I'm not giving them free money if they're not passing some of the benefit on to the community
Not really.
The overlap between people bothering to answer ”stupid question, RTFM” and people able to give useful answers is extremely small.
The meaningful data the LLMs are trained on is the actual answers.
Not my problem as a user.
I'm afraid programming is going to be frozen at 2020s tech for the foreseeable future. New frameworks, libraries and languages will suffer from a chicken and egg problem where no one uses them because LLMs don't know how to answer questions about them and LLMs can't learn the new stuff because programmers aren't generating new samples for the LLMs to ingest.
This is why I've had to spend a huge amount of my free coding time this year documenting my canvas library[1][2] in a way that can (potentially[3]) be used as LLM training data instead of, well, developing my library with new and exciting (to me) features.
On the silver lining side, it's work that I should have been doing anyway. It turns out that documenting the features of the library in a way that makes sense to LLMs also helps potential users of the library. So, win:win.
[1] - Telling the LLM training data Overlords about the capabilities of the library is in itself a major piece of work: https://github.com/KaliedaRik/Scrawl-canvas/blob/v8/LLM-summ...
[2] - The Developer Runbook was long-overdue documentation, and is still a work-in-progress: https://scrawl-v8.rikweb.org.uk/documentation
[3] - Nothing is guaranteed, of course. Training data has to be curated so documentation needs to have some rigour to it. Also, the LLMs tell me it can take 6-12 months for such documentation to be picked up and applied to future LLM model iterations so I won't know if my efforts have been successful before mid-2026.
You should see what Elixir is doing with Tidewave and usage rules.
https://www.zachdaniel.dev/p/usage-rules-leveling-the-playin...
Rise of the documentation specialist. Where specs and standards and documentation and design documentation is required and not just an afterthought.
not sure if that's a bad thing when it comes for FE frameworks - not reinventing it every 5-7 years i think is a good thing.
Sure, but the technology peels off the aggravation and delivers the content without the asshats.
If someone stuck an LLM between me and facebook, so I got all my facebook content without the flat earthers, moon landing deniers and tartarians, meta would never see me again.
That's not good enough. The AI has to give me updates on important events of my friends and family without showing me everything they ate at restaurants, funny cat videos they liked, or what movies they planned to watch.
Proving that AI is not just parroting back what it reads on the web, ChatGPT manages to correct my programming mistakes without making me feel bad. If it learned from Substack, I'm glad it learned selectively!
The sarcastic enthusiasm and fake humanity from the LLMs is wearing thin as well if you ask me.
You’re absolutely right! (tm)
The difference is I can instruct an LLM (and have) to knock that shit off.
True. Humans don’t take direction very well.
Which is good to some extent. We have people off the deep end sharing “unlock/jailbreak prompts” which turn LLMs in to schizophrenia machines affirming any psychosis. While a real person would push back and try to get you help.
ChatGPT can’t tell the difference between being given a harmless instruction / role play prompt, vs someone who is going insane. Probably explains why many of the most vocal AI users seem detached from reality, it’s the first time they have someone who blindly affirms everything they think while telling them they are so smart and completely correct all the time.
>Probably explains why many of the most vocal AI users seem detached from reality, it’s the first time they have someone who blindly affirms everything they think while telling them they are so smart and completely correct all the time.
I am glad I am not the only one that has noticed this. The one thing that is unsettling is how they keep talking about the Singularity as if it is this incoming event in our near future. I am somewhat sceptical that somehow the same humanity that is collectively down the Kardaschev scale is going to create a god like being with technology that is not that far advanced in the future.
So the cognitive reality of being a billionaire is now available to everyone?
Those stack overflow dudes would be savage if you started posting crazy manifestos looking for feedback.
It's an easy critique of stack overflow, sure, but the same applies to reddit tbh. It's quickly becoming far more worthwhile to chat with AI than get angry at stupid, predictably reactionary reddit comments - and you’re not reaching many people, you’re just used for training a model, or for advertising opportunities for sleazy subreddit owners
Try and follow /new on raspberry_pi or similar...
You'll see reason for the hate, mainly with people not bothering to spend any time searching before posting.
And it is getting worse, new people asking help: 'but chatgpt told me X', 'I followed chatgpt and it doesnt work, please help fix bug', or some idiots that might burn the house down and deserve yelling (li-ion batteries aren't a joke, ac current likewise)
Or... LLM generated stuff... which is equal to spam...
If some people like doing unappreciated tech support all power to them, others might fight through spam to find nice items, I mostly stopped bothering and looking for something else. (also yelling at idiots that might kill themselves)
If you block beginners questions and posts then the entire community becomes pretty hostile and annoying to be in.
If you don't block beginners then the entire community will leave and you end up with the /r/suggestALaptop type subreddit. A woodworking subreddit will have 3 daily "What's the best table saw for a beginner" and "Dewalt vs Milwakee?" threads and anyone who cares will leave and you're left with all the bots and people trying to sell you stuff.
The funny thing is that didn't use to be a problem in online communities back in the day. Every forum has a "New Users" section, a beginner section, maybe an intermediate section and an advanced section. There were forums I would hang out on in the beginners and common areas and only readonly the advanced area until I felt confident enough to participate in the conversation there intelligently or to even have a smart enough question to ask.
This doesn't work in a place like reddit or stackoverflow. Those places are simply too big to have a cohesive consistent "culture" (for lack of a better word). You can't turn newbies away from /r/3dprinting because no body is on /r/4dprinting_for_beginniers. And people on the former don't care about the latter because it's not part of "the community".
Back in the day it also used to be a problem and answer used to be 'get better' or 'rtfm' and general laughter.
That I used to find mean, now I see it as necessary but nobody does it anymore (lack of anonimity I guess)
If someone fails to do basic research that then it's on them. They lack basic grit or other skills that they should learn.
Also, someone asking the same basic question that, id typed in google would have led them to previous threads is a special type of idiocy or attention seekinf
> You'll see reason for the hate, mainly with people not bothering to spend any time searching before posting.
As a beginner at anything it’s hard to search. It’s the “you don’t know what you don’t know problem”. I see this all the time both as the expert and the beginner.
On topics I understand, I can craft a google query that will drop exactly what I’m looking for as the first result. On new topics I have to query and scan over and over until I start to hone in on some key words.
usual answer before was get better.
get better at searching, read documentation, manuals, books, articles, etc.
When you are stuck with something non trivial usually other people will jump to help as they've likely spent time on it as well.
If someone fails to do that then it's on them. They lack basic grit or other skills that they should learn.
I keep doing that and have had no issue. (coding, electronics, woodworking, gardening, cooking...). Somehow I don't end up asking noob questions.
> "not bothering to spend any time searching"
because searching has become MUCH worse, and because even when it used to be good, searching is a SKILL.
I still use SO out of habit, but they make it really difficult to use it. Everything on the web is gated behind ridiculous captchas now. More than the AI, the legacy websites will die because they are too busy trying to prevent AI companies from scraping the content and have ruined the product in the process.
Seems pretty crappy to blame the websites for this instead of the AI companies, who are the really bad actors here
Agreed, but SO was bad before LLMs showed up. Almost all expert communities seem to develop problems with gatekeepers and ego trippers past a certain size.
Ego trippers are bad, I agree
But gatekeeping is actually good if you care about quality, and I think we're going to discover that more with LLMs
They might democratize code but the code produced will be very low quality. Once coding communities start getting overrun with "Please help me fix my LLM generated code" we'll wish we did a bit more gatekeeping
Stack Overflow existed because it had a moat on specific bug-fix related coding information that wasn't available elsewhere, or the mechanisms/community to solicit that information wasn't available elsewhere. Its moat naturally dissolves when a chatbot can offer all that plus more. So we have to think, what other moats will dissolve as AI gets better, cheaper, more effectively and widely deployed?
Will law firms be a thing, or basically just a formality because laws still require humans to submit cases? Will therapists still exist when AI therapy could be scientifically and anecdotally shown to be 10x as effective and much less expensive? A lot of inertia will exist because of trust, people's bias towards "the way things have always been", but as the difference in utility between traditional services and AI-powered services grow, that inertia will not be able to resist the force of change.
Expertsexchange was around at the time. SO's moat was they gave away access for free instead of pretending that paying got you better answers.
I never ask questions on any SO site, and I'm a 30 year professional. It really feels like the only people that post are people who wish no one else would ever post.
My most souring experience on SO was posting a comment below an answer pointing out that it did not answer the question and merely repeated it.
The comment was deleted, and deleted again when I posted it again.
Then the author of the answer went on meta and complained about my behavior, from which came a barrage of downvotes on my answer.
Now think which answer has 4 times as many votes as his answer, years later? Mine. But why delete the comment? Why not just reply? I don't get it. It wasn't even a mod, it was just someone with 3k points, much less than I have.
I prefer Reddit communities over SO any day. SO, folks are so high headed, they will bash you with anything that doesn't suit their framework. I am sure with GPTs slowly they will lose traffic.
Reddit has been 1000x worse than S.O. for me. (and S.O. sucks)
Reddit = Question asked 6 months to 5 years ago. Auto-closed because age. Answer is out of date. Ask again, get's closed as already asked.
Reddit has all the same mod problems as S.O. but it's worse because it's goal isn't to provide info, it's to be social media.
What is the "elsewhere" you have in mind?
I think it really is as simple as the AIs give better answers faster in most cases.
The problem I have is that is not really true
If the AI is capable of solving the problem quickly then it is usually the case that the question and answer are almost verbatim the first google search result from SO anyways
That's not really any faster
It might be faster for things that don't have a good SO answer, but tbh then it's usually much lower quality
That has been my experience as well, I would ask Chat GPT a question, and then I would also look on SO and both answers were more often than not basically the same.
I have been trying to reduce how much I use ChatGPT and I think I have made solid progress, I saw two noteable studies that have influenced my decision to go this way, one was the recent MIT study that showed that ChatGPT ruins your cognitive abilities (at least with regards towards coding) and the second was this study https://metr.org/blog/2025-07-10-early-2025-ai-experienced-o... that was able to produce results where their developers were actually slowed down by using LLMs and also more consequently these developers incorrectly believed that they were faster with these tools.
So at least in the current state of things I have decided it is better to not really engage with these tools.
Amen. I will have a small party the day that SO goes away. What a bunch of aholes.
Before I can even see a question or answer on this Q&A site, I get three overlays entirely covering anything useful. Log into Google. Join stack overflow! Cookie consent banner. Asinine.
No thank you and get the hell out of my face.
But without stackoverflow how do you think the AI will be able to reply about next year's new programming language?
Eventually through experience and self-play with the technologies in question.
adding the documentation to the training material and drawing on the vast amount of coding context training it already relies on.
And it's still just going to give me crappy syntax. The number of times I need to tell copilot to PLESE not use Optional[] typing syntax in Python is mind boggling.
LLM can give many answers using absorbed docs and codebase.
Rest still could be asked/answered on SO or github.
This didn’t just start now. It’s been fading for over a decade. I remember when every forum had its own look, strange layouts, unique colors, and a vibe you couldn’t really describe but you felt it.
Now everything feels the same. Same layout, same font, same clean boxy design. Sites copy each other. AI just made it more obvious, but the soul started slipping away long before that
I remember usenet where every forum was exactly the same and it was still better than today, so I’m not convinced this is a fundamental symptom of our current problems. To me it’s more that the internet has lost any sort of physical, spatial, kinetic quality. There’s no time or place, no nooks and crannies to disappear into with friends. Just an unyielding cacophony. I agree it’s all undifferentiated but it’s not the aesthetics that are the problem for me.
I think the issue is optimization. As these sites have grown more efficient at gaining and exploiting (like a natural resource) users for money, they’ve optimized away mechanisms people used to form community and such. Moving to a feed of recommendations instead of a feed of people you follow is an easy example, but there must be a thousand little examples like that.
Fundamentally, if the goal is to make money, then that’s what will be optimized for, and in this case that goal appears to be in conflict with the formation and maintenance of community. It was just a matter of time.
I was thinking about this the other night - everything is more fun until it becomes professionalised too much. In this case, professionalisation is synonymous with optimisation for engagement.
Motorsports, video games, chatting online, working in a warehouse - all things that are loads more fun to do when someone isn't seeking to eke out more and more marginal gains.
Yeah, I see this all over. Every hobby becomes a question of how to get better at it, not of how to enjoy it more. Even if you enjoy your craft and growing your skills, the internet presents you with infinitely many well-trodden paths, completely robbing you of any sense of ownership. Instead of being here and now, possessing agency in a particular moment, you're just a dot in the bottom-left quadrant of some enormous scatter graph. It's the total perspective vortex.
Yeah, maybe you’re right. Could be nostalgia playing tricks on me. I just remember how exciting it felt to join a new forum, or discover something like eMule, Sababa DC, or random p2p tools.
Everything felt raw and full of possibility. Even if a lot of it looked the same, it didn’t feel the same. There was this sense of exploring something alive.
It's possible that various Discord servers, or obscure streamer chatrooms still feel like this, and we're just old. But it definitely feels like the default has become very top-down and public instead of bottom-up and intimate.
I think the difference there is streamers are just there to get money from their audiences. Doing something they like sure, but a vast majority are trying to make a living. That has a different context entirely.
I think there's an extremely long tail of streamers and associated chat communities that are untroubled by any form of financial rewards. When I speak to people in those communities it sounds to me like the closest thing to IRC in the 90s - tight-knit groups with regular comings together at specific times and places, being their whole selves with each other.
"Context collapse"? The phenomenon that, no matter where you go and what the nominal topic of discussion is, it always comes back to US politics.
It's more a thing of the masses now when in the earlier days on average more smart people used it.
> I remember usenet where every forum was exactly the same
alt.confident.assertion.question.doubt.disagree
;)
This was in reply to a post about visual design of different forums.
It's funny, I generally agree with you, but this reminds me of old people complaining about rock music. Maybe the cacophony is the point, it's not to our taste, and we don't get it. But maybe it's also less and less our world anymore.
My memory of this was Facebook overtaking MySpace
I remember being 13-years-old and completely baffled people preferred the platform where I had no say over the HTML on my page.
I didn’t understand how people could prefer a boilerplate with profile picture and name over an actual artefact made by the person.
I loved Myspace. You could talk directly to bands members (At least the unknown punk bands I was following back then)
Once they lost all the pre-2016 content, I think that was it. Hard to make a comeback after something like this
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2019/mar/18/myspace-l...
You can still do that on Instagram
It's a long shot, but you might find some resources here:
https://wiki.archiveteam.org/index.php/Myspace
I guess you didn't have a lot of friends that would make their text white, on a yellow background, with autoplaying music. Then sprinkle in some blinking and/or moving text to make it even harder to read.
I think there could have been a nice middle ground with more "tasteful" customization that would have still left plenty of room for individuality, but nobody built it before Facebook totally took over.
You still have Straight Dope for realtalk and RPGCodex for shitposting.
Besides that, there’s Reddit. They’re all vastly different and are essentially discussion boards.
What faded were the obscure or niche ones where discussions simply didn’t invite enough people.
With CSS and JS Libraries I can create a 'good' looking and usable web interface in minutes.
As a counterpoint, have you seen Stack Overflows proposed new brandings and redesigns? Pretty wild colour choices.
I sure hope not. Internet is fine but the web is more of a virtualized app platform than a hypertext platform by this point, as evidence by the fact that I can't read TFA without giving them money or looking it up on a third party archive.
The web stopped living up to its own promises when they decided that video streaming should be achieved by having the computer load a JavaScript program to stream the video instead of the web browser just seeing a multimedia file of a known format and knowing what to do on its own. Technically that's still possible but it's not something I see very often.
Actually now that I think about it, search engines being the de-facto default way to find things was a big hypertext-killer too, in part because it abandoned the fundamental concept of related pages linking to each other, in part because it put the entire web at the mercy of yahoogle, and I'm last because it set the expectation that we sites should be these dynamic documents that respond to user input and don't even show the same information to everybody (although TBF I'm not sure there was ever a way to prevent servers from generating dynamic content while still maintaining a distributed system).
Maybe AI is killing some people's corners of the web. The web itself is just fine. From what I can tell, it's mostly hitting the ad-sponsored parts. Online stores now actually need to focus on creating good content for their products rather than forcing themselves into people’s browsing. Now you need to be matched to consumers based on how relevant you are to what they want as expressed to their AI agent. I actually see it wiping out the big content gatekeepers. While the AI agents will in themselves be gatekeepers, they seem really replaceable. But they have a fantastic ability to aggregate content, such that eventually, we won't need gateway content platforms like youtube etc because you don't need that front end anymore.
I don't want to just stick to one or two little corners of the web, I want to peruse and find corners that interest me or have information/something that's useful to me. When too much of what I find is AI slop or part of some SEO-maxxed marketing funnel, I become less likely to search for stuff or take a chance on reading something in general.
Conversely, web operators generally feel differently about freely and openly serving actual human readers vs robots, both because of their differing motives (the robot might index me or just be learning from me, the human might actually talk to me or share me) and scale (I can afford to host a website serving all my real human readers but not all the robots on the Internet).
I actually think that gatekeepers benefit a lot from the erosion of trust in the web. They handle all the hard parts of keeping your shit up and accessible by real people without bots taking it down, and can actually verify that people are who they say they are.
Personally, to me the whole point of "the web" is that it's way bigger and more open than a little cozy corner of people I already trust, or a handful of walled gardens. And I think this problem is really quite hard to solve without just creating another walled garden.
I can't think of a single part of the internet that AI isn't enshittifying.
Nah. With everything behind anti-bot crap now, control has been handed over to companies like CloudFlare.Some people here maintain that what ruined the web is the consolidation of the web into a few huge web properties. Others say it is advertising. Others, VCs or the profit motive. In contrast, my big beef is with the browser, which I see as a frustrating barrier between me and the information (and the people) on the internet that I want to access. I've felt that way for about 20 years.
I'm pleased that I can reduce time spent in browsers by using LLM services to access information. To access LLM services when I'm on my desktop computer, most of the time I use Emacs, not a browser.
AI might be killing search. But there is more to the web than search. The aspect of thee web where you could look up the answer to any question or find some piece of a long tail seemed miraculous. And those parts are taking a big hit. But the part where I can see if my child is missing any assignments is still great. And the aspect where I can order a part for my bicycle from the one supplier I trust half a continent away? That still works.
The web is still capable of being a better Sears catalog than the Sears catalog. Even without using Amazon or some other unreliable vendor. And it is still a great way to check your bank statement.
AI is going to kill a lot of things about the web, but many of those things should probably be killed anyway. There is a lot of good stuff that is going to survive just fine. It remains to be seen if killing off some bad stuff will outweigh killing off some of the good stuff.
All of the stuff you listed that are great about the web are commercial things fwiw. If the community side of the web dies out, all thats left is a tool for business or government interests. Sure you get some benefits but consider what is really being lost. A powerful way to learn independently, to communicate with other people, to organize, to share ideas and opinions. What happens to our society when these sort of things are silenced? Who benefits from that happening? I think we know it isn't you and me.
I suppose people will have to connect in-person again. If this were to transpire, I think it would provide numerous benefits. Human health would improve. It would be more difficult to surveil peoples' offline communications. One thing that will change though is that we will probably be less connected to distant people.
"Independent study" is an interesting phrase. You can still browse MIT courses despite AI. You can still read the translated works of Friedman.
This is a commonly used meaning of independent study. But it isn't quite the same as Curie's independent study.
If Stackoverflow is experiencing a steep dropoff it suggests that people are more satisfied with AI. Presumably they are still learning independently with the help of web-based AI.
You should see the damage AI is doing to classroom instruction. People who are trying to learn can benefit from AI just like they could from the massive human effort of Wikipedia. People who are trying to dodge can hurt themselves with AI in the same way people hurt themselves with Wikipedia.
None of that means the web is dying.
I know it sounds counter-intuitive, but I think we need less collaboration, less competition, and less team dynamics in general. Anything that does cross-pollination should be opaque.
More individuals cultivating personal points of view drastically different from homogenized masses.
That extends way beyond the web though.
Pafnuty Chebyshev, a Russian mathematician who discovered a bunch of important things, deliberately limited his intake of other mathematicians' works, in order to force himself think in original ways, not ways suggested by others' works.
This medicine needs to be taken in moderation though, else one can end up reinventing some key wheels instead of speeding forward on these wheels, like https://fliptomato.wordpress.com/2007/03/19/medical-research...
I read somewhere that the explanation for the integration article was citation restrictions on some other paper, where the easiest solution was to get the method published in an existing relevant journal to create the citation needed.
That is quite interesting, but it is a personal choice of his.
If just a bunch of math wizards and weirdos do it, they'll be seen as isolated and it won't take effect in the dynamics of the web.
I'm talking about everyone doing it.
The web has been terrible for 20 years. Advertising killed it, not AI.
As AI tools shift how people search, the old tricks no longer work. Clickbait collapses. Content mills go silent. And in their place, there is a chance to build something better- something rooted in quality, not quantity.
AI didn’t kill the internet; it was already going downhill. Articles were mostly fluff, reviews were just affiliate links, and SEO race had already ruined a lot of stuff.
the web died years ago, for a different reason: labor monopoly. The web, and software in general, stopped reflecting or serving users, when the ruling class started pouring massive capital to dismantle any paradigm for major web/software development other than ones vetted by pedigree VCs and planned for obsolescence by acquisition. Gen AI is actually the only thing that could’ve punctured their hold on world software - the vague air of confidence they maintain when they talk about “their future of AI” is a facade. There’s already a new Web (or Webs) coming that will dwarf the current one, and it won’t be coming from them - so they’re clinging to their only means of control: the AI token infra.
> There’s already a new Web (or Webs) coming that will dwarf the current one
Care to elaborate? What is this new web if no one is incentivized to publish, only consume?
A huge chunk of online content (especially what ranked on Google )was already SEO churned sludge, and I'm not I buy the argument that elite publishers and creators like the New York Times, The Economist, and The Atlantic have ever really depended on Google. When the Economist sells itself to advertisers it doesn’t talk about its web traffic numbers, it talks about the fact that it's read by CEOs.
You're likely to see content creators pull their work behind access-controlled spaces (which might actually work out better than the current bargain of it being free but unreadable, recipes buried by long winding stories, etc). You might see the weird web emerge again as search engines are able to discover it under a pile of SEO sludge.
The Economist and FT no, but a lot of the other more mainstream (read by a wider audience) media like Guardian, NY Times, Washington Post, Le Monde, Le Figaro, etc. depend a lot on Google traffic. There were numerous legal disputes over this dependence, how Google circumvented it for users (the quick answers that made it so a lot of queries were resolved without even needing to visit the source website), and profit sharing.
You see I even disagree with that. People don't accidentally discover the Guardian, NY Times, Washington Post, Le Monde, Le Figaro via Google, their muscle memory is trained to these publications because that's where they go to get their opinions and worldview validated.
Of course they can get that from ChatGPT too, but it hits different when you realise ChatGPT validates everything you say anyway.
It has been many years, but there was a time when I was young, and I did not know about any of those publications other than the NYT (from seeing it on newstands). I did discover almost every other one via google, when looking for variety in my sources of news.
No matter how famous something is, for every individual, there is a first point of contact. The web has been the great filter for the last couple of decades until now, and it is extremely common to discover even main stream things that way.
> You see I even disagree with that. People don't accidentally discover the Guardian, NY Times, Washington Post, Le Monde, Le Figaro via Google, their muscle memory is trained to these publications because that's where they go to get their opinions and worldview validated
That's for daily news reading. If you search for news (like what happened with the Spanish/Iberian grid), you'd use Google. And you shouldn't use ChatGPT because it wastes a ton of resources to just hallucinate anyways, whereas a Google search gets you the direct links to the sources.
> Openai is soon expected to launch a browser of its own.
Is that right? I'm not sure how I feel about that. Actually, I think I know how I feel about it.
The "web" is already just business infrastructure. It already was, much prior to AI. I would challenge the assumption that there is anything worth saving.
Yeah, the sentiment I was looking for in this thread. I could get over the death of the Web pretty quickly, I think.
The internet has been dead for a few years now.
I think we are in the timeline where AI tales over. Look at Elon's tesla robots. I don't think AI will become sentient and rule/kill humans, more like corrupt rulers using AI to generate videos of people they don't like commiting a crime, and using it as proof the victim did the crime.
Maybe start a new movement, similar to the Amish. And have a completely separated version of the internet.
I just read Technofeudalism by Yanis Varoufakis which has an interesting perspective that "cloud capitalism" is replacing traditional capitalism and competition. A few players are assembling their own fiefdoms inside dominant web/mobile platforms. https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/751443/technofeudal...
The internet doesn't have a clear, simple, micro-payment system that would allow people to reward value, so instead we have an attention based system where the number of likes and followers grants social status and financial opportunity.
When cryptocurrency first started getting attention (2010,2011-ish?) I was so excited that a potential micropayments system would come out of it and solve this problem. Sadly it did not go that way..
god fr real, everyone making shit and selling it online is still paying their tithe to Visa/MC and working under their rules as to what you can and can't sell, and possibly another tithe to Paypal or Square or Stripe or whoever on top of that. Crypto's just a giant sucker trap and the amount of stuff you can buy with it without paying your tithe to Visa/MC to turn it into real money is infinitesimal.
I might well be killing the ad financed web and that is good. I wouldn't be surprised if Google dies with it.
I do not see traditionally paid and paywalled content suffer. The discoverability in that segment already suffered from how Google treated it and AI only sped up the inevitable. Good content behind paywall will be fine.
The small sliver of the web that is popular on HN and that is, let's call it altruistically free, will only benefit. Less competition from ad supported content. As long as you only care about your content being read and not where and under which name, you will be good.
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“Yet as Google does the Googling, humans no longer visit the websites from which the information is gleaned. ”
Can you blame them? These publishers’ content is buried under paywalls, logins, screen-engulfing ads, deceptive headlines, the list goes on forever. Publishers created such user-hostile experiences that people are desperate for a user interface that’s barely there and gives them what they want, and will gladly pay $20 per month for it.
Making it federated (so it's a true network of people's sites) is what can theoretically save things. But given under 0.001% can self-host, I don't see how that can work .. the centralized services are slated to win.
Perhaps some global law could help - significantly disincentivizing for centralization and network effects.
I feel like the barrier for self hosting could be so much lower. The resources required to host a static site are tiny and even a dynamic one with comments accessed by all the people I actually know could easily run on a cheap router.
I think self-hosting is a distraction. You can make your own site using Astro and deploy it for free to Netlify and still get 99% of what we're talking about here.
If that was less scary maybe more people would do it!
Welcome to MySpace!
> But given under 0.001% can self-host, I don't see how that can work
The place where the web is still great is where you have to be invested to be a real participant. Everyone can yell about politics in a text box on twiter/FB/reddit/HN or post photos to IG/Dataing site Or videos to twitch/YouTube.
If you can host something, even for a small number of people your one of the rare few. If your "into" something where there is a focused community then your back into one of those 1% pools where people vibe and participate.
To make an analogy of it: The web is now a tourist town. Everyone is interested in making money off the visitors with the flashy lights and signs luring them into the over priced tourist traps. The locals, the natives, the REAL .01% know where the cheap places with great food and local flavor are.
I thought social media killed the Web 20 years ago. RIP
AI is just a one more tool that increasing wealth inequality and over monetization/unregulated capitalism are exploiting that makes everything it touches worse. It's not the first tool, it won't be the last.
I liked SO back in the day. And then I didn’t. Felt that way about ARS community in the early days. And the didn’t. I loved for slashdot info for a while, and then didn’t. Reddit seems to be passing the same zenith. I remember originally loving comp.lang._____.
In each case, some form of Pournelles iron law of beauracracy seems to take over. Enshitification just feels like an economic abstraction over Pournelles law. It’s the way that crap acretes on to good.
I’ve come to believe it’s inevitable. And just look for where the next cycle is occurring at. Ride the wave while it works.
Help us AI! Save us from AI.
Seems possible that one possible unintended consequence of AI could be a rebirth of the Web as something closer to what we knew. Because why use search at all for general inquiry when AI can satisfy much of that?
More critically, it’s not hard to imagine that, with AI-boosted boosted coding, a thousand bespoke search engines and other platforms being just around the corner, radically changing the economics of platform lock-in. When you can build your own version of Google Search with the help of AI and do the same with social media or any other centralizing Internet force, then platforms cease to be platforms at all. With AI, the challenges of self-hosting could become quite manageable as well. And while we’re at it, some version of the same, individual-centered computing economics on your own devices seems possible.
In these senses, it’s quite possible that Jobs’s vision of computing as extensions of individuals rather than individuals being extensions of computing is again at hand, with the magic of self-curated order from a chaotic Net not far behind.
I literally cannot read this article because of a paywall.
The title is deeply ironic.
I think we need to look at it per type of use. The beauty of the web is its versatility.
- It's an ever evolving information repository - the initial use - from Wikipedia to blogs to newspapers.
- It's a debate space - forums ( used to be newsgroups )
- It's a transaction space - ecommerce, marketplaces
- It's a social space – from keeping in touch to meeting new people – social media, dating websites. used to be irc
- It's an entertainment space - tiktok, youtube, netflix, etc...
AI will have the harshest initial impact on the information repository use. It will cannibalize it but also needs it to feed itself.
The transaction space will be affected. Protocols like MCPs once strengthened will need to support transactions. Payment infrastructure will need to be built for this.
Then, the social space will be the weirdest. AI Companions will become ubiquitous, naturally filling the void left by the weakening of the social fabric and loneliness epidemic.
For the debate space, 99% of it doesn't play the role of debate, but more of the role of echo chamber and social validation. It's AI Companionship but by community. These spaces will stay. AI is one to one, not one to many. But they will drastically lose appeal. AI will perfectly play this role of validation and echo chamber.
Finally, entertainment is already being disrupted. The question will be how the industry as a whole ( it's more than purely content creation, it's the whole mythos creation around it ) will adapt to the possibility of on the fly content creation.
AI will become the main human-machine interface, and the role of machines will grow exponentially in our daily lives. The capitalistic concentration that will ensue will be never seen before. The company who will win AI will be the most powerful company in history. They will dominate not only tech, but culture, economics, world view.
Remember, GPT2 was only released 6 years ago.
Someone should make a new internet modeled off of around 2002.
Bind to port 81 and go for it.
The web as we knew it — open, chaotic, full of real voices already gone. Free speech isn't what it was 15 years ago; it's filtered, throttled, and buried under bots and algorithmic noise. But AI isn’t the root of the problem — it’s just another layer. The real issue is that the current internet model no longer serves people; it serves platforms. Maybe it’s not about saving the old web. Perhaps it’s time to build a new one—one that puts users, privacy, and real expression first.
Just ignore the platforms. Use RSS on a body of self-curated websites/bookmarks. Click to read the articles and essays on their own domains (show the creators some love by doing that), and click around over there on that other domain.
I built my own system for that, but I know for sure this is possible with off-the-shelf (open source) software.
It takes some time to get used to this. No saturated video thumbnails, no infinite scrolling, no notifications. It's slower and feels more boring in the beginning. But it becomes a blessing very soon, when you go back to LinkedIn's feeds or Youtube's algo grid after a month and it feels like a punch in the stomach.
I used to be a heavy user of RSS, back in the Google Reader days. I loved it for following a wide array of different blogs. I'm not really sure why I stopped with rss - I switched to viable alternatives to Google reader when it died.
Recently I've been keen to get back into this way of using the web, because I have evidently been sucked into scrolling on the platforms until the algorithms give me something I want to see.
The other day, one of my favourite web dev blogs (and one of the only blogs I actually seek out) created this fantastic compendium of Web Performance resources and blog links, along with an associated rss opml file. Surely this is the push I needed to get back to the glory of the web.
https://infrequently.org/links/
But I definitely need to put in the effort to discover other eclectic blogs. I really miss reading long, authentic things on diverse topics
Nice, thanks!
I think OPML is underrated and the combination of RSS (Really Social Sites) and OPML (Other People's Meaningful Links) could give the open web a resurrection as the social media of choice for curious people.
Right now, I'm working on integrating more and more OPML functionality into my RSS software. I envision a quick way of exploring and discovering new links/feeds from sites/feeds that I already follow.
> RSS (Really Social Sites)
Rich site syndication.
RDF Site Summary.
I have to inform you that it has a new name.
I have to inform you that it doesn't.
A ton of good discussion of things has left Reddit/Facebook/Twitter for all the obvious reasons and gone to Discord because of discoverability is low, so is discovery by trolls and AI scraper bots and plagiarists.
Which is great - if you have the invite and like the Discord UI.
It really sucks if you'd prefer to follow RSS or longer-form in general.
God, having complex conversations on WhatsApp is a pain, doing it on discord or any real time chat …
I am an RSS user but it is pretty frusterating these days being one. All of the I guess "first tier" sort of sites you'd really want an RSS feed for don't have one any more or offer a truncated one that forces you onto the platform (yes I roll my own morss, doesn't always get the content). You are left with sort of second tier news websites that pollute their feed with reposted AP content you might even see on several same feeds you follow.
And the biggest issue is that no one is starting a new site and implementing RSS. Seems like for a lot of RSS feeds I follow, the only reason they still exist is because the webmaster has not yet culled the service for whatever reason; like some of these links are found on vestigial web pages that look like 2007 internet whereas the rest of the site is modern.
And it makes sense why RSS is dying. It is a huge free bone tossed to the community. You don't see free bones tossed out anymore without a string attached to pull you back into some profit making angle. Everyone wants you on their site so they can serve you ads. They don't want you using a feed reader and getting that content without having to see an ad.
I have to agree with you. Completely.
On one hand I think it's a shame and I do miss feeds on certain (big) websites, but on the other it makes me appreciate the small web or indie web or just open web more.
Feels like rehab after two decades of 'social media'. But the open web is the ultimate form of social media itself, if you'd ask me. I plea for a name change of RSS to Really Social Sites. I already started calling it like that in my own software.
Ignoring is not how it works. Internet is a basically huge social circle, if not enough people got on broad, a site can die out really quickly. I've observed quite few examples of small community closed down because no one was there anymore, some websites that I loved as a child no longer exists because of this reason too, gone with it is all the content they once hosted.
Here's the problem:
1. Software/Infrastructure have a cost: If you want to self-host, there's a consistent dread of maintaining things. It wears you down, slowly maybe, but eventually.
2. The problem of discovery: Back to the past, people used to sharing links and resource manually, often on a forum ("forum life", i call it). But now days people are more rely on platform recommendations (starts from "Just Google it"). If your content/link is not recommended, then you can't reach far. Also, people now days really hates registration (and memorizing/recording account/password), and they will not even try to use "strange" websites.
3. Government regulation: The government pushing laws upon laws that could restrict self-hosting content, by either making self-hosting difficult, or forcing websites to self-censor (which most personal sites just don't have enough admin to do).
4. Some people who has the capability and know-hows on solving the problem are "solving" it the wrong way. Instead of creating systems that modern users would love to use, they tries "being back the old way" so do speak, but not giving any consideration on why people abandoned "the old way" in the first place. The software they created maybe even quite hostile to regular non-tech-savoy people, but hey at least they themselves thinking it's cool.
There are few projects gets it right, like Mastodon, and maybe Blue Sky etc. But, then these project still don't earn a lot of money and political capital, meaning it still can't escape the point 1 above and maybe point 3 as well.
Over all, I think it's less that the platforms exploiting the Internet, it's mainly that most people just "moved on" to what could make their life easier. Internet is a tool after all.
P.S. If someone wants to solve the social media over-monopolization problem, I'd recommend that you make sure you're "user forced", user, user, user, regular old man/woman John/Marry Doe user. That's how you create social circle/network effect and that's how you grow and sustain.
Freetube is a way to achieve this with YouTube. You just get RSS feeds, you avoid endless scrolling.
https://freetubeapp.io/
I worry that AI/bot presents as a desincentive for proper RSS distribution. Authors may not don't want to provide easy access to their content by bots. Maybe paywalling? Maybe proof of work solves this?
That's something the few can do, but not the many.
As open source improves at user onboarding, and user experience, there might be a chance.
You're using the wrong tools to browse the web if it seems that is the case.
The weird, creative, bordering on unhinged part of the web is still very much around and alive. It's just that you need to depart from the major social media sites and search engines if you want to find it again.
Delete all social media immediately. It’s the equivalent of Neo unplugging himself, taking these tubes out of his throat.
Well said. There's a good search engine for that, maybe you've heard of it?
https://marginalia-search.com/
;)
Well as it happens...
Hahaha
I’ve tried Marginalia about… probably 10 times, at this point? Every time I want niche search results. I haven’t found an interesting site through it, yet.
I love the concept and want it to work! I pay for Kagi; I value search.
The explore mode[1] is probably the tool you're looking for if you're just looking for something interesting / demonstration that the weird web still exists.
[1] https://marginalia-search.com/explore
This is a step in the right direction. Thanks for this.
Bring
Back
Web
Rings
(But seriously, I think I would love to rat-hole down interesting web rings.)
There's a web ring revival happening, ironically by people who are too young to actually remember them.
Other networks are web ring prone, too, like Tor and I2P. Lot of web rings found on either.
The problem of the pre-platform Web is the difficulty of discovery; your interesting content will have but a few readers.
The lure of platforms, like Twitter, or, well, HN, is that your content can potentially be seen by "everyone". Going viral is fun but not that important; being seen by the right people you never knew, or never had a hope to grab attention of, is much move valuable. This leads to much stronger cross-pollination.
(Spam is a problem here, but spam is also a problem in similar biological systems; blooming plants release tons of pollen, and then tons of seeds, most of them fruitless.)
Discoverability wasn't much of a problem for Google's first half decade. We had great content spread all over from millions of sources easily discovered with a simple search engine. Then Google IPO'd and Facebook showed up and everything went to shit. And that ignores other great discovery tools from directories all the way back to web rings. The web from 1995-2005 really was pretty good for content and discovery both. Today it's a few mega corporations with walled gardens who control all of the discovery and are loathe to let users engage with the web outside of their walls.
You can look for forums on tor. It's just not very usefull unless you are a drug addict or criminal.
The thing that stops me pursing this idea though is how do you verify contributors to this new internet aren’t platforms/businesses?
Where do you draw the line?
Who gets to draw the line?
This is an incomplete thought, but a friend of mine has this idea around reputation built through a sort-of key signing. You get a key, your friend gets a key, you sign each other's keys. The key can serve as an indicator of trust, or validity that an individual's contributions are meaningful (or something). And if your friend suddenly turns into a corporate shill, you could revoke that trust. And if the people haven't established their own trust with that person, their trust goes when yours does. Transitive trust.
It obviously has some flaws, and could be gamed in the right circumstances, but I think it's an interesting idea.
Isn't this just a standard pgp web of trust?
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_of_trust
Sounds like following people on a social media platform and only reading posts from in your network. Which is exactly how most people I know use Bluesky.
It works better than Twitter's algorithmic feed but it's still not foolproof because not everyone has the same idea of what sort of content they are willing to trust/ track.
Anything that requires the end user to internalize PKI is dead on arrival.
A) The interface won't get intuitive enough.
B) The asshats will still find a way in.
C) Ain't nobody ever met someone in the real world and gone "Yo dawg, what's your public key?"
Encryption is just a machine that turns already hard problems into key management problems.
A plug-in. Trusted users thumbs up/down sites and ratings are recorded in a database. The plug-in visually differentiates shite links (according to database) so others can avoid clicking on them (or they can hide them altogether).
A kind of PiHole for just shitty SEO sites.
Why that line in particular? It seems not to be about the quality of the content. Part of the issue is that businesses were advised to produce useful content, but the motivation for doing so is disappearing. A net negative, surely?
Even if you could do it perfectly (distinguish "authentic people" from slop merchants) the same old actors will do the same old things as long as the incentives are there. They will just wear "real people" like skin suits. Almost worse :/
It will never happen as long as Google is able to gatekeep the Internet with its search and browser. Even if you could find enough power users to break out and create something that hits critical mass, user-powered indexes don’t scale. Whomever swoops in to fix the problem immediately becomes the new Google.
LLM reply. At least get rid of the dashes, come on.
No one noticed the parent post is LLM slop?
Spams of groups of threes (open, chaotic, full of real voices - filtered, throttled, and buried - users, privacy, real expression)
It's not just X - it's Y type of sentence structure Vapid marketing style writing that has no real substance (Maybe it’s not about saving the old web. Perhaps it’s time to build a new one)
Of course, there are emdashes too, they may not betray LLM alone as they exist in literature and a minority like to use them in internet comments but when they are present along with other signs of slop they are still a strong tell, particularly when they are numerous.
Is this satire? or trolling? it is concerning everyone replies to it as if there had been human thought behind this drivel.
Typically LLMs don't put spaces between em dashes and the words that surround them—which is the correct orthography, I should point out. Humans often put spaces around them when they shouldn't, like in the example you quoted. I don't know if it's AI or not, but if you ask an AI to use a sentence with an em dash in it, it won't include spaces.
Don't forget semicolon. Normal people don't use that.
I don’t know that I’d call myself normal, but I use semicolons regularly, though infrequently.
Semicolons are fine so long as you know how to use them.
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I didn’t notice because I unconsciously skim over slop-looking comments without evaluating whether it’s human-written or not, and only read the more interesting comments.
> one that puts users, privacy, and real expression first
users aint that special.
It already exists, it's called the Gemini protocol: https://geminiprotocol.net/
I moved my site to Gemini, finished middle last year.
Clients:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gemini_(protocol)#Software
Some links to find content:
gemini://sdf.org
gemini://gem.sdf.org
gemini://gemi.dev/xkcd/
gemini://warmedal.se/~antenna/
gemini://gemini.circumlunar.space/capcom/
gemini://skyjake.fi/~Cosmos/view.gmi
gemini://calcuode.com/gmisub-aggregate.gmi
gemini://tinylogs.gmi.bacardi55.io/
gemini://sl1200.dystopic.world/juntaletras.gmi
gemini://tilde.team/~khuxkm/leo/
gemini://raek.se/orbits/space-elevator/
gemini://fediring.net/
Do you have readers, or is it just for you?
I do not understand. Clients link above has a list of clients to read gemini sites.
They are asking if your site has people viewing/reading it after you moved it to Gemini or if it is just you reading it at that point.
>They are asking if your site has people viewing/reading it after you moved it to Gemini
I have no idea. I do not keep track or log any visitors.
> The web as we knew it — open, chaotic, full of real voices already gone. Free
Commented on a site whose top pages are curated manually....
I hope not! The web sucks now.
Talking to LLMs is way, way better.
Sadly HN has never been of much value to me despite my first account being almost of drinking age. Yes, having people like Nagle (animats) and other hardcore experts who know what they’re talking about is great. But they’re an extreme rarity in a sea of absolute shit. You want to talk about enshittification? Just take a look at the nosedive of HN. So yeah, for me it’s usually more insightful to do a deep dive with an LLM. Before that, of course, the Wikipedia rabbit holes were I think a staple of the internet.
LLMs for me to a large degree satisfy the “hacker curiosity” that HN guidelines wank over but betray with every bullshit upvoted and gamed clickbait post. It’s a search engine that flattens rabbit holes for me and makes traversing the corpus of information out there very enjoyable.
People complaining about a LLMs being scrapers is to me just amusing to the point of nonsensical. The entire point is to use it as a discovery engine that brought the most common and the most obscure on the same level of accessibility.
I think the even bigger problem is that what AI is doing to the Internet now, it will do to personal knowledge on a generational scale.
It will get good, startling good, to the point that going through the heavy effort of really learning things becomes old fashioned, and positively antiquated.
I am afraid of what happens to the march of progress when that happens.
It's not AI. It's corporations, a much more dangerous form of non-human person. The actual AI bots aren't doing this abusive HTTP request spamming that causes services to be infeasible to run due to resource usage. It's coming from normal HTTP request software with no AI. And it's happening due to the perverse incentives of corporations and their intrinsic lack of liability. They truly are the worst legal persons.
AI is one sharp tool cutting slices from the old internet. But perpetrators have used different tools from the start: SEO spam, algorithmic feeds, embrace/extend/extinguish, building moats, the attention economy, and many others. AI is just the next newfangled sharp tool.
In other words, I don't think that AI is killing the web.
It's being profit-oriented and running amok in an unleashed way. It's prisoner's dilemma. You know, if you don't do it then someone else will do it and you lose. Enshittification is one consequence. The internet experienced it from the beginning. But only about fifteen years ago companies learnt how to squeeze the last drop out and, like in the tragedy of the commons, everybody is worse off.
And what's the most catastrophic? People are confused. They look at the tools but not at some famous people behind these rampages. Of course as leaders they just optimize the hell out of the internet with the target that their companies thrive. But in doing so they cause heavy damage.
Think it’s a done deal.
I have a little bit of hope for semi independent operations though. Things like hn or lemmy that were never really ad supported anyway and have some distance from the enshitification trend
AI inference can save it because it can be used to make tools that reverse "enshittification" Cloudflare slams the door in the the face of this "exit".
I think the economics will save it.
AI isnt cost effective. The investors are going to want their money back very soon due to outside economic influences... they wont get it back and many of these AI pop ups are going to fold. the rest are going to scale back and jack up prices.
>AI isnt cost effective. The investors are going to want their money back very soon due to outside economic influences... they wont get it back and many of these AI pop ups are going to fold. the rest are going to scale back and jack up prices.
Nothing stopping us from having cake and eating. Open AI could fall over, and we would still have all the publicly available models kicking around.
its not the I/O that is costing.. its the hardware to push them, and the power to push the hardware...
oh and the companies themselves that are pulling in mountains of debt to build themselves...
Personally this is what I’m hoping for. Stories I read about services sold as AI turning out to be minimum wage workers tells me that as much as everyone thinks this is the dawn of a new age of hyperintelligent machines we haven’t gotten as far as we wanted to as fast as we wanted, or hoped.
Given that incredibly capable models can be run on fairly low cost hardware, how will this really change anything?
Problem #1 - to "save it", you first have to define the idealized and/or snapshot-in-time web that you want to save. Don't expect much agreement here, especially on the details.
Problem #2 - if you aren't the Emperor of Earth or some such, how could you make your ideal web stable over time, in today's world?
At the same time, apps are also a bit in decline. People still make them but the whole race for making it to the top 10 in the app stores seems to have faded away. And a lot of them are simple web page wrappers. People still install some apps but more on a need to have basis than that they are constantly adding/removing apps. So, I don't buy this "the web is in decline" framing.
Change is a constant on the web. Things were very different in 1995 (plain html, no good search engines), 2005 (no widespread web capable smart phones usage yet, Google, AJAX), 2015 (peak social media and app hype), and 2025 (social media has shifted to new apps and lots of people are disengaging entirely, AI is starting to threaten Google, content aggregators serve most web content).
For 2035, I would predict that AI will drive a need for authenticity. Existing platforms don't provide this because they lack content signatures. We've had the tools to reliably sign content for decades. But we don't use those a lot except for DRM content behind paywalls (for commercial reasons). So, you can't really tell apart the AI generated propaganda, marketing, misinformation, etc. from authentic human created content by individuals you care about. And that might be contributing to people disengaging a bit. But you can see the beginnings of this on platforms like bluesky and signal which push end to end encryption and user verification. People might share AI nonsense via these platforms. But they seem to be less about that as say X, Tik Tok or Instagram are. We sometimes watermark our images. We don't digitally sign them. Why is that?
Just speculating here but the web could use a big upgrade here and do more than just certify domain name ownership. Which is fairly meaningless if the domain is some big network with many millions of users. What about certifying content itself? Reliably tie content to their creators in a way that can't be forged. IMHO this is long overdue and the related UX challenges are there but solvable in principle. DRM is a prime example of a fairly usable implementation. Just works if you paid for the content. Signed content would make it very challenging to pass off AI gibberish as authentic if it's not signed by a reputable private key. And if it happened anyway, that would damage the reputation of that key. I don't exclude the possibility of reputable AIs emerging. How would you tell those apart from the disreputable ones?
I think, the web was killed before by human slob search engines can't or won't filter. Now we find out, a little longer prompt in an AI chat returns better results. So what?
But for the existence of YouTube, I think the ad business killed the internet.
We are many, search engines are the mean to discover things because even with usenet it's impossible for a human to discover via URLs and links enough information on the web, that's the real revolution: links are useful but not enough. Search engines are the best tool we have had so far to find knowledge around the web, now LLMs try to surpass traditional search engines milking knowledge from web contents, like we have many articles about wildfires in a region, but let's say not one about wildfire trends in that region, an LLM could try to spot a trend milking all articles in a significant timeframe. The Conrad Gessner's Biblioteca Universalis dream.
So well, LLMs do not kill the web, eat it. We are still almost the sole valid source of data for LLMs.
What really killed the web are social networks as proprietary walled gardens instead of an open Usenet with a web companion for stuff to be preserved for posterity or too long/complex for a mere post. What killed the web is the fact that ISPs do not offer an open homeserver instead of a closed box called "router" even if it's a limited homeserver. With an open version, with IPv6, anyone could buy a domain name and publish from his/shes own iron a blog with a ready-to-write software, with automatic RSS feeds, newsletters etc. If we give such tool to the masses the original web will be back but it would mean free speech and giants/politicians etc have free speech preferring ways to master public topics through their platforms to hide from most stuff they dislike and push ideas they like...
Search engine indexes being turned into copyright enforcement levers also significantly killed the net as it created scarcity in info dissemination for the sake of maintaining info asymmetry.
Go ahead and try to find JLG equipment/service manuals on the open net anymore. I'll wait.
they are anyway needed and we also have YaCy as an example, and other distributed search solution. The point is that most do not participate so only commercial one get enough resources to be useful.
The web was already dead.
> We care about your privacy. Can we please put a camera in your toilet seat for a personalized experience? > > [ ACCEPT ]
Browsing the web is a nightmare these days, I rarely visit "new" websites
> Subscribe to our spam for a 10% off coupon > > [ ] [SEND]
It is just a pain to visit any website these days... anyone involved creating these modern monstrosities should just fire themselves and go on a hike or something.
> We rely on invasive, tracking ads! Please enable your adblocker so we can get 0.00001 USD, please. > > [IVE DISABLED MY FIREWALL AND ANTI-VIRUS] [PAY 999 USD A MONTH FOR AN AD-FREE EXPERIENCE]
Start to regulate the technical protocols to access the AI prompts.
Like regulated noscript/basic (x)html interop. Or 'curl' based simple APIs.
Basically, if the whatng cartel web engines are not anymore required to access and use "AIs", things will start to significantly move.
I don't get why the articles behind paywalls are shared here.
they killed the web, not the AI.
One of the things I've been wondering about with the 'digital detox' trends or one of the younger generations getting dumbphones instead of smart, is why haven't the papers found some way of turning back the clock to explore capitalizing on that when it's supposedly hard to sell news now. 24 hour news is decades old at this point and the constant firehose of events from every location on the globe is tiring especially if only a tiny fraction is directly relevant to you. I'd be interesting if they could make a more attractive 'news/analysis product' like a newspaper or the evening news broadcast which is distinct from what is readily available from all the other sources.
It's the other way around. Paywalls are a result of the web and the Ad companies which power it killing the revenue models of publishers. AI, which steals even more and repackages their content, will make it worse.
What I don't understand is why nobody has actually figured this out. I read a lot of different news sources. I'd have no problem paying a reasonable amount of money to read an article I came across in the Podunk Picayune that looked of interest, but no, I have to sign up for a subscription. So they get nothing.
Yeah, just share the archive link directly.
Canonical links are preferred, per guidelines. Paywalled sites that are otherwise on topic with a workaround are usually allowed.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html
Totally agree, here is something is use to read without paywalls https://archive.ph/2021.09.10-164025/https://www.bostonglobe...
Because paywalls are optional, at least for a crowd such as the HN crowd. Information wants to be free.
No. All great things come to an end - artistic movements, cultural, nations, etc etc - the end of the internet is now.
The internet is cables and other hardware, and protocols, none of which is going anywhere. The Web, an internet application, seems to be dying, and certainly newsgroups and other internet applications have also died, but the internet itself isn't dead or dying. In fact, it's growing as the global rollout of broadband continues and the unconnected get connected.
Web is obsolete. Going forward AI is the first and maybe last step to getting information about a topic. No need to sift through ads, forum drama, clickbait blog posts, comments etc… just straight compiled information into your brain as quickly as possible. Yea sometimes it’s wrong, but sometimes things you find on the wild web are wrong anyway, just deal with it.
I find that when people pine for the old web, what they’re really asking for is some way to connect to other people and see things that people have written or made just for fun in a genuine way, without it being performative, derivative or for other motivations.
In theory social media should have been this, but people’s constant need to accumulate validation or tendency to produce meme-like content adversely affects the quality of their output, giving it a machined style feel that rarely feels genuine or true to their human nature. Instead of seeing people’s true personalities, you see their “masks”.
Thus the issue is not rooted in a technical problem but rather a cultural one: people no longer naively share things that don’t fuel their ego in the most perfect way.
Until that same AI starts shilling ads and certain viewpoints peddled by their owners in the output... This will happen 100% (ads, the other bit has already happened). The economics of all of these models doesn't work as is. There will be a major squeeze down the line.
Some of us have dipped our toes in local LLMs. To be sure, the ones I can run on my hardware always pale when compared to the online ones. But perhaps in time the ones you can run locally will be good enough.
Or perhaps an Apple or Kagi will host an LLM with no built-in monetization skewing its answers.
you csn run the model, but someone with vastly bigger resources need to train it.
paywall can surely save it
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It's still not as annoying as the assorted influencers who repeat The Economist headlines and articles back at me
Anyway this article is about AI replacing web search, not "killing the web" which I would take as it somehow deleting or overwriting content on existing webpages. Or generating so much spam as to make the web unusable for the average person.
Large sites that can't exist without "traffic" already killed the web a long time ago. A paywall is the proper solution, not ads in content and content in ads. That means you will have lower traffic, it doesn't mean you are being killed. It just means you stopped assaulting passersby who are linked to your site.
the standardized web we have had until now, was policed by google so they could harvest ad revenue from us. with no gorilla to encorce such standard, the web will balkanize as it's done before.
> Anyway this article is about AI replacing web search, not "killing the web"
Indeed, exaggerating title. But we all have to get the idea the web is really dying, so we give up working on it. We have to get that idea because the genie of the web is already out of the bottle for 30+ years. That stuff is going nowhere. The open web is a hindrance for big businesses. Big business wants to keep internet infrastructure to push apps, AI and what not, but does not want to keep the open web.