from Hacker News

It's the End of the Web as We Know It

by CaptainZapp on 4/23/24, 6:53 AM with 71 comments

  • by abraae on 4/23/24, 7:45 AM

    Google's SEO malarkey created the intense vacuum which AI will now happily rush to fill.

    The article mentions recipe articles, and how these now invariably have a waffly preamble designed to please the SEO algorithms. It's been obvious to humans how stupid this is for years, just as it's obvious that sites that simply copy from stack overflow are leaches on our attention and should not be highly ranked.

    Yet Google hasn't dealt with any of these problems, and with a focus on short term profits, has consistently preferred to take the money from ads hosted on these crappy sites instead of delivering a quality search experience.

    Now the chickens are coming home to roost for Google, which can only benefit a range of competitors, from Kagi to OpenAI.

  • by skilled on 4/23/24, 7:34 AM

  • by DeathArrow on 4/23/24, 9:05 AM

    Maybe we need human curated content. If we rely on bots such as Google to recommend content, there is always going to be a lot of spam, a lot of noise, a lot of SEO and a lot of AI generated content.

  • by Terr_ on 4/23/24, 7:43 AM

    Ultimately this is a offline problem as well: Trust, reputation, social-proof, and webs of attestation.

    If we want to look for solutions to apply to the internet, we need to look at what has developed in the real-world domain, where different interests have been trying to alternately solve and exploit trust-issues for millennia. It might not have final definitive answers, but we can at least avoid reinventing too many wheels.

  • by listenallyall on 4/23/24, 8:33 AM

    Seems there is a market opportunity for a search engine to promote itself as AI-free... no AI prompts, just the same search keywords people have been using for 25 years, and more importantly, a commitment to avoid returning AI-generated content, as much as possible. As Google increasingly returns garbage results, I'll happily use something else.

  • by BlueTemplar on 4/23/24, 8:37 AM

    Sounds like an education problem ?

    This kind of spam is an annoyance, but you learn to filter it out soon enough.

    Stack Overflow is a great example : its value is not so much in giving you a quick answer, but even more because you will see several answers, and the discussion around them. And yes, sure, convincing malicious actors there are always possible, but not probable.

    Same thing with Wikipedia's Talk pages, blog's comments (with the censorship issue), or third party comment sites like HN (with the platform issues).

    I'm much more concerned about artists that make works for their aesthetic value losing their already precarious livelihood to AIs. And even considering that it's sometimes feels like it's worth it : https://youtube.com/@D4BadRadio (who would have paid enough for this to be made by artists ? nobody)

  • by dijksterhuis on 4/23/24, 8:00 AM

    I agree with some of this, sort of. Up until this absolutist claim —

    > the web … will cease to exist in any useful form

    What has tended to happen in the past is, drum roll please, competition appears making the interwebs more useful again.

    Example: DuckDuckGo’s popularity came out of the desire for a more privacy friendly search engine.

    The only constant in life is change. Just because a thing becomes less useful short term, does not mean it will always be less useful long term.

    On a more meta note —

    Title —> Subtitle —> Advert —> Four sentences —> Advert -> Four sentences —> Paywall

    I find it mildly ironic that it will be the push for GenAI’s fault, when the publisher is doing everything they can to stop me from reading an article about how it’s going to be the push for GenAI’s fault.

    I am for fair pay for creators, and I’m definitely not a big fan of GenAI. I just found it to be an interesting irony, given the setup of the article wrt the origins of the interwebs.

  • by hi-v-rocknroll on 4/23/24, 9:34 AM

    Then we need content "reCAPTCHA" signatures such as artful inclusions of code comments containing ASCII art and poetry embedded in web page content that include multiple layers of beauty that would not be easy to replicate by an LLM.

    And also socially through authenticity and originality pledges from content producers and their platforms identifying what was created entirely by humans and what predictive text completion tools were used, if any.

  • by tannhaeuser on 4/23/24, 9:10 AM

    > The advent of AI threatens to destroy the complex online ecosystem that allows writers, artists, and other creators to reach human audiences.

    I gleaned these words before TFA fades and prompts me for a subscription; how about we stop linking to paywalls and excessive data collectors, or at least flag posts as such?

    Actually, writers haven't been able to reach audiences for a long time now, much less make a living (see also the "nobody reads books" story featuring on HN right now) as illegal ad providers/search engine monopolies and others have established themselves as new men in the middle, something the web was designed to break to begin with. The other route to monopolies is lack of payment options/microtransactions, the subversion of regulated stacks with fair access (such as 3G networks used to be) by de facto "platforms", and the utter and complete failure of politicians to uphold currency sovereignty or (pretend to) even grasp the problem.

    Perhaps the web dying as it is can benefit actual authors and other content producers? At least we don't have to endure BS freeriding articles like these pretending to "save the web".

  • by willmill1989 on 4/29/24, 2:24 PM

    "Eventually, people may stop writing, stop filming, stop composing—at least for the open, public web. People will still create, but for small, select audiences, walled off from the content-hoovering AIs."

    A quote that's unironically behind the paywall.

  • by throwthrowuknow on 4/23/24, 9:20 AM

    From what I could glean from the couple of paragraphs peaking out from behind all the ads occupying 2/3 of the screen and before I hit the paywall this seems to be an article complaining about the quality of content on the internet.

  • by el_don_almighty on 4/23/24, 4:18 PM

    Every night is the end of the world as you know it

  • by louwrentius on 4/23/24, 7:44 AM

    ‘The end of … as we know it’

    is such a terrible and deeply dishonest trope in my view, I really dislike it.

  • by rob74 on 4/23/24, 7:40 AM

    ...and I feel fine (?)

    (I know I will probably get downvoted for this, but as an old R.E.M. fan, I just couldn't help it)

  • by seydor on 4/23/24, 7:29 AM

    Which end? End number 2? 3? 113?

  • by HonestOp001 on 4/23/24, 12:36 PM

    The internet died in 2016, when Google announced they would do more to influence elections.

    After that, the powers that are in charge have engaged in social manipulation to try and steer the internet to provide only the ”approved” concepts.

    Gemini’s results on blacks proliferating in the confederate army is an example of how far it has gone.

    Wikipedia is not trustworthy on articles on notable people (watch when an election kicks off and how manipulated they are) and Google tries to openly manipulate search results because of the SEO decisions made years ago.

    Our only hope is Web3 and an ability to host stuff on there.