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Comment by l2silver | Hacker News Reader

I've seen a lot of people saying this is the future of search... But this is so destructive for content producers, why would they continue to publish content that has no chance of SEO value.

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I'm old enough to remember when people did this for the joy of teaching and sharing knowledge, not branding and click rate.

And the signal to noise ratio was way better then.

It's a bit weird with these folks so worried about content creators, almost like I'm browsing a different internet with them. In my internet whenever I need to find some actually useful information, I almost always go to a content creator who is not ( primarily) paid via ads. HN, reddit, SO, wikipedia etc. The vast, vast majority of ad funded content is such utter crap that I am pretty confident whatever makes ad driven business worse makes internet better as a whole.

Yes but back then - people actually came to read what you shared. You put that knowledge out there and for a brief moment while they were reading the thing you enjoyed creating you both shared a plane of existence.

Where are they now though ?

They exist, but because they don't care about SEO, you can't find them in google.

Just tried a couple searches. The results provided in the expert-mode explanation included inline links to sources from which information was pulled and summarized. Seems that SEO value is retained, no? Or is your concern that the summary will be too good, thus costing the content producer a click (and, thus, monetization opportunity)?

If the search-driven concern is costing content producers a click, perhaps there’s an opportunity for Phind (and/or similar services) to establish new monetization strategies that don’t rely entirely on getting a click to a site to display an ad. I don’t know what that would look like, but the possibility is intriguing—perhaps we could see such services experiment not just with ad-driven revenue, but sharing that revenue with high-quality content producers who are sourced in answers. Such an arrangement would obviously need to figure out how to identify and down-rank crappy content farms—especially of the variety that copies StackOverflow and similar content and hosts it verbatim on an ad-flooded alternate domain. Doing so would, I think, bring content producer, user, and search engine interests in better alignment.

I think the point of content is for users to go onto your site. If you're creating content for someone else to use and profit from, that's a problem.

I believe there was a case recently where some sort of lyric website sued Google for showing lyrics in their search, taking away the need for users to actually go to the lyric website. Not sure what the outcome was, but I think it shows one aspect of these chat search engines that is problematic.

> perhaps there’s an opportunity for Phind (and/or similar services) to establish new monetization strategies that don’t rely entirely on getting a click to a site to display an ad.

Most companies seem to be very reluctant to give up all that juicy ad revenue.

Google made its name by being a (faster) ad-free alternative to Alta Vista. But then started serving up ads.

IMDB started out ad-free, but before long started serving up ads.

DuckDuckGo started up ad-free but then started serving up ads.

One of the selling points of cable networks like HBO used to be that they didn't have ads. Their customers would actually pay to have an ad-free experience. But then they too started showing ads.

YouTube started ad-free but switched to showing ads.

Despite their users paying for Windows, Microsoft seems to want to show ads in the Windows Start menu.

Wikipedia is the most mainstream website I can think of that's managed to resist showing ads. Craigslist, too, to a large extent.. but that's about it.

So even were some new service to start up ad-free and even charge for the service, odds are that at some point they'll start showing ads.

Wikipedia doesn't show ads now? So what is that giant popup that occupies half my screen asking for money every time I visit it? That's an ad -- and one more obnoxious than most.

I agree that something needs to be done to help content producers. We're not opposed to revenue sharing.

A few years ago I would've agreed with you. But now, so many websites are also festooned with intrusive/obstructive advertising that I cringe nearly every time I click on a SERP result whose domain is unknown to me.

Perhaps the rise of tech like phind will force those sites to re-think their approach to monetizing their content...? I'm not holding my breath.

This cites its source, though. Some of the content I’ve written[0][1] has appeared as a citation (in Perplexity, Google snippets etc.) and this is exactly what I want as a content creator. It answers the user’s question directly and provides my material as a source for further reading. A win-win.

[0] https://www.jazzkeys.fyi/bebop-enclosures/ [1] https://www.makforrit.scot/scots/read-scots/

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