Hot take: SEO is dead, content farms are done, almost no one will leave Google/Bing to read more than what it generates.
Thank you content writers for your service training LLMs. Here's 10 amazing ways to find a new career in a LLM world.
Thank you content writers for your service training LLMs. Here's 10 amazing ways to find a new career in a LLM world.
PS. check out the dog wearing a hat on potato.horse if you haven't
(Jk, but truly a beautiful site. Every link I clicked was a delight. Your brain seems like a marvelous place.)
Thanks, I've been trying to build a digital garden (or a cemetery) for some time, but with interconnected sites/articles/toys on different domains rather than a single Obsidian Publish style site.
Tangent: I recently found a beautiful and extremely well structured digital garden made by Maggie Appleton (https://maggieappleton.com). So, now I'm just jumping between either being inspired by the amount of research she's shared or analysis paralysis since there are so many interesting approaches to the subject matter.
Is the actual prose written by hand, or is it from an LLM?
Obviously with this kind of work, the good stuff requires luck (== quantity) or a manual curation process. I just wanted to run this on autopilot.
I might add a feedback loop at some point, e.g. poets with better engagement become more motivated and those who perform poorly start getting jealous... a little bit of drama here and there.
SEO is a scam to convince search engines to show something other than most useful content. Content farms are a drain on human attention. Human intelligence had it's chance and we squandered it. Bring on the AIs, they're not going to be worse than the mess we've already made.
Maybe it’s a matter of differing definitions, but I’ve got a lot of useful information out of well-written and well-researched "content farms".
I'm terrified of a world where I ask, what beverage will be served on Mars, and the answer will be engineered to be given as Coca-Cola is a popular drink possibly available on Mars, or right now. Would you like it delivered?
Fire one of the many offline LLMs up on a university network or somewhere else that a single IP connecting many times won't be too suspicious and let it go to town.
The real problem for some sites, is the amount of believable spam on mindless rant feeds, like Twitter and Reddit etc.
I disagree. What incentive does a website have to produce content if it receives no traffic? Website owners want control over their traffic and the data too. They will wall off any search engine that doesn't give them anything in return (basically they're scrapers at that point). The search engines that do this will starve themselves of information they need to stay relevant and the first search engine to play fair continuing to share traffic will get an advantage.
More likely, Google and Bing will continue to play fair and send traffic. Perhaps AI features will become browser features instead, complementing websites, not replacing them.
Interesting conclusion.
AI features seem to incur more cost than search (don't they?!)
Wonder how that'll play out - the user is conditioned not to pay at this point, and the search engine is no longer incentivized to pay for it.
The trade is info to Google for visitors. It's not hard to guess how sites will react when that trade stops.
More likely they will need to be sued, like the news / media companies in Europe and Australia have done.
more on topic though, people wont use bing if chatgpt/phind/etc answers well enough for them
For instance, when searching for information on setting up RDS, like high availability MySQL on self-hosted servers on-premises, neither ChatGPT nor Brad provided the necessary details. I would not make a publicly searchable blog or Github repository if I were well-versed in setting such RDS on-premises. Instead, I would make it available only behind a paywall. Why should Google and MS/Bing benefit from my hard work if they do not direct traffic to my site? Previously, low- or high-quality pages benefited from SEO, but that is no longer true. There is a wealth of knowledge that has not yet been documented. Unless Google or Bing starts directing many traffic, experts, and websites will not share updated and other valuable information. I anticipate more paywalls for high-quality content, similar to good news sites.
Besides that, be careful about wishing for one or two centralized sites controlled by big tech giants with AIs such as Google and Microsoft. The web developed because of many 3rd party websites.
I don't have answers on how good 3rd party sites will survive with Google/Bing sending traffic and Ad clicks, but the equation is about SEO changing. Either you create non-profit Wikipedia-style content or high-quality content paywalled. That is my best guess.
You won’t. But I will and I think others will as well. My goal is to help people set up RDS and I don’t care about commercialization. So happy if AI reuses all the material.
There are many technical blogs that are just hobbies, or fun, or brand PR, or book tie ins or whatever.
If I want to paywall it, I don't know where to start. I imagine there's keys-included solutions, but I doubt they can just send me e-transfers for each payment. Maybe they can send money to my PayPal? I've never used that for receiving money before. Do I need a business bank account? Will transparency rules require me to share my address publicly? Maybe I need a PO box. I just wanted to share something helpful.
If they are in abundance or in low demand.
Your blog post's knowledge-dump ends up never being seen.
This is why StackOverflow reacted so poorly to Stack Exchange's announcement they would be using all of your hard work to train a for-profit model.
It might not be illegal - but it sure does feel weird, at a minimum.
It's not important that my contribution go directly from me to the other person; what matters is that they get the information they're looking for.
With a blog post - you get feedback via comments. With SO, you get feedback via votes and comments. With HN, you get feedback the same way.
We have feedback on all of these systems so that humans can more readily discern correctness. An AI model is not going to be able to readily understand what solution is correct, lest it wouldn't need to crawl the page in the first place.
I don't think this is true - it ends up being added to a soup of knowledge that is ladled out as people ask about it. It might not directly be seen, but it may contribute more to the overall knowledge about the space since OP's knowledge is now able to be sliced, diced, and recombined.
It sucks for the individual who wants to be credited, and it is annoying that megacorps will benefit directly. But for someone who wants to increase the knowledge in the world, it's not so bad...
You may actually be decreasing the knowledge of the world.
It's not difficult to imagine a future where people do not know how to effectively communicate, and instead rely on ChatGPT (or whatever) to communicate for them. Or a future where nobody knows anything, and instead blindly trusts the output of AI models.
There's already dating services that let your ChatGPT bot woo someone else's ChatGPT bot...
Progress is here, old man. Thinking that people will deliberately go out of their way to grok through pages of PDF documentations hoping to find that one line of relevant information instead of just asking is stupid and misguided.
Along with your "old man" dig, the fact that you have to attribute hidden motives to someone who's got specific concerns elaborated in their comment doesn't do you any favors.
> You can similarly argue that internet will ruin our social life because we no longer have to go to the library and meet with strangers researching up similar topics. But I don’t see anyone arguing against internet?
I know smart people who argue that paper maps reduce social ties because they remove the necessity to ask for directions. They're not wrong. It doesn't mean maps aren't really useful, or that they even want maps gone. It means they're paying attention to dynamics and maybe even better prepared to fine-tune them by introducing something else to the system.
People do argue against "the internet", btw -- the problem of determining authority/reliability of an internet source, hidden incentives of search or feed algorithms, sand castles, and yes the capacity for isolation or echo chambers from virtual interaction. They're not wrong either.
> Progress is here
Change is here. Thoughtful people can recognize that comes with potential advantages and look with concern on hazards and disadvantages.
For example if one person knows two correct facts about a specific sport, and another person knows those same 2 correct facts as well as 2 false facts, and doesn't know which 2 are true or false, isn't the second person less knowledgeable about that sport than the first person, despite technically having the same amount of true facts on the subject?
Equally, even if the amount of known knowledge in the world remains the same, isn't a world in which every human while studying spends every minute learning true stuff vs. spending half their time reading made up stuff, won't people on average be less knowledgeable despite the fact that no global knowledge got destroyed in the process? (Ofc there's never been a time when it's possible to spend 100% of the time learning completely accurate stuff, hypothetical exaggeration there.)
The billion dollar company was already profiting off that goodwill by putting ads beside people looking for it
As far as the blog is self advertising for your resume or company, it's just as good since you're linking it directly. Maybe even better since the ai will have opinions about you
what does that even mean?? and how in the world is it better than receiving direct visitors from Google as a reward for posting??
No. He is helping people and he is helping for profit companies.
Both are true at the same time. You can’t help people without also helping the companies. Wealth generation is not zero sum.
This seems trivially false. Even if the info just gets sucked into an LLM there will still be people helped.
This has all been played out before. I’m cool helping companies along with people.
Imagine you discover free energy. Would you not give it away because you don’t want billion dollar companies to benefit?
I have a choice to give away info or keep it. Id rather give it away than not. I’m not going to sell info. It’s not worth the time for whatever negligible gains it would make.
Even if there was a magic way to only allow “good people” and not companies to use my info, I’d still allow companies because I think information should be freely given and exchanged and hope that others feel the same.
Imagine where we would be if Linux wasn’t used by billion dollar companies. The world would be way worse. Amazon would be poorer but the world would be much poorer.
Energy is one of many inputs into industrial systems, and it is a fairly commoditized one at that.
Free energy doesn't mean you don't need tons of infrastructure still in place, tons of parts and labor to install that infrastructure, factories to make the parts of that infrastructure. And then when it comes to using that energy, large capital expenditures are still needed to get up and running, which means the rich will keep getting richer.
Or to put it another way, electric cars + solar panels are totally a thing you can do right now, and at no point was anyone's life put at risk to bring these about.
Odds are the first country to get free energy would see obscene economic growth, all sorts of absurd things become possible. For start, salt water + energy => fresh water, solving the droughts that our farmlands are facing.
All metal processing uses tons of energy.
Meanwhile, my local electric co, Puget Sound Energy doesn't even make a billion a year in profits. The nation's largest energy company, Exelon, barely clears 2 billion in profits per year.
Microsoft makes more profit in a week than the nation's largest energy company does in a year.
ExxonMobil's operating revenue is $413.7bn USD. I'll be surprised if someone isn't getting whacked if they let the free energy genie out of the bottle.
Energy isn't cheap in the UK. Far from it. https://www.telegraph.co.uk/money/consumer-affairs/electric-...
My family lived in South Africa post-WWII because my gruncle's skin grafts wouldn't take in the UK climate. The Kariba dam gave free electricity to the surrounding area, the idea that this was something people paid for elsewhere just blew the minds of everybody there. Free energy is not a new thing.
However, politics and socioeconomics play a big part in whether or not a country can make successful use of energy, but the possibility of something being possible doesn't mean it'll happen. Furthermore, today, water reserves are a problem for the dam, and power generation was being suspended late last year due to it.
Most of ExxonMobil's revenue seems to come from oil (https://www.statista.com/statistics/1034911/exxonmobil-reven...), where as I presume free electricity would primarily impact their natural gas revenue.
Also isn't ExxonMobil one of those strange vertically integrated situations where most of their revenue comes from themselves? They drill the oil, then process it through their own plants which results in them paying themselves lots of money, but I may be mis-remembering that.
Anyway, solar is coming, wind is coming, and electric cars are coming, and no one is getting gunned down in the streets.
Heck China would love infinite free energy! So would any other country that wants completely dominate heavy industry overnight.
> Energy isn't cheap in the UK.
It has been a long time since the UK highly subsidized heavy manufacturing.
Energy prices have of course been going up everywhere, as, most people, realize cheap energy that results in dead kids and cancer for everyone was, in retrospect, really stupid.
> Furthermore, today, water reserves are a problem for the dam, and power generation was being suspended late last year due to it.
Infinite free energy would solve all water reserve problems, although it might end up being an environmental disaster near ocean shorelines...
Would you release or keep it a secret?
Especially when they knew it was allowed by the CCL?
This feels like the same philosophical difference that leads to debates about GPL vs. Apache licenses. The "how dare someone else make money using my work" camp vs. the "if someone else is able to make money using my work, more power to them" camp.
Google even banned AGPL at one point from its code hosting platform - it was that upset with open source.
The GPL doesn't prevent you from making money; it only requires you to contribute your changes back. That way others can also make money based on your work, like... you just did!
I think it does though as if my contribution is made public others are less likely to buy it.
With Apache/etc, I can make modifications and sell more easily.
It’s not exactly the same, but I’ve frequently heard “I don’t want someone to take my code and just sell it.” So want to use gpl or some other license that opens but prohibits selling. I don’t think the latter really works out that well, but people seem to ask for it quite a bit.
N.B. I’m not actually going to do this, but it’s still a straightforward attack.
Seems like the obvious next step. For clarity, I'm not saying I particularly like that future, but I have a hard time grasping why you think a paywall would be an obstacle here. Especially not for the wealthiest corporations (ever). Additionally because most paywalls to information have very hard time keeping information from leaking. Otherwise news orgs would have figured that out by now!
It's not as if Google is a stranger to hiring experts to keep them away from other places!
They're certainly not getting the content for free. They're running ads against it, and making money on it, but they are also paying for it. It's a relatively small shift in their funding model to pay out to creators for their contributions to an AI model instead of paying out per pageview.
Those are advertisers funding the content, not google. google is just a middleman. They generate no content and pay none of they money, they just facilitate the transaction and take a cut.
The only way to protect ip really. The question is what happens when they attempt to steal content and integrate it in their "ai"?
For regular tech bloggers such as the ones you see posted on HN, I agree it’s desperate.
Yes, for creators who have managed to establish an audience that had high intent to consume that creator’s content. But good luck to people who are trying to make money just by delivering useful niche content where the consumers don’t even know of the creator.
Then putting advertising in whatever format LLM outputs are dressed as.
My biggest fear is, abuse eg how LLMs for search can work with targeted ads, eg making you slightly prefer Coke vs. Pepsi, or One Political Brain Parasite(tm) over another.
I asked chatgpt and of course it gives the answer right away. We also have searches that land on pages with fancy ui's where user has to enter info to get answers. Took me about 1 minute to get chatgpt to spit out the answers and once I knew how to prompt it I could shorthand the input and get answers much faster.
We are so dead.
I will be very curious how the promoted stuff works with LLMs. When you ask a LLM what the best brand of shoes are, can folks pay to influence the result?