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Totally agreed, SEO spammers wrecked the public web years ago and Google did everything they could to enable it for more ad revenue.

SEO spammers were a thing even before Google fucked their search results. You know when Google search results were still amazing, like decade ago? SEO spammers were thriving. I know that for a fact because I worked for one back then. 90% of why Google search sucks now is due to Google being too greedy, only the rest is caused by SEO spammers.

No, SEO made things noticeably worse from the very beginning. This is almost tautological, when you think about it.

Agree googles machinations have not helped, but disagree with your 90/10 split.

You can't really separate SEO and the Google algorithms. SEO is a product of the Google's ranking algorithms.

The entire effort of SEO is to either to follow Google's official guidelines, or reverse-engineer how things work to exploit their algorithms. Those whole point of SEO is to score higher on ranking algorithms.

> Those whole point of SEO is to score higher on ranking algorithms.

Which is why they typically make things worse for the end user.

Agree it's a coupled problem wrt ranking algorithm. SEO messes with the algorithms, algorithms change to account for it, lather rinse repeat.

More recently though, google make presentation changes not as simple as ranking, which made things worse. Which I think is what GP was referring to.

With respect, I think you're missing a key variable, which is volume.

Sure, interns or outsourced content was there, but those are still humans, spending human-time creating that crap.

Any limiter on the volume of this crap is now gone.

Plus, at worst, human writers simply regurgitate/summarize info from other articles. It's more work to intentionally write something false.

AI writing has no idea what is real or fake and doesn't care.

Yes but the content from the web flows into social media, news, “books” (now e-books) in an intangible cyclone of fabricated information.

If sewage gets into the water supply no one is safe. You don’t get to feel better for having a spigot away from the source.

The sewage has already been flowing for years. Now we're just going to have more of it.

Search results on both Bing and DDG have been rendered functionally useless for a year or so now. Almost every page is an SEO-oriented blob of questionable content hosted on faceless websites that exist solely for ads and affiliate links, whether it's AI-generated or underpaid-third-world-worker-generated.

You see how that’s worse, don’t you?

It was a growing trend even before ChatGPT was released. The trend accelerated, but it's not new.

that's not good. it's actually worse if it's not new. and I agree it's not new.

The thing that you initially said was, as I interpreted, that there’s a very large difference between no sewage and a little, since a low concentration is still dangerous. The response to you pointed out that we already have sewage in the supply, implying it may not make a huge difference to add more. I feel like you’re goalpost moving.

I'm agreeing with you. The only part i'm highlighting is that continuing a bad trend is even worse.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:List_of_citogenesis_...

Now powered by AI.

I agree that low quality content has always existed.

But the issue is about the volume of misleading information that can be generated now.

Anything legit will be much more difficult to find now, because of the increased (increasing?) volume.

Good insight about Apps.

If there is to be a "web" going forward, I hope it not only moves to a new anonymized layer, but requires frequent exchange of currency to make generating lots of low quality material less viable. If 90% of the public doesn't want to pay, then they are at liberty to keep eating slop.

One wonders: How good could the next generation of AIs after LLMs become at curating the web?

What if every poster was automatically evaluated by AIs on 1, 2, and 5 year time horizons for predictive capability, bias, and factual accuracy?

Okay so this is pretty bleak isn't it, for the entrepreneurs, grassroots, startups, or just free enterprise in the most basic form?

I hope making software, apps, coding and designing is still a viable path to take when everyone has been captured into apps owned by the richest people on earth and no one will go to the open marketplace / "internet" anymore.

Will smaller scale tech entrepreneurship die?

>If there is to be a "web" going forward, I hope it not only moves to a new anonymized layer, but requires frequent exchange of currency to make generating lots of low quality material less viable. If 90% of the public doesn't want to pay, then they are at liberty to keep eating slop.

I completely agree!

> Although I agree with the title, I also don't think the internet is that significantly different from before GPTs 4, 3, or 2.

I feel the same way.

I'm sure some corners of the internet have incrementally more spam, but things like SEO spam word mixers and blog spam have been around for a decade. ChatGPT didn't appreciably change that for me.

I have, however, been accused of being ChatGPT on Reddit when I took the time to wrong out long comments on subjects I was familiar with. The more unpopular my comment, the more likely someone is to accuse me of being ChatGPT. Ironically, writing thoughtful posts with good structure triggers some people to think content is ChatGPT.

I failed a remote technical interview by writing a bad abstraction and mudding myself with it.

After the interview I rewrote the code, and sent an email with it and a well written apology.

The company thought the email and the code was chatgpt! I am still not sure how I feel about that.

I think you might have missed a big-old .303 bullet there. If a company isn't able to recognise the value of going back and correcting your mistakes, even with the help of LLMs, it doesn't sound like a very nice working environment.

Wow I am not looking forward to that in my future interviews. At least showing atomic little micro commits should probably give potential employers a view into your thought process?

Although what am I saying, my current employer keeps pushing us to use AI tooling in our workflows, so I wonder how many employers will really care by then.

I personally don't like using AI - I feel like it takes the fun out of work, and I have ethical issues with it. But I have many co-workers who do not feel this way.