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> Why would anyone ever publish stuff on the web for free unless it was just a hobby

That's exactly what the old deal was, and it's what made the old web so good. If every paid or ad-funded site died tomorrow, the web would be pretty much healed.

Paging Sergey

That's a bit too simple. There is way fewer people producing quality content "for fun" than people that aim or at least eventually hope to make money from it.

Yes a few sites take this too far and ruin search results for everyone. But taking the possibility away would also cut the produced content by a lot.

Youtube for example had some good content before monetization, but there is a lot of great documentary like channels now that simply wouldn't be possible without ads. There is also clickbait trash yes, but I rather have both than neither.

Demonetizing the web sounds mostly awesome. Good riddance to the adtech ecosystem.

The textual web is going the way of cable TV - pay to enter. And now streaming. "Alms for the poor..."

But, like on OTA TV, you can get all the shopping channels you want.

Not to be the downer, but who pays for all the video bandwidth, who pays for all the content hosting? The old web worked because it was mostly a public good, paid for by govt and universities. At current webscale that's not coming back.

So who pays for all of this?

The web needs to be monetized, just not via advertising. Maybe it's microtransactions, maybe subscriptions, maybe something else, but this idea of "we get everything we want for free and nobody tries to use it for their own agenda" will never return. That only exists for hobby technologies. Once they are mainstream they get incorporated into the mainstream economic model. Our mainstream model is capitalism, so it will be ever present in any form of the internet.

The main question is how people/resources can be paid for while maintaining healthy incentives.

It costs the Internet Archive $2/GB to store a blob of data in perpetuity, their budget for the entire org is ~$37M/year. I don't disagree that people and systems need to be paid, but the costs are not untenable. We have Patreon, we have subscriptions to your run of the mill media outlets (NY Times, Economist, WSJ, Vox, etc), the primitives exist.

The web needs patrons, contributions, and cost allocation, not necessarily monetization and shareholder capitalism where there is a never ending shuffle of IP and org ownership to maximize returns (unnecessarily imho). How many times was Reddit flipped until its current CEO juiced it for IPO and profitability? Now it is a curated forum for ML training.

I (as well as many other consumers of this content) donate to APM Marketplace [1] because we can afford it and want it to continue. This is, in fits and starts, the way imho. We piece together the means to deliver disenshittification (aggregating small donations, large donations, grants, etc).

(Tangentially, APM Marketplace has recently covered food stores [2] and childcare centers [3] that have incorporated as non profits because a for profit model simply will not succeed; food for thought at a meta level as we discuss economic sustainability and how to deliver outcomes in non conventional ways)

[1] https://www.marketplace.org/

[2] https://www.marketplace.org/2024/10/24/colorados-oldest-busi...

[3] https://www.marketplace.org/2024/08/22/daycare-rural-areas-c...

No one paid you to write that?

Except I also pay my network provider to run the infrastructure

I think you forgot that

> There is way fewer people producing quality content "for fun" than people that aim or at least eventually hope to make money from it...But taking the possibility away would also cut the produced content by a lot.

....is that a problem? most of what we actually like is the stuff that's made 'for fun', and even if not, killing off some good stuff while killing off nearly all the bad stuff is a pretty good deal imo.

Agreed. The entire reason why search is so hard is because there's so much junk produced purely to manipulate people into buying stuff. If all of that goes away because people don't see ads there anymore, search becomes much easier to pull off for those of us who don't want to stick to the AI sandbox.

There's a slight chance we could see the un-Septembering of the internet as it bifurcates.

Remember in that time, less web content meant major media outlets dominated news and entertainment on TV and newspapers.

Unless the reason for the death of the paid content deal is because of AI vacuuming up all the content and spitting out an anonymous slurry of it.

Why would anyone, especially a passionate hobbyist, make a website knowing it will never be seen, and only be used as a source for some company's profit?

> and only be used as a source for some company's profit?

Are we forgetting the main beneficiaries? The users of LLM search. The provider makes a loss or pennies on million tokens, they solve actual problems. Could be education, could be health, could be automating stuff.

The problem is not the ad sites dying. The problem is that even the good sites will not have any readers, as the content will be appropriated by the AI du jour. This makes it impossible to heal the web, because people create personal sites with the expectation of at least receiving visitors. If nobody finds your site, it is as if it didn't exist.

Exactly. Even if people don't publish information for money, a lot of them do it for "glory" for lack of a better term. Many people like being the "go to expert" in some particular field.

LLMs do away with that. 95% of folks aren't going to feel great if all of the time spent producing content is then just "put into the blender to be churned out" by an LLM with no traffic back to the original site.

chatGPT puts trillions of tokens into human heads per month, and collects extensive logs of problem solving and outcomes of ideas tested there. This is becoming a new way to circulate experience in society. And experience flywheel. We don't need blogs, we get more truthful and aligned outcomes from humna-AI logs.

But it would disincentive those who create knowledge? AFAIK, most of the highly specific knowledge comes from a small communities where shared goal and socialization with like-minded individuals are incentive to keep acquiring and describing knowledge for community-members. Would it really be helpful to put an AI between them?

You, for one, welcome our new AI overlords?

Blogs have the enormous advantage of being decentralized and harder to manipulate and censor. We get "more truthful and aligned outcomes" from centralized control only so long as your definition of "truth" and "alignment" match the definitions used by the centralized party.

I don't have enough faith in Sam Altman or in all current and future US governments to wish that future into existence.

First issue, silos of information.

Second issue: who decides the weights of sources. this is the reason why every nation must have culturally aligned AIs defending their ways of living in the information sphere.

I'm not so sure.

I think the best bloggers write because they need to express themselves, not because they need an audience. They always seem surprised to discover that they have an audience.

There is absolutely a set of people who write in order to be read by a large audience, but I'm not sure they're the critical people. If we lost all of them because they couldn't attract an audience, I don't think we'd lose too much.

Yet 300M users are creating interactive sessions on chatGPT, which can be food for self improvement. AI has a native way to elicit experience from users.

To quote Prince: ahh, now people can finally go back to making music for the sake of making music.

As if OpenAI won't end up offering paid access to influence these results, or advertise inside them. Of course they will, just like how Google started without ads.

It will be even more opaque and unblockable.

Only middle-class and rich people could participate in "the old deal" Internet made by and for hobbyists. I think people forget this. It was not so democratized and open for everyone – you first had to afford a computer.

If you're a member of a yacht club, you can probably expect other members to help you out with repairs while you help them. But when a club has half the world population as members, those arrangements don't work anymore.

The internet was great before the great monetization of it, had tons of information provided for free with no ads. After ads, it will still have tons of information. Stack Overflows will still exist, Wikipedias, corporate blogs that serve just to boost the company, people making courses and other educational content, personal blogs (countless of which make their way here), all of those will continue to exist.

Ad-driven social networks will continue to exist as well.

The age of the ad-driven blog website is probably at an end. But there will be countless people posting stuff online for free anyway.

Nobody will visit stackoverflow because AI through its reasoning and back and forth with users will have solved the problems. This process creates training data for future AIs of that particular company unavailable to any other

Many people have an intrinsic motivation to share knowledge. Have a look at Wikipedia. There are enough of these people that we don't need to destroy the open Internet to accommodate those who only write when they expect to be paid.

> the history of the domestication of the tomato" that Google essentially forced on recipe sites for SEO competitive reasons

That may help with SEO, but another reason is copyright law.

Recipes can't be copyrighted, but stories can. Here is how ChatGPT explained it to me:

> Recipes themselves, particularly the list of ingredients and steps, generally can't be copyrighted because they're considered functional instructions. However, the unique way a recipe is presented—such as personal stories, anecdotes, or detailed explanations—can be copyrighted. By adding this extra content, bloggers and recipe creators can make their work distinctive and protectable under copyright law, which also encourages people to stay on their page longer (a bonus for ad revenue).

> In many cases, though, bloggers also do this to build a connection with readers, share cooking tips, or explain why a recipe is special to them. So while copyright plays a role, storytelling has other motivations, too.

> can't be copyrighted because they're considered functional instructions

by that logic software shouldn't be copyrighted either!

Would like to read more about this. Has anybody used this technique to actually successfully sue someone for infringing their copyright on an instructional website or is it only theoretically possible?

> Why would anyone ever publish stuff on the web for free...?

Why indeed, person who posted for free* on the Internet?

As a side note, consider that adds can be woven into and boosted in LLM results just as easily as in index lookups.

* assuming that you're not shilling here by presenting the frame that the new shiny is magically immune to revenue pressures

It can be like the youtube premium model. The search app is subscription based. So every time your content is served you will get paid. But you have to make your content available to the AI for crawling and mention your monetisation preferences.

The recipe trade-off doesn't make sense: while it's trivial to skip the history, you can't skip the false ingredients of the gpt variety

Then this whole category is not known for "high quality recipes", so the general state wouldn't change much?

That's why you're seeing media companies making deals with companies like OpenAI to allow them to access their content for AI learning/parsing purposes, in exchange for the media company getting paid yearly royalties.

Since anyone creating content (whether that's a big media corp or a small cooking blog) holds copyright over their content, they get to withhold the permission to scrape their content unless these AI platforms make a deal with them.

By the same logic they'd get to sue over the scraping done to originally train the models. If royalties need to be paid for additional use, they would've needed to be paid for the original use.

> Can someone please explain how the open web, at least the part of the web the requires some sort of viable funding model for creators, can survive this?

The funding model for the open web will be for the open web content to be the top of the funnel for curated content and/or walled gardens.

I think many business models already treated the web this way. Specifically, get people away from the 800-pound gorilla rent-seekers like Google and Amazon, and get them into your own ecosystem.

> fundamentally and irretrievably break the economics of the web

Good riddance, it is a surefire way to get slop by having misaligned incentives for publication.

> Why would anyone ever publish stuff on the web for free unless it was just a hobby?

So that ChatGPT mentiones you, not your competitor, in the answer to the user. I have seen multiple SEO agencies already advertise that.

Wait, did google force "the history of the domestication of the tomato" to be part of recipes on the web for SEO reasons?