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Comment by rkagerer | Hacker News Reader

Who says they need to monetize it? Is that the only value we ascribe to traffic, now?

Indeed, this is what I likened to a "Dark Forest":

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42459246

Either I’m monetizing my site and I care about traffic or why else would I care if people visit my site as long as information gets out there?

If I had a site (no time lately to maintain one) it would be because I wanted to inform people and contribute to the world’s accessible knowledge. I would want my information presented in context, accurately, the way I intended, not digested and reworded (often inaccurately) by Google.

And how likely is someone to find your site through search instead of word of mouth?

I bet you if you had insightful posts on HN (not saying you don’t) and people knew you, you would get more traffic by putting a link in your profile here than people searching on Google.

I can answer that question with actual numbers: 90% of my traffic comes from search engines. The remaining 10% is much more time-consuming to acquire. It doesn’t help that external links are downranked by most social media sites.

Building a professional reputation? Letting people contact you with feedback and improvement suggestions? Pure personal pride? Plenty of reasons to want your work to be attributed to you regardless of whether you're directly monetising people reading it.

And who is going to find or even care about these websites except for people going to them specifically because of a link to your profile on social media sites, through public talks or otherwise through word of mouth?

I don't understand what you're getting at. This thread concerns how we used to be able to find good information with these contraptions called search engines, so that word of mouth was not the only way information was found.

What I’m getting at is simple, no one is going to find a random persons obscure blog where they are trying to build a “brand” or be a “thought leader” that is not on the first page of search results.

I subscribe to Ben Thompson’s writing and make it habit to go to a few other websites because they have earned my trust.

The only method that most people have ever had of gaining traction is via word of mouth and not through search engines.

No one owes you traffic or discoverability any more than they owed HuffPost or the other click bait, SEO optimized websites before the algorithm changes

I don't know how old you are, or whether you ever really knew the web in the prior era that we're talking about. Forgive me if I'm making flawed guesses about where you're coming from.

Back in the day, if I wanted the answer to some specific question about, say, restaurants in Chicago, I'd search for it on Google. Even if I didn't know enough about the topic to recognize the highest quality sites, it was okay, because the sorts of people who spent time writing websites about the Chicago restaurant scene did know enough, and they mostly linked to the high-quality sites, and that was the basis of how Google formed its rankings. Word of mouth only had to spread among deeply-invested experts (which happens quite naturally), and that was enough to allow search engines to send the broader public to the best resources. So yeah, once upon a time, search engines were pretty darn good at pointing people to high quality sites, and a lot of those quality sites became well-known in exactly that way.

I’m old enough that my first paid project was making modifications to a home grown Gopher server built using XCMDs for HyperCard.

My first post was on Usenet in 1994 using the “nn” newsreader

The web has gotten much larger than when it didn’t exist when I started.

But web rings on GeoCities weren’t exactly places to do “high quality research”. You still had to go to trusted sites you knew about or start at Wikipedia and go to citations.

Before two years ago I would go to Yelp. Now I use the paid version of ChatGPT that searches the internet and returns sources with links

https://imgur.com/a/hZwrjJS

This whole website's raison d'être was to provide neutral and accurate information about German immigration.

> as long as information gets out there

A possibly incorrect summary of the information gets out there. Given how much nuance I weave into my content, and how much effort I put into getting the phrasing just right, it frustrates me to no end. There's a very high likelihood that AI could give someone an invalid answer _and_ put my name under it, surrounded by their ads.

And ChatGPT 4o (at least the paid version) and the AI overview in Google both give real time links to sources. Well at least you can ask the paid version of ChatGPT to give you sources and it will do a web search

I use Perplexity and it routinely confabulates while linking to the source it confabulates from. Parent has a valid gripe that AI is essentially damaging their reputation by pretending to cite its information with a credible source, I wish there were some legal avenue to sue but it's not quite libel is it?

And you have the source as proof. But that says a lot about Perplexity.

Does Perplexity actually give you a clickable link like ChatGPT does?

It gives you clickable links to a half dozen or so sources. It's not clear which of the information comes from source 1 vs source 2, etc.

And it’s too much to verify the sources? When you use Google and search for something do you not have to go to multiple sources?

I've had numerous people contact me directly with follow up questions about various info I've put on my website. Many of those have turned into further conversations and collaborations.

You can't have that if Google is plagiarizing your site and delivering the info.

How many of those people found you by randomly searching Google versus via links via your profile on social media?

That's the real question, because younger generations use less and less Open Web.

That was actually one of the main concerns of Larry Page back in the day, that the majority of Web's information might get and be locked behind walled gardens, paywalls or whatever else.

The web is just as “open” as it ever was. It is just as easy if not more so to create and host your own content.

You’re complaining about “discoverability” which hasn’t been easy since 2000.

The most successful independent writer today is probably Ben Thompson’s “Stratechery”

https://stratechery.com/about/ https://blockbuster.thoughtleader.school/p/how-ben-thompson-...

Through organic search, you probably won’t find any of his free articles when searching for a topic on the first page. He had to put in the work over years and couldn’t depend on Google.

Walled gardens like Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn and others are the missed opportunities for the Open Web. Google nor any other search engine can't crawl their information, so Web users who are not on the aforementioned sites are missing a lot of useful information and social dynamics that would otherwise take place on the Open Web.

At least for Facebook, if the information is not publicly available via Google it’s because the content creator has decided not to make their content public.

Google very much can crawl information on Facebook and Instagram that people have made “public”

As far as “social dynamics”, do you remember Cambridge Analytics? Why would I want my social graph to be publicly available.

It’s bad enough that people have their contacts synced with Facebook.

If most information on Facebook is private, it’s because everything else gets spammed to hell. Same with discord. They are not a replacement to public, curated information put out by relatively knowledgeable people.

All of them, because I'm not on any social media. I also mostly put obscure things on my website that aren't easily found elsewhere online, so very specific searches tend to end up on my site.

Also probably why I get email from people visiting as it's one of the few places people can reference said info.

So you aren’t willing to put in the work necessary to get your site recognized in 2024 and you don’t see that as a problem?

Eh? My site is recognized and found on google searches. People find the info they are looking for and sometimes email me asking follow up questions. The site is working as intended so I'm not sure what you're talking about.

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