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Comment by kristianc | Hacker News Reader

A huge chunk of online content (especially what ranked on Google )was already SEO churned sludge, and I'm not I buy the argument that elite publishers and creators like the New York Times, The Economist, and The Atlantic have ever really depended on Google. When the Economist sells itself to advertisers it doesn’t talk about its web traffic numbers, it talks about the fact that it's read by CEOs.

You're likely to see content creators pull their work behind access-controlled spaces (which might actually work out better than the current bargain of it being free but unreadable, recipes buried by long winding stories, etc). You might see the weird web emerge again as search engines are able to discover it under a pile of SEO sludge.

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The Economist and FT no, but a lot of the other more mainstream (read by a wider audience) media like Guardian, NY Times, Washington Post, Le Monde, Le Figaro, etc. depend a lot on Google traffic. There were numerous legal disputes over this dependence, how Google circumvented it for users (the quick answers that made it so a lot of queries were resolved without even needing to visit the source website), and profit sharing.

You see I even disagree with that. People don't accidentally discover the Guardian, NY Times, Washington Post, Le Monde, Le Figaro via Google, their muscle memory is trained to these publications because that's where they go to get their opinions and worldview validated.

Of course they can get that from ChatGPT too, but it hits different when you realise ChatGPT validates everything you say anyway.

> You see I even disagree with that. People don't accidentally discover the Guardian, NY Times, Washington Post, Le Monde, Le Figaro via Google, their muscle memory is trained to these publications because that's where they go to get their opinions and worldview validated

That's for daily news reading. If you search for news (like what happened with the Spanish/Iberian grid), you'd use Google. And you shouldn't use ChatGPT because it wastes a ton of resources to just hallucinate anyways, whereas a Google search gets you the direct links to the sources.

> And you shouldn't use ChatGPT because it wastes a ton of resources to just hallucinate anyways

A lot of people are asking "@grok is this true?" under news on Twitter every day. So a not insignificant number of people are going through AI for this sort of thing.

It has been many years, but there was a time when I was young, and I did not know about any of those publications other than the NYT (from seeing it on newstands). I did discover almost every other one via google, when looking for variety in my sources of news.

No matter how famous something is, for every individual, there is a first point of contact. The web has been the great filter for the last couple of decades until now, and it is extremely common to discover even main stream things that way.

So, you didnt discover any of these large media companies during your study program? There are quite some international Flagships like NYT

Some of us don't wait for school to introduce us to things, but seek them out because we are interested. And although I saw a couple of these in our libraries, my uni studies had nothing to do with newspapers (as most fields of study don't). Even some I had seen walking by, I never looked at seriously until I found them via a specific google search that showed to me they might be of interest.

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