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Comment by artyom | Hacker News Reader

"The web" is full of ads. Google search is unusable. Ad-blocking is fought against. Content is tailored to be as long as possible to render more ad impressions. Mobile views have 3% content and the rest is ads. 27 compliance popups about cookies and tracking and offers would show on top of the information that you're looking for, all of them rigged so you click the option that they want.

Is that the web you want to save? Let it die.

Because this romantic view of the web as this "ocean of free information" has been dead for a very long time.

I wonder why someone would even be surprised that people just moves naturally to something better? Something that's not even remotely so hostile to the user?

And yes: when VC capital dries up, AI will become equally hostile.

Then people will move to the better thing and we'll have articles about "Better thing is killing AI".

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> Because this romantic view of the web as this "ocean of free information" has been dead for a very long time.

That part is just not true tho. There is still ocean of free information on web. It is literally there and easy to access.

Yes... but that ocean has a lot of trash and algal blooms to work around. If you're not careful, you end up the sea turtle with a stomach full of plastic.

That issue of varying quality of web-based information (and varying ability to assess said quality) has also been the case for a long time.

Yes. It's mainstream search that's either broken, hijacked, or optimised for someone else

Data, not information.

This has been said previously, but it's worth repeating. Use Firefox (w/ ublock-origin) and Firefox on android. Or use one of the alternative Chrome browsers.

I don't remember the last time I saw an advert.

Brave for iOS for ad blocking which Firefox doesn’t provide

But I've been doing that for years. The whole point is beyond you or me.

Advertising killed the web long before AI did.

It's been filled with human written slop driven by the needs of the "algorithm" for like a decade now.

This is true and hardly a secret and the fact the Economist is being forgetful here is itself information.

So the actual question here is what are the (financial, geopolitical, social engineering) incentives for the stakeholders of the Economist (please spare me "journalism" tropes) to poo poo AI in this manner.

Human-written blogspam is why AI summaries and answers are remotely useful instead of just reading the original articles.

3%, dear god... do you have a link to where you heard that?

nah, but I can provide the source material for the 27 compliance popups claim.

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