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Comment by coaltree | Hacker News Reader

Is this how the internet finally dies? Not with a bang but with the whimper of thousands of AI slop apps scrapping websites into oblivion?

Most of these problems the slop apps can solve are dependent on gathering information to answer questions. If no one ever visits weather.com to get weather information, ad revenue will completely dry up and the site will go under. Then the slop stops slopping and I can’t get my hyper local weather app to work.

I’m not going to go as far as to say this article is wrong, in fact in this cursed timeline it’s probably right. I just don’t see how it’s good.

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Ironically this may finally force the fulfillment of the Web 2.0 paid API service dream. Remember when people were pushing companies that just provided a paid API?

There might very well be more of that. In a world where everyone has agents filtering data on their behalf, it seems more complicated to figure out a way to force a user to view certain content along with their desired data than to simply refuse to supply data until a small transaction completes.

On the other hand, that’s just traditional banner/video style advertising where the goal is to force specific content on the user. If someone wants to spread the word about their product or service, I’m sure they’ll pay money to advertising services that use agents to inject their message into the global context. This is happening already, we just talk about it in the frame of “dead internet theory” and AI influencers, etc. Anywhere that content is being produced and consumed is an opportunity for the message to be nudged in favor of the person paying money.

So we go from the days when we have to pay our ISP so that we could go to weather.com to see it if it's raining outside, to a future where we have to pay for our ISP, so that we can connect to the AI company who we also have to pay, so that we can have their AI connect to the API at weather.com which we also have to pay for, so that we can see if it's raining outside? I'm not convinced that'd be making our lives better through technological progress.

Not better, just more profitable (for a small handful)

> Is this how the internet finally dies?

Like many major cultural phenomenon, expect a pendulum effect, more than a beginning or end of a trend.

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