The Web was much better and more useful back before it had a business model. Good riddance.
So you’re saying the ad driven internet will die? And we will be left with what? Wikipedia and Lemmy? I for one welcome our AI overlords!
Nah, it’s saying that ad and AI-driven internet will prevail. People only use Google to find an answer and don’t dig deeper, and if they do, it’s often because the links are sponsored. People using GPT’s are even less likely to click a link. Currently no ads, but just wait.
Apologies if you were joking.
“what should I do if I’m going through severe emotional distress? How to choose a good psychiatrist?”
ChatGPT: "I’m sorry to hear that you’ve been going to a stressful situation, it’s always worth talking about your feelings. I’ve come up with a plan to help you:
1 Purchase an ice cold Pepsi Black™ from a Pepsi official supplier"
Or one of these https://lemmy.world/post/29579726
Drink 2 Mountain Dews to unlock more searches.
Haha reminds me of Black Mirror
This is part of the larger problem that AI tools are trained on (and profit off of) content that is produced and hosted by others who are now seeing their traffic change from humans to bots. For content sources that pay for hosting with ads, this means a loss in revenue to pay for hosting. For content sources like Wikipedia, they are seeing their hosting costs increase significantly due to the increase in bot traffic. Even if you want every website that depends on ad revenue to fail (which I don’t entirety agree with), AI is still damaging the open web in other ways. Websites like Wikipedia for example may soon be forced to lock content behind logins or leverage aggressive captchas just to fight the bot traffic, which makes things worse for those of us that still prefer to use actual websites over AI summaries.
Nobody is scraping wikipedia over and over to create datasets for AIs, there are already open datasets and API deals. But wiki in particular has always had a data dump of the entire db bimonthly.
You clearly haven’t run a website recently. Until I set up anubis last week I was getting constant requests from dozens of various bot scrapers 24/7. That included the big ones.
Kay, and that has nothing to do with what i said. Scrapers, bots =/= AI. It’s not even the same companies that make the unfree datasets. The scrapers and bots that hit your website are not some random “AI” feeding on data lol. This is what some models are trained on, it’s already free so it’s doesn’t need to be individually rescraped and it’s mostly garbage quality data: https://commoncrawl.org/ Nobody wastes resources rescraping all this SEO infested dump.
Your issue has everything to do with SEO than anything else. Btw before you diss common crawl, it’s used in research quite a lot so it’s not some evil thing that threatens people’s websites. Add robots.txt maybe.
Oh ok I’ll just ignore the constant requests from GPTBot, ByteSpider, and the hundreds of others who very plainly, sometimes in their useragent, tell you that they’re grabbing content for training data. Robots.txt is nice and all but manually adding every single up and coming AI company is impossible. Like I said Anubis is the first time I’ve gotten them all to even remotely calm down.
Bots only identify themselves and their organization in the user agent, they don’t tell you specifically what they do with the data so stop your fairytales. They do give you a really handy url though with user agents and even IPs jn json if you want to fully block the crawlers but not the search bots sent by user prompts.
Your ad revenue money can be secured.
https://platform.openai.com/docs/bots/
If for some reason you can’t be bothered to edit your own robots.txt (because it’s hard to tell which bots are search bots for muh ad money) then maybe hire someone.
Lmao you linked to the same page I did where this text appears:
GPTBot is used to make our generative AI foundation models more useful and safe. It is used to crawl content that may be used in training our generative AI foundation models.
Also you’re so capitalism brained you assume anyone running a website must be doing so for profit. My hobby projects (personal homepage and personal git forge) were getting slammed by bots while I just paid the bills. I could have locked them both behind an auth portal but then I might as well just take them off the internet and run everything on my LAN.
But with the rise of AI, the dynamic is changing: We are observing a significant increase in request volume, with most of this traffic being driven by scraping bots collecting training data for large language models (LLMs) and other use cases. Automated requests for our content have grown exponentially, alongside the broader technology economy, via mechanisms including scraping, APIs, and bulk downloads. This expansion happened largely without sufficient attribution, which is key to drive new users to participate in the movement, and is causing a significant load on the underlying infrastructure that keeps our sites available for everyone.
- https://diff.wikimedia.org/2025/04/01/how-crawlers-impact-the-operations-of-the-wikimedia-projects/
via mechanisms including scraping, APIs, and bulk downloads.
Omg exactly! Thanks. Yet nothing about having to use logins to stop bots because that kinda isn’t a thing when you already provide data dumps and an API to wikimedia commons.
While undergoing a migration of our systems, we noticed that only a fraction of the expensive traffic hitting our core datacenters was behaving how web browsers would usually do, interpreting javascript code. When we took a closer look, we found out that at least 65% of this resource-consuming traffic we get for the website is coming from bots, a disproportionate amount given the overall pageviews from bots are about 35% of the total.
Source for traffic being scraping data for training models: they’re blocking javascript therefore bots therefore crawlers, just trust me bro.
republicans and oligarchs are already going after wikipedia
Don’t take this the wrong way, but fuck your business model. The internet was supposed to be open and be ours, and you stole it for profit.
To be honest: you can still make your own website, and in many ways big companies are actually making it easier through open-source projects and stuff like Let’s Encrypt. The web industry is remarkably open compared to what big companies do in other industries. A lot of the standards meetings and stuff you can just go to and give your opinion. Or ignore the standards and fork it yourself. This alarmism I fear will make people not take the actually alarming things like encryption bans or ID requirements seriously.
Only for some things, though. If you host your own e-mail these days, chances are, you’re going to have a very difficult time sending them anywhere without risking them being deleted, or automatically thrown into spam folders.
True, but sadly that’s because of what became a genuine user safety concern
Because, as user sfled pointed out…
The first spam email was sent in 1978
also independent of that, fuck cloudflare
And fuck the region-blocking that often comes with cloudflare.
Lol. Yup 100%
The first spam email was sent in 1978. It’s been downhill since.
Letting Google break the law for years with illegal anti-competitive practices is now hurting everyone else’s ability to earn money.
I wonder if we have the combined will to do anything about it, or if we will wait and hope the invisible hand of the market will fix it…
if we will wait and hope the invisible hand of the market will fix it…
Have we lost faith in our handsome businessman? /s
Good. Maybe we can go back to paying for our services instead of getting tracked everywhere we go.
That’s not what will happen. We will have to pay AND be tracked. They are not going to give anything up.
Time to look for other services then.
Besides the internet?
Meshtastic is free… now imagine remaking the internet on our own terms. (blackjack + hookers)
My food subscription is about to run out!!
When Orwell predicted universal surveillance he never anticipated that the people themselves would install the cameras, let alone pay a subscription.
This sounds more like “everyone is on TikTok and Instagram and will only ever be using TikTok and Instagram”.
Err… you think you’re not being tracked when you spend money?
Wow.
The internet was founded on the sponsorship model where content was free and ads were ubiquitous. while I completely agree with you that I would rather pay for the product instead of being the product, at this informs every single sign up I make on the internet, I think it’s self deluding to think there’s any great again to go back to. The philosophy was always there, the execution just wasn’t possible until they had finished building their walled gardens
The web doesn’t have a business model, cloudflair, you do. And nobody cares because you suck.
Eh, Cloudflare provides a pretty good service for a very reasonable price.
But yeah, the web doesn’t have a business model in the same way a town square doesn’t, yet you can make a business work in both areas. Make a compelling product and people will pay you for it.
You mean product that literally makes web unusable for many and tracks your every single step with extremely invasive fingerprinting techniques? That product?
I’d say that getting your server DDoSed makes it a whoooole lot less usable.
That’s a big reason why I don’t use their security layer, mostly just their domain registrar. They have a ton of products that don’t involve tracking your users.
Cloudflare provides a pretty good service for a very reasonable price.
You mean selling fingerprinted user data to advertisers?
Ever had one of your servers DDoSed before? Clearly not
Are they still defending the fact they host Stormfront?
Host_ed_, right? They did drop them at some point, I thought.
Cloudflare already ruined the web way before AI was even a thing.
In what way?
It needs to get even nastier so that it affects all the big players in a huge way so they get to do something about it. While it only affects the indie web we are all just gonna keep suffering.
Yeah I think we’re going to be grappling with this issue for at least the next decade. The traditional web model falls apart under AI
To be fair, the traditional web models were falling apart prior to AI as well. We’ve gone so far past “ad driven” that Everything has to be full of ads and clickbait to drive revenue just to run the infrastructure, let alone pay for the pages creation and upkeep. Journalists and developers, services and goods are all using adword soup to try to get anything close to a useful revenue stream and it’ll just keep getting worse until we figure out a better business model. We’re going to increasingly see paywalls to try to make up for that, but a large part of people on the internet won’t want to spend money on quality sources when they use to be able to get it for free. It’s been a race to the bottom for a while and it’s at a point that isn’t sustainable long term. AI just accelerates that to the next level.
What’s challenging about paywalls and not wanting to spend money is not necessarily not wanting to spend, but convenience and cost. If it costs me 10 cents for each blog or tutorial or github page I look at while working on a project, or 1 cent for every funny video, that adds up. And do I have to put my credit card in for every site? Hope that every site has good enough security to prevent payment information leaks?
And I don’t think anyone is interested in a Netflix-style internet that fractures into 6 different subscriptions to get every site you need on the web.
Some sort of universal microtransaction layer is the dream. I believe there’s also a proposed web standard for it.
Scroll was also making it work before they got bought by Twitter
That’s exactly Elon Musk’s goal with making Twitter a payment platform.
Hah. No. That goes all the way back to the 90ies. Tim Berners-Lee proposed that standard.
Did I say Elon came up with the idea? I said that’s his goal.
Also not saying it like it’s a good thing, just stating a fact.
Scroll was just for reading websites though. Musk seems to want We chat style super app
The traditional web was long gone anyways. There are like a dozent sites you find for any Google query. It’s so hard to find small hidden treasure on the internet.
maybe their business model. trust me. they’ll find a way to monetize the zero click internet too. then it’s back to square one
I believe this is why tech execs and investors are so hot on pushing AI into everything. They’ll control everyone’s digital experience and you can 100% count on being force fed ads and paid propaganda. Embrace, extend, extinguish
Yeah, so much for all those promises of disintermediation being a benefit of the web.
Yep. They have direct control over the flow of information.
Honestly, Metal Gear Solid 2 was on fucking point.
And so was 4.
I tried playing 2 again recently because I had the same thought, and I had to stop because my wife would not stop laughing at Rose’s dialogue. God, I wish Kojima had ever met a woman.
What parts of Rose’s dialogue made her laugh so much?
I could tell that it was commentary on the lonely and reserved lives that was stereotypical of gamers in the early to mid 2000s. So much of that game was meant to be directed towards the player, I wonder if it fell on deaf ears for her because she’s not really the target audience.
And she’s 100% justified. The older you get the more appearant it becomes that he’s bad at writing dialogue and story. He’s a tendency of using controvencies to create drama and it often falls flat, if not into eye-roll territory.
I could not stop cringing during Death Stranding. I had to fast forward the ending. I imagine Margaret Qualley being completely bewildered when they were capturing her character’s twin soul melding scene.
I don’t necessarily think he’s bad at writing dialogue and story, I think he’s mostly just bad at writing women. As I’ve gotten older, I went from taking Metal Gear Solid super seriously to treating it like nuclear/techno Evil Dead
Yeah, we’re just less experienced and have fewer expectations when we’re young. We were much more impressionable then.
Guys in general are bad at portraying women, as I understand. That’s on top of being bad in general for Kojima, I think. There’s a funny interview with the MGS2 English translator Agness Kaku where she comments that the writing at times is high school fanfic level.
Everyone is too busy doomscrolling TikTok to notice.
Can someone check in with the inventor of the web and ask him what the web’s business model is?
Anyone know Al Gore’s email?
yes but cloudflare defending garbage people who dox trans people is also killing the web
I didn’t even know about that until now. But how does that affect AI and websites?
I didn’t come here for heartwarming stories; yet here I am.
