alt Hacker NewsIt's pretty much over for the human-internet. Search was gamed, its usefulness has plummeted, so humans will increasingly ask their LLM of choice and that LLM will have been trained on the content of the internet.
So when someone wants to know something about the topic that my website is focused on, chances are it will not be the material from the website they see directly, but a summary of what the LLM learned from my website.
Ergo, if I want to get my message across I have to write for the LLM. It's the only reader that really matters and it is going to have its stylistic preferences (I suspect bland, corporate, factual, authoritative, avoiding controversy but this will be the new SEO).
We meatbags are not the audience.
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I (perhaps naively) still believe that communities can successfully curate human writing. While there's lots of AI slop that gets posted on HN, for instance, the amount of thoughtful human content seems well above the base rate.
There there, remember when all images were hand painted? (me neither)
And I know it's different, but I'm surprised the overall sentiment is so pessimistic on HN. So maybe we will communicate through yet another black box on top of hundreds of existing ones already. But probably mostly when seeking specific information and wanting to get it efficiently. Yes this one is different, it makes human contact over text much more difficult, but the big part of all of this was happening already for years and now it's just widely available.
When posting on HN you don't see the other person typing like using talk command on unix, but it is still meaningful.
Ideally we would like to preserve what we have untouched and only have new stuff as an option but it's never been like this. Did we all enjoy win 3.11? I mean it was interesting.. but clicking.. so inefficient (and of course there are tons of people who will likely scream from their GUIs that it still is and windows sucks, I'd gladly join, but we have our keyboard bindings, other operating systems, and get by somehow)
Tragedy of the attention-economy. Ad networks gives you money if you placed their ads on your site, so people got machines to generate fluff to earn some money. Now all search result is just bullshit pages to capture your attention until the banner ad..
A simple query like "Ford Focus wheel nut torque" gives pages with blah blah like:
> Overview Of Lug Nut Torque For Ford Focus
> The Ford Focus uses specific lug nut torque to keep wheels secure while allowing safe driving dynamics. Correct torque helps prevent rotor distortion, brake heat transfer issues, and wheel detachment. While exact values can vary by model year, wheel size, and nut type, applying the proper torque is essential for all Ford Focus owners.
And the site probably has this text for each car model.
Somehow the ways the ad industry destroyed the Internet got very varied...