alt Hacker NewsI don't like this and I wish it weren't true, but I think the period of "information wants to be free" is coming to an end, it was a relic of a bygone era. Increasingly, making your information free means you're the sucker who is doing free labor for AI companies, or worse, you're helping your competitors. Paywalls, login walls, and rate-limits are going up everywhere: there's the GitLab news on the home page right now, and sites like Twitter, Reddit etc. which used to be publicly-readable are now gated (and Xitter is using the legal system to shut down any bypasses).
I hate this but I don't think there's any going back now that LLMs exist.
"Information wants to be free" never meant that people want to release their information; it meant that information is very hard to keep secret, and that everything leaks like a sieve, and especailly that once it's out, it's out forever.