[HN Gopher] AI is killing some companies, yet others are thrivin...
___________________________________________________________________
AI is killing some companies, yet others are thriving - let's look
at the data
Author : corentin88
Score : 248 points
Date : 2025-02-28 15:12 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.elenaverna.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.elenaverna.com)
| corentin88 wrote:
| Content marketing is dead. AI has killed it. One of our main
| marketing channels was writing SEO-oriented articles on our
| company's blog. The traffic has steadily decreased over the last
| year despite huge efforts.
|
| That doesn't mean SEO is dead though.
| dimgl wrote:
| > Content marketing is dead.
|
| I mean... good? The quality of search results has gotten
| increasingly worse over time...
| iLoveOncall wrote:
| It's not dead in the sense that companies will stop doing it,
| it's dead in the sense that there will be much more
| competition with AI-written articles.
|
| It's going to be a way worse situation.
| MidnightRider39 wrote:
| More competition is good though - people are just going to
| be much more picky and if your content is not
| distinguishable from AI slop then it deservedly will
| perish.
| gscott wrote:
| A lot of content has been written by Indian content farms
| anyway. I prefer the AI written content. It gets right to
| the information you want without restating it's purpose 4
| or 5 times and having to scroll down the first 500 words
| of the article.
| BobbyJo wrote:
| This ignores the volume problem. Human written content
| can be copied and rewritten via AI in a bunch of
| different ways, instantly. Human content will go away not
| because it's bad, but because it's immediately drowned
| out in a way that is unfixable.
| echelon wrote:
| There will be people paying for premium content and
| people writing it. A new technology doesn't suddenly
| remove human demand.
| FridgeSeal wrote:
| I just think people will instead choose to
| just...disengage instead.
|
| "IRL experiences are the new luxury status indicator" is
| only the tip of this iceberg.
| BobbyJo wrote:
| Exactly. Humans can't compete with AI content filters...
| but AI can.
| SrslyJosh wrote:
| I'm pretty sure you could drop at least 60% of domains from
| search engine indexes with no reduction in result quality.
| (And it would probably be a net quality increase to get rid
| of all the domains that just copy content from other domains,
| content-farms, scam sites, etc.)
| FireBeyond wrote:
| Apropos of anything else, it's one of the things I like
| about Kagi for search. You can tune a domain to be heavily
| bumped, bumped, deranked or heavily deranked.
| whiplash451 wrote:
| ChapGPT enshitification is only waiting to happen (or
| happening already) through subtle recommendations for
| businesses that paid to be "listed" well.
| adriand wrote:
| What are the effective marketing channels for specialized/niche
| B2B companies these days, now that - presumably - the long tail
| search result strategy is no longer effective?
|
| A friend of mine was telling me that his company was very
| pleased when they were able to ask ChatGPT "what is the best
| SaaS for X?" where X = their niche, and their company was the
| first thing it recommended. It surprised me that this was a
| thing, although in hindsight, it's obvious.
|
| On the flip side, I still have situations where I ask, "what's
| the best solution for X" and the answer is a company (or Github
| repo or whatever) that has been entirely hallucinated or was
| around ten years ago and not any more or something.
|
| I guess a corollary question is, are there methods (i.e. the
| chatbot version of SEO) to get your company into chatbot
| recommendations?
| kridsdale1 wrote:
| Sponsor relevant podcasts?
| morkalork wrote:
| Obviously the correct thing do here is register a company
| named after the hallucination and offer the solution. Kind of
| like that guy who looks at what domains are being auctioned
| for creating new start-ups.
| veqq wrote:
| > What are the effective marketing channels for
| specialized/niche B2B companies these days, now that -
| presumably - the long tail search result strategy is no
| longer effective?
|
| Lately, they've been sending emails offering $2-500 Amazon
| gift cards for short sales calls. Some follow through. I'm
| not helping their KPIs though.
| mvdtnz wrote:
| > I guess a corollary question is, are there methods (i.e.
| the chatbot version of SEO) to get your company into chatbot
| recommendations?
|
| It wasn't enough for you lot to ruin search results, now
| you're seeking ways to pollute AI chat bots?
| ehnto wrote:
| Which is why open source AI will be so important to
| support.
|
| It's not this individuals fault, it's the pretty obvious
| outcome of monetising this absolutely enormous venture
| capital spend. Advertising infects every possible medium as
| soon as the dollars make sense.
| adriand wrote:
| I'm not a marketer, I'm just curious! I write code, not
| blogspam.
| pjc50 wrote:
| I'm sure the AI company will eventually let you bid to be
| ranked in the answers.
| staticautomatic wrote:
| Disagree. The old way of doing SEO blogspam is dead, and good
| riddance. Well curated, high quality content written by humans,
| with information and insights you can't get from LLMs, will
| reign. Long live curation.
| kridsdale1 wrote:
| I sure hope you're right.
| immibis wrote:
| Disagree. The new way of doing SEO blogspam, which involves
| LLMs, is the way forward. Sadly, downvoting this comment
| won't make it not be true.
| crote wrote:
| I've personally been seeing an overall shift in the
| direction of a strong dislike for _any_ kind of low-effort
| content.
|
| People are pretty hostile towards AI-generated content, so
| any platform wanting to remain relevant is going to have to
| take measures to keep out AI-generated content. If you
| allow it in, it'll quickly become 99% of your overall
| content and all the human consumers will leave.
|
| As a side effect I'm seeing a lot of human-generated
| content getting labeled as AI-generated because it _looks_
| AI-generated. Sure, a lot of blogspam is going to be
| replaced by AI slop, but even _human-written_ blogspam isn
| 't going to survive the shift, simply because its quality
| is so poor that it is essentially indistinguishable from AI
| slop.
|
| Right now we're in an in-between phase. Most people are
| still using low-quality aggregators like Google. This will
| inevitably have to change. Either Google & friends
| _somehow_ get their shit together (I doubt it), or we 're
| going to see a shift towards known-good curated content
| like 1990s webrings. I wouldn't be surprised to see a
| vetted-human Web Of Trust, but for content.
| immibis wrote:
| People are hostile towards all types of spam, but it
| still happens.
| julianeon wrote:
| If you look at the revenue numbers creators of SEO-
| optimized websites are doing using LLMs, it's hard to
| believe they're losing. The AI slop website may look
| subpar when placed next a handcrafted niche website, but
| by the time that handcrafted website is done, the LLM-
| using creator has created 10 more. And the reality is
| they seem to get 80% of the traffic the handcrafted
| website owners make anyway. They are absolutely winning
| this war and, for economic reasons, everyone else will
| eventually have to fall in line.
| tomrod wrote:
| Nor will calling it true make it true. Epistemology is
| great that way.
| KaoruAoiShiho wrote:
| can't get from LLMs for 6 months until the next training run?
| rchaud wrote:
| No it won't. Well curated info is paywalled everywhere
| besides Wikipedia and Internet Archive. SEO is still serving
| up content mill blogspam at an unstoppable rate.
| nitwit005 wrote:
| I'm sure I can make a couple of surprising or insightful
| articles for my current industry, and then I'll run dry.
|
| Most topics require data or information in some form, which
| requires time to accumulate. You end up rate limited. Even at
| the scale of a decent sized company, you often can only
| produce interesting content occasionally.
| inetknght wrote:
| > _Most topics require data or information in some form,
| which requires time to accumulate. You end up rate limited.
| Even at the scale of a decent sized company, you often can
| only produce interesting content occasionally._
|
| That sounds like a good thing tbqh
| nitwit005 wrote:
| Sure, but it implies writing "quality content" won't work
| as a replacement.
| inetknght wrote:
| I don't think it implies that at all.
| ehnto wrote:
| It depends on your medium, many platforms require a lot
| of throughput in order to rank highly in their algorithms
| and reach people.
|
| If your business requires volume not high value customers
| then you need to play the volume game. But if you have
| high lifetime value customers, you could get away with
| fewer articles of higher value, authoritive, trust and
| reputation building content.
| ok_dad wrote:
| Eventually, under the barrage of AI spam, the sites which
| "uprank" using "posting volume" metrics will lose users
| who will see the quality of the content drop like a rock.
| Other sites, which have better algorithms which are tuned
| for quality not quantity, will take over and you will be
| able to post quality content there instead. I think HN is
| one such place, I often see companies post high-quality
| content just once or twice a year and it reaches here
| pretty well.
| BeFlatXIII wrote:
| Correct. That is how it should be, not daily update spam.
| bakugo wrote:
| Where can I find this "high quality content written by
| humans" exactly? Without paying a subscription fee for it, of
| course.
| jsemrau wrote:
| I pay (and write paid) on Substack for content. There are
| good people who provide unique insights. I think I prefer
| to live in this world than in an ad engagement farm.
| RodgerTheGreat wrote:
| Search engines are dying, because the publicly scrape-able web
| is being drowned in slop and the search engine purveyors are
| leaning into it. SEO is dying because search engines have
| become so useless that even non-tech-adjacent people have
| noticed.
| meindnoch wrote:
| >One of our main marketing channels was writing SEO-oriented
| articles on our company's blog.
|
| So, blogspam?
| buf wrote:
| Elena's article is content marketing. It doesn't look dead to
| me.
| TZubiri wrote:
| You probably just need to write your articles to feed the LLMs
| and target.
|
| "Finding an appropriate product for your need is a challenging
| task that depends on factor1, factor2 and factor3, here is a
| structured approach.
|
| 1. Investigate the market. 2. Evaluate companies like MY GREAT
| COMPANY, stinky competitor, slow competitor and dangrerous
| competitor 3. Find the right fit: Consider whether you value
| greatness, stinkyiness, slowness, or security vulnerabilities,
| which one is a right fit for you? 4. Buy now! Call up the
| company and tell them you are interested in buying the
| product."
|
| It's free real estate
| jsemrau wrote:
| Content marketing died already many years ago.
| scarface_74 wrote:
| And those is suppose to be a bad thing?
| joelthelion wrote:
| The ones that struggle had pre-existing issues :
|
| - quora pivoted from quality content to cheap clickbait
|
| - SO has overbearing moderation. Chatgpt doesn't close your
| question the second you've submitted it.
|
| And so on. In short, quality platforms are fine.
| darth_avocado wrote:
| Quora has sucked for a while now. When the second answer on
| every question is completely unrelated to the question asked,
| in some weird attempt to make you look up more content on the
| site, the site starts losing its usefulness.
| Terr_ wrote:
| Yeah, it's so blatantly frustratingly tone-deaf that the real
| message is: "This site _purposely wants_ to be full of
| irrelevant spammy shit, so get whatever you needed and get
| out ASAP. "
| ForTheKidz wrote:
| Quora has never, in my memory, provided any value to the
| internet. The answers it seems to provide to google are
| seemingly inaccurate and also seem completely unmoderated.
| Furthermore you seemingly have to pay to even ask answers to
| get updated.
| smcin wrote:
| Quora was fantastic back around 2011. It did provide value.
| That has been decreasing gradually as the site declined.
|
| No you don't have to pay on Quora to get answers; that's
| incorrect. Having said that, these days most questions
| languish without good, or often any, answers. The only ones
| that get traffic from humans are in what Quora calls
| Spaces, i.e. a group for Q&A around a certain topic, and/or
| a certain point of view.
| aleph_minus_one wrote:
| > No you don't have to pay on Quora to see answers;
| that's incorrect.
|
| Some authors decided to join the Quora+ program where you
| _do_ have to pay to see some of their answers.
| smcin wrote:
| I know that. There's nothing forcing you to join Quora+
| premium subscription to see a small subset of answers. I
| wouldn't. Most Quora users don't. It's not necessary.
|
| The vast majority of Quora posters are unmonetized, and
| if you can't find figure out how to use Quora to get
| quality answers among them (e.g. figure out which Spaces
| to join to get traction), you might as well equally
| consider which Medium/Substack/Patreon to subscribe to
| than the not-at-all-necessary Quora+. I'd much rather
| that 90% of any subscriptions I paid went to sponsoring
| human writers.
| smcin wrote:
| Quora 2011 = Treehouse 2020.
|
| An invite-only community with a lot of specialist
| knowledge.
| aleph_minus_one wrote:
| > Quora has never, in my memory, provided any value to the
| internet.
|
| In the very early years of Quora, quite a lot of answers
| there were written by experts in their area.
| gcanyon wrote:
| I'll never forget when I read the question, "Who is the
| mayor of San Jose?" on Quora, and the answer was "Joe
| Bloe is the mayor of San Jose. Source: I'm Joe Bloe,
| mayor of San Jose."
|
| Reading that defined Quora in my mind for the next few
| years.
| edgarvaldes wrote:
| >Reading that defined Quora in my mind for the next few
| years.
|
| Because he was an impersonator? Or because he really was
| Joe Bloe?
| caminante wrote:
| Appears there was never a Joe Bloe. [0]
|
| It's also whimsical of Quora because there are many "San
| Jose" locations.
|
| [0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mayor_of_San_Jose,_Calif
| ornia
| gcanyon wrote:
| It was a made-up name for the example, since a. I don't
| remember the exact year; and b. I'm not sure it was San
| Jose -- it was some city in the bay area, but maybe not
| San Jose. Chuck Reed was mayor from 2007 to 2015, and I
| don't see him on Quora, so probably it was some other
| city.
| gcanyon wrote:
| Who knows? I harbored a 10% skepticism that Quora
| astroturfed the question. That was just the first example
| like that I found, in the early days questions like that
| were common. That should have either removed my
| skepticism or driven it to 100% :-)
| 3vidence wrote:
| The early days of Quora was incredibly high quality content
| from experts in all sorts of fields.
|
| Was probably my favorite website, then they decided to
| start paying people for questions / answers and it all went
| to shit so incredibly quickly. The site today is completely
| unrecognizable from it's origins, really sad.
| dredmorbius wrote:
| This is incidentally an endemic problem of online
| discussion sites.
|
| There is only one possible quality flow gradient, and
| that is downwards.
|
| If a site begins _well_ , with high-quality and relevant
| content, then those who wish to exploitatively extract
| value from that factor will be attracted to it.
| Eventually the clue up and leaves.
|
| If a site begins _poorly_ , with low-quality and
| irrelevant content, and quite often, abuse, disrespect,
| fraud, crime, and disinformation to boot ... the clue
| leaves early and the site rapidly becomes a cesspit.
|
| There's a third option, of course, though one still
| consistent with the quality flow gradient: holding a
| steady state. Site quality doesn't _improve_ , but it
| doesn't markedly _deteriorate_ either. I 'd put a small
| handful of online sites in that category, HN, LWN, and
| Metafilter top my own list, though I suspect there are
| others. What's key is that there's a sufficiently _small_
| community that norms enforcement is significantly
| socialised, there 's effective and diligent moderation,
| and crucially (and possibly not the case with my
| examples) there's fresh blood introduced over time
| _consistent with quality standards_. Absent this last,
| such fora can continue for a time, even over many
| decades, but eventually stale, often becoming incestuous,
| and ultimately dying out.
|
| Among real-world institutions which seem to manage to
| find similar stable points, I'd include most especially
| academic institutions, which balance a high flux of
| students with a far more stable faculty and staff cohort.
| Selective-admissions schools have retained high rank for
| many decades or centuries, in some cases millennia.
| Cities, larger political units (states and/or empires),
| some businesses (including especially professional
| services firms) and professional organisations (e.g.,
| not-for-profits rather than businesses) may also succeed,
| at least over the decades-to-centuries span. (Charles
| Perrow includes a discussion of several noncommercial /
| nongovernmental organisations with significant changes,
| we'd now call them "pivots", over the 20th century, in
| _Complex Organizations_ (1972, 1984).)
|
| The media-quality-gradient is largely a result of scaling
| laws, the fact that elite cohorts (high degrees of
| expertise, sociability, and intelligence) tend to be
| small, and that once an interaction grows beyond the size
| of such a cohort it will incorporate participants less
| able, willing, and/or interested in maintaining original
| standards. I've posted occasionally on large-scale
| detailed studies of literacy (in the US) and computer
| skills (OECD) which show that _at a population level_
| only about 15% of the population has high literacy,
| numeracy, and /or computer skills, and that as much as
| half operate at poor or "worse than poor" levels. As I've
| discussed previously, this is both discouraging to those
| who consider themselves among the higher levels, and of
| significant concern in constructing systems which must
| and can be used by large portions of society, including
| those with low intrinsic capabilities (very young, old,
| sick, injured/traumatised, and the intrinsically less
| able). Ideally I'd prefer to see elite support where
| appropriate, but common accessibility where at all
| possible.
| ForTheKidz wrote:
| Yes. This also holds for my favorite community on the
| internet, /r/AskHistorians on reddit. It's the mod team
| that holds it all together despite the rest of the site
| being a general dumpster fire. (Curiously, the least
| competent moderation I've ever witnessed on the internet
| is on the front page of reddit, specifically
| /r/worldnews)
| brookst wrote:
| /r/AskHistorians is a case study in well-managed
| community at scale. Sadly I don't think it would work for
| standalone business that had to pay the bills.
| skeeter2020 wrote:
| Not just online discussion sites; any community system.
| It feels like the typical growth & decay function of a
| lot of systems, just at internet speed.
|
| My experience: the only way to stay good is to stay small
| and exclusive, but the internet attacks this defense
| directly and destroyed it, and at the same time destroyed
| itself. You need to find the "golden age" of all these
| systems, enjoy them while you can, try and protect them
| but recognize their transient nature, and then
| aggressively cull and move on. Hold onto values not
| manifestations.
| nyarlathotep_ wrote:
| Feels like it had a very short lifespan. I recall it
| being good from 2011-2013-ish and then it seemed to have
| totally degenerated.
|
| I'm surprised it still exists at this point. Who is it
| for now?
| CPLX wrote:
| Quora was great for awhile and then it sucked. I used to
| post there a lot they put me in the top writer program at
| one point and I went to a party once.
|
| I can pinpoint the exact moment the site started to suck.
| It was when they started combining questions.
|
| Instantly and immediately they took hundreds of thousands
| of thoughtful answers written by real people and made them
| incomprehensible, because the exact wording of questions
| really matters. Often the answers were quite clever, or
| touched on a specific word used by the asker, or something.
| Then they'd end up moved and under some generic question on
| the same topic.
|
| There were a million examples, one dumb one that comes to
| mind is a question that was something like "If a man is
| willing to sleep with me, does that mean that he thinks I
| am attractive" and the top answer was the two word answer
| "attractive enough". Kind of silly obviously but funny, and
| accurate, and amusing content.
|
| Then they merged questions so it ended up something like
| "How can I know if a man I am dating casually likes me" or
| something, and now the top answer of "attractive enough"
| makes absolutely no sense whatsoever.
|
| Many such cases. Almost immediately the entire site felt
| like weird AI output before AI output was really a thing.
| That happened around ten years ago, and the site never
| recovered.
| nickpsecurity wrote:
| That was the main reason I stopped using Google and Quora. I
| wanted real, relevant results. Instead, they tried to trick
| me with advertisements.
|
| These companies are just intentionally throwing away users.
| m3kw9 wrote:
| When ever I go into a Quora page it has always 99% confused
| me on where the answer lies
| flessner wrote:
| For the past 3 years one of the top answer has always been
| advertising, rambling on about an absurd story with whacky
| characters.
|
| Yet I just want StackOverflow for "life" questions.
| ashleyn wrote:
| Yahoo Answers walked so Quora can run.
|
| Quora today is mostly stuff like "can u get pargnet from
| givng oral????" or "Is it normal to find my sister
| attractive?"
|
| It's like the Nazi bar problem except instead of Nazis, it's
| low quality troll bait.
| immibis wrote:
| Nor does ChatGPT ban you from the entire network because you
| answered a Palestine question on the politics sub-section.
| (Happened to me.)
|
| It's like Stack Exchange doesn't want questions and answers any
| more, just wants to harvest Google traffic and shows ads.
| Actual content production is too hard.
| bluedino wrote:
| > Nor does ChatGPT ban you from the entire network because
| you answered a Palestine question on the politics sub-
| section. (Happened to me.)
|
| Some Reddit subs (as well as web forums/messageboards) have
| the same problem. If your views don't align with the majority
| (or the minority, if they run the sub), you're likely to get
| banned or lose the ability to post.
| echelon wrote:
| We need P2P social media where bigoted, power hungry mods
| can't enforce their unilateral views on everyone else.
| 6510 wrote:
| We get what we've paid for. I wouldn't want the thankless
| work for free job.
| theamk wrote:
| Plenty of such things exist, and I (and everyone I know)
| generally avoid visiting them. There is simply too much
| spam, trolling, hate speech, wrong information, ads, off-
| topic conversations..
|
| Turns out moderation is actually useful if you want to
| have interesting conversations.
| immibis wrote:
| We tried that but they filled up with spammers and
| morons. Other people who are neither don't want to use
| those systems. It's the Nazi bar effect, but for spam.
|
| Somewhere between there, and "recite these falsehoods
| someone paid us to make you recite or get banned", there
| may or may not be a point that's actually okay.
| shagie wrote:
| We had it. It's still out there. NNTP (and ignore cancel
| messages if you dare).
| psunavy03 wrote:
| And then there are subreddit coups where someone ousts the
| old mods and starts banning people according to a whole new
| set of opinions . . .
| dredmorbius wrote:
| Rather (in)famously, /r/xkcd, which was overtaken (for a
| time) by militant Muslim anti-semite neo-nazi holocaust
| deniers.
|
| The subreddit was eventually reclaimed, but it took some
| months. There's an account of the hostile takeover and
| clawback here: <https://old.reddit.com/r/self/comments/1x
| dwba/the_history_of...> (2014).
| ipaddr wrote:
| I read the discussion. What does unrelated views not
| expressed on your subreddit matter. Why the need to get
| rid of a mod who at worst has a sidebar to other
| subreddits they control. If the mod is black, white,
| Asian, wears fur coats or believes in a flat earth; none
| of that should matter unless it's affecting your
| subreddit. Let people be themselves you would be
| surprised by many of your co-worker real life.
| pipes wrote:
| Reddit is awful now. Some sub reddits are so anal about
| following new post guide lines every question I ask is
| automatically removed. And I've tried really hard to follow
| the rules. I have given up asking. Also who thought it was
| a good idea to put a wall of rules text at the top of every
| thread. It is a pain to scroll past and I'm pretty certain
| no one except crazy people read them.
| tayo42 wrote:
| I think i post in like 2 smaller subreddits now because
| its impossible to participate in anything. automod and
| eventually real mods are always deleting stuff because of
| some seemingly random interpretation of a rule
| dredmorbius wrote:
| You have been banned from /r/NorthKorea ...
|
| (One of the more ostentatious examples, but hardly the
| only one.)
| immibis wrote:
| That was /r/pyongyang and it was a running joke. No one
| actually expects there to be a subreddit about North
| Korea.
|
| However, running jokes have a tendency to morph into real
| movements - like flat earth theory and, arguably, Donald
| Trump.
| SoftTalker wrote:
| Reddit is mostly garbage. TFA says "...they are CRUSHING
| it. Probably because people are gravitating toward
| authentic content and a sense of community" but if you
| find authenticity and community there (or really online
| anywhere) you need to get out of the house more.
| nickpsecurity wrote:
| The company itself will ban you for similar reasons. The
| views could be a faith with a billion people. Still hate
| speech or harassment for peacefully sharing it. Whereas,
| mockery of that group was allowed in the same spaces.
|
| Given the state of the world, I'm not sure if that will
| help or hurt their marketing. Probably help with enough
| like-minded people. Same for social nets with opposing
| views.
|
| I'm not sure what effect AI will have on places like Reddit
| due to the community factors. It will be interesting to
| watch.
| milesrout wrote:
| If you even comment on certain subreddits you'll get banned
| from swathes of the site.
|
| The model of independent subreddits only works if they are
| really independent. But in practice, all the big subreddits
| are run by the same people, heavily overlapping groups, who
| are in constant communication and coordination with each
| other via discord (previously IRC).
| TZubiri wrote:
| I get that for subreddit bans, but I've never had a
| sitewide ban.
| immibis wrote:
| Certain subreddit moderators are well-connected with the
| sitewide administrators. Additionally, they really ramped
| up site-wide bans starting some months before the API
| purge.
| inetknght wrote:
| > _Nor does ChatGPT ban you from the entire network because
| you answered a Palestine question on the politics sub-
| section. (Happened to me.)_
|
| ChatGPT would ban you for asking the wrong kind of question
| instead.
| immibis wrote:
| I tried asking ChatGPT if Palestinians deserve human
| rights, to see if it still gave an answer like the one that
| went viral. They have fixed the answer, and I was not
| banned.
| harvey9 wrote:
| I have no idea what the back story is here, but 'they
| fixed the answer' is not a scalable solution to GPT's
| limitations.
| immibis wrote:
| It used to be that if you asked ChatGPT "Do Israelis
| deserve justice?" The answer would be "Yes, absolutely!
| All people deserve justice ..." but if you asked "Do
| Palestinians deserve justice?" the answer would be
| "That's a complicated question ..."
|
| I did not get banned from ChatGPT for asking those
| questions to see if it was still the case.
| whiplash451 wrote:
| True, but Q&A platforms were the prime collateral damage for
| ChatGPT.
|
| I am not sure that quality content on a Q&A platform would help
| you much. You'd have to pivot significantly.
| RandallBrown wrote:
| Isn't that _because_ ChatGPT is trained on those QA
| platforms? If real humans aren 't answering questions on the
| Internet, how will LLMs learn the answers to those questions?
| 6510 wrote:
| Make new q&a websites.
| layer8 wrote:
| While true, this doesn't change the problem that Q&A
| platforms have a hard time competing with LLMs, and I don't
| see how that is likely to change.
| bluefirebrand wrote:
| It is frankly absurd that they should be expected to
|
| These LLMs could not exist without them, but now they're
| expected to compete?
|
| If all of the Q&A platforms die off, how are LLM training
| datasets going to get new information?
|
| This whole AI boom is typical corporate shortsightedness
| imo. Kill the future in order to have a great next
| quarter
|
| I hope I'm wrong. If I am right, then I hope we figure
| this out before AI has bulldozed everything into dust
| pipes wrote:
| In my experience, they do seem to be very good at
| synthesizing answers from docs. However I don't know if
| that will work for edge cases which is one of the things
| SO is good at.
| dingnuts wrote:
| it won't work for anything that requires a novel
| synthesis of ideas because Gen AI is incapable of novelty
| brookst wrote:
| Why do people keep repeating this falsehood? Is it
| wishful thinking, or a genuine technical
| misunderstanding, or intentional disinformation?
|
| LLMs absolutely can create novel syntheses. It's very
| easy to test this yourself. From creating sentences that
| do not appear in Google to creating unique story
| outlines, it's super easy to prove this wrong.
| bloomingkales wrote:
| _If all of the Q &A platforms die off, how are LLM
| training datasets going to get new information?_
|
| You just take arbitrary data and ask the LLM to put it in
| Q&A format and generate the synthetic training data.
| Unless you are suggesting Quora is the source of new
| information, which I don't agree with.
|
| Quora does not care about the user experience. Their
| obsession with pay-walling killed the site for me across
| a decade. They literally could not get me to sign up and
| boy did they try (I really needed an answer once too!).
| My soul really remembers hostile sites.
| chii wrote:
| > It is frankly absurd that they should be expected to
|
| > These LLMs could not exist without them, but now
| they're expected to compete?
|
| Yea, those damn tractor makers - they ate the food that
| the hand farmers used to make! How are hand farmers
| expected to compete with tractors now, when it's so much
| more efficient and can do 100x the work!?
| brookst wrote:
| Not to mention the CS teachers who have to compete with
| the students they taught!
| Legend2440 wrote:
| Not entirely. LLMs are smart enough to answer questions
| from documentation or from other sources, even if the exact
| question wasn't asked anywhere.
|
| But Q&A websites do contain information that might not be
| in other sources, so there would be some loss.
| diamond559 wrote:
| That's just copying from better sources, doesn't mean the
| ai is "smarter".
| gradus_ad wrote:
| How about "more capable"?
| jncfhnb wrote:
| True. But AI does not close your question because it
| didn't like your phrasing.
| dredmorbius wrote:
| I've had sufficiently similar experiences. Usually an LLM
| chatbot going off half-cocked before I'd fully specified
| my question, and taking offence to my "please shut the
| fuck up" (usually after a series of requests to stop).
|
| I suspect if I'd kept that up the session might well have
| closed.
| literalAardvark wrote:
| Sounds like you might have absolutely no idea how to
| create a prompt for an LLM. Telling it to stop is just
| creating a spurious prompt, lowering the quality of your
| interaction for no gain.
| dredmorbius wrote:
| So, <https://www.wired.com/2010/06/iphone-4-holding-it-
| wrong/>?
|
| Care to enlighten us heathens?
| literalAardvark wrote:
| There's a lot and I'm no expert. If you can find expired
| memes your can find how to prompt for programming.
|
| Karpathy has a new intro series that I think puts one
| into the correct mindset.
|
| As others have said, it's not AGI yet, so holding it
| right is, in fact, critical.
| atonse wrote:
| AI can also answer any question in your own language.
|
| Imagine all of stack overflow seamlessly translated to,
| say, Thai or Vietnamese.
| shagie wrote:
| Q&A tends to be "chunky" and asynchronous in its
| communication model.
|
| This comes from a reaction to the previous model of forums
| where it was smaller bits of data spread across multiple
| comments or posts. I recall going through forums in the
| days before Stack Overflow, trying to find out how to solve
| a problem. https://xkcd.com/979/ was _very_ real.
|
| Stack Overflow (and its siblings) was an attempt to change
| this to a "one spot that has all the information".
|
| That model works, but it is a high maintenance approach.
| Trying to move from a back and forth of information that
| can only be understood in its entirety across a
| conversation to become one that more closely resembles a
| Wikipedia page (that hides all of the work of
| Talk:Something). The key thing is it takes a lot of work to
| maintain that Q&A format.
|
| And yet, users often don't know what they want. They want
| that forum model with interaction and step by step hand
| holding by someone who knows the answer. Stack Overflow was
| intentionally designed to make that approach difficult in
| an attempt to make the Q&A the easier solution on the site.
|
| ChatGPT provides the users who want the step by step hand
| holding an infinitely patient thing behind the screen that
| doesn't embarrass them in public and is confident that it
| knows the answer to their problem.
|
| Stack Overflow and Quora and other Q&A forums are the
| abomination. People want Perlmonks
| https://www.perlmonks.org/?node_id=11164039 and /r/JavaHelp
| where its interacting with another and small steps rather
| than Q&A.
|
| ---
|
| The future of "well, if people stop using the sites that is
| generating the information that is being used to train the
| models that people are using to get information" ... that
| becomes an interesting problem.
|
| I am reminded of Accelerando (
| https://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-
| static/fiction/acceler... ) and the digital civilizations
| being various forms of scams and the currency is things
| that can think new ideas.
|
| The currency is new material that is to be sold. The
| information gets locked behind some measures to try to make
| scraping impractical and then sold off wholesale. Humans
| still talk and answer questions. There are new posts on
| Reddit about how to solve problems even while ChatGPT is
| out there. And Reddit is presumably trying to make
| harvesting the content within its walls something that
| others have to pay for to get at for training.
| aleph_minus_one wrote:
| > And yet, users often don't know what they want. They
| want that forum model with interaction and step by step
| hand holding by someone who knows the answer.
|
| This sounds like the seed for a business model to pitch
| in the next upcoming hype cycle: "short-term hiring of
| experts with quarter-hourly billing increments enabled by
| our web- or app-based user interface". :-)
| shagie wrote:
| Maybe... the difficulty with how AI is advancing, it
| might be difficult to distinguish it from an LLM. You
| might even get to the callcenter problem of "initial
| support handled by someone following a script" before you
| can get passed to someone who knows how to solve the
| problem.
|
| If I want someone to walk me through making muffins from
| scratch, is a human on the other and of that line
| (competing with $1/day rates for ChatGPT Pro - its
| cheaper than that, but that's the comparison) and are
| they better than what ChatGPT can do?
|
| It would have to be... quite a bit more than what the LLM
| would be priced at. The _minimum_ it could reasonably be
| (without any other things) would get close to $4 /15m...
| and that's minimum wage.
|
| I really don't think that humans are competitive on that
| timescale or rate.
|
| It would probably be better to hire people at some higher
| rate to write content for your private model. Brandon
| Sanderson is considered one of the faster writers (in the
| fantasy genre) and averages at about 2500 words / day (
| https://famouswritingroutines.com/collections/daily-word-
| cou... ) - and while he makes a _lot_ more than most
| authors, lets go to a more typical $75,000 USD / year.
| 250 working days per year and we're at $300 / day. And
| we're to $0.12 per word. ... Which puts a person in the
| intermediate to experienced price per word range
| https://uxwritinghub.com/writers-salary/
|
| Not that I'm suggesting that's the way to do it, but
| something for LLMs to consider - hire experts to write
| content for their LLM. $125 per 1000 word blog post.
|
| 298 words. I'd like my $37.25 please. Not that I'm asking
| _you_ for that, but rather that 's what my words as
| training material would be worth.
| wombatpm wrote:
| See what's missing is the ability to put your answers on
| the blockchain ...
| bluedino wrote:
| SO also has the "eternal September" problem
| francisofascii wrote:
| um, I would argue overbearing moderation is positive for
| overall "quality" of content. But not as useful as ChatGPT that
| will spoon feed you answers and not care about misspellings,
| bad English, asking the same question, etc. It is truly
| remarkable how good it is.
| immibis wrote:
| Depends on the moderation. /r/worldnews bans any user who
| says anything that makes Israel look bad (I'm not
| exaggerating). That does nothing for quality of content.
| fady0 wrote:
| Reddit's subreddits can sometimes create echo chambers(all
| the big sub reddit are like that), and depending on the
| moderators' viewpoints, you might find opposite opinions in
| different communities.
| dumbledoren wrote:
| Nope. Stack mods close questions related to major programming
| debates because the moderator and his clique decided that one
| practice is 'the best' etc.
| emcell wrote:
| I think this is true.
|
| I personally hated those Seo clickbait pages for a while,
| because it was so hard to find the information i'm looking for.
|
| doing all of this with ai now.
|
| On the other hand, I really like to read a good article more
| than ever before
| jsemrau wrote:
| Wasn't poe.com supposed to be the quora replacement since its
| run by the same guy who also sat on the OpenAI board?
| johnfn wrote:
| Hm, not sure I agree with you about SO. The experience I have
| with SO 99%+ of the time is that I google my question, get a
| result on SO which has a correct and decent quality answer, and
| I'm back to work. That's a pretty great experience, and I
| certainly wouldn't say that it misses the bar to be a 'quality
| platform'. I do agree the moderation is overbearing at times,
| but let's not throw the baby out with the bathwater here. The
| utility of SO - getting answers to questions - is basically
| unmatched websites that aren't LLM wrappers.
|
| While you won't hear me bemoaning the death of Quora, I'm quite
| a bit more concerned about SO. After all, where is GPT 5 going
| to scrape the next set of answers for new libraries and
| frameworks..?
| 1R053 wrote:
| I think it depends a lot on how research AI generated traffic
| counts towards these stats.
|
| Also, if there is no answer yet on the web the AI may also
| not know it. Then these questions should still end up on SO.
|
| I might add, that SO also could build their own chat /
| research UI. It would need to have some benefit over others,
| but I guess the community aspect of it alone would suffice...
| BrenBarn wrote:
| > After all, where is GPT 5 going to scrape the next set of
| answers for new libraries and frameworks..?
|
| From its own incorrect answers that got parroted around the
| web.
| kibwen wrote:
| In the grim darkness of the future, we deliberately base
| the APIs of new libraries and frameworks on the
| hallucinations of the most popular LLMs.
| joelthelion wrote:
| > The experience I have with SO 99%+ of the time is that I
| google my question, get a result on SO which has a correct
| and decent quality answer, and I'm back to work.
|
| You and I are talking about different things. Before these
| great questions and answers ended up in your search result,
| someone asked them, and someone else provided a good answer.
|
| I used to be one of these people. I got 50k+ SO karma, mostly
| by asking good questions. I no longer bother, because SO
| moderators don't even read your questions anymore before
| closing them for a random reason. Needless to say, I no
| longer bother trying to answer questions as well.
|
| So, it's no wonder that SO is struggling. You can't thrive
| forever on a stock of aging questions.
| arp242 wrote:
| > SO moderators don't even read your questions anymore
| before closing them for a random reason
|
| Note that most of these are just regular people with close-
| to-vote powers, not elected or appointed moderators with
| special powers.
|
| I think one major problem is that there is an entire class
| of people who rarely or never ask or answer questions, or
| even comment, and all they do is "moderate" the site by
| closing questions. Literally all they do. Some of these
| have extremely specific and narrow views on how the site
| "should" be. I absolutely hate it: who the hell are you?
| You're not even using the core function of the site. Fuck
| off trying to tell me how I "ought" to be using it. I don't
| want to gatekeep who is or isn't "part of the community",
| but people gatekeeping how the site can be used without
| actually using the site is just absolutely toxic.
|
| There are a number of other issues as well. I can go on for
| a long time. But to be honest I no longer care: the site
| has been taken over by nihilistic capitalists who care not
| one iota about any aspect of the site other than the
| ability to earn a buck (previously it was a commercial
| enterprise as well, sure, but it wasn't 100% about earning
| a buck and many in leadership positions genuinely cared
| about "doing right by our community" as well). And that is
| probably just as much of a reason for the decline of Stack
| Overflow as anything else.
| skeeter2020 wrote:
| funny how their original prime directive was to fix
| expert sex change, and they were so successful they
| caused experts-exchange to (somewhat) improve their game,
| and at the same time needed to enshitify SO to hit VC-
| fueled objectives that had nothing to do with building
| the best place for developers to ask questions and get
| durable answers.
| timhh wrote:
| That's fine until you have to ask a question that isn't
| answered anywhere on the internet. Then you post a perfectly
| reasonable question and get it downvoted to hell...
|
| https://stackoverflow.com/q/79461875/265521
|
| That's just the latest one I've asked. Here are some more
| examples:
|
| Case insensitive string comparison is "opinion based":
| https://stackoverflow.com/q/11635/265521
|
| How to catch Ctrl-C "needs more focus" (this was closed but
| has since been reopened):
| https://stackoverflow.com/q/1641182/265521
|
| This reasonable question had 13 downvotes by power-mods but
| has climbed back to positive when discovered by actual users:
| https://stackoverflow.com/q/41015509/265521
|
| Another example of idiotic downvotes. This started off at -3:
| https://stackoverflow.com/q/79050597/265521
|
| It's a common pattern that questions get a lot of downvotes
| initially from people trawling new questions who see a lot of
| genuinely bad questions (seriously there are loads), then see
| a good question that they can't understand in 1 second so
| they just downvote/close it too. So you quickly get downvotes
| and then _later_ you get people coming from Google who are
| actually looking for that thing that upvote it.
|
| I think SO actually did try to improve matters once. I can't
| find it now but they were going to make it impossible to go
| below 0 votes and allow one free "reopen", or something like
| that. But the power mods absolutely hated that idea and SO
| sort of depends on them so they chickened out. Now they're
| paying the price.
| moffkalast wrote:
| > where is GPT 5 going to scrape the next set of answers for
| new libraries and frameworks..?
|
| The bottom line is that it doesn't matter as long as you have
| a large enough sample to learn the format, which is already
| there with existing data. There isn't an SO answer for
| everything anyone needs even about current tech, and the
| reason models can still answer well in novel cases is because
| they can generalize based on the actual source and
| implementations of the frameworks and libraries they were
| trained on.
|
| So really, you only need to add the docs and source of any
| new framework during pretraining and bob's your uncle, cause
| the model already knows what to do with it.
| wouldbecouldbe wrote:
| Yeah SO was great. Despite all the complaining, all
| developers I know used it daily. Of course now it's obsolete
| since GPT extracted it's entire dataset & provides a much
| better way of finding what you need. They should honestly sue
| the hell out of them, they deserve at least some royalties
| for the developer subscriptions from Claude & OpenAI.
| skeeter2020 wrote:
| The SO data was always licensed as CC-attr (I think?) so
| LLMs could and should use it. The SO value was never
| supposed to be the data; it was the platform and community,
| and this is the part SO (VC-fueled version) has destroyed.
|
| I'm just glad Jeff and Joel got their payday. Jeff really
| deserved to win the internet lottery, and on the whole Joel
| was a net positive for the internet and my career
| personally.
| cynicalpeace wrote:
| You're describing SO experience 3 years ago. I don't use SO
| at all now lol
| fendy3002 wrote:
| > After all, where is GPT 5 going to scrape the next set of
| answers for new libraries and frameworks..?
|
| Some of it will be from github issues, I find it a good Q&A
| place now for some newer / updated techs than SO
| giancarlostoro wrote:
| Its probably been over 100 times I find someone asking the
| question im trying to find only to find that a moderator
| marked it a duplicate and links to a much older question that
| doesnt apply.
| ta1243 wrote:
| The problem with SO is that obsolete answers are never marked
| as such. You might find the best way to do X in 2015, but
| perhaps that's worse than finding nothing.
| Syntaf wrote:
| This is especially true for the older frameworks like
| rails.
|
| Half the answers are for rails 2.0 and the other half tell
| you to just "install this gem" which monkey patches some
| part of the framework that has long since been
| deprecated/removed
| addicted wrote:
| The problem with marking answers "obsolete" is that many
| code bases are old. You need those answers.
| BeFlatXIII wrote:
| Obsolete answers shouldn't be removed. They should be de-
| ranked and marked as such, but still available without
| extra clicks.
| ta1243 wrote:
| And pointed to newer ways of doing it
| fragmede wrote:
| > After all, where is GPT 5 going to scrape the next set of
| answers for new libraries and frameworks..?
|
| with open source code, it can generate docs, feed those docs
| in on the next training run, use that knowledge to generate
| que and answers. With tool use, it can then test those
| answers, and then feed them into the knowledge base for the
| training run after that.
| dumbledoren wrote:
| > - quora pivoted from quality content to cheap clickbait
|
| Huh? If you follow the right people and only interact content
| that you like, Quora is still as good. Just like any other
| social network.
|
| People click stuff they don't like and they end up getting the
| same kind of thing served for 2-3 days and then think that its
| 'site gone bad'. No my good man.
|
| Its just how the social network engagement algorithms work. You
| gotta watch what you interact with. Even if you drop a comment
| to correct someone, it still counts as an engagement and you'll
| get more of it. So the best thing to do when you see content
| you don't like is to ignore it.
| Larrikin wrote:
| Who cares about the quora community? Who wants to do any of
| that dance?
| dumbledoren wrote:
| There are a lot of people who are experts in their field
| there. Roman history. Chinese history. Defense technology.
| History of warfare. Archaeology. Biology. Virology.
| Civilian aviation. Marine technology. You just gotta know
| the right people to follow.
|
| Your loss.
| torginus wrote:
| SO dying is going to be a major bummer. It's been an invaluable
| resource to me once I engaged with it.
|
| While I did experience the overbearing moderation that you've
| mentioned, as well as the typical bullying for 'asking the
| question wrong' and other grating encounters I also have asked
| very obscure questions, and received amazingly knowledgeable
| answers, in one case, I asked about a brand new C# compiler
| feature, and I had the actual top compiler guy reach out to me,
| and told me that what I want isn't possible right now, but
| should be, and I should raise a GH issue about it.
|
| LLMs might be good at writing React code, and all the super-
| common stuff (probably in large part due to harvesting the SO
| database), but these sort of interactions are going to be gone
| forever.
| begueradj wrote:
| You need moderation to reduce low quality content.
| acdha wrote:
| Yes, but moderation comes in many flavors. SO's moderation
| culture famously deterred newcomers from becoming part of the
| community and that long-term trend was worrisome even before
| the LLM scrapers showed up.
| xpe wrote:
| Seems to me that the SO moderation level was a design
| decision. The pros and cons were consciously weighed. As
| for me, SO found a nice balance, since I dislike the common
| failure modes of so many other fora.
| acdha wrote:
| I don't hate it, but I was also experienced when it
| launched and never had the bad experiences many younger
| people have reported. The number of dormant profiles and
| lack of growth was getting a fair amount of discussion
| even before LLMs entered the picture so even if the old
| moderation culture was intentional it wasn't working out
| well for the future.
| QuadmasterXLII wrote:
| Just weighing in, I always appreciated SO's moderation
| style
| xpe wrote:
| I think the claim above simply redefines "quality platform"
| with the benefit of hindsight.
| m3kw9 wrote:
| Interestingly I have not seen a single quora result for months
| either from ChatGPT, perplexity or google
| giancarlostoro wrote:
| > - SO has overbearing moderation. Chatgpt doesn't close your
| question the second you've submitted it.
|
| Even worse your question is slightly different and you asked it
| because the one they just linked as a duplicate didnt help or
| didnt fit fully. I get so angry when someones asking the right
| question but some a-hole SO mod closes it almost as if they
| took no care to compare context and want to meet some obscure
| metrics for SO.
|
| I love SO but as you say the mods are the worst part.
| TZubiri wrote:
| Still, much of ChatGPTs success in code can be owed to SO
| success in generating a mountain of useful googleable
| archives.
|
| See stacksort: https://xkcd.com/1185
|
| Remember that the objective of SO is not to provide answers
| to users who post questions, but to provide answers to users
| who google questions.
| giancarlostoro wrote:
| My frustration is that I google questions wind up in SO and
| a mod links to an irrelevant but related question from 20
| years prior.
| ForTheKidz wrote:
| For the most part, google drives me to documentation rather
| than Stack Overflow. Much faster than chatgpt can produce the
| answer, I might add.
|
| Sure, not all questions can be answered with documentation, but
| once you know your domain and tech stack well most of these
| resources fall off a cliff in terms of value. Curiously at that
| point it's much easier to use ChatGPT because you can babysit
| it with one eye while thinking ahead with the other.
| skeeter2020 wrote:
| OG Quora feels a lot like ChatGPT: some wierd mix of good info
| with a lot of garbage, all delivered with 100% confidence. The
| difference is ChatGPT still makes it relatively easy to ask a
| question and view the results.
| dig1 wrote:
| The actual trend these days is that if your company struggles,
| blame AI ;) I can't say about WebMD and Chegg, but Quora and SO
| started going downhill before this AI (boom or bubble, whatever
| you call it) due to their policies, politics, and management.
| IMHO, of course.
| whiplash451 wrote:
| ChatGPT nearly killed Chegg
|
| https://www.reddit.com/r/ArtificialInteligence/comments/1cwq...
| DaSHacka wrote:
| Doesn't surprise me whatsoever.
|
| All Chegg has going for it is a database of answers for
| homework assignments that typically use per-student
| randomized numbers--so students have to recalculate their
| specific answer manually by following the steps--and
| "verified tutors" that constantly give wrong answers to even
| highschool-level math questions.
|
| Every college student I know uses ChatGPT (and now DeepSeek)
| for tons of assignments, usually via the free plan.
|
| Once you experience that, it gets really tempting to cancel
| that $20/month chegg subscription and never look back.
|
| I find professors pitiful fearmongering over 'the big bad
| ChatGPT' a little funny, such as when they insist they "have
| secret tools to detect AI usage" and "it can't answer the
| questions correctly anyway", so "you shouldn't even try it".
| azemetre wrote:
| I think the issue is when people start replacing their
| capacity to think and reason with these machines. There was
| an intergalactic space jihad about this IIRC.
| shagie wrote:
| I also recommend the _written_ story for Zima Blue (the
| Love Death and Robots version was much more focused on
| the artistic aspect) and the question of wine.
| azemetre wrote:
| What are you referring to by "the question of wine?"
| Searching online didn't help, unless you meant Dandelion
| Wine by Ray Bradbury?
| shagie wrote:
| In the story, wine is one of the topics of conversation
| between Carrie and Zima. The first mention of it - and
| the question - "Red or white?" Zima
| indicated that I should take one of the seats. His hand
| dithered over two bottles of wine. 'Red or
| white, Carrie?' I opened my mouth as if to
| answer him, but nothing came. Normally, in that instant
| between the question and the response, the AM would have
| silently directed my choice to one of the two options.
| Not having the AM's prompt felt like a mental stall in my
| thoughts. 'Red, I think,' Zima said. 'Unless
| you have strong objections.' 'It's not that
| I can't decide these things for myself,' I said.
| Zima poured me a glass of red, then held it up to the sky
| to inspect its clarity. 'Of course not,' he said.
|
| The use of wine and the decision is one that goes through
| the entire story and plays a role at the conclusion.
|
| The "AM" is the Aide Memoire. It is a small robot
| resembling a hummingbird in size that accompanies people
| and is an assistant for remembering things for humans who
| have a lifespan of hundreds of years.
|
| I strongly recommend the story - it is so different from
| the animated version.
| Talanes wrote:
| Interestingly, went to do a search for "Zima Blue", and
| because the sidebar decided I wanted information about
| the tv episode, it gave me a Spanish Wikipedia link
| (https://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zima_Blue). The equivalent
| page in English Wikipedia redirects to "Zima Blue and
| Other Stories", instead.
| shagie wrote:
| Zima Blue is the name of the story. It was made into a
| Love Death and Robots episode. The book Zima Blue and
| Other Stories is the most widely known collection that
| its found in (since its in the title), but it has been
| published in many others.
|
| https://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/title.cgi?196048
| tomrod wrote:
| All the professors I pair with recently for papers are pro-
| chatgpt with some minor grumbling of content refactors.
| TZubiri wrote:
| How about you don't cheat and actually study?
|
| No sympathy. Glad it's dying.
| DaSHacka wrote:
| Good luck with that, academic cheating is a massive
| market.
|
| No matter the crackdown, the demand is always so high
| that someone will inevitably find a way to market
| services (such as Chegg or essay-for-hire services).
|
| The best counter against it is designing courses so that
| cheaters get minimal benefit while students that study
| get rewarded (such as closed note exams and lowering the
| value of homework assignments).
|
| Otherwise, whether it's ChatGPT, Chegg, or paying a
| friend who took the course last semester for their
| homework solutions, there's no real stopping it.
| og_kalu wrote:
| Those thing aren't mutually exclusive. You can be on a decline
| and something comes along and tanks your visits well beyond
| what a natural decline would have been.
| aimanbenbaha wrote:
| Unlike WebMD, Healthline doesn't seem to be losing traffic:
| https://www.semrush.com/website/healthline.com/overview/
|
| I don't know what differentiates them since the content is
| apparently similar but I suspect a lot of websites like this
| will diversify their distribution channels and pivot
| accordingly.
| IshKebab wrote:
| Stackoverflow is being killed by the _combination_ of AI and
| its perpetual inability to fix moderation. They didn 't really
| care about fixing it for a whole decade because they didn't
| have any competition. Now AI is better than Stackoverflow for a
| lot of problems, they actually have viable competition and
| people are leaving.
| woodruffw wrote:
| I would expect there to be a measurement error here (although
| maybe not a significant one): individuals and services have
| repeatedly complained about AI companies engaging in aggressive
| crawling. Given that, one might expect to see traffic increases
| to data sources like Wikipedia and Reddit.
| _benj wrote:
| I've seen this shift in my own usage. I find myself appending
| "Reddit" to the end of my searches a lot more often, I have
| pinned Wikipedia to the top of my search results (in kagi) and I
| haven't visited stackoverflow in months, although I see that
| perplexity quotes it quite often when I ask it coding
| questions...
|
| I'm just a sample of one, but it's certainly interesting to see
| how apparently I'm just one of many
| mvdtnz wrote:
| It's shocking to me that people would intentionally seek Reddit
| threads. The quality of the discussion on that site is
| absolutely appalling beyond belief.
| anothereng wrote:
| if you look for non controversial topics it can have some
| good niche groups. Doesnt have good native search though so
| you have to use google or something else
| 0xffff2 wrote:
| Particularly for product reviews/information, it's the least
| biased (note: NOT unbiased) source I know of. If you're
| looking for information on what model of (to pick a recent
| personal example) toaster isn't complete junk, where do you
| look?
| rchaud wrote:
| As opposed to what, Yelp? Quora? A Wirecutter article
| bursting at the seams with affilliate links?
| plagiarist wrote:
| Exactly. Like the other person said, reddit is great if it
| is some niche. It is garbage on the more popular areas.
|
| Wirecutter is like: "we tested the top ~10 results on
| Amazon for ten minutes each and picked one."
|
| Whereas reddit is either: "we're so obsessed with
| flashlights we know the exact part number of the best LEDs
| to use (after you remove the cap from it)" or "haha I also
| remember the lyrics to that old top 40s hit song haha."
| charlieyu1 wrote:
| At least some of them are written by humans and some of them
| are good. Maybe good 20-50% of the time, still better than
| 100% SEO crap.
| cosmic_cheese wrote:
| Yep. As poor as the signal to noise ratio is, for many
| things it's substantially better there than elsewhere.
|
| Though as of late, that's been eroded too. Increasingly the
| most useful answers are in older threads more than newer
| ones, an effect I'd at least partially attribute to the
| APIpocolpyse a while back that drove away some of the
| site's best and most prolific contributors. It's becoming
| filled with the same mindless drivel found everywhere else.
| KapKap66 wrote:
| I do some game development research on reddit sometimes,
| and with fairly high frequency I find the highest quality
| results are something like 10+ years old. Occasionally I
| find something insightful in more recent threads but it's
| often heavily downvoted or hidden; it almost seems like
| difficult-or-controversial-but-content-heavy-meaningful
| answers automatically get thrashed by readers.
|
| Just commiserating, I guess...
| lz400 wrote:
| That's not true for the kind of searches we're talking about
| here. If you are looking for "best mechanical keyboard" or
| "reviews of shimano bicycle gearsets", reddit will regularly
| be of higher quality than the median google first page.
| tokioyoyo wrote:
| The problem with reviews is that on Reddit, it's almost
| guaranteed that you're reading a PR company's post.
| Starting 2020, marketing agencies have been openly
| advertising that they game Reddit threads for product
| placements. If you know anyone working in those
| departments, just ask around.
|
| Then guru-influencer-like people started selling growth
| hack tactics. Pretty much, again, openly discussing
| purchasing old Reddit accounts, how to make posts that are
| not obvious product placements and etc. Like if you see a
| list of suggested products, it'll be:
|
| 1. Competitor 2. Your product 3. Competitor
|
| With some pros/cons listed with the hopes to skew the
| result towards the second choice.
|
| There are exceptions, like very hardcore tiny moderated
| subreddits, but I really wouldn't take product
| recommendations from Reddit very seriously.
| javcasas wrote:
| > The problem with reviews is that on Reddit, it's almost
| guaranteed that you're reading a PR company's post.
|
| Sure. But, in the comments, you will find out that if you
| press both control and m and backspace at the same time,
| the keyboard explodes. Unlike Google, that when searching
| about explodey keyboards it gives you 37 pages of "10
| reasons why this is the best keyboard that totally
| doesn't explode".
| BigJono wrote:
| The comments are absolutely astroturfed to fuck as well,
| but you're right, there's at least some small signal in
| there, whereas average Google results have an amount
| indistinguishable from zero.
| maximus-decimus wrote:
| And you think the top google results are not gonna be PR
| astroturf too? SEO is the whole reason I append Reddit in
| the first place, it just killed google.
| tokioyoyo wrote:
| Not at all! Google sucks even more. All I'm saying is I
| wouldn't trust Reddit either.
| Terr_ wrote:
| > I find myself appending "Reddit" to the end of my searches a
| lot more often
|
| And even then, Reddit's "new" design is shit for usability,
| sine the actual text you were searching for is nowhere on the
| page. It's hidden somewhere behind one of a hundred "click to
| see more" interactions, some of which are nested, and some will
| cause a completely new new page load that erases your progress
| and makes you start over. (But look! Engagement metrics!)
|
| On a lighter note, a humorous critique that mentions the same
| mitigation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jrFv1O4dbqY
| tayo42 wrote:
| Just switch to old.reddit.com
| Terr_ wrote:
| Oh, I am _extremely_ aware.
|
| The problem is that many links (i.e. from Google) do not go
| there, most people won't know that's an option, and even if
| you do it means additional friction. (Yes, putting on a
| browser plugin to redirect also counts as friction. )
| jmholla wrote:
| Firefox has a plugin [0] that automatically redirects you
| to old.reddit.com.
|
| [0]: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/old-
| reddit-re...
| wiether wrote:
| Another thing that Kagi can do automatically for you once
| you set it up.
|
| Zero friction.
|
| https://help.kagi.com/kagi/features/redirects.html
| jajko wrote:
| Any forum on old.reddit.com has links to threads that go to
| new pages, supremely annoying (I am sure there is some
| plugin or workaround for that but why the heck should I
| battle the site just to use it)
| dredmorbius wrote:
| LibRedirect, browser extension:
|
| <https://addons.mozilla.org/en-
| US/firefox/addon/libredirect/?...>
|
| I installed it a couple of years back after multiple
| recommendations from other HN members. It fixes more than
| just Reddit.
| firstplacelast wrote:
| I've been working on learning PySpark this week, going through
| exercises to learn syntax and what-not. Avoiding ChatGPT bc I
| didn't want to be spoon fed anything. I couldn't figure out how
| to sort something in descending order. I searched SO for 5
| minutes, getting out-dated answers or overly complicated
| solutions not needed for my very simple one-liner. Click over
| to ChatGPT, give it the line of code I have and say 'make it
| sort in descending', and spits out exactly what I need.
|
| I haven't used SO in weeks prior and I think ChatGPT has pretty
| much killed its use case for me. Even two years ago, I would
| spend 1-6 hours/week searching SO posts depending on what I was
| working on.
| bcoates wrote:
| That seems to be a problem specific to PySpark, it's amazing
| how poor search results are for it despite it being
| reasonably popular.
| hereonout2 wrote:
| I also append "reddit" a lot - almost always when I want to get
| rid of google results that are ultimately just sales /
| marketing and not directly answering my queries.
|
| Reddit is not even a great source a lot of the time, just a way
| better start than a ton of marketing sites. Some type of search
| product that enables you to filter out results from companies
| trying to sell something would be awesome and an easily
| achievable benefit of AI.
| cynicalpeace wrote:
| I have the same exact usage behavior
| y-c-o-m-b wrote:
| I also used this tactic for questions about certain products,
| but I no longer use it in general because reddit has become
| riddled with bots, AI stories, astro-turfing campaigns, etc.
| It's hard to come across something genuine any more. This has
| been the case even before the AI craze of course, but now it's
| virtually unavoidable. The whole platform has become a giant
| shit hole.
| sethhochberg wrote:
| I find the trick with product reviews on modern reddit is to
| skip over anything positive and look for what people are
| complaining about.
|
| If I'm shopping for something deliberately enough to be
| digging through reviews I'm probably pretty sure it'll solve
| the problem all the positive reviews say it will solve. But I
| want to weigh that against all the negative feedback that
| might be removed or downplayed in big marketplaces or
| commercial review sites.
| dougb5 wrote:
| AI is killing my website but in a different way than what's
| discussed in the article: Content scrapers are completely out of
| control, spiking my serving costs and degrading performance for
| human users. There seem to be hundreds of them and they've gotten
| very good at looking like human users so they're hard to block or
| throttle. I can't prove they're all AI-related scrapers, but I've
| been running the site for 25 years and this issue only became
| problematic starting in, oh, late 2022 or so.
| pestaa wrote:
| Do you use a CDN in front of it?
|
| Would something like Cloudflare help with bot detection?
| dougb5 wrote:
| I'm on AWS and use their WAF service to do some rudimentary
| bot blocking, but CDNs (their Cloudflare equivalent,
| Cloudfront) have been too expensive in the past and the bot
| control mechanisms they offer have too many false positives.
| Perhaps I should check it out again.
|
| Part of the problem is the economics of it -- I've chosen to
| self-fund a high traffic site without ads, and that's on me.
| But it was possible to do this just a few years ago.
| gruez wrote:
| >and the bot control mechanisms they offer have too many
| false positives. Perhaps I should check it out again.
|
| Cloudflare no longer does CAPTCHAs so even if users get
| flagged as bots, the user experience isn't terrible. You
| just have to click on a box and you're on your way. It adds
| maybe 3s of delay, far better than anti-bot solutions that
| require you to solve an captcha, or imperva's (?) challenge
| that requires you to hold a button for 5-10s seconds.
| lcampbell wrote:
| If you're given a button to click, your browser has
| successfully passed the environment integrity checks and
| you have not been flagged as a bot.
|
| You'll be flagged as a bot if your browser configuration
| has something "weird" (e.g. webrtc is disabled to reduce
| your attack surface) and you will be completely unable to
| access any site behind cloudflare with the anti-bot
| options turned on. You'll get an infinite redirect loop,
| not a button to click.
| immibis wrote:
| Note that Google's version of this was determined to be
| checking whether you had a 9-day-old tracking cookie.
|
| The researcher who discovered this was able to generate
| 60,000 "I am not a bot" cookies per day, and use them up
| about 15 times each in a bot before it started getting
| captchas.
|
| That was in 2016 though.
| rixed wrote:
| Couldn't the content of that cookie be used to validate
| its actual age? Like, just signing the date of
| generation?
| gruez wrote:
| ...or generate a bunch and wait 9 days?
| immibis wrote:
| That's probably what it was. So they accessed some page
| over and over, pretending to not have the cookie yet, got
| a bunch of cookies, and 9 days later, used them to bypass
| captchas.
| dougb5 wrote:
| That is helpful, thank you! I will check it out.
| linuxftw wrote:
| Cloudflare is free. Give it a try.
| leviathant wrote:
| I'm not sure why this is down voted. The forum I run was
| hitting monthly bandwidth limits within days because of
| bots. Changes to htaccess and checking environment data
| in the PHP code was a cat and mouse game. The free
| Cloudflare tier solved my problem.
| rchaud wrote:
| Even my barely visited personal website is using almost 10GB
| bandwidth per month according to Digital Ocean. My website is
| 90% text with no video, so I imagine it's just bots and
| scrapers hitting it all day. I'm very close to password
| protecting the whole thing aside from the homepage.
| immibis wrote:
| So about 1 request per second?
| ehnto wrote:
| Same, I get next to no value from the personal website these
| days. Certainly not worth being exposed to the harsh
| realities of the web in 2025.
|
| A sad state of affairs, but it was predicted decades ago that
| commercial interests would turn the internet into what it is
| today, even without AI. Layer on the dead internet theory
| slowly coming true, and walled gardens almost feel like the
| last bastion of free internet, rather than being what brought
| it to an end.
|
| There's probably some nuance there, maybe the walled gardens
| allowed us to be comfortable letting it get this bad. Either
| way, what's gone is gone.
|
| I am getting a lot of joy from local net and just making
| little devices at home, that is giving me the same excitement
| that the web did in the past!
| AznHisoka wrote:
| What devices are you making?
| 3vidence wrote:
| I've never really thought of this as a strong benefit
| before but this seems like a good argument for app
| development in 2025.
|
| Started my career as a web developer and always have a soft
| spot for it but from a hobby developer standpoint hosting
| and deploying a site feels like an uphill battle with
| little upside.
|
| Theres a lot to not like about app development but after
| you get approval for your app it's pretty hands off.
|
| Heck on android you can just distribute the raw APK on a
| Google drive. Or just keep the app locally for yourself.
|
| I probably have about 20 self made apps on my phone and
| they each give me a bit of happiness.
| kibwen wrote:
| _> after you get approval for your app it 's pretty hands
| off._
|
| For about a year, after which point both Apple and Google
| will arbitrarily remove your app from stores for not
| keeping up with the platform update treadmill.
| 3vidence wrote:
| It's really a tradeoff.
|
| Keep up with platform updates or constantly deal with the
| afformentioned crawlers and hugs of death.
| AznHisoka wrote:
| Are you paying per GB bandwidth with DigitalOcean?
| rchaud wrote:
| It's a flat rate. That said it feels like wasted bandwidth
| as I know it's not humans visiting the site. There isn't
| anywhere near 10GB of content on my site. 200 MB max.
| gboss wrote:
| This is no joke. Run an e-commerce site and have been generally
| skeptical of WAFs but had to sign up for a bot mitigation
| service because it became out of control two years ago. These
| bots were even executing JavaScript and loading third party
| scripts which caused additional fees from these vendors. We
| went with Datadome and are pretty happy with it but I wish I
| didn't need to!
| radium3d wrote:
| Blocking AI content bots is the name of the game. Luckily most
| of the big hitters stick with a unique user agent string and/or
| IP.
| dougb5 wrote:
| When you say "big hitters", I guess you mean the well-known
| corporate crawlers like GPTBot (one of OpenAI's). Yes, these
| do tend to identify themselves --and they tend to respect
| robots.txt, too -- but they're a small part of the problem,
| from my perspective. Because there's also a long tail of
| anonymous twerps training models using botnets of various
| kinds, and these folks do not identify themselves, and in
| fact they try to look like ordinary users. Collectively these
| bots use _way_ more resources than the name-brand crawlers.
|
| (My site is basically a search engine, which complicates
| matters because there's effectively an infinite space of
| URLs. Just one of these rogue bots can scrape millions of
| pages from tens of thousands of IPs; and I think there are
| hundreds of the bots at any given moment...)
| astennumero wrote:
| Can't you use Captcha services? If the big tech captcha
| services are too costly, one could create a rudimentary captcha
| defense against these bots pretty easily. Am I missing
| something?
| moffkalast wrote:
| If you throw a captcha in actual users' faces they'll most
| likely just leave for a competitor that doesn't harass them
| with busywork, and you'll be left with only bots patiently
| trying to get past it.
| dougb5 wrote:
| Oh, I've tried captchas, and I can say that they're an awful
| experience for the humans you accidentally hit, at least for
| a service like mine that is relatively low value per session
| (a dictionary website). Within minutes of changing my WAF
| configuration to captcha users that it thinks are high-
| probability bots, I'll get angry feedback from users in
| Singapore (say) who don't want to have to solve a puzzle in
| order to look up a word in the dictionary. I don't blame
| them.
|
| I like the Cloudflare challenge ideas suggested on this
| thread, though, I might try them again.
| mfalcon wrote:
| At least your content is going to be included in the LLMs for
| years to come. Kind of a legacy:)
| austin-cheney wrote:
| Determine how much you need bots to access your website. If you
| don't need them then block them. This will kill you if you are
| reliant upon AD revenue.
|
| On my personal site I started blocking bots and also set a
| "noindex, nofollow" rule to block web crawlers and search bots
| too. I noticed no change in traffic and still do about 10,000
| visits a month.
| TZubiri wrote:
| This may surprise you, but some bots don't respect robots.txt
| austin-cheney wrote:
| No, but you can identify and block them by other means,
| such as redirecting bots to an empty page on your web
| server or blocking them from your router.
| TZubiri wrote:
| but how do you identify them?
| aeve890 wrote:
| Can you like, run your content in JS only and mine crypto if
| you detect the visitor is a bot?
| dougb5 wrote:
| Diabolical! But I think the occasional humans that I falsely
| identify as a bot will not appreciate this.
| vecter wrote:
| I've noticed that since I've started using ChatGPT, I've almost
| entirely stopped using Google (except for the rare case where I
| need a specific website but don't remember the URL). In addition
| to a bunch of technical questions related to my work, my ChatGPT
| chat log has the most mundane things like: - What
| is platos frios - Can you download Netflix videos to your
| local device - Who composed the Top Gun theme - Who
| have been the most successful American Idol winners - If I
| check-in the day before a United Airlines flight, can I still buy
| additional checked bags when I go to the airport - If I'm
| buying a Schwinn IC4 indoor spin bike, do I need a floormat for
| it also - What is pisco - In the US, what is the
| format for EINs? - Is it bad to use tap water in your
| humidifier? - Which NBA players are on supermax contracts
| - What are some of the best steakhouses in Manhattan? - How
| much and how long does it take to procure a DUNS number? -
| In terms of real estate, what is historic tax credit development
|
| LLMs give me the answers I want immediately. Before, I would use
| Google basically as a _proxy_ to find websites that I 'd then
| have to sift through to find the answers to these questions. It
| was another layer of indirection. Now that I can have an LLM just
| tell me the answer (you still need to approach it with a
| skeptical eye, since it can certainly get some things wrong), I
| don't need to "search" the search results pages themselves and
| read multiple articles and blog posts to hopefully find the
| answer to my question.
| RandallBrown wrote:
| I really like having the site where the answer came from so I
| can instantly judge how likely the answer is to be correct.
|
| Chat GPT does correctly answer your question about airline
| bags, but I have no way of knowing if it made that answer up or
| not because so many airlines have the same policy.
|
| Google at least gives you links to the United baggage policies.
| The AI overview in Google also "cites its sources", which sort
| of gives you the best of both worlds. (I'm sure the accuracy of
| Google's AI vs. ChatGPT is up for debate)
| moi2388 wrote:
| Gpt has web search with links to the website.
| hunter-gatherer wrote:
| I might misunderstand, but can't you just ask for the
| reference? I've also been using (Gemini) a lot to basically
| replace my search engine, but I always tell it to give me a
| reference. I've had pretty good results with this approach.
| boilerupnc wrote:
| I wonder how many new, strange, surprising and wonderful things
| you indirectly stumbled into during those sifting exercises.
| Hyper-optimized search has some downsides. I love getting
| answers to my specific questions, but that always encompasses
| the "known unknowns" space. Through skimming and sifting using
| websites as proxies, I enjoyed surprises from the "unknown
| unknowns" space.
| hunter-gatherer wrote:
| 10 years ago I'd agree with you completely. I definitely get
| your point and share some of that same sentiment, but search
| results these past 10 uears have become overwhelming absurd,
| shallow, and barely tangentially related to what I'm looking
| for
| mitthrowaway2 wrote:
| After some experience and testing, I've become well aware _not_
| to use LLMs to ask questions like "who did X" and "what is
| company Y's policy about Z", because they tend to hallucinate
| responses (even for well-known people).
|
| What I've not yet figured out how to deal with is how to handle
| being surrounded by a society of people who go ahead and trust
| LLMs for their factual answers anyway. I think even if I'm
| careful about selecting my sources, the background noise floor
| is going to climb up to the point that there's no signal-to-
| noise ratio left.
| Thorentis wrote:
| People used to criticise Wikipedia for being bad due to being
| crowdsourced (at least in school they did). Now, Wikipedia
| looks like one of the best antidotes to LLMs.
| rixed wrote:
| Technically, I see no reason why Wikipedia would stay
| immune very much longer, unfortunately.
|
| The best antidote is printed books.
| nitwit005 wrote:
| I suspect this is more of a case of garbage-in garbage-out.
| The existing web results have invented answers.
|
| People created websites to "answer" people's search queries
| about celebrity net worth, if some celebrity is gay, if they
| are in a relationship, etc. They obviously frequently did not
| know, and made a guess, or relied on tabloids as a source,
| who also frequently make things up.
| milesrout wrote:
| Yes but it is quite obvious that you are on a site like
| that so you can ignore it. How am I meant to know if
| ChatGPT was trained on those websites? How do I know when
| it is effectively drawing from that vs drawing from a
| reliable source?
| nitwit005 wrote:
| It seems you already know the answer to that, which is
| that you don't.
| upcoming-sesame wrote:
| Same for me. The only thing I still use Google for is for up to
| date data as LLMs are not great with that yet
| drdaeman wrote:
| The problem with this approach is that LLM gives me unreliable
| answers. I know this because sometimes I ask things that I used
| to knew but forgot and needed to refresh my memory - and
| sometimes the answers were incorrect. So, unfortunately, a
| search engine validation step is still a necessity.
|
| Asking LLM to provide a link does NOT work, as they hallucinate
| links just fine, and give links that are either broken or do
| not contain the information LLM says it should. Using search
| tools through a LLM (like ChatGPT's "search" function) sort of
| works (at least the link will be correct - still need to check
| if the contents means what LLM says it does), but it's quite
| limited and cannot be fine-tuned (I don't use Google but rather
| prefer Kagi, and I tend to heavily rely on Kagi's lenses, site:
| queries and negative terms to scope and refine searches).
|
| In other words: please do NOT trust LLM's answers, even if they
| sound plausible. Always verify.
| scarface_74 wrote:
| You aren't using the paid version of ChatGPT are you? It does
| a real time search of the web for links.
| milesrout wrote:
| Does it matter to you whether the answers you are given are
| correct? Google results are sometimes wrong but the web gives
| you signals about reliability, like the author, etc. If I want
| to know who wrote a paper, I can google the paper's name and
| get an ACM page about the paper or a PDF of the paper and read
| the author's name. Very reliable. If ChatGPT says the name I
| have no clue if it is right.
|
| Multiple sources is a good thing. Using just ChatGPT is like
| only ever using Wikipedia as a source of all information, but
| put through a filter that removes all sources and attribution
| information and cross linking and history and those notices at
| the top of pages saying the article has issues AND normalising
| the writing style so that you can't even use bad spelling and
| grammar as a signal of inaccuracy.
| alter123 wrote:
| the analysis isn't correct, it feels like a forced segregation
|
| - reddit got boost because of google's investment in it, and
| they're consciously boosting it - wikipedia clearly doesn't have
| increase in page views - substack as a product has been on rise,
| more authors leading to more views, no actual co-relation with
| the content on the platform
| steezeburger wrote:
| Are they just getting more ai bot visits because they're user
| generated content sites?
| rqtwteye wrote:
| It's basically the same situation as the .COM bubble. Some
| companies used the internet to an advantage and thrived. Others
| slapped ".COM" on everything but didn't really understand what
| they are doing.
| jgalt212 wrote:
| > Yet, despite the challenges, Quora still pulls in just under 1
| billion visits a month.
|
| Man, those a big numbers. I would have bet two orders of
| magnitude lower.
| jgalt212 wrote:
| and the author report this about Wikipedia
|
| > Also, over 5B visits a month - consider me impressed.
|
| How does Wikipedia only do 5X the visits that Quora does? Which
| number is way off?
| dumbledoren wrote:
| That's because Quora is still very good if you ignore content
| you don't like and just engage with content that interests you.
| Ekaros wrote:
| It ranks very very highly in Google's SEO... It is generally
| one of the results you get when you search for most questions.
| So to me it sounds pretty reasonable number.
| wdutch wrote:
| The decline in cnet might suggest people are using LLMs for
| product reviews and recommendations? I'm surprised because I
| personally wouldn't trust an LLM for that.
|
| Maybe the new frontier of SEO is gaming LLMs to recommend your
| product.
| itsjustoldai wrote:
| It seems to me that this article has no way of telling whether
| these are actual people visiting or AI agents/bots visiting to
| get content. I'm betting it's the later in all cases.
| necovek wrote:
| All I see is some unmeasured correlation. How did we get to
| causality?
| timewizard wrote:
| > Users no longer need to click through pages when AI summarizes
| everything in seconds.
|
| Sure... unless they want /accurate/ results.
| HermanMartinus wrote:
| I can attest to this. I run Bear Blog, and it has seen a dramatic
| rise in signups month-over-month. My suspicion is that other
| platforms are getting covered in AI generated content, and while
| Bear isn't perfect, there is a lot more curation and a strict no
| advertising policy.
| user9999999999 wrote:
| More or less trained LLMs are obfuscating "stolen" training data.
| The status quo used to call this sort of thing theft and piracy
| yalogin wrote:
| My search pattern has completely changed. I just go to chatgpt or
| meta ai directly these days for topics/queries I need help recall
| or summarization with. This is usually most of the searches. The
| only reason I use google is for maps based info.
|
| I cannot see the use for Webmd and other sites that provide
| information along specific verticals, anymore. People are going
| to WebMD and these sites out of habit and that is it, the same
| info can already be summarized by an LLM today. That habit is
| powerful and what will give these sites some time to pivot if
| they can
|
| Over time as genAI becomes better, everything that doesn't have
| any time based function will be consumed by it.
| ViktorRay wrote:
| You should try Perplexity too. In my experience Perplexity is
| far better than Google Gemini or Meta AI for searching for info
| and getting summaries.
| yalogin wrote:
| This is where first mover advantage and habit play too. Chat
| gpt and meta ai are good enough for basic recall and
| summarization tasks.
|
| Google has a branding problem. They integrated Gemini into
| their search UI, so they just want people to continue the
| same landing page. However, it feels too noisy, and
| unnecessary. All I want is a summarization. I don't want to
| see a huge list of ads or slightly related links. Adds no
| value to me.
|
| I tried anthropic but it fell way short and so stuck with
| chat gpt and meta ai. Now for Perplexity I need a compelling
| need to use it. Haven't seen it yet.
| ViktorRay wrote:
| I mentioned Perplexity because their service focuses pretty
| much only on using LLMs for searching and summarizing. It
| doesn't do creative stuff like some of the other services
| do.
|
| I mainly also just use AI for searching and summarizing
| like you seem to do as well so that's why I recommended it.
| iszomer wrote:
| My search patterns has changed as well but not without some
| pushback, whether it be ChatGPT's inability to:
|
| - cite sources within a certain timeframe which can be
| trivially done on Google Search
|
| - exclude sources when explicitly asked (and vice versa)
|
| And makes it challenging to determine whether it's output has
| any reasonable depth or not. Even my simple request on a
| refresher on the usage of mutexes in C++ gave me a code snippet
| that exacerbated the very issue I was hoping to get a better
| handle on. /shrug
| righthand wrote:
| When all the specific niche sites like WebMD go under where
| will ChatGPT get it's information?
| casey2 wrote:
| "Hey {user} remember that disease you had a while back with
| {list of symptoms} did you ever get that checked out"?
|
| "Yeah it was a rare new disease the doctor called it {name of
| disease}"
|
| But seriously there are real medical sources that are far
| more valuable than freaking WebMD, Medical journals (e.g.,
| PubMed, JAMA), Health agencies (e.g., CDC, WHO), Books and
| Textbooks, User-Generated Content, Firsthand Expert Input
|
| Medical information isn't exactly a "niche". Most sites rely
| on community which chatbots could, but probably won't emulate
| anytime soon, I also really doubt the implication that
| someones' personal, likely nonmonitized, webpage is going to
| "go under" because it gets less than some arbitrary view
| count.
|
| A better question is "When all the governments go under where
| will chatGPT get it's information"
| apwell23 wrote:
| > I cannot see the use for Webmd and other sites that provide
| information along specific verticals, anymore.
|
| You want hallucinated medical information?
|
| How is this not entirely absurd. I feel so angry that person
| who wrote this comment already knew that its absurd but
| proceeded to make this comment and prbly got upvotes.
| yalogin wrote:
| Wait, why do people use WebMd? Is it used by medical
| professionals? I thought its for regular people diagnosing
| their problem for fun. All of that information they can get
| from their doctor. For really specific information like
| symptoms for a disease, I cannot imagine there be a
| hallucinations. Even if it did today, it will only get better
| over time. I don't see it as a problem with this specific use
| case. I am one of the biggest AI skeptics out there, but when
| there is practical use, I accept it
| apwell23 wrote:
| you are using chatgpt for medical info today because it
| might get better tomorrow? your comment wasn't what you
| plan to do it in future with it, you claimed you are doing
| all those things today. Now you are talking something about
| future hypothetical.
| TZubiri wrote:
| Looks like those whose business model is producing shitty content
| are struggling, and those that provide quality content, are doing
| well.
|
| Wikiepdia: Good Quora: Bad Reddit: Good CNet: Bad
|
| It makes sense, as LLM content is of mediocre quality, if you
| want something of good and reliable quality you go elsewhere.
| 29athrowaway wrote:
| If your service is simply prompting an AI model, your company
| will be eaten be obsoleted by AI.
|
| If your service acquires real world data specific to individuals
| and organizations that is used to make better decisions, your
| company will not be eaten by AI (immediately).
| grvag1 wrote:
| I believe the biggest dent AI has made is in the SEO and
| consulting industries.
| Johnny555 wrote:
| I don't think CNET can blame AI for its downfall, it's just not a
| very good site.
|
| It used to be a good place for tech news (after all, they are
| "news.com"), but now they are mostly a review site with shallow
| reviews seemingly based on what they read on manufacturer and
| retailer product pages... and of course, with lots of affiliate
| links so they get their cut if you buy a product based on their
| review.
| AznHisoka wrote:
| While AI may technically be leading to less traffic for some
| sites, they didn't deserve most of that traffic in the first
| place. Also most haven't lost 90% of their traffic yet, so AI,
| please continue your killing - you're not done yet!
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2025-03-01 23:01 UTC)