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..?
> 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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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...
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...
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.
> 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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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% :-)
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.
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.
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.
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)
/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.
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.
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."
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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!?
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.
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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.
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.
> 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". :-)
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.
> - 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> - 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Nope. Stack mods close questions related to major programming debates because the moderator and his clique decided that one practice is 'the best' etc.
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.
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.
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!
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.
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!
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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...)
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.
>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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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".
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
> 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!)
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. )
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)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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".
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.
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.
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."
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.
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.
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?
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
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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."
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?
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
"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"
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.
> 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.
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
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.
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.
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
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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)
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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..?
> 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.
> 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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
The problem with marking answers “obsolete” is that many code bases are old. You need those answers.
Obsolete answers shouldn't be removed. They should be de-ranked and marked as such, but still available without extra clicks.
And pointed to newer ways of doing it
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
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...
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.
> 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
> 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.
> 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.
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.
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.
You're describing SO experience 3 years ago. I don't use SO at all now lol
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
> 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.
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.
>Reading that defined Quora in my mind for the next few years.
Because he was an impersonator? Or because he really was Joe Bloe?
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,_California
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.
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% :-)
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.
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?
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.
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.
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)
/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.
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.
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.
When ever I go into a Quora page it has always 99% confused me on where the answer lies
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.
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."
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
That's just copying from better sources, doesn't mean the ai is "smarter".
True. But AI does not close your question because it didn’t like your phrasing.
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.
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.
So, <https://www.wired.com/2010/06/iphone-4-holding-it-wrong/>?
Care to enlighten us heathens?
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.
AI can also answer any question in your own language.
Imagine all of stack overflow seamlessly translated to, say, Thai or Vietnamese.
How about "more capable"?
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.
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
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.
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.
it won't work for anything that requires a novel synthesis of ideas because Gen AI is incapable of novelty
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.
> 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!?
Not to mention the CS teachers who have to compete with the students they taught!
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.
See what’s missing is the ability to put your answers on the blockchain …
> 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". :-)
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.
Make new q&a websites.
> - 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.
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.
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
SO also has the "eternal September" problem
I think the claim above simply redefines “quality platform” with the benefit of hindsight.
Wasn't poe.com supposed to be the quora replacement since its run by the same guy who also sat on the OpenAI board?
You need moderation to reduce low quality content.
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.
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.
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.
Just weighing in, I always appreciated SO’s moderation style
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
You have been banned from /r/NorthKorea ...
(One of the more ostentatious examples, but hardly the only one.)
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.
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
And then there are subreddit coups where someone ousts the old mods and starts banning people according to a whole new set of opinions . . .
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/1xdwba/the_history_of...> (2014).
I get that for subreddit bans, but I've never had a sitewide ban.
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.
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).
We need P2P social media where bigoted, power hungry mods can't enforce their unilateral views on everyone else.
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.
We had it. It's still out there. NNTP (and ignore cancel messages if you dare).
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.
We get what we've paid for. I wouldn't want the thankless work for free job.
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.
> 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.
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.
I have no idea what the back story is here, but 'they fixed the answer' is not a scalable solution to GPT's limitations.
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.
Interestingly I have not seen a single quora result for months either from ChatGPT, perplexity or google
> - 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.
Who cares about the quora community? Who wants to do any of that dance?
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.
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.
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.
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.
Nope. Stack mods close questions related to major programming debates because the moderator and his clique decided that one practice is 'the best' etc.
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.
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.
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!
What devices are you making?
Are you paying per GB bandwidth with DigitalOcean?
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.
So about 1 request per second?
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!
Can you like, run your content in JS only and mine crypto if you detect the visitor is a bot?
Diabolical! But I think the occasional humans that I falsely identify as a bot will not appreciate this.
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.
This may surprise you, but some bots don't respect robots.txt
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.
but how do you identify them?
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?
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.
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.
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.
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...)
At least your content is going to be included in the LLMs for years to come. Kind of a legacy:)
Do you use a CDN in front of it?
Would something like Cloudflare help with bot detection?
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.
>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.
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.
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.
Couldn't the content of that cookie be used to validate its actual age? Like, just signing the date of generation?
...or generate a bunch and wait 9 days?
That is helpful, thank you! I will check it out.
Cloudflare is free. Give it a try.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
ChatGPT nearly killed Chegg
https://www.reddit.com/r/ArtificialInteligence/comments/1cwq...
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".
How about you don't cheat and actually study?
No sympathy. Glad it's dying.
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.
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.
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.
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
What are you referring to by "the question of wine?" Searching online didn't help, unless you meant Dandelion Wine by Ray Bradbury?
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?"
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.
All the professors I pair with recently for papers are pro-chatgpt with some minor grumbling of content refactors.
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.
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
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.
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.
> 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
Just switch to old.reddit.com
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. )
Another thing that Kagi can do automatically for you once you set it up.
Zero friction.
https://help.kagi.com/kagi/features/redirects.html
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...
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)
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.
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.
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.
That seems to be a problem specific to PySpark, it’s amazing how poor search results are for it despite it being reasonably popular.
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.
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.
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.
> 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".
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.
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.
Not at all! Google sucks even more. All I’m saying is I wouldn’t trust Reddit either.
As opposed to what, Yelp? Quora? A Wirecutter article bursting at the seams with affilliate links?
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."
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.
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.
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...
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?
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
I have the same exact usage behavior
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.
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.
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.
> 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
Sure, but it implies writing "quality content" won't work as a replacement.
I don't think it implies that at all.
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.
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.
Correct. That is how it should be, not daily update spam.
Where can I find this "high quality content written by humans" exactly? Without paying a subscription fee for it, of course.
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.
can't get from LLMs for 6 months until the next training run?
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.
I sure hope you’re right.
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.
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.
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.
People are hostile towards all types of spam, but it still happens.
Nor will calling it true make it true. Epistemology is great that way.
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
Content marketing died already many years ago.
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?
I'm sure the AI company will eventually let you bid to be ranked in the answers.
> 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.
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.
> 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?
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.
I’m not a marketer, I’m just curious! I write code, not blogspam.
Sponsor relevant podcasts?
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.
>One of our main marketing channels was writing SEO-oriented articles on our company’s blog.
So, blogspam?
Elena's article is content marketing. It doesn't look dead to me.
> Content marketing is dead.
I mean... good? The quality of search results has gotten increasingly worse over time...
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.)
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.
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.
Exactly. Humans can't compete with AI content filters... but AI can.
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.
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.
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.
There will be people paying for premium content and people writing it. A new technology doesn't suddenly remove human demand.
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.
ChapGPT enshitification is only waiting to happen (or happening already) through subtle recommendations for businesses that paid to be “listed” well.
I believe the biggest dent AI has made is in the SEO and consulting industries.
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.
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
When all the specific niche sites like WebMD go under where will ChatGPT get it’s information?
"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"
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.
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.
> 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.
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
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.
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.
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
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.
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).
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.
Are they just getting more ai bot visits because they're user generated content sites?
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.
All I see is some unmeasured correlation. How did we get to causality?
> 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.
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.
That's because Quora is still very good if you ignore content you don't like and just engage with content that interests you.
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?
> Users no longer need to click through pages when AI summarizes everything in seconds.
Sure... unless they want /accurate/ results.
More or less trained LLMs are obfuscating "stolen" training data. The status quo used to call this sort of thing theft and piracy
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:
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.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.
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.
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.
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?
It seems you already know the answer to that, which is that you don't.
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.
Technically, I see no reason why Wikipedia would stay immune very much longer, unfortunately.
The best antidote is printed books.
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)
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.
Gpt has web search with links to the website.
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.
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
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.
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
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