This resonates with me. I’m willing to pay for content for humans by humans.
I am reducing my engagements with the web and technology in general due to lack of quality. It due to AI content, AI hype seeping through everything non-stop. Throw in ads literally everywhere, hyper partisan politics, phony influencers, social media algorithms that live off of FOMO.
It’s all gross and has been sapping the joy from people for too long.
aeon_ai · 23m ago
Their frustration with plagiarism, inaccuracy, and the "tragedy of the commons" effect on web content is valid, but that is human behavior - they even cite an example.
But "wisdom", if we are going to aspire to that, would look for the ways these tools can be used to better our condition as creators and thinkers, rather than have our opinion be led by a reactive moral narrative not grounded in pragmatism or reality.
sp4cemoneky · 1h ago
To be honest, is it really that bad that the web is dead? I understand the value of a forum, but as far as the content is concerned if we were to go back to the days of physical magazines I wouldn't be upset.
dotancohen · 53m ago
It is not the medium that is dying, rather it is the content that is dying. People are saying the web is dying because there's no longer financial incentive for actual humans to create content (there may be other incentives, and those types of forms may flourish). That goes equally for other media as well: print, digital, it doesn't matter.
CuriouslyC · 45m ago
There's an incentive to create content, but it's skewed towards video (or towards creating content of any sort when you already have a fan base).
Trying to create a fan base with the written word in 2025 is probably a bad idea.
pentamassiv · 54m ago
Only that there is no way back. Those physical magazines would contain the same AI generated content.
Mk2000 · 1h ago
I feel like we're going though an evolution of the web, and no matter what we do, it's going to happen.
The web is going to change (for better or worse) or die, and there's nothing we can do about it.
The web killed printed media to a large degree and AI will do the same, Resistance is futile!
cootsnuck · 39m ago
You may be right that resistance is futile. But I don't think adaptation is. And there's no reason our adaptation can't be rooted in resistance.
For example, maybe smaller local forums make a comeback and their communities decide to hide all threads behind auth. (I don't necessarily see that happening, just an example.)
And honestly given the stronger feelings people are developing against what I'll just call "creative use of generative AI", I'm starting to think maybe resistance isn't futile... Poisoning original digital art so it's less useful for image generators...social shaming of AI generated music being laundered on platforms...those things do feel like meaningful steps towards resistance.
notarobot123 · 33m ago
Printed media, radio and television are still very much alive and well, just not as big as they once were. We've past peak Web but it's not going anywhere anytime soon.
We do need new protocols though.
As a social network the web is collapsing but it is entirely possible that a new kind of internet could emerge in its place. After all, routing around damage is part of the essence of the Internet.
paul7986 · 42m ago
Without authors being paid to create new content AI is nothing/it's irrelevant!
Either some startup needs to come up with compensation for authors or the big players need to set up a system that still gets authors paid as Im guessing in five to ten years we are not visiting websites. Our soon to be AI friend (Facetime the "friend," or just talk or text it) seen on our lockscreens or in a hologram is visiting all sites to create visuals of the info and displaying/discussing it with us immediately upon request.
ballenf · 1h ago
> Nothing that I publish here has come from AI or answer engines. Every word that is written comes from this human.
I think we're rapidly approaching the point where no one will be able to make this claim anymore. AI summaries and answers are ubiquitous and our knowledge or beliefs are directly or indirectly informed by them. We can avoid 1st order AI use, but it is impossible to avoid 2nd order and further exposure.
The water supply has been poisoned and everyone needs to drink.
CafeRacer · 2h ago
So... a reasonably stupid question - captchas and bot protection (e.g. cloudflare stuff) do not deter bots anymore?
throwup238 · 58m ago
Haven’t for a while. There’s a bunch of open source projects that provide a Captcha and Cloudflare bypass proxy where you just point your scraping through the proxy and it takes care of the challenges. It’s rather trivial to handle nowadays.
A bunch of the torrent trackers are now behind Cloudflare so the pirate community has been maintaining many of these projects in order to enable their autodownloaders like Sonarr, Radarr, Lidarr, etc.
wild_egg · 1h ago
They're more of a speed bump. Deter drive-by scraping and whatever they call script kiddies these days.
chrismorgan · 26m ago
> Both are well worth the effort of creating an account to read them.
Talking about how AI broke the web, while gating the content in a way that breaks the web, which they’ve been doing since before the AI/LLM threat came on the scene.
One of the reasons people prefer AI to visiting the source websites is because the source websites have so often made it such an unpleasant experience, making you jump through hoops and navigate a maze of dark patterns. Meanwhile, AI gives you what you want without all those roadblocks.
This is like Napster vs iTunes all over again. People started paying for media online as soon as it became convenient to do so. You make things inconvenient for people, you’ll lose out to whatever the more convenient option is.
coffeefirst · 11m ago
This might get worse.
The free open web was economically dependent on reaching large audiences by search and social, and supported by advertising. Without that scale, you're looking at more paywalls and membership programs. The smaller the niche, the more expensive and tighter the program needs to be.
A lot of that gating went into effect after social media start suppressing links.
If you believe in making quality products available to mass audiences—information wants to be free and all that—this is a problem.
frizlab · 2h ago
I do agree that no AI content is primordial and I’d personally accompany it with a “no AI crawlers allowed”.
Feeding AI with new high quality content only add to the problem. We must stop feeding it.
altairprime · 2h ago
Set your site to 401 unauthorized with a basic challenge if an auth header isn’t sent, and set the auth description to “Enter anything to proceed. All human access is authorized. Unauthorized non-human access is prohibited.”. Crawlers can’t parse the instructions and will deadstop on them, while people will shrug and enter any password, which will work.
Anubis is also viable and popular, but it lacks the legal threat to AI of being able to file a federal hacking claim against a scraper’s unauthorized intrusion if they code their scraper to transmit an empty/invalid/valid authentication header.
NitpickLawyer · 32m ago
> Crawlers can’t parse the instructions
What decade do you think it is? :) Depending on who you ask, captcha bots have become better at solving them than humans...
There's almost nothing you can do that "AI" can't while keeping it easy enough for your average joe that wants to login. Especially considering "the grandma test"...
AznHisoka · 1h ago
“while people will shrug and enter any password, which will work.”
I think you might be overestiating how much patience humans have when browsing a site
noman-land · 1h ago
Can you say more about why a crawler couldn't parse an auth deacription and also what is an auth description?
orkj · 1h ago
> what is an auth description?
They are probably referring to the text in the basic auth "pop-up" which is usually set like
WWW-Authenticate: Basic realm="my text"
makingstuffs · 1h ago
Very feasible solution I guess the only issue is that we now have to add friction for legitimate users which will only accelerate their migration to AI summaries at the top of the page.
dylan604 · 21m ago
> Crawlers can’t parse the instructions and will deadstop on them, while people will shrug and enter any password, which will work.
Well, that just seems like something where they will just fix the glitch. Do you really think that the devs of bots can't fix this instead of it just haven't fixed it yet?
sixQuarks · 41m ago
So AI writers will now include an owl emoji to indicate that they are human writers.
I am reducing my engagements with the web and technology in general due to lack of quality. It due to AI content, AI hype seeping through everything non-stop. Throw in ads literally everywhere, hyper partisan politics, phony influencers, social media algorithms that live off of FOMO.
It’s all gross and has been sapping the joy from people for too long.
But "wisdom", if we are going to aspire to that, would look for the ways these tools can be used to better our condition as creators and thinkers, rather than have our opinion be led by a reactive moral narrative not grounded in pragmatism or reality.
Trying to create a fan base with the written word in 2025 is probably a bad idea.
For example, maybe smaller local forums make a comeback and their communities decide to hide all threads behind auth. (I don't necessarily see that happening, just an example.)
And honestly given the stronger feelings people are developing against what I'll just call "creative use of generative AI", I'm starting to think maybe resistance isn't futile... Poisoning original digital art so it's less useful for image generators...social shaming of AI generated music being laundered on platforms...those things do feel like meaningful steps towards resistance.
We do need new protocols though.
As a social network the web is collapsing but it is entirely possible that a new kind of internet could emerge in its place. After all, routing around damage is part of the essence of the Internet.
Either some startup needs to come up with compensation for authors or the big players need to set up a system that still gets authors paid as Im guessing in five to ten years we are not visiting websites. Our soon to be AI friend (Facetime the "friend," or just talk or text it) seen on our lockscreens or in a hologram is visiting all sites to create visuals of the info and displaying/discussing it with us immediately upon request.
I think we're rapidly approaching the point where no one will be able to make this claim anymore. AI summaries and answers are ubiquitous and our knowledge or beliefs are directly or indirectly informed by them. We can avoid 1st order AI use, but it is impossible to avoid 2nd order and further exposure.
The water supply has been poisoned and everyone needs to drink.
A bunch of the torrent trackers are now behind Cloudflare so the pirate community has been maintaining many of these projects in order to enable their autodownloaders like Sonarr, Radarr, Lidarr, etc.
Talking about how AI broke the web, while gating the content in a way that breaks the web, which they’ve been doing since before the AI/LLM threat came on the scene.
(According to <https://medium.com/whats-new-in-publishing/inside-the-econom...>, they always had a soft paywall, but they diminished their free article limits steadily until it reached zero and became a hard paywall in 2019.)
This is like Napster vs iTunes all over again. People started paying for media online as soon as it became convenient to do so. You make things inconvenient for people, you’ll lose out to whatever the more convenient option is.
The free open web was economically dependent on reaching large audiences by search and social, and supported by advertising. Without that scale, you're looking at more paywalls and membership programs. The smaller the niche, the more expensive and tighter the program needs to be.
A lot of that gating went into effect after social media start suppressing links.
If you believe in making quality products available to mass audiences—information wants to be free and all that—this is a problem.
Feeding AI with new high quality content only add to the problem. We must stop feeding it.
Anubis is also viable and popular, but it lacks the legal threat to AI of being able to file a federal hacking claim against a scraper’s unauthorized intrusion if they code their scraper to transmit an empty/invalid/valid authentication header.
What decade do you think it is? :) Depending on who you ask, captcha bots have become better at solving them than humans...
There's almost nothing you can do that "AI" can't while keeping it easy enough for your average joe that wants to login. Especially considering "the grandma test"...
I think you might be overestiating how much patience humans have when browsing a site
They are probably referring to the text in the basic auth "pop-up" which is usually set like
WWW-Authenticate: Basic realm="my text"
Well, that just seems like something where they will just fix the glitch. Do you really think that the devs of bots can't fix this instead of it just haven't fixed it yet?
This is so useless