this post was submitted on 13 May 2025
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[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

yes but cloudflare defending garbage people who dox trans people is also killing the web

[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 weeks ago

I didn't even know about that until now. But how does that affect AI and websites?

[–] [email protected] 109 points 2 weeks ago (4 children)

Yeah well maybe the web shouldn't be a business

[–] [email protected] 37 points 2 weeks ago

America: "No money = no purpose"

the o'l capitalist shalamalama ding-dong...

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 weeks ago

You can't say something like that without bringing forth some arguments...

[–] [email protected] 4 points 2 weeks ago

That’s not gonna happen, and I even disagree with the statement but I can see the merit in it.

That being said the new business model will be the old business model, where everything is paid for. And I do not think that’s so bad, for example I’d pay for a browser if it respects my privacy.

[–] [email protected] 50 points 2 weeks ago (4 children)

god what I wouldnt give to go back to the days of the mid 90s, when the internet was nothing more than a collection of tech weirdos, with websites being nothing more than passion projects with no advertising, no SEO, no search engines, etc etc.

[–] [email protected] 13 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

there was plenty of advertising on america online though almost ever keyword was to a business that was an advertisement.

i do agree that web 1.0 and the 90s internet was superior

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[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 weeks ago (2 children)

Can't we go back? What's stopping you?

[–] [email protected] 28 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

the pesky linearity of time as we understand it.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

I'm going to risk that going back to personal websites would be a blast. And people would enjoy it.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago) (6 children)

People on neocities: "what's stopping all of you?"

The small-web exists and thrives in its little bubble of creativity

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

what is that, some successor to geocities? or is the naming convention purely coincidental

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[–] [email protected] 26 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

Cloudflare already ruined the web way before AI was even a thing.

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[–] [email protected] 129 points 2 weeks ago (3 children)

For a glorious second, the entire world was able to communicate as one.

Then we catalogued every accessible reservoir of culture and knowledge, mined them bare, and refilled them with slop.

A global collective consciousness, hollowed out, replaced with static. No signal. Only noise.

[–] [email protected] 48 points 2 weeks ago (3 children)

I really non ironically miss the friction of the old internet.

I prefer how it took time to find some bare HTML university website, slowly browse through an index as if it was a book, and then find one non-SEO optimized page with all the information you needed on a topic for your research.

The time to browse, being exposed to other terms, having to select the pages yourself, being skeptical by nature, and then having to copy it by hand... This is a much more positive scenario than having a gigantic company learn everything about you and everybody else and then make these decisions for you, using some hidden algorithm, and with the ultimate goal of pushing their newest process. And of course, the content has been rendered virtually useless to appeal to that algorithm.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 2 weeks ago

That's because real information looks like that. If you can find a shortcut, then it's fake.

[–] [email protected] 25 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

when the internet was a wild and unexplored frontier, and we were adventurers charting the unknown.

[–] [email protected] 16 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

I'll drink to that memory, my brother

[–] [email protected] 8 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago)

Wild and magical, where we..upon getting our first connection to this wide world of wonder, would just explore. Clicking every link with wild abandon and discovering magic behind every one of them. No need for caution, Viruses were rare, Malware didnt exist, just spread wings gliding over vast lands of unbridled discovery.. Not even realizing 16 hours had passed and you had missed sleep, the adrenaline of adventure keeping you going, wide eyed and focused.

God I'm depressed now.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

Sorry for beginner reaction, can I use this in a website for an open source XHTML-extension I am developing? do I need to credit you somehow or lemmy link is enough or what is the best practice here?

[–] [email protected] 5 points 2 weeks ago

I don't know what the general policy is on Lemmy or the default license, but absolutely, feel free to use it, lemmy link is enough

Don't forget to share your extension with us once you're comfortable.

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[–] [email protected] 224 points 2 weeks ago (2 children)

The Web was much better and more useful back before it had a business model. Good riddance.

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[–] [email protected] 160 points 2 weeks ago (4 children)

So you’re saying the ad driven internet will die? And we will be left with what? Wikipedia and Lemmy? I for one welcome our AI overlords!

[–] [email protected] 6 points 2 weeks ago

republicans and oligarchs are already going after wikipedia

[–] [email protected] 26 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago) (1 children)

This is part of the larger problem that AI tools are trained on (and profit off of) content that is produced and hosted by others who are now seeing their traffic change from humans to bots. For content sources that pay for hosting with ads, this means a loss in revenue to pay for hosting. For content sources like Wikipedia, they are seeing their hosting costs increase significantly due to the increase in bot traffic. Even if you want every website that depends on ad revenue to fail (which I don't entirety agree with), AI is still damaging the open web in other ways. Websites like Wikipedia for example may soon be forced to lock content behind logins or leverage aggressive captchas just to fight the bot traffic, which makes things worse for those of us that still prefer to use actual websites over AI summaries.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 weeks ago (3 children)

Nobody is scraping wikipedia over and over to create datasets for AIs, there are already open datasets and API deals. But wiki in particular has always had a data dump of the entire db bimonthly.

https://dumps.wikimedia.org/

[–] [email protected] 16 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

You clearly haven't run a website recently. Until I set up anubis last week I was getting constant requests from dozens of various bot scrapers 24/7. That included the big ones.

[–] [email protected] -4 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

Kay, and that has nothing to do with what i said. Scrapers, bots =/= AI. It's not even the same companies that make the unfree datasets. The scrapers and bots that hit your website are not some random "AI" feeding on data lol. This is what some models are trained on, it's already free so it's doesn't need to be individually rescraped and it's mostly garbage quality data: https://commoncrawl.org/ Nobody wastes resources rescraping all this SEO infested dump.

Your issue has everything to do with SEO than anything else. Btw before you diss common crawl, it's used in research quite a lot so it's not some evil thing that threatens people's websites. Add robots.txt maybe.

[–] [email protected] 14 points 2 weeks ago (3 children)

Oh ok I'll just ignore the constant requests from GPTBot, ByteSpider, and the hundreds of others who very plainly, sometimes in their useragent, tell you that they're grabbing content for training data. Robots.txt is nice and all but manually adding every single up and coming AI company is impossible. Like I said Anubis is the first time I've gotten them all to even remotely calm down.

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[–] [email protected] 9 points 2 weeks ago

It would be very naïve to think they won't go against Wikipedia and the fediverse at some point unfortunately..

[–] [email protected] 51 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago) (2 children)

Nah, it’s saying that ad and AI-driven internet will prevail. People only use Google to find an answer and don’t dig deeper, and if they do, it’s often because the links are sponsored. People using GPT’s are even less likely to click a link. Currently no ads, but just wait.

Apologies if you were joking.

[–] [email protected] 30 points 2 weeks ago (4 children)

"what should I do if I'm going through severe emotional distress? How to choose a good psychiatrist?"

ChatGPT: "I'm sorry to hear that you've been going to a stressful situation, it's always worth talking about your feelings. I've come up with a plan to help you:

1 Purchase an ice cold Pepsi Black™ from a Pepsi official supplier"

[–] [email protected] 25 points 2 weeks ago

When Google itself is the one stopping you from clicking on a website you've got a problem.

[–] [email protected] 25 points 2 weeks ago

It needs to get even nastier so that it affects all the big players in a huge way so they get to do something about it. While it only affects the indie web we are all just gonna keep suffering.

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