The Web We Know Is Going to Disappear

Posted by taubek 1 day ago

Comments

Comment by margalabargala 23 hours ago

What the article's prompt wanted to warn of, has already happened. For a decade at least.

Personal blogs aren't going to disappear, there's right now more of them than ever! And there will be more! But the preponderance of sheer cruft will reduce their percentage.

Discoverability of the content you want has always been the problem, and it still will be.

Comment by duskwuff 21 hours ago

> Personal blogs aren't going to disappear, there's right now more of them than ever!

I'm not at all convinced. The personal blog, as it existed in the 2000s/2010s, is essentially dead. There are certainly still some sites which operate on that model - most commonly, in my experience, ones operated by professional authors or artists - but those, too, are increasingly rare.

In fact, I think this is an aspect of a broader trend - having a personal web site is increasingly uncommon. The default nowadays is to post your creations or experiences on social media, and to create communities within hosted services like Reddit or Discord.

Comment by margalabargala 19 hours ago

There's a difference between a personal blog and a personal website. I'll agree the amount of updates to personal websites is likely declining.

Personal blogs are not necessarily self hosted. Substack is very popular and not uncommon nor dying.

Comment by duskwuff 19 hours ago

> Personal blogs are not necessarily self hosted. Substack is very popular and not uncommon nor dying.

That isn't necessarily quite as personal as a personal blog from the era I'm remembering, though. My impression is that Substack blogs (as well as similar sites like Medium) are typically used for content about particular topics, deliberately crafted to appeal to the interests of some audience. They're more akin to a newspaper column than a diary, if that comparison makes sense.

Some contemporary social media sites which operated on this model were LiveJournal and Xanga.

Comment by ge96 21 hours ago

Yeah it does kind of suck where you have to go to someplace like reddit to get content and people have to "low-key" drop a link to their source blog

Comment by xtiansimon 7 hours ago

I don’t know how to have a conversation at this level. Slinging around these doomsaying words when people are more online than ever, and with the exception of police states you can gain access to the world network. So what if the medium is text, or video or whatever. Just so long as someone can share their information freely to the world only for the cost of hosting. It’s like a conversation with a stock trader—buy, sell.

Here. I’ll predict the future, too. If the UK law requires ID to create social media account on fb/x/whatever behemoth, then private blogs are the way to go. Long live the self-hosted blog!

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48556985

Comment by VulgarExigency 23 hours ago

The web as I knew it is already dead. It has been dead for years. I don't understand why the blog owner had the AI that wrote the article focus on technology like Flash vs HTML5, those had no bearing on what actually mattered, which were communities.

What killed the web was the rise of social media and social media-like sites like Reddit. No one makes a website for their hobby or game/book/movie they're a fan of, and a forum and/or IRC channel for their site, anymore. They just post about it on Facebook or Twitter, or maybe on a subreddit for it, but the sense of community that used to be part of it is totally gone. You don't really get to know people like you used to on a forum. Niche Discord servers don't have this problem as much, but they suffer greatly in terms of discoverability.

AI has made it even worse, because now you can't even be sure you're talking to a person, but in my opinion the centralization around social media was far more damaging.

Comment by fsflover 22 hours ago

> No one makes a website for their hobby or game/book/movie they're a fan of

This is just not true. We even have a dedicated web search for that: https:// wiby.me

Comment by plastic-enjoyer 21 hours ago

This is obviously a hyperbole and you obviously know what he means with it.

Comment by fsflover 21 hours ago

In the absolute numbers, the parent is probably wrong. In percentage they're right.

Comment by raychis 21 hours ago

The web from the 90s was so much more fun. I have a vivid memory of a website from some guy dedicated to Liverpool FC and his favourite dinosaurs, you would never get that kind of random fun any more.

Comment by mdotk 19 hours ago

Definitely still exists. You just can't find it amidst everything else.

Comment by mdrzn 10 hours ago

When people ask "What are the AI tells that you notice?" the "rule of three" comes to mind immediately:

"Our modem was 14,400 bps. Yes, bits per second. Not megabits. Not gigabits. Not fiber."

"It was not massive. It was not scalable. It was not "cloud native."

"Every business would have a BBS. Every community would have one. Every company would run its own small digital place"

"The Web was the future. Not BBSs. Not CD-ROM encyclopedias. Not isolated digital islands. The Web."

Comment by senderista 23 hours ago

> Maybe this article will be read by humans. Maybe it will be summarized by an AI into two polite lines for someone curious on the other side of the planet.

Maybe it was generated by an AI in the first place.

Comment by alabut 23 hours ago

I get the impression a lot of people use ai to clean up writing when English isn’t their first language, which unfortunately means they can’t see the robotic generic tone it creates. E.g. the references to user groups in Buenos Aires.

One way they could maybe counteract it is approach it like code golf - can you use an LLM to make it much, much shorter? Because being overly verbose dilutes the handful of points you’re trying to make.

Comment by ben_w 21 hours ago

> I get the impression a lot of people use ai to clean up writing when English isn’t their first language, which unfortunately means they can’t see the robotic generic tone it creates. E.g. the references to user groups in Buenos Aires.

At this point, so many things include it as a feature that this is probably the default. Like spellcheck and grammar check 26 years ago (memories of editing page 6 of my coursework only for everything to get a red squiggle underline at once because Word had randomly decided the entire thing was in a different language).

Today I keep finding I want to write "unironically" into HN comments, no, this is not the right word.

*My best guess* is that crudeness of various kinds is going to be a proof of humanity fairly soon. not just swearing but violent language and obscenities, nocap, slang, spell everifing a bit rong, and definitely no symbol you need a modifier key to reach (so these brackets are right out, but this also directly excludes caps because shift is a modifier key). Gen-Z-ers will be mocked by Gen Alpha for using emoji. That kind of thing.

Comment by alabut 20 hours ago

Oh yeah, we’re already there. In fact it’s a pre-ai thing too, where I saw a cyclist YouTuber explain how making thumbnails look too professional is an anti-signal. People often crave authenticity over production value.

Comment by lbrito 23 hours ago

Yeah I thought the same. The short sentences, like "The Web may become like IRC, FTP, Gopher, or BBSs. Not dead. Just smaller.", kind of gave that impression.

Comment by lwhi 22 hours ago

Unless the author's taking styling tips from AI prose.

Comment by reconnecting 23 hours ago

> Not megabits. Not gigabits. Not fiber.

...

> Not BBSs. Not CD-ROM encyclopedias. Not isolated digital islands.

...

> Artists had websites. Musicians had websites. Game developers had websites.

...

> People want answers. People want connection. People want tools.

This is just impossible to read.

Comment by mcphage 23 hours ago

It’s not impossible to read, just… pointless.

Comment by mumbisChungo 1 day ago

Already has.

Comment by plagiarist 23 hours ago

It is already gone. Actual content has been flooded out by millions if not billions of affiliate ad listicles where, completely coincidentally, the top ten best $product are also the first ten $product on the Amazon search page.

Comment by spwa4 22 hours ago

There is more content than ever before accessible. It's just harder to find. If anything, this is a total failure of Google (and other search sites)

I wonder what this will mean for the future, both of Google and for finding information on the web.

Comment by tonymet 23 hours ago

none of these platforms exists without the people and the content they produce. I’m less worried about the platforms and more worried about the contributors , what they are contributing, and which ones are favored, and why.

Comment by smitty1e 17 hours ago

> The next interface for many tasks will be conversational. Not necessarily one chatbot. More likely a layer of assistants across devices, apps, operating systems, browsers, cars, TVs, glasses, and whatever strange object Silicon Valley convinces us to wear on our faces next.

There is also that famous legacy application: other people.

The bad news about AI is that I am now the product.

This will seem fine for a vast swath of the population.

But watch the Luddism thrive.

Comment by johnea 20 hours ago

What do you mean by "We" Kimosabe?

For dipshits who think aggregating ad-based websites, and hate filled doom-loop algorithmic feeds, are "the web", this may be true.

But the rest of us, who aren't part of this "we", will still be here...

Comment by paul7986 23 hours ago

Actually i think AI will make the web the backbone of humanity once a system is in place that gets all humans paid for our daily content (conversations, pics, videos, songs, movies, etc). All of us create content daily via living. The web now is a system that all of humanity owns and its not controlled by one company or organization. It can be a place where every human publishes our daily content to our own websites for AI to pay us to access it and feed off of it.

I see Trump saying he's going to be talking to AI companies about them providing Americans with stock. That's one way AI pays us and this other idea I mention above and wrote about on my Substack https://ryanspahn.substack.com/p/ai-to-pay-for-all-americans...

Comment by nancyminusone 23 hours ago

yeah, but they won't be paying you. Not today, not ever. That's a pretty fundamental premise of the whole AI phenomenon.

Comment by paul7986 17 hours ago

So we as humanity should let AI destroy the money economy / society we have built over centuries for a handful of billionares or we should demand that AI pays us for thriving off our content?

Your comment says I dont care let it destroy society there's nothing we can do. But there is we can think of ideas and deploy such to ensure humanity thrives as AI does too.

Comment by RajT88 23 hours ago

> once a system is in place that gets all humans paid for our daily content (conversations, pics, videos, songs, movies, etc).

That is never going to happen, lol. That's what Youtube was supposed to be, and the trend is to pay content creators less and less, while keeping them creating the same amount of content.

> It can be a place where every human publishes our daily content to our own websites for AI to pay us to access it and feed off of it.

Social media will still exist. People will want to share content with each other, and it has to live somewhere. Sure, a lot of the interactions with LLM's will go back into the training data, that's already happening. But people aren't going to stop publishing content - because what happens then when there's no more training data out there?

You can't train an AI model without updated repositories of information. There is a bit of a question on whether an AI agent should be the interface for those repositories. Today, that's a very expensive proposition, and probably a silly direction to go (at some point, cheaper ways of doing things are going to win out for some use cases).

> I see Trump saying he's going to be talking to AI companies about them providing Americans with stock.

And this is proof positive why it's a bad idea that will never gain traction.

Comment by cdrnsf 23 hours ago

The only Americans likely to be furnished with stock have the same last name as the president.

Comment by 1shooner 23 hours ago

That is a very... optimistic interpretation of what Trump is describing in your link.

Comment by paul7986 17 hours ago

ah two different concepts which i outline my idea of AI paying all of us for our content. What Trump is talking about is a different concept where all Americans get free stock in AI companies. Both my idea and that one gets us paid for our content that AI needs in order to thrive.

I say AI needs to provide both concepts and any others that gets us paid for our content / making it thrive!

Comment by fred_is_fred 23 hours ago

The US President has no legal means to give every American stock - and even if he did, then what? What good is my 1 share of OpenAI going to do me?

Comment by icepush 19 hours ago

In a long enough timescale it's easy to imagine one company run by an advanced AI driving all other companies out of business. Since it has no expenses, all profits are paid out as dividends, creating a kind of UBI where the number of shares you own determines your income. This has been discussed as an economic model by people who want advanced AI but don't want to get rid of public markets and shareholders.

Comment by paul7986 16 hours ago

Or maybe how much content you contribute to it