[nicbou]

This is something that bothers me a lot.

I live from the content I write. It's not fluff. Some of it comes from weeks-long email conversations with government officials. It takes a lot of research and help from experts I have long-standing relationships with.

If search engines serve that information but deny me the traffic, the website dies, as does the source of the information.

I can deal with lazy copywriters just rephrasing my work because the original still outranks them, and I have legal options to deal with them.

I can't do anything if Google - over 80% of of my traffic - decides to proxy my content and starve me of my income.

[uconnectlol]

That's just too bad. I've been creating web services for free since 2000 and just gave up once I realized that the web is innately commercial and bad for users. No matter what I do is just at odds with the fact that I have to host the content myself when the users could easily just mirror it with something like bittorrent but all we lack is the 10 lines of code for that infrastructure to be usable in the common user's flow. Plus the moment that happens big corpo and govo will cry CP and copyright and there mere act of using a computer will become strictly regulated and file hosting will be illegal. Later on, I spent months creating high quality articles in niche technical subjects, but quickly stopped as I realized that I don't want to contribute to the web anymore. When a real medium for grownups (both because the regulation on the web is bogus and dystopic addressing childish concerns with no bearing in reality, and because the web is a terrible amateur protocol) appears I will publish on that.

Information should be retrievable without all kinds of nonsense personalization and ads, and in milliseconds, not 10 seconds. The 99.999% of web content made between 2000-now is not whatever virtuous content you claim to have struggled to create, but a bunch of bloat that just wastes the user's time, and most of the time it's not even a good answer to the question, but just the exact same paraphrased answer from several other commercialized blogs. Your doomsday scenario here would be the perfect justice, and you will be one of the _very few_ innocent victims of it. Of course it won't be so simple, anyone like Google would find a way to make the user experience insufferable. I don't see a place for monetization on the future web, it will just be a bunch of people exchanging information, like where are the bad guys with guns and should I avoid going there. AI can't answer that because you don't know its sources, rather you exchange information with your trusted peers and make judgements based on that. This isn't a money concerning thing, it's just people exchanging info for info as the internet was originally intended to be.

[concordDance]

The problem of incentivizing valuable content is known to be very hard and currently unsolved. Which is why our current media is 90% dross.

I agree this worsens it.

[solarkraft]

Spontaneous idea: Medium claps, but each is a small amount of money.

[concordDance]

Youtube has these.

[Valakas_]

There can be a model where every time a bot goes to a website to get info, a payment is immediately made.

[kolinko]

In your case though, people visit your posts to see the source material specifically, right?

[nicbou]

I can't tell.

Google sometimes shows snippets from my website as a direct answer to a query (in a collapsible box). If the out-of-context answer satisfies the user, then I get no traffic.

[fendy3002]

Can confirm. Most of the time Google give decent snippet with enough information without requiring me to visit the referenced web.

It gets worse with current state of common websites full of mailing, ads and cookie popup, moreover account-walled content, even with adblocker.

[nicbou]

In at least one case, Google gave a completely wrong answer (snippet for the wrong question), and credited me for it.

For the record, I run a pretty lean, annoyance-free website. It looks the same without an ad blocker. It uses Plausible for analytics. No newsletters, no annoyances. I still get shafted.

[spyder]

That's one of the reasons more and more sites are starting to require sign-up to continue reading the article. So only provide a summary of your article to search engines and users can access the rest by the annoying sign up (or captcha). But that also means less of the content is searchable so the summary you provide for search engines has to be really good (maybe even AI can help to produce this summary).

And it's probably not just big companies we will have to worry about because at least they can be somewhat regulated and they are in the public eye. The other "threat" in the future is the "distributed" AI when people can run their own personal AI assistants that could collect information for them by any means (singing up to to websites, e-mailing, calling people, talking to other AI agents) and with filtering out ads and sponsored content. At that point probably everything worthwhile will be paywalled and the "SEO" game will be to convince/trick these AIs to sing up / pay for your content.

[Nathanba]

That's a very positive way to look at it: Use the AI for your own benefit to generate a summary but the full information is hidden behind a signin/paywall. Of course whether this ends up being better for humanity is the question. On the other hand, maybe Google should be paying people for high quality, trainable content.

[nicbou]

I have no paywall by design. It's a core principle behind the website I run. I can cover the bills through affiliate links for services I actually recommend. However those are stripped by whoever uses my content for their own benefit, including Google.