[jjeaff]

Potentially good for users initially. But I can't see how anyone will be incentivized to create and post content for Google to scrape if they won't have any traffic from Google.

It could actually be a huge benefit in some ways if it chokes out the content mills. However, something tells me that they have little to no overhead compared to the people who actually toil away to post good, original content.

[bnralt]

> But I can't see how anyone will be incentivized to create and post content for Google to scrape if they won't have any traffic from Google.

The problem right now is that the incentives have caused most of the output online to be garbage.

[nabakin]

Exactly. If Google is able to provide better answers than the garbage websites with their SEO hacks, those garbage websites will not get clicks. I could see this improving the incentive system significantly

[nwienert]

- collect creators content, make it searchable, become worlds largest company

- encourage more content because PROFIT

- content becomes garbage

- have to pay those pesky content creators

- slowly squeeze out entire industries by inlining more and more content

- still, not squeezing the juice all the way

- introduce "AI", it just laundries copyrighted content to look original

- bye creators

- for some odd reason people cheer you for this

- creators forced to make their content private

[nabakin]

Garbage websites are 'content creators' now?

[tstrimple]

The incentive to what, be an unpaid content creator for Google? Search results lead to sources which land users on the content creators "property". Chat results, especially based on what we see right now, won't do that.

[nabakin]

How can you call garbage SEO websites 'content creators'? I think we'll be better off with websites which spread knowledge for the sake of spreading knowledge. Down with ads and low quality copy-paste sites.

[ohashi]

So everything being done for free except for Google taking all the profits?

Are you kidding me?

People need to make a living, creating good content isn't easy. Sure a few folks do it for free, but wholesale trying to kill off everyone who does it by making it financially non-viable is long term idiotic. What are you going to train on once everyone stops writing or letting your scrape their data to train from?

Search engines scraping your content is an agreement that they can look at it and use it, and send you traffic if it matches well with a user. Why would anyone subscribe to a deal that there is literally zero benefit except training some AI which will repurpose your knowledge.

[nabakin]

People making a living is great ofc. People making a living off of copy-pasting content and ruining the search experience is clearly not useful and that is the only point I was ever arguing for.

[moffkalast]

This may actually be fantastic for the web. The current incentives are terrible anyway: cheat, scam and SEO your way to the first search result page and then do whatever since you'll get visits and decent ad revenue regardless of content.

Most people that make good content don't make it for money anyway. Did people back in the pre-google days think "oh I'd make this site but gosh darn there's nobody to pay me for it". They just went and made the site regardless.

[rchaud]

> Did people back in the pre-google days think "oh I'd make this site but gosh darn there's nobody to pay me for it".

Google is a huge part of the reason the old web doesn't exist anymore. Artisanal websites cannot compete for visibility against corporate websites that have staff dedicated to figuring out SEO tricks from every imaginable source: page speed, HTTPS, image compression, meta tags.

The hobbyist back then didn't need to know all this. Today, not having HTTPS alone can cause your site to be hidden from search, even if it is read-only. In that kind of world, only the infinitesimally small minority will bother to make a website on their own dime.

[moffkalast]

I don't see why SSL is that much of an issue these days. Cloudflare does it for free, lots of hosting providers can handle let's encrypt for you.

[bbor]

I think this could be the death knell of sites that need to make money and publish content that can be easily understood in a short ChatBot answer, both mills like geeksforgeeks and hobbyists that wouldn't do it without a financial incentive. Is that such a bad thing? We've been complaining about SEO optimized crap for years.

Sites with complex or lengthy information will not fall to LLMs, IMO. No one interested in reading Paul Graham's blog posts is going to just read the AI summary and move on, for example.

[stcroixx]

Robots.txt to block anonymous scraping and offer google the opportunity to purchase your sites content if they value it. Web traffic can switch to another provider to index. Google search will be nothing but content mill garbage unless they want to pay for their AI fuel.

[hackernewds]

Website are not posting content for the sake of Google scraping it currently anyways. Look at reddit for example: fake internet points

[jjeaff]

Ya, but if you don't get fake internet points or any responses/comments on your work, what will be the incentive.