[TeMPOraL]

> And this is why humanity is going down the tubes...

On the contrary - this is exactly how and why humanity built a technological civilization in the first place. Note that I didn't say

> because you want something, you derive value from what you want, and yet you do not care about giving something back to who makes it.

Yes, because it would be backward and limiting to do that. Note: I never said I don't want to give anything back - I said I don't personally care specifically about the author/publisher. I don't want to establish any relationship with them. If I'm paying them directly for something, I'm paying them for that thing - not also for relationship (which really is a sales channel), not also for being advertised to. If I'm paying some intermediary, then rewarding the maker is the intermediary's problem, not mine.

Consider: do you compensate directly, and have an active relationship with, the person who bakes your bread (hint: people selling bread in bakeries are not actual bakers)? The company who supplied them with flour? The farmers who supplied the flour-makers with grain? Do you pay delivery drivers directly? After all, you're deriving value from their labor directly. Etc. Then there's an entire army of people whose work benefits you directly, and whom you don't even think much about, and rely on being compensated from the common pool (e.g. taxes) or stochastically.

The whole point of money is to allow exchanging value without forcing parties into maintaining an ongoing relationship. That's a feature, not a bug. And if anything is driving humanity down the drain, it's the idea that you should, need, or are even entitled to capture all the value you produce.

[dageshi]

What does your example have to do with this situation?

The people in the bread supply chain get paid, the author of content we're discussing will never get paid by anyone, will never even get a bit if personal satisfaction from their analytics knowing last month x thousand people read that page and it hopefully helped them.

It's completely zero reward, even worse it's completely zero feedback of any kind!

This really is the doom of the web as we know it because for the first time ever there will be an active disincentive to put knowledge on it. I think much information will retreat to places like Discord or locked down login only versions of sites like Stackoverflow.

[TeMPOraL]

> What does your example have to do with this situation?

It's addressing GP's complaint about me pointing out the indirect and transactional nature of the interaction between information producer and consumer.

> the author of content we're discussing will never get paid by anyone

That's... not my problem? Bear with me here.

> will never even get a bit if personal satisfaction from their analytics knowing last month x thousand people read that page and it hopefully helped them.

Aha!

So we're talking specifically about content creators that publish for free in hopes of maximizing a number on their analytics? That's healthy neither for them nor the society at large. Or you mean people publishing content for free to make money off ads? Yeah, I don't mind that content to disappear entirely.

Note that outside of web publishing, it was never the expectation of an author to have any idea how many people read their work, much less get paid for every single "read event". They only got a lump sum or a fraction of first sale of a printed work - but had no insight or control over further circulation of parts of entirety of their works. Being able to resell your books or magazines, or give or lend it to friends, or borrow some from a library, are all good things.

All that was true before AI, and people found reasons to write new books, or to publish quality content on-line, for free and without advertising or telemetry. LLMs don't change that. If anything, they may reduce readership, not publication.

> I think much information will retreat to places like Discord or locked down login only versions of sites like Stackoverflow.

This has already been happening for the past couple years; LLMs, again, don't change anything here.

[detourdog]

The analytics is similar to happy customers if you separate the customers from the bots.

[detourdog]

I'm really struck how this is the first time I have seen a disincentive to freely share information on the internet.

I can't tell if I have aged out of some ideal or is it that the individual creative efforts are being homogenized into pseudo answers for someone to sell.

[supriyo-biswas]

Regarding the baker example, some form of compensation is eventually directed to the employees, the farmers etc. even though you could say there are many layers of indirection.

In case of LLMs, no compensation is directed to the person authoring the information. While it may not be a problem for the consumer of the information, it removes any incentives for the people authoring the information to continue doing so, which has long term consequences.

[Kostchei]

Depends what the incentives are. Some folks like the community- that doesn't change. A website like honestwargamer or goonhammer has a clan. Mostly because they are insightful and friendly. But if an AI scraped their content, it would have to build a better goonhammer? Maybe. But I bet it would have half a dozen nerds contributing and tinkering at the backend, painting the new minis that came out, talking about tournament results etc.. That is current, constant fresh relevant content, based on IRL activity. Very hard to replicate. For honestwargamer... Build a better twitch stream... that seems even less likely. they run a round and stream games, review results, collate stats. And then engage with the audience in twitch.

So when you say "contribute to the internet", this is what I consume and.. I'm sure there are similar examples in every niche- fishing, golf, coding, AI art creation ...

No I don't see this as gloomy scenario, and content creators- the goonhammers and honestwargamers, creatives, are still going to get paid (a bit, they were never rich), maybe in new ways.

[jaen]

That's a somewhat one-sided view. For gaming and entertainment, yes, people would do it anyway, since it's just fun, but these do not contribute much useful information to the collective consciousness anyway. Hobbies & creative communities will also survive.

OTOH, there are also plenty of technical blogs full of advanced content that is not "fun" to produce on its own, that are written to interact with a community of professionals (or juniors), and that might wither if engagement with actual human beings is reduced.

[vouaobrasil]

Yes, because it would be backward and limiting to do that. Note: I never said I don't want to give anything back - I said I don't personally care specifically about the author/publisher. I don't want to establish any relationship with them. If I'm paying them directly for something, I'm paying them for that thing - not also for relationship (which really is a sales channel), not also for being advertised to. If I'm paying some intermediary, then rewarding the maker is the intermediary's problem, not mine.

And I maintain that your attitude is one that makes the world worse. We should know where things come from and not have an anonymous transactional attitude towards it. Our technological civilization as you call it has led us to destruction with only a minority benefitting.

BTW, my favourite place to get bread is one in which they actually sell and bake it in store (a tiny market with its own oven).