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by dageshi
1064 days ago
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For years people have been making travel blogs based on where they've visited and the practical information they've discovered, like experiences of visiting attractions or good places to stay in cities or how they got from one place to another. They monetised with ads and affiliate links so they could travel more based on that income. In LLM land, they get no monetisation any more because nobody visits their sites, instead the LLM just regurgitates the answers they found. The search engines actively supported these authors, by sending them people who needed the answers they had. So in LLM land this information goes away because the feedback loop of the traveller creating information which earns them money to continue travelling goes away. A LOT of the useful information on the web was built on similar feedback loops and they go away in LLM land. |
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I consider this to be a problem on its own, but it's not relevant here because:
> In LLM land, they get no monetisation any more because nobody visits their sites, instead the LLM just regurgitates the answers they found.
That can't possibly be true, because if it were, there wouldn't be any travel blogs anymore today. All that travel spam has been made redundant approximately around the time Flickr was created, and every interesting location ever has been photographed from every interesting angle in a way neither me, nor you, nor your favorite travel blogger could ever hope to match. All the information they post has also been posted many times over by travel bloggers that came before.
The point being: travel information and photography is worthless commodity these days. Travel bloggers (or Instagrammers, or whatever) are not in the business of selling information. They're selling dreams and personal experiences. The photos and information are necessary as delivery vector ("social object"), but by themselves are worthless and not the point. The point is entertainment, and ideally getting you trapped in a parasocial relationship with the travel blogger/grammer, which gives them a recurring revenue stream.
> In LLM land, they get no monetisation any more because nobody visits their sites, instead the LLM just regurgitates the answers they found.
It's the same model as with most other ad-monetized social media publishing. People will keep visiting them for the same reason they visit them now, and for the same reason they have their favorite youtubers and tiktokers. LLMs and other generative models don't change anything here, at least not short-to-mid-term, because they can't convincingly replicate human connection and keep it up for long.
(Also, I personally don't buy that travel instagrammers can actually sustain their travel lifestyle through ads and affiliate marketing and sponsorship deals. I suspect most are funded in some way, whether by family wealth or by services performed while traveling around.)
> The search engines actively supported these authors, by sending them people who needed the answers they had. (...) A LOT of the useful information on the web was built on similar feedback loops and they go away in LLM land.
Hard disagree. The only feedback loop this created in practice is the one that displaces quality information from the Internet - the combination of SEO and ad-based monetization means the most scummy players are the ones with most money to stalk every conceivable search query. The results speak for themselves: making a Google query for pretty much any topic of interest to general population will give you only content marketing sites - results that carry negative knowledge, as in if you waste your time reading them, you'll come more misinformed about the topic than you were before. If LLMs make all that go away, I'm 100% for it.
As for "A LOT of the useful information" - nope, can't think of a single case where ad/affiliate-supported site was a good information source, vs. just displacing a better free source.