[apsurd]

How do people find these novel publications?

Seems it's the age of social, 1:1 subscriptions like substack, patreon -- creator economy.

That's fine, but in this ecosystem, there's no need to publish things publicly, right?

Public publishing is for search discoverability. If the end game for search is instant answers, then both the engines and the content creators dont benefit one another. To your point of it only mattering in the aggregate training sense.

So public content discovery by index is dead.

[layer8]

I agree insofar as discovery of novel articles mostly happens through sites like HN for me, or, when looking for specific topics, via tools like hn.algolia.com. But I also use Google many times a day to find stuff, including human-written content, that LLMs are useless for, or at the very least more cumbersome, and/or that I’d have to verify by Google searches anyway.

One thing that the web provides that LLMs don’t is that it lets me form an opinion, by sampling a multitude of online resources, whereas LLMs only give me one take, or a bullet list of takes, without a good affordance on assessing them.

By the GP argument, HN comment threads are dead, because why would you read them (or post a comment!) if you can instead just ask an LLM.