[dageshi]

Those outputting the article from the LLM can concentrate on SEO including backlinks from other LLM generated articles. The question becomes does an average LLM article + the best possible SEO beat the original article?

I'm gonna say, yes, it does at which point there's no incentive for the original author. That's of course assuming the user actually searched at all or went to the LLM directly instead in which case the original author of the article has no chance at all.

[layer8]

People write and publish without such incentives, without the goal of turning up on page 1 of Google search results, and don’t care about being “beaten” by whatever alternative publication. And at least so far, truly good and useful content generally does find its audience, even without SSO.

There’s also a lot of content that can’t be meaningfully replaced by LLMs, such as people writing about their side projects (such as the current top HN submission https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41154135), product reviews, or more generally, reports of personal experiences, or personal takes on whatever topic.

[dageshi]

If that were truly the case, this thread would not exist.

The truth is a decade ago the quality of sites you could find and therefore the quality of search results were way higher, back then google was literally magic in terms of finding answers to questions.

It is far, far from that now.

[layer8]

I fully agree that the experience has degraded (though defaulting to verbatim search helps a lot IME). However, I was responding to the assertion that the web is dead and that people will stop publishing on it, which I see little basis for.