[Retric]

The internet has increased in the number of users and the amount of time they spend online not just the number of creators.

The odds 5+ people see your content is probably the same as it ever was, but ‘success’ has been redefined in terms of ever larger follower counts.

[sph]

In the age of bots, LLMs and people that have about .5s for you to impress them with a flashy image as they scroll by endlessly, I doubt you get the same attention you would’ve in the 90s Internet.

More eyeballs, sure, but worth 1/1000th of a visitor coming straight from a webring for your own niche, or that found you in the right section on Yahoo and AltaVista.

[rightbyte]

Ye. "Everyone" somehow ended up visiting The Best Page in the Universe somehow. The internet was way smaller and the reach in the internet population way higher.

[imachine1980_]

I personally believe that this doesn't hold, more and more competition outside of webpage, means that we check less and less pages each year, I feel ai could be a savior by destroying the whole internet by spaming SEO websited, and make small pages the only way to find something

[solaire_oa]

Not to make you more downtrodden, but it's not like AI would have any trouble at all producing a small page.

If you mean that there needs to be signals in place that an article was thought about and physically typed up by human fingers, well, that's a different problem I suppose.

In any case, the system prompt can factor in any existing signals that SEO might want to adjust for ("You are a chill software engineer dude, who understands the subtlety of colloquia in the field. You speak in modern slang and are very energetic about you field.").

I share your downtrodden sentiment, for what that's worth. The only idea I have for making genuine human digitized hallmarks is to start "writing" in heiroglyphs and pictograms. I'd love to hear more realistic ideas for signaling humanity, however.