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by yalogin 79 days ago
Why use the present continuous tense? We can safely use the past tense as llms definitely killed it. The web of course isn’t going to vanish but there is no motivation for anyone to create a new site now.
3 comments

What is the point of playing guitar any more? You're not going to be another Elvis. You're not going to be another Robert Plant or Paco de Lucia, even if you play equally good. The world is choke-full of excellent guitar music recordings.

People still play guitar nevertheless. They do it for the enjoyment of the few friends sitting next to them, and, most of all, for the fun they personally have in the process. If your motivation is seriously different, especially it it involves fame, influence, or money, you are holding it wrong.

Your metaphor doesn't apply. It's not pointless to create a new site because better ones exist. It's pointless because it will get scraped and summarized/remixed for someone else's profit, if the few sites people use for discovery even deign to index it. And the people who do consume it will be too lazy to read it in its original unsummarized form.

You can still journal for the love of writing, but why put the effort into publishing for so little return?

> get scraped and summarized/remixed for someone else's profit

Well, yes, so what? Are you creating it for your own enjoyment, or are you holding yourself back to stick it to the greedy capitalist? It would be hard to find your site using Google, unless you know a perfect long fragment, but it was equally hard, or harder, to find it using AltaVista in 1995! People who care link to each other and participate in webrings, much like they did 30 years ago.

Everything is dust in the wind, everything we create is most likely going to perish, make peace with that. Then you notice that there is a gap between the moment you create something, and the time it perishes, and it's plenty long enough to bring joy to you and those you care about, and maybe even random passers-by.

Well said and I agree completely...but did Robert Plant play guitar?
Technically he did, but not during his time at LZ. Jimmy Page played the guitar.
What one earth are you talking about? What ever was the motivation for creating a new site? How has it changed?
Not everything is about money. People were doing it, so they clearly had a motivation of some sort. I'm sure that some folks did it for themselves - just like writing a diary - but many others wanted to make new friends, earn praise, teach others, and so on.

If nothing else, LLMs have an indisputably negative impact on the second part. Fewer people will make it to your website if there's an AI digest on top of search results (or if they can skip search altogether by asking ChatGPT).

I am happy to ignore the scrapers (I block them wholesale) and will probably move to something even more drastic in the near future.