[jdw64]

Personally, I think this is a good idea. But the core problem is this: How is a newcomer supposed to build reputation now? Without exaggerated business promises or capital, basic online reputation usually depends on writing. In fact, my own first step into freelancing came because someone found the articles on my Korean blog interesting. So the question is: if the subscribers are bots, what benefit do they actually give me? If bots become the readers, then what matters is whether they can provide any kind of symbolic capital or real capital. I can build caching with Redis without much difficulty, but I worry that if this continues, the result may simply be that LLMs learn from my writing while no benefit returns to me. People write partly to organize their thoughts, but also partly to gain symbolic capital. That is one reason why I write my own posts instead of using an LLM to write them for me.

[ryandrake]

I think in general, "Writing on the Internet with the intent to make money" is effectively dead, or at least soon to be dead. AI+bots mean we now have the "infinite typewriter monkeys" from the thought experiment. With infinite supply, the price goes to zero.

We need to stop this treadmill of trying to "build reputation" and stop focusing on "symbolic capital" and "clout" and whatever else bloggers are going after. You're not going to get it, and even if you do, you're not going to be able to "monetize" it.

If you have a need to write, write. Maybe a handful of actual people will read it, maybe not. But, I wouldn't try to do it for a living. The reward will have to be the cathartic process of writing itself, and not in how much attention it gets, how much it "blows up" or how viral it gets.

[jdw64]

I am not trying to make money from writing.

What I need is for my writing to spread enough that I can receive opportunities to have my programming ability evaluated.

The reason I write about programming is that, in the past, some readers found my programming essays interesting, and that led to chances for me to be tested. I had to leave graduate school because of financial problems, and I did not graduate from a prestigious university.

So this is not simply about monetizing writing. It is a struggle to receive opportunities. Those are fundamentally different things.

Some people may be happy writing things that nobody reads. But many people are happier when they can share their writing and let their values collide with those of others.

[lenkite]

The world-wide web has been unfortunately been conquered, annexed and is being burned by the Tyrannical AI Empire. Until a Pure-Humans-Only alternative resistance movement and platform arises from its sordid ashes, we will all need to bow our heads and kneel before the God-Emperor.

[pixl97]

>How is a newcomer supposed to build reputation now

Dead internet manifest.

[johng]

What's worse, is they train on your content, and very often you don't even get an attribution link. So the end user never even knows it was your site that provided the information and you never even get a single clickthrough. It's not like the SERPs where someone would click through, read your site, hopefully find it interesting and useful and come back.

It's going to be a serious problem and I've already seen sites that are down 90% in traffic simply because AI is scraiping them, answering the questions themselves and never providing a linkback.

[01284a7e]

I pulled all the websites I had - some existed for a decade plus and made me hundreds of thousands of dollars. All that is left is bots that theft the value of my work. Until something changes, goodbye.

[cultofmetatron]

I have no problem with these AI summaries but someone needs to make a law requiring the AI provider to generate links to the primary source as part of the output. If a human writer ripped off someones work and didn't attribute, it would be a huge scandal. when an AI does it, its expected.

[monkpit]

Because of the way training works, is this possible/feasible? Not saying it shouldn’t be done, just wondering _how_ it could be done?

[tardedmeme]

You might as well serve different content to bots. Incorrect content.

[gbgarbeb]

Why not just redirect all requests to your website to the Reddit frontpage?

[tardedmeme]

Redirects are easily detectable.

[gbgarbeb]

This is like choosing to be an elementary school teacher and then quitting because it turns out your students for the year aren't your pets in perpetuity.

[diatone]

If your students were growing up to subvert your line of work, sure. Pretty sure that’s not the case though!

[01284a7e]

No, it's not at all. Bizarre analogy.

[gbgarbeb]

It's about control. Admit it.

[nilirl]

I feel that pressure of not knowing how to definitively compete on the internet, especially when there's so much AI created noise.

I'm a copywriter and I used to get hired to write posts on behalf of founders on LinkedIn or for their company blog.

Now, the last three jobs I had were all focused on sending cold email.

[nicbou]

It's already happening. My traffic is down 60-70% from its peak, because Google serves answers from my website directly before it. ChatGPT picks up the rest.

I am losing motivation to put out hard-earned information if it's all going to get stolen. I'm just training 3 companies to better capture the value of my hard work. Why even bother?

I live from that website. I have poured 9 years of my life into it. It's known by everyone locally. In a year or two I won't be able to cover my bills anymore. I could go back to my old job, but it's also getting automated.

I'm just so tired.

[whstl]

I dunno. SEO spam made by human-robots already killed the first half of the internet in the late 2010s. Mostly driven by low-paid freelancers writing without expertise and plagiarizing other articles like crazy.

It has been virtually impossible to find real information in some areas if you don't personally know which website is reliable or not. That's why we devs used to go to StackOverflow, and people use site:reddit.com when searching Google. LLMs just exacerbated all of that, but it was already happening.

[mmarian]

By syndicating everywhere you can and inviting discussions (Reddit, HM, etc). The reality is that your blog post would've rarely been found anyway due to the SEO blog spam.

I managed to get some great discussions through sharing my posts on Reddit and HN.