I'm in a couple of dozen groups on Facebook and they produce interesting and thoughtful content every day.
Of course I wish they were on the open web, but don't blame the network.
Since by definition it will need to be open to the majority of the world’s population, regardless of writing skill, but the bottom half of writers are already indistinguishable from cutting edge LLM output.
And no one can install some sort of worldwide identity verification system, or it wouldn’t be ‘open’ anymore.
How do you differentiate between say 20 real people with low skills and LLM output lightly edited by a high skilled individual?
Consider a normal criminal court case. Most witnesses don't know how to express themselves well neither in the written nor spoken word. Their testimony still holds value and gives important information.
And it’s not like a live video call, where a few seconds delay would be noticeable.
There would still be a real human being, just as smart as you, behind the LLM, but pretending to be say 20 different lower skilled people.
Yes, even scoundrels may supply to you true information for some period of time but eventually they will try to obtain their actual goals…
The web cannot 'die'. Everything and everyone moves online.
Point one: A return to pre-internet days is not likely.
Point two: Walled gardens had their peak moment. The dangers of everybody relying on them for our entire online existence are more than apparent to anybody with a firing neuron (and despite appearances, our species is not entirely inane).
Ergo. The only path is forward, a more sane, less monopolized web. Build it and they will come.
To say that the web is dead means that nobody outside massive social media type sites will still run a server (and SO / github are social media type walled gardens at this point, thats why they get enshittified).
But this development would be absurd as a whole. Mind you search engines as we have come to know them might be dead, but thats of their own making. People need to find / communicate useful, truthful information and sooner or later they will get it.
Not everything needs to go through a search engine.
this presupposes the argument that for the web to have value then you must have a search engine to allow you to find things of worth on the web.
Which argument you have not made but only taken as a given.
Nextdns and the RPi alternative do it. Kagi has all the infrastructure in place to make it happen at the search level, it just requires more manual work right now.
There is no one list to rule them all. Tons of people curate their own block lists and make them available. It’s entirely up to you to pick and choose which ones you want to use that most align with your views on SEO garbage. You can override them with your own preferences too, as I do all the time with NextDNS. Like I said, all the infrastructure to support this is already in place in Kagi, they just need to implement the support for external lists.
For example, here is a list of the crowdsourced blocklists available in uBlock Origin: https://github.com/gorhill/ublock/wiki/Filter-list-licenses
different Search engines with different rules and so forth would lessen the benefit of the O part, because it seems unlikely you could efficiently optimize for every particular algorithm and ruleset.
Perhaps SEO is an inevitable outcome of one big dominant search engine and also made worse by that search engine not really giving a shit about making its search work that well for years and years but only about how many ads they could push at people and how much they could charge for those ads.
But I would argue one big search engine is unavoidable since no one would want to use the second best search engine.
Google search didn’t come the best because the other service like mail map and YouTube. So breaking up Google does nothing to stop google search from being the monopoly it is today.
While I don't have the answer, what we might consider is the incentives that come with each model.
In the current model, the incentives are clear. Google's incentive was to rent-seek all usefulness out of web search, privileging advertisement and their own profitability over usefulness.
I am not sure if a search engine beholden to the government would be ideal. Governments do have their own sets of interests (legitimate or otherwise) that may at times go against users.
Web search is in the end a piece of public infrastructure, used by billions across the world, very much subject to the Tragedy of the Commons.
Perhaps it should be some sort of nonprofit, as other projects are (Linux Foundation comes to mind, being a successful one).
I've said this before (on HN) and I'll say it again: a search engine that refuses to index sites containing advertisements absolutely kills off SEO.
What's the point of getting to the top of the search results if you are unable to monetise it?
The only way forward is to refuse to index sites with advertisements. Google will obviously not do this (and, in fact, to me it looks like they do the reverse - downrank non-monetised content - because it's in their best interest to serve sites with ads).
Promoting your product/service, see brand astroturfing in Reddit.
But ... that's the point, is it not? Someone searching for "FOO" will find all those sites who optimised for selling FOO.
That's an improvement over finding the top 10 results all optimised on FOO but delivering ads to make money, not FOO.
I concur. Maybe now is the time to seriously think about alternate visions for "search". I have been toying with an idea[1] along those lines myself out of sheer annoyance at the state of WWW and web "search" in general.
OP example of what a content-devoid internet would look like is exactly what Facebook is now. A site that started as the place to connect and share with your friends and family now is just a place that is filled with AI slop and emptiness.
All the long, rambling stories you see before recipes? That's just there so the recipes can rank higher.
I can't remember the source, but I also remember a website adding AI generated slop to cater to Google's wishes, and leaving a page to explain to normal users why they did so.
It's also seen when you look at YouTube videos, where now it's basically necessary to have a clickbait thumbnail + title + reminders to like and subscribe.
m-hm.
SEO spam has been strangling the web for years. Now, genAI SEO spam has escalated that onto inhuman levels. To make matters worse, no one wants to post to the open web anymore because their posts are just going to drown in that sea of spam and only genai's data stealing bots will read them. As the amount of spam posted to the web increases, the amount of worthwhile content posted decreases. Eventually, nothing of value will be posted. (like facebook?)
You can lay the blame for the web's death squarely at Google's feet for allowing SEO to hijack search in the first place (or maybe the government is to blame for not breaking up Google's ad/search empire fast enough). Either way, the big companies all know the end is here and are gambling on genai to replace search. Already, places of knowledge are closing their borders and charging fees for genai to access.
We have entered the internet's dark age.
Fun aside: I think it's hilarious and fitting that Google's genai model sucks. And I hope they lose the genai wars (just out of spite, not because I think any other genai is worth a shit).