The Web was much better and more useful back before it had a business model. Good riddance.
I have a surprisingly forgiving opinion on AI. There are many cases that I think it’s purpose is stupid or defeats the point but it has the potential to cause such a large break to employability and capitalism in general that it has it’s upsides.
People are right to take issue with the fact that it is causing people to lose their jobs or be unemployable by no fault of their own, but underlying that issue is the fact that society shouldn’t function on the employment being necessary (which I am aware is an opinion).
Even in its absurd energy and water usage, this is largely an issue with how we currently get our energy and water. Having our technocrats suddenly more invested in new and better forms of energy, even just for powering AI has the potential to be a path to better clean energy options.
AI is fundamentally a neutral tool, but as much as it may be sued for evil, it may accelerate flawed economic and environmental systems to a breaking point where a redesign of those structures will be required, which could be the greatest opportunity to implement better structures that we’ve had since the industrial revolution.
I generally agree. My focus was on the “business model” side, where people act like the web exists only to serve business interests. The Web will be just fine, possibly even better, if some of these companies monetizing everything were to fail.
Yeah well maybe the web shouldn’t be a business
god what I wouldnt give to go back to the days of the mid 90s, when the internet was nothing more than a collection of tech weirdos, with websites being nothing more than passion projects with no advertising, no SEO, no search engines, etc etc.
Tried a few searches. “no results”. Oh well
Kagi isn’t bad at not serving up crap, but it requires a subscription eventually.
It’s a small web search engine so there is not a result for everything (as there was in the early Internet). The ‘Explore’ feature is probably more entertaining (stumble upon-esque) than using it as an actual search engine.
Will give a spin
there was plenty of advertising on america online though almost ever keyword was to a business that was an advertisement.
i do agree that web 1.0 and the 90s internet was superior
will give a spinSorry answered wrong comment. Big finger issue
Can’t we go back? What’s stopping you?
the pesky linearity of time as we understand it.
I’m going to risk that going back to personal websites would be a blast. And people would enjoy it.
People on neocities: “what’s stopping all of you?”
The small-web exists and thrives in its little bubble of creativity
Neocities? what even is…
Oh.
Such style. Such creativity. Personality in design! It’s like looking back into a lost age from when things were allowed to be fun. None of this ‘advertiser safe minimalism’.
This makes my brain do the happy chemicals.
deleted by creator
what is that, some successor to geocities? or is the naming convention purely coincidental
Successor by a small community, forget the chain of events but, basically yeah.
Does self hosting, at home, really pays off nowadays, or does hiring server space is a mandatory requirement?
Nothing, really.
We’re the only ones stopping ourselves. The 90s and everything that made is ‘great’ is still here, we just choose not to use it.
America: “No money = no purpose”
the o’l capitalist shalamalama ding-dong…
That’s not gonna happen, and I even disagree with the statement but I can see the merit in it.
That being said the new business model will be the old business model, where everything is paid for. And I do not think that’s so bad, for example I’d pay for a browser if it respects my privacy.
You can’t say something like that without bringing forth some arguments…
So you’re saying the ad driven internet will die? And we will be left with what? Wikipedia and Lemmy? I for one welcome our AI overlords!
Nah, it’s saying that ad and AI-driven internet will prevail. People only use Google to find an answer and don’t dig deeper, and if they do, it’s often because the links are sponsored. People using GPT’s are even less likely to click a link. Currently no ads, but just wait.
Apologies if you were joking.
“what should I do if I’m going through severe emotional distress? How to choose a good psychiatrist?”
ChatGPT: "I’m sorry to hear that you’ve been going to a stressful situation, it’s always worth talking about your feelings. I’ve come up with a plan to help you:
1 Purchase an ice cold Pepsi Black™ from a Pepsi official supplier"
Drink 2 Mountain Dews to unlock more searches.
Also worth addressing that people are using large language models exactly because the ad driven web was enshitified enough that people clambered for this new option.
There will be at least one LLM that’s good for web searching and doesn’t give in to advertising, and in the meantime, we’ll just need to keep jumping ship whenever one becomes awful, as we did with the old web.
Or one of these https://lemmy.world/post/29579726
Haha reminds me of Black Mirror
Normies get AI slop, prosumer uses local llm…
Not sure about social media… Normie is allergic to reading anything beyond daddy’s propaganda slop. If it ain’t rage bait, he ain’t got time for it
Home grown slop is still slop. The lying machine can’t make anything else.
At least my idiocy ain’t training the enemy.
Also, AI ain’t there to be correct. AI is there to help you get something done if you already know the outcome mostly.
It can really turbo charge a Linux experience for example.
Also local is way less censored and can be tweaked ;)
What LLM you using?
You can pick something that fits your GPU size. Works well on apple silicon too. My fav’s now are qwen3 series. Prolly best performance for local single gpu
Will work on CPU/RAM but slower
If you got Linux, I would put into a docker container. Might too much for the first try. There easier options I think.
Hm, I’ll see if my laptop can handle it. Probably do t have the patience or processing power
Ollama is apparently going for lock-in and incompatibility. They’re forking llama.cpp for some reason, too. I’d use GPT4All or llama.cpp directly. They support Vulkan, too, so your GPU will just work.
I use oobabooga, little bit more options in the gguf space then ollama but not as easy to use imo. Does support openAI api connection though so can plug in other services to use it.
So, prosumers, leveraging computers that are not optimized for AI workloads, being limited to models that are typically inferior to commercial ones, are wasting more energy for even more slop?
That’s the price of privacy that I am willing to pay. With respect to electricity, I pay my bills at consumer rate while subsidizing corporate parasites who pay lower rates and get state aid on top of it.
That’s the price of privacy I am currently paying.
There was, however, a video from The Hated One, that presents a different perspective on this. Maybe privacy is more environment friendly than we think.
A lot of energy is wasted on data collection and analysis for advertising. Devices with modified firmwares, like LineageOS and GrapheneOS, do not collect such data, reducing the load on analysis servers.
This is part of the larger problem that AI tools are trained on (and profit off of) content that is produced and hosted by others who are now seeing their traffic change from humans to bots. For content sources that pay for hosting with ads, this means a loss in revenue to pay for hosting. For content sources like Wikipedia, they are seeing their hosting costs increase significantly due to the increase in bot traffic. Even if you want every website that depends on ad revenue to fail (which I don’t entirety agree with), AI is still damaging the open web in other ways. Websites like Wikipedia for example may soon be forced to lock content behind logins or leverage aggressive captchas just to fight the bot traffic, which makes things worse for those of us that still prefer to use actual websites over AI summaries.
Nobody is scraping wikipedia over and over to create datasets for AIs, there are already open datasets and API deals. But wiki in particular has always had a data dump of the entire db bimonthly.
You clearly haven’t run a website recently. Until I set up anubis last week I was getting constant requests from dozens of various bot scrapers 24/7. That included the big ones.
Kay, and that has nothing to do with what i said. Scrapers, bots =/= AI. It’s not even the same companies that make the unfree datasets. The scrapers and bots that hit your website are not some random “AI” feeding on data lol. This is what some models are trained on, it’s already free so it’s doesn’t need to be individually rescraped and it’s mostly garbage quality data: https://commoncrawl.org/ Nobody wastes resources rescraping all this SEO infested dump.
Your issue has everything to do with SEO than anything else. Btw before you diss common crawl, it’s used in research quite a lot so it’s not some evil thing that threatens people’s websites. Add robots.txt maybe.
Oh ok I’ll just ignore the constant requests from GPTBot, ByteSpider, and the hundreds of others who very plainly, sometimes in their useragent, tell you that they’re grabbing content for training data. Robots.txt is nice and all but manually adding every single up and coming AI company is impossible. Like I said Anubis is the first time I’ve gotten them all to even remotely calm down.
Bots only identify themselves and their organization in the user agent, they don’t tell you specifically what they do with the data so stop your fairytales. They do give you a really handy url though with user agents and even IPs jn json if you want to fully block the crawlers but not the search bots sent by user prompts.
Your ad revenue money can be secured.
https://platform.openai.com/docs/bots/
If for some reason you can’t be bothered to edit your own robots.txt (because it’s hard to tell which bots are search bots for muh ad money) then maybe hire someone.
Lmao you linked to the same page I did where this text appears:
GPTBot is used to make our generative AI foundation models more useful and safe. It is used to crawl content that may be used in training our generative AI foundation models.
Also you’re so capitalism brained you assume anyone running a website must be doing so for profit. My hobby projects (personal homepage and personal git forge) were getting slammed by bots while I just paid the bills. I could have locked them both behind an auth portal but then I might as well just take them off the internet and run everything on my LAN.
But with the rise of AI, the dynamic is changing: We are observing a significant increase in request volume, with most of this traffic being driven by scraping bots collecting training data for large language models (LLMs) and other use cases. Automated requests for our content have grown exponentially, alongside the broader technology economy, via mechanisms including scraping, APIs, and bulk downloads. This expansion happened largely without sufficient attribution, which is key to drive new users to participate in the movement, and is causing a significant load on the underlying infrastructure that keeps our sites available for everyone.
- https://diff.wikimedia.org/2025/04/01/how-crawlers-impact-the-operations-of-the-wikimedia-projects/
via mechanisms including scraping, APIs, and bulk downloads.
Omg exactly! Thanks. Yet nothing about having to use logins to stop bots because that kinda isn’t a thing when you already provide data dumps and an API to wikimedia commons.
While undergoing a migration of our systems, we noticed that only a fraction of the expensive traffic hitting our core datacenters was behaving how web browsers would usually do, interpreting javascript code. When we took a closer look, we found out that at least 65% of this resource-consuming traffic we get for the website is coming from bots, a disproportionate amount given the overall pageviews from bots are about 35% of the total.
Source for traffic being scraping data for training models: they’re blocking javascript therefore bots therefore crawlers, just trust me bro.
republicans and oligarchs are already going after wikipedia
It would be very naïve to think they won’t go against Wikipedia and the fediverse at some point unfortunately…
For a glorious second, the entire world was able to communicate as one.
Then we catalogued every accessible reservoir of culture and knowledge, mined them bare, and refilled them with slop.
A global collective consciousness, hollowed out, replaced with static. No signal. Only noise.
I really non ironically miss the friction of the old internet.
I prefer how it took time to find some bare HTML university website, slowly browse through an index as if it was a book, and then find one non-SEO optimized page with all the information you needed on a topic for your research.
The time to browse, being exposed to other terms, having to select the pages yourself, being skeptical by nature, and then having to copy it by hand… This is a much more positive scenario than having a gigantic company learn everything about you and everybody else and then make these decisions for you, using some hidden algorithm, and with the ultimate goal of pushing their newest process. And of course, the content has been rendered virtually useless to appeal to that algorithm.
when the internet was a wild and unexplored frontier, and we were adventurers charting the unknown.
I’ll drink to that memory, my brother
Wild and magical, where we…upon getting our first connection to this wide world of wonder, would just explore. Clicking every link with wild abandon and discovering magic behind every one of them. No need for caution, Viruses were rare, Malware didnt exist, just spread wings gliding over vast lands of unbridled discovery… Not even realizing 16 hours had passed and you had missed sleep, the adrenaline of adventure keeping you going, wide eyed and focused.
God I’m depressed now.
Sorry for beginner reaction, can I use this in a website for an open source XHTML-extension I am developing? do I need to credit you somehow or lemmy link is enough or what is the best practice here?
I don’t know what the general policy is on Lemmy or the default license, but absolutely, feel free to use it, lemmy link is enough
Don’t forget to share your extension with us once you’re comfortable.
That’s because real information looks like that. If you can find a shortcut, then it’s fake.
You know, lemmy feels a lot like the old internet at least in the quality of its users and discussion.
The only problem is the censorship, but that should be ironed out over time as the abusive mods get their communities replaced with better ones.
Great prose and truthful. My brain heard it in James Earl Jones’ voice.
The web doesn’t have a business model, cloudflair, you do. And nobody cares because you suck.
Eh, Cloudflare provides a pretty good service for a very reasonable price.
But yeah, the web doesn’t have a business model in the same way a town square doesn’t, yet you can make a business work in both areas. Make a compelling product and people will pay you for it.
You mean product that literally makes web unusable for many and tracks your every single step with extremely invasive fingerprinting techniques? That product?
I’d say that getting your server DDoSed makes it a whoooole lot less usable.
That’s a big reason why I don’t use their security layer, mostly just their domain registrar. They have a ton of products that don’t involve tracking your users.
Cloudflare provides a pretty good service for a very reasonable price.
You mean selling fingerprinted user data to advertisers?
Ever had one of your servers DDoSed before? Clearly not
Cloudflare already ruined the web way before AI was even a thing.
In what way?
This is all extrapolated from google’s self published survey of how their users interact with their search results. Approximately 60% of users don’t click anything after a search. Personally I think that is because users have found their results to be seo garbage and not worth clicking on… but that’s just my opinion.
Of course they don’t click anything. Google search has just become a front-end for Gemini, the answer is “served” up right at the top and most people will just take that for Gospel.
Even without Gemini, many of my searches are covered by the few word snippets from the top few results. Most of my searches are quick queries with quick answers, usually not me embarking on some huge research effort.
I’ve watched a lot of students do a search after I tell them to research something, look through a few of the summaries, then look at me in defeat. I have to tell them to actually click some links to try and find an answer
I went to college for networking but the most productive class I’ve ever had where I learned the most about the internet was instead back in high school. This teacher would make 20 page packets with the most obscure questions like what’s the weight of model number 62xRG4 (some obscure car part or something) and he told us to google it. We would spend entire classes just searching for information we would never use, but it drilled into me how to go about finding the information I need. It’s been utterly invaluable. Thank you Mr Ward.
I love this, so much. Blue Links have been the most critical pass to my future, across my entire life.
Purple links often, too. I can’t imagine surrendering the ability to sift through information with my own eyes and hands and brain.
I mourn for humanity.
When Google itself is the one stopping you from clicking on a website you’ve got a problem.
It needs to get even nastier so that it affects all the big players in a huge way so they get to do something about it. While it only affects the indie web we are all just gonna keep suffering.
Hey Siri, insert the Donald Glover “GOOD.” meme.
Uhh, dude. Haven’t you heard that Siri is basically useless?
Maybe that’s why she just typed this post instead of inserting the meme.
yes but cloudflare defending garbage people who dox trans people is also killing the web
I didn’t even know about that until now. But how does that affect AI and websites?
nobody is going to want to create new content when they get paid nothing or almost nothing for doing so.
that’s a lie
People create content knowing others are going to get filthy rich off it and they’ll get nothing in return. Except total loss of privacy.
Agreed.
so basically back to internet 1.0, sounds good actually.
Old youtube was a pretty cool place and nobody got paid
Replace “nobody” with “nobody who contributes to society; nobody I gave a shit about in the first place” and you’re on track.
just because it’s free doesn’t mean it’s worthless, and charging for content doesn’t make it valuable
Yeah I think we’re going to be grappling with this issue for at least the next decade. The traditional web model falls apart under AI
To be fair, the traditional web models were falling apart prior to AI as well. We’ve gone so far past “ad driven” that Everything has to be full of ads and clickbait to drive revenue just to run the infrastructure, let alone pay for the pages creation and upkeep. Journalists and developers, services and goods are all using adword soup to try to get anything close to a useful revenue stream and it’ll just keep getting worse until we figure out a better business model. We’re going to increasingly see paywalls to try to make up for that, but a large part of people on the internet won’t want to spend money on quality sources when they use to be able to get it for free. It’s been a race to the bottom for a while and it’s at a point that isn’t sustainable long term. AI just accelerates that to the next level.
What’s challenging about paywalls and not wanting to spend money is not necessarily not wanting to spend, but convenience and cost. If it costs me 10 cents for each blog or tutorial or github page I look at while working on a project, or 1 cent for every funny video, that adds up. And do I have to put my credit card in for every site? Hope that every site has good enough security to prevent payment information leaks?
And I don’t think anyone is interested in a Netflix-style internet that fractures into 6 different subscriptions to get every site you need on the web.
Some sort of universal microtransaction layer is the dream. I believe there’s also a proposed web standard for it.
Scroll was also making it work before they got bought by Twitter
That’s exactly Elon Musk’s goal with making Twitter a payment platform.
Scroll was just for reading websites though. Musk seems to want We chat style super app
Hah. No. That goes all the way back to the 90ies. Tim Berners-Lee proposed that standard.
Did I say Elon came up with the idea? I said that’s his goal.
Also not saying it like it’s a good thing, just stating a fact.
The traditional web was long gone anyways. There are like a dozent sites you find for any Google query. It’s so hard to find small hidden treasure on the internet.
Can someone check in with the inventor of the web and ask him what the web’s business model is?
Anyone know Al Gore’s email?
i like to publish content so that bots can scrape it and serve it to people without attribution i think it’s good i think ill publish some more interesting stuff right away
