Quora has sucked for a while now. When the second answer on every question is completely unrelated to the question asked, in some weird attempt to make you look up more content on the site, the site starts losing its usefulness.
Quora has never, in my memory, provided any value to the internet. The answers it seems to provide to google are seemingly inaccurate and also seem completely unmoderated. Furthermore you seemingly have to pay to even ask answers to get updated.
Yeah, it's so blatantly frustratingly tone-deaf that the real message is: "This site purposely wants to be full of irrelevant spammy shit, so get whatever you needed and get out ASAP."
Isn't that because ChatGPT is trained on those QA platforms? If real humans aren't answering questions on the Internet, how will LLMs learn the answers to those questions?
Q&A tends to be "chunky" and asynchronous in its communication model.
This comes from a reaction to the previous model of forums where it was smaller bits of data spread across multiple comments or posts. I recall going through forums in the days before Stack Overflow, trying to find out how to solve a problem. https://xkcd.com/979/ was very real.
Stack Overflow (and its siblings) was an attempt to change this to a "one spot that has all the information".
That model works, but it is a high maintenance approach. Trying to move from a back and forth of information that can only be understood in its entirety across a conversation to become one that more closely resembles a Wikipedia page (that hides all of the work of Talk:Something). The key thing is it takes a lot of work to maintain that Q&A format.
And yet, users often don't know what they want. They want that forum model with interaction and step by step hand holding by someone who knows the answer. Stack Overflow was intentionally designed to make that approach difficult in an attempt to make the Q&A the easier solution on the site.
ChatGPT provides the users who want the step by step hand holding an infinitely patient thing behind the screen that doesn't embarrass them in public and is confident that it knows the answer to their problem.
Stack Overflow and Quora and other Q&A forums are the abomination. People want Perlmonks https://www.perlmonks.org/?node_id=11164039 and /r/JavaHelp where its interacting with another and small steps rather than Q&A.
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The future of "well, if people stop using the sites that is generating the information that is being used to train the models that people are using to get information" ... that becomes an interesting problem.
The currency is new material that is to be sold. The information gets locked behind some measures to try to make scraping impractical and then sold off wholesale. Humans still talk and answer questions. There are new posts on Reddit about how to solve problems even while ChatGPT is out there. And Reddit is presumably trying to make harvesting the content within its walls something that others have to pay for to get at for training.
In my experience, they do seem to be very good at synthesizing answers from docs. However I don't know if that will work for edge cases which is one of the things SO is good at.
Nor does ChatGPT ban you from the entire network because you answered a Palestine question on the politics sub-section. (Happened to me.)
It's like Stack Exchange doesn't want questions and answers any more, just wants to harvest Google traffic and shows ads. Actual content production is too hard.
> Nor does ChatGPT ban you from the entire network because you answered a Palestine question on the politics sub-section. (Happened to me.)
Some Reddit subs (as well as web forums/messageboards) have the same problem. If your views don't align with the majority (or the minority, if they run the sub), you're likely to get banned or lose the ability to post.
Reddit is awful now. Some sub reddits are so anal about following new post guide lines every question I ask is automatically removed. And I've tried really hard to follow the rules. I have given up asking. Also who thought it was a good idea to put a wall of rules text at the top of every thread. It is a pain to scroll past and I'm pretty certain no one except crazy people read them.
We tried that but they filled up with spammers and morons. Other people who are neither don't want to use those systems. It's the Nazi bar effect, but for spam.
Somewhere between there, and "recite these falsehoods someone paid us to make you recite or get banned", there may or may not be a point that's actually okay.
Plenty of such things exist, and I (and everyone I know) generally avoid visiting them. There is simply too much spam, trolling, hate speech, wrong information, ads, off-topic conversations..
Turns out moderation is actually useful if you want to have interesting conversations.
um, I would argue overbearing moderation is positive for overall "quality" of content. But not as useful as ChatGPT that will spoon feed you answers and not care about misspellings, bad English, asking the same question, etc. It is truly remarkable how good it is.
Depends on the moderation. /r/worldnews bans any user who says anything that makes Israel look bad (I'm not exaggerating). That does nothing for quality of content.
The actual trend these days is that if your company struggles, blame AI ;) I can't say about WebMD and Chegg, but Quora and SO started going downhill before this AI (boom or bubble, whatever you call it) due to their policies, politics, and management. IMHO, of course.
All Chegg has going for it is a database of answers for homework assignments that typically use per-student randomized numbers—so students have to recalculate their specific answer manually by following the steps—and "verified tutors" that constantly give wrong answers to even highschool-level math questions.
Every college student I know uses ChatGPT (and now DeepSeek) for tons of assignments, usually via the free plan.
Once you experience that, it gets really tempting to cancel that $20/month chegg subscription and never look back.
I find professors pitiful fearmongering over 'the big bad ChatGPT' a little funny, such as when they insist they "have secret tools to detect AI usage" and "it can't answer the questions correctly anyway", so "you shouldn't even try it".
I think the issue is when people start replacing their capacity to think and reason with these machines. There was an intergalactic space jihad about this IIRC.
Those thing aren't mutually exclusive. You can be on a decline and something comes along and tanks your visits well beyond what a natural decline would have been.
AI is killing my website but in a different way than what's discussed in the article: Content scrapers are completely out of control, spiking my serving costs and degrading performance for human users. There seem to be hundreds of them and they've gotten very good at looking like human users so they're hard to block or throttle. I can't prove they're all AI-related scrapers, but I've been running the site for 25 years and this issue only became problematic starting in, oh, late 2022 or so.
Even my barely visited personal website is using almost 10GB bandwidth per month according to Digital Ocean. My website is 90% text with no video, so I imagine it's just bots and scrapers hitting it all day. I'm very close to password protecting the whole thing aside from the homepage.
I'm on AWS and use their WAF service to do some rudimentary bot blocking, but CDNs (their Cloudflare equivalent, Cloudfront) have been too expensive in the past and the bot control mechanisms they offer have too many false positives. Perhaps I should check it out again.
Part of the problem is the economics of it -- I've chosen to self-fund a high traffic site without ads, and that's on me. But it was possible to do this just a few years ago.
>and the bot control mechanisms they offer have too many false positives. Perhaps I should check it out again.
Cloudflare no longer does CAPTCHAs so even if users get flagged as bots, the user experience isn't terrible. You just have to click on a box and you're on your way. It adds maybe 3s of delay, far better than anti-bot solutions that require you to solve an captcha, or imperva's (?) challenge that requires you to hold a button for 5-10s seconds.
If you're given a button to click, your browser has successfully passed the environment integrity checks and you have not been flagged as a bot.
You'll be flagged as a bot if your browser configuration has something "weird" (e.g. webrtc is disabled to reduce your attack surface) and you will be completely unable to access any site behind cloudflare with the anti-bot options turned on. You'll get an infinite redirect loop, not a button to click.
Note that Google's version of this was determined to be checking whether you had a 9-day-old tracking cookie.
The researcher who discovered this was able to generate 60,000 "I am not a bot" cookies per day, and use them up about 15 times each in a bot before it started getting captchas.
I’ve seen this shift in my own usage. I find myself appending “Reddit” to the end of my searches a lot more often, I have pinned Wikipedia to the top of my search results (in kagi) and I haven’t visited stackoverflow in months, although I see that perplexity quotes it quite often when I ask it coding questions…
I’m just a sample of one, but it’s certainly interesting to see how apparently I’m just one of many
> I find myself appending “Reddit” to the end of my searches a lot more often
And even then, Reddit's "new" design is shit for usability, sine the actual text you were searching for is nowhere on the page. It's hidden somewhere behind one of a hundred "click to see more" interactions, some of which are nested, and some will cause a completely new new page load that erases your progress and makes you start over.
It's shocking to me that people would intentionally seek Reddit threads. The quality of the discussion on that site is absolutely appalling beyond belief.
Yep. As poor as the signal to noise ratio is, for many things it’s substantially better there than elsewhere.
Though as of late, that’s been eroded too. Increasingly the most useful answers are in older threads more than newer ones, an effect I’d at least partially attribute to the APIpocolpyse a while back that drove away some of the site’s best and most prolific contributors. It’s becoming filled with the same mindless drivel found everywhere else.
Particularly for product reviews/information, it's the least biased (note: NOT unbiased) source I know of. If you're looking for information on what model of (to pick a recent personal example) toaster isn't complete junk, where do you look?
if you look for non controversial topics it can have some good niche groups. Doesnt have good native search though so you have to use google or something else
Content marketing is dead. AI has killed it. One of our main marketing channels was writing SEO-oriented articles on our company’s blog. The traffic has steadily decreased over the last year despite huge efforts.
Disagree. The old way of doing SEO blogspam is dead, and good riddance. Well curated, high quality content written by humans, with information and insights you can’t get from LLMs, will reign. Long live curation.
I'm sure I can make a couple of surprising or insightful articles for my current industry, and then I'll run dry.
Most topics require data or information in some form, which requires time to accumulate. You end up rate limited. Even at the scale of a decent sized company, you often can only produce interesting content occasionally.
> Most topics require data or information in some form, which requires time to accumulate. You end up rate limited. Even at the scale of a decent sized company, you often can only produce interesting content occasionally.
No it won't. Well curated info is paywalled everywhere besides Wikipedia and Internet Archive. SEO is still serving up content mill blogspam at an unstoppable rate.
I've personally been seeing an overall shift in the direction of a strong dislike for any kind of low-effort content.
People are pretty hostile towards AI-generated content, so any platform wanting to remain relevant is going to have to take measures to keep out AI-generated content. If you allow it in, it'll quickly become 99% of your overall content and all the human consumers will leave.
As a side effect I'm seeing a lot of human-generated content getting labeled as AI-generated because it looks AI-generated. Sure, a lot of blogspam is going to be replaced by AI slop, but even human-written blogspam isn't going to survive the shift, simply because its quality is so poor that it is essentially indistinguishable from AI slop.
Right now we're in an in-between phase. Most people are still using low-quality aggregators like Google. This will inevitably have to change. Either Google & friends somehow get their shit together (I doubt it), or we're going to see a shift towards known-good curated content like 1990s webrings. I wouldn't be surprised to see a vetted-human Web Of Trust, but for content.
What are the effective marketing channels for specialized/niche B2B companies these days, now that - presumably - the long tail search result strategy is no longer effective?
A friend of mine was telling me that his company was very pleased when they were able to ask ChatGPT "what is the best SaaS for X?" where X = their niche, and their company was the first thing it recommended. It surprised me that this was a thing, although in hindsight, it's obvious.
On the flip side, I still have situations where I ask, "what's the best solution for X" and the answer is a company (or Github repo or whatever) that has been entirely hallucinated or was around ten years ago and not any more or something.
I guess a corollary question is, are there methods (i.e. the chatbot version of SEO) to get your company into chatbot recommendations?
> What are the effective marketing channels for specialized/niche B2B companies these days, now that - presumably - the long tail search result strategy is no longer effective?
Lately, they've been sending emails offering $2-500 Amazon gift cards for short sales calls. Some follow through. I'm not helping their KPIs though.
Obviously the correct thing do here is register a company named after the hallucination and offer the solution. Kind of like that guy who looks at what domains are being auctioned for creating new start-ups.
Search engines are dying, because the publicly scrape-able web is being drowned in slop and the search engine purveyors are leaning into it. SEO is dying because search engines have become so useless that even non-tech-adjacent people have noticed.
I'm pretty sure you could drop at least 60% of domains from search engine indexes with no reduction in result quality. (And it would probably be a net quality increase to get rid of all the domains that just copy content from other domains, content-farms, scam sites, etc.)
Apropos of anything else, it's one of the things I like about Kagi for search. You can tune a domain to be heavily bumped, bumped, deranked or heavily deranked.
It's not dead in the sense that companies will stop doing it, it's dead in the sense that there will be much more competition with AI-written articles.
More competition is good though - people are just going to be much more picky and if your content is not distinguishable from AI slop then it deservedly will perish.
This ignores the volume problem. Human written content can be copied and rewritten via AI in a bunch of different ways, instantly. Human content will go away not because it's bad, but because it's immediately drowned out in a way that is unfixable.
A lot of content has been written by Indian content farms anyway. I prefer the AI written content. It gets right to the information you want without restating it's purpose 4 or 5 times and having to scroll down the first 500 words of the article.
I would expect there to be a measurement error here (although maybe not a significant one): individuals and services have repeatedly complained about AI companies engaging in aggressive crawling. Given that, one might expect to see traffic increases to data sources like Wikipedia and Reddit.
the analysis isn't correct, it feels like a forced segregation
- reddit got boost because of google's investment in it, and they're consciously boosting it
- wikipedia clearly doesn't have increase in page views
- substack as a product has been on rise, more authors leading to more views, no actual co-relation with the content on the platform
I've noticed that since I've started using ChatGPT, I've almost entirely stopped using Google (except for the rare case where I need a specific website but don't remember the URL). In addition to a bunch of technical questions related to my work, my ChatGPT chat log has the most mundane things like:
- What is platos frios
- Can you download Netflix videos to your local device
- Who composed the Top Gun theme
- Who have been the most successful American Idol winners
- If I check-in the day before a United Airlines flight, can I still buy additional checked bags when I go to the airport
- If I'm buying a Schwinn IC4 indoor spin bike, do I need a floormat for it also
- What is pisco
- In the US, what is the format for EINs?
- Is it bad to use tap water in your humidifier?
- Which NBA players are on supermax contracts
- What are some of the best steakhouses in Manhattan?
- How much and how long does it take to procure a DUNS number?
- In terms of real estate, what is historic tax credit development
LLMs give me the answers I want immediately. Before, I would use Google basically as a proxy to find websites that I'd then have to sift through to find the answers to these questions. It was another layer of indirection. Now that I can have an LLM just tell me the answer (you still need to approach it with a skeptical eye, since it can certainly get some things wrong), I don't need to "search" the search results pages themselves and read multiple articles and blog posts to hopefully find the answer to my question.
After some experience and testing, I've become well aware not to use LLMs to ask questions like "who did X" and "what is company Y's policy about Z", because they tend to hallucinate responses (even for well-known people).
What I've not yet figured out how to deal with is how to handle being surrounded by a society of people who go ahead and trust LLMs for their factual answers anyway. I think even if I'm careful about selecting my sources, the background noise floor is going to climb up to the point that there's no signal-to-noise ratio left.
People used to criticise Wikipedia for being bad due to being crowdsourced (at least in school they did). Now, Wikipedia looks like one of the best antidotes to LLMs.
The problem with this approach is that LLM gives me unreliable answers. I know this because sometimes I ask things that I used to knew but forgot and needed to refresh my memory - and sometimes the answers were incorrect. So, unfortunately, a search engine validation step is still a necessity.
Asking LLM to provide a link does NOT work, as they hallucinate links just fine, and give links that are either broken or do not contain the information LLM says it should. Using search tools through a LLM (like ChatGPT's "search" function) sort of works (at least the link will be correct - still need to check if the contents means what LLM says it does), but it's quite limited and cannot be fine-tuned (I don't use Google but rather prefer Kagi, and I tend to heavily rely on Kagi's lenses, site: queries and negative terms to scope and refine searches).
In other words: please do NOT trust LLM's answers, even if they sound plausible. Always verify.
I really like having the site where the answer came from so I can instantly judge how likely the answer is to be correct.
Chat GPT does correctly answer your question about airline bags, but I have no way of knowing if it made that answer up or not because so many airlines have the same policy.
Google at least gives you links to the United baggage policies. The AI overview in Google also "cites its sources", which sort of gives you the best of both worlds. (I'm sure the accuracy of Google's AI vs. ChatGPT is up for debate)
I might misunderstand, but can't you just ask for the reference? I've also been using (Gemini) a lot to basically replace my search engine, but I always tell it to give me a reference. I've had pretty good results with this approach.
I wonder how many new, strange, surprising and wonderful things you indirectly stumbled into during those sifting exercises. Hyper-optimized search has some downsides. I love getting answers to my specific questions, but that always encompasses the "known unknowns" space. Through skimming and sifting using websites as proxies, I enjoyed surprises from the "unknown unknowns" space.
10 years ago I'd agree with you completely. I definitely get your point and share some of that same sentiment, but search results these past 10 uears have become overwhelming absurd, shallow, and barely tangentially related to what I'm looking for
The ones that struggle had pre-existing issues :
- quora pivoted from quality content to cheap clickbait
- SO has overbearing moderation. Chatgpt doesn't close your question the second you've submitted it.
And so on. In short, quality platforms are fine.
Quora has sucked for a while now. When the second answer on every question is completely unrelated to the question asked, in some weird attempt to make you look up more content on the site, the site starts losing its usefulness.
Quora has never, in my memory, provided any value to the internet. The answers it seems to provide to google are seemingly inaccurate and also seem completely unmoderated. Furthermore you seemingly have to pay to even ask answers to get updated.
Yeah, it's so blatantly frustratingly tone-deaf that the real message is: "This site purposely wants to be full of irrelevant spammy shit, so get whatever you needed and get out ASAP."
True, but Q&A platforms were the prime collateral damage for ChatGPT.
I am not sure that quality content on a Q&A platform would help you much. You’d have to pivot significantly.
Isn't that because ChatGPT is trained on those QA platforms? If real humans aren't answering questions on the Internet, how will LLMs learn the answers to those questions?
Not entirely. LLMs are smart enough to answer questions from documentation or from other sources, even if the exact question wasn't asked anywhere.
But Q&A websites do contain information that might not be in other sources, so there would be some loss.
Q&A tends to be "chunky" and asynchronous in its communication model.
This comes from a reaction to the previous model of forums where it was smaller bits of data spread across multiple comments or posts. I recall going through forums in the days before Stack Overflow, trying to find out how to solve a problem. https://xkcd.com/979/ was very real.
Stack Overflow (and its siblings) was an attempt to change this to a "one spot that has all the information".
That model works, but it is a high maintenance approach. Trying to move from a back and forth of information that can only be understood in its entirety across a conversation to become one that more closely resembles a Wikipedia page (that hides all of the work of Talk:Something). The key thing is it takes a lot of work to maintain that Q&A format.
And yet, users often don't know what they want. They want that forum model with interaction and step by step hand holding by someone who knows the answer. Stack Overflow was intentionally designed to make that approach difficult in an attempt to make the Q&A the easier solution on the site.
ChatGPT provides the users who want the step by step hand holding an infinitely patient thing behind the screen that doesn't embarrass them in public and is confident that it knows the answer to their problem.
Stack Overflow and Quora and other Q&A forums are the abomination. People want Perlmonks https://www.perlmonks.org/?node_id=11164039 and /r/JavaHelp where its interacting with another and small steps rather than Q&A.
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The future of "well, if people stop using the sites that is generating the information that is being used to train the models that people are using to get information" ... that becomes an interesting problem.
I am reminded of Accelerando ( https://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/fiction/acceler... ) and the digital civilizations being various forms of scams and the currency is things that can think new ideas.
The currency is new material that is to be sold. The information gets locked behind some measures to try to make scraping impractical and then sold off wholesale. Humans still talk and answer questions. There are new posts on Reddit about how to solve problems even while ChatGPT is out there. And Reddit is presumably trying to make harvesting the content within its walls something that others have to pay for to get at for training.
While true, this doesn’t change the problem that Q&A platforms have a hard time competing with LLMs, and I don’t see how that is likely to change.
It is frankly absurd that they should be expected to
These LLMs could not exist without them, but now they're expected to compete?
If all of the Q&A platforms die off, how are LLM training datasets going to get new information?
This whole AI boom is typical corporate shortsightedness imo. Kill the future in order to have a great next quarter
I hope I'm wrong. If I am right, then I hope we figure this out before AI has bulldozed everything into dust
In my experience, they do seem to be very good at synthesizing answers from docs. However I don't know if that will work for edge cases which is one of the things SO is good at.
it won't work for anything that requires a novel synthesis of ideas because Gen AI is incapable of novelty
Make new q&a websites.
SO also has the "eternal September" problem
I think this is true.
I personally hated those Seo clickbait pages for a while, because it was so hard to find the information i'm looking for.
doing all of this with ai now.
On the other hand, I really like to read a good article more than ever before
Nor does ChatGPT ban you from the entire network because you answered a Palestine question on the politics sub-section. (Happened to me.)
It's like Stack Exchange doesn't want questions and answers any more, just wants to harvest Google traffic and shows ads. Actual content production is too hard.
> Nor does ChatGPT ban you from the entire network because you answered a Palestine question on the politics sub-section. (Happened to me.)
Some Reddit subs (as well as web forums/messageboards) have the same problem. If your views don't align with the majority (or the minority, if they run the sub), you're likely to get banned or lose the ability to post.
Reddit is awful now. Some sub reddits are so anal about following new post guide lines every question I ask is automatically removed. And I've tried really hard to follow the rules. I have given up asking. Also who thought it was a good idea to put a wall of rules text at the top of every thread. It is a pain to scroll past and I'm pretty certain no one except crazy people read them.
And then there are subreddit coups where someone ousts the old mods and starts banning people according to a whole new set of opinions . . .
We need P2P social media where bigoted, power hungry mods can't enforce their unilateral views on everyone else.
We tried that but they filled up with spammers and morons. Other people who are neither don't want to use those systems. It's the Nazi bar effect, but for spam.
Somewhere between there, and "recite these falsehoods someone paid us to make you recite or get banned", there may or may not be a point that's actually okay.
Plenty of such things exist, and I (and everyone I know) generally avoid visiting them. There is simply too much spam, trolling, hate speech, wrong information, ads, off-topic conversations..
Turns out moderation is actually useful if you want to have interesting conversations.
We get what we've paid for. I wouldn't want the thankless work for free job.
um, I would argue overbearing moderation is positive for overall "quality" of content. But not as useful as ChatGPT that will spoon feed you answers and not care about misspellings, bad English, asking the same question, etc. It is truly remarkable how good it is.
Depends on the moderation. /r/worldnews bans any user who says anything that makes Israel look bad (I'm not exaggerating). That does nothing for quality of content.
The actual trend these days is that if your company struggles, blame AI ;) I can't say about WebMD and Chegg, but Quora and SO started going downhill before this AI (boom or bubble, whatever you call it) due to their policies, politics, and management. IMHO, of course.
ChatGPT nearly killed Chegg
https://www.reddit.com/r/ArtificialInteligence/comments/1cwq...
Doesn't surprise me whatsoever.
All Chegg has going for it is a database of answers for homework assignments that typically use per-student randomized numbers—so students have to recalculate their specific answer manually by following the steps—and "verified tutors" that constantly give wrong answers to even highschool-level math questions.
Every college student I know uses ChatGPT (and now DeepSeek) for tons of assignments, usually via the free plan.
Once you experience that, it gets really tempting to cancel that $20/month chegg subscription and never look back.
I find professors pitiful fearmongering over 'the big bad ChatGPT' a little funny, such as when they insist they "have secret tools to detect AI usage" and "it can't answer the questions correctly anyway", so "you shouldn't even try it".
I think the issue is when people start replacing their capacity to think and reason with these machines. There was an intergalactic space jihad about this IIRC.
Those thing aren't mutually exclusive. You can be on a decline and something comes along and tanks your visits well beyond what a natural decline would have been.
AI is killing my website but in a different way than what's discussed in the article: Content scrapers are completely out of control, spiking my serving costs and degrading performance for human users. There seem to be hundreds of them and they've gotten very good at looking like human users so they're hard to block or throttle. I can't prove they're all AI-related scrapers, but I've been running the site for 25 years and this issue only became problematic starting in, oh, late 2022 or so.
Even my barely visited personal website is using almost 10GB bandwidth per month according to Digital Ocean. My website is 90% text with no video, so I imagine it's just bots and scrapers hitting it all day. I'm very close to password protecting the whole thing aside from the homepage.
Do you use a CDN in front of it?
Would something like Cloudflare help with bot detection?
I'm on AWS and use their WAF service to do some rudimentary bot blocking, but CDNs (their Cloudflare equivalent, Cloudfront) have been too expensive in the past and the bot control mechanisms they offer have too many false positives. Perhaps I should check it out again.
Part of the problem is the economics of it -- I've chosen to self-fund a high traffic site without ads, and that's on me. But it was possible to do this just a few years ago.
>and the bot control mechanisms they offer have too many false positives. Perhaps I should check it out again.
Cloudflare no longer does CAPTCHAs so even if users get flagged as bots, the user experience isn't terrible. You just have to click on a box and you're on your way. It adds maybe 3s of delay, far better than anti-bot solutions that require you to solve an captcha, or imperva's (?) challenge that requires you to hold a button for 5-10s seconds.
If you're given a button to click, your browser has successfully passed the environment integrity checks and you have not been flagged as a bot.
You'll be flagged as a bot if your browser configuration has something "weird" (e.g. webrtc is disabled to reduce your attack surface) and you will be completely unable to access any site behind cloudflare with the anti-bot options turned on. You'll get an infinite redirect loop, not a button to click.
Note that Google's version of this was determined to be checking whether you had a 9-day-old tracking cookie.
The researcher who discovered this was able to generate 60,000 "I am not a bot" cookies per day, and use them up about 15 times each in a bot before it started getting captchas.
That was in 2016 though.
Cloudflare is free. Give it a try.
I’ve seen this shift in my own usage. I find myself appending “Reddit” to the end of my searches a lot more often, I have pinned Wikipedia to the top of my search results (in kagi) and I haven’t visited stackoverflow in months, although I see that perplexity quotes it quite often when I ask it coding questions…
I’m just a sample of one, but it’s certainly interesting to see how apparently I’m just one of many
> I find myself appending “Reddit” to the end of my searches a lot more often
And even then, Reddit's "new" design is shit for usability, sine the actual text you were searching for is nowhere on the page. It's hidden somewhere behind one of a hundred "click to see more" interactions, some of which are nested, and some will cause a completely new new page load that erases your progress and makes you start over.
On a lighter note, a humorous critique that mentions the same mitigation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jrFv1O4dbqY
It's shocking to me that people would intentionally seek Reddit threads. The quality of the discussion on that site is absolutely appalling beyond belief.
As opposed to what, Yelp? Quora? A Wirecutter article bursting at the seams with affilliate links?
At least some of them are written by humans and some of them are good. Maybe good 20-50% of the time, still better than 100% SEO crap.
Yep. As poor as the signal to noise ratio is, for many things it’s substantially better there than elsewhere.
Though as of late, that’s been eroded too. Increasingly the most useful answers are in older threads more than newer ones, an effect I’d at least partially attribute to the APIpocolpyse a while back that drove away some of the site’s best and most prolific contributors. It’s becoming filled with the same mindless drivel found everywhere else.
Particularly for product reviews/information, it's the least biased (note: NOT unbiased) source I know of. If you're looking for information on what model of (to pick a recent personal example) toaster isn't complete junk, where do you look?
if you look for non controversial topics it can have some good niche groups. Doesnt have good native search though so you have to use google or something else
Content marketing is dead. AI has killed it. One of our main marketing channels was writing SEO-oriented articles on our company’s blog. The traffic has steadily decreased over the last year despite huge efforts.
That doesn’t mean SEO is dead though.
Disagree. The old way of doing SEO blogspam is dead, and good riddance. Well curated, high quality content written by humans, with information and insights you can’t get from LLMs, will reign. Long live curation.
I'm sure I can make a couple of surprising or insightful articles for my current industry, and then I'll run dry.
Most topics require data or information in some form, which requires time to accumulate. You end up rate limited. Even at the scale of a decent sized company, you often can only produce interesting content occasionally.
> Most topics require data or information in some form, which requires time to accumulate. You end up rate limited. Even at the scale of a decent sized company, you often can only produce interesting content occasionally.
That sounds like a good thing tbqh
can't get from LLMs for 6 months until the next training run?
I sure hope you’re right.
No it won't. Well curated info is paywalled everywhere besides Wikipedia and Internet Archive. SEO is still serving up content mill blogspam at an unstoppable rate.
Disagree. The new way of doing SEO blogspam, which involves LLMs, is the way forward. Sadly, downvoting this comment won't make it not be true.
I've personally been seeing an overall shift in the direction of a strong dislike for any kind of low-effort content.
People are pretty hostile towards AI-generated content, so any platform wanting to remain relevant is going to have to take measures to keep out AI-generated content. If you allow it in, it'll quickly become 99% of your overall content and all the human consumers will leave.
As a side effect I'm seeing a lot of human-generated content getting labeled as AI-generated because it looks AI-generated. Sure, a lot of blogspam is going to be replaced by AI slop, but even human-written blogspam isn't going to survive the shift, simply because its quality is so poor that it is essentially indistinguishable from AI slop.
Right now we're in an in-between phase. Most people are still using low-quality aggregators like Google. This will inevitably have to change. Either Google & friends somehow get their shit together (I doubt it), or we're going to see a shift towards known-good curated content like 1990s webrings. I wouldn't be surprised to see a vetted-human Web Of Trust, but for content.
What are the effective marketing channels for specialized/niche B2B companies these days, now that - presumably - the long tail search result strategy is no longer effective?
A friend of mine was telling me that his company was very pleased when they were able to ask ChatGPT "what is the best SaaS for X?" where X = their niche, and their company was the first thing it recommended. It surprised me that this was a thing, although in hindsight, it's obvious.
On the flip side, I still have situations where I ask, "what's the best solution for X" and the answer is a company (or Github repo or whatever) that has been entirely hallucinated or was around ten years ago and not any more or something.
I guess a corollary question is, are there methods (i.e. the chatbot version of SEO) to get your company into chatbot recommendations?
I'm sure the AI company will eventually let you bid to be ranked in the answers.
> What are the effective marketing channels for specialized/niche B2B companies these days, now that - presumably - the long tail search result strategy is no longer effective?
Lately, they've been sending emails offering $2-500 Amazon gift cards for short sales calls. Some follow through. I'm not helping their KPIs though.
Obviously the correct thing do here is register a company named after the hallucination and offer the solution. Kind of like that guy who looks at what domains are being auctioned for creating new start-ups.
Sponsor relevant podcasts?
> I guess a corollary question is, are there methods (i.e. the chatbot version of SEO) to get your company into chatbot recommendations?
It wasn't enough for you lot to ruin search results, now you're seeking ways to pollute AI chat bots?
Search engines are dying, because the publicly scrape-able web is being drowned in slop and the search engine purveyors are leaning into it. SEO is dying because search engines have become so useless that even non-tech-adjacent people have noticed.
>One of our main marketing channels was writing SEO-oriented articles on our company’s blog.
So, blogspam?
> Content marketing is dead.
I mean... good? The quality of search results has gotten increasingly worse over time...
I'm pretty sure you could drop at least 60% of domains from search engine indexes with no reduction in result quality. (And it would probably be a net quality increase to get rid of all the domains that just copy content from other domains, content-farms, scam sites, etc.)
Apropos of anything else, it's one of the things I like about Kagi for search. You can tune a domain to be heavily bumped, bumped, deranked or heavily deranked.
It's not dead in the sense that companies will stop doing it, it's dead in the sense that there will be much more competition with AI-written articles.
It's going to be a way worse situation.
Exactly. Humans can't compete with AI content filters... but AI can.
More competition is good though - people are just going to be much more picky and if your content is not distinguishable from AI slop then it deservedly will perish.
This ignores the volume problem. Human written content can be copied and rewritten via AI in a bunch of different ways, instantly. Human content will go away not because it's bad, but because it's immediately drowned out in a way that is unfixable.
There will be people paying for premium content and people writing it. A new technology doesn't suddenly remove human demand.
A lot of content has been written by Indian content farms anyway. I prefer the AI written content. It gets right to the information you want without restating it's purpose 4 or 5 times and having to scroll down the first 500 words of the article.
ChapGPT enshitification is only waiting to happen (or happening already) through subtle recommendations for businesses that paid to be “listed” well.
Are they just getting more ai bot visits because they're user generated content sites?
I would expect there to be a measurement error here (although maybe not a significant one): individuals and services have repeatedly complained about AI companies engaging in aggressive crawling. Given that, one might expect to see traffic increases to data sources like Wikipedia and Reddit.
the analysis isn't correct, it feels like a forced segregation
- reddit got boost because of google's investment in it, and they're consciously boosting it - wikipedia clearly doesn't have increase in page views - substack as a product has been on rise, more authors leading to more views, no actual co-relation with the content on the platform
I've noticed that since I've started using ChatGPT, I've almost entirely stopped using Google (except for the rare case where I need a specific website but don't remember the URL). In addition to a bunch of technical questions related to my work, my ChatGPT chat log has the most mundane things like:
LLMs give me the answers I want immediately. Before, I would use Google basically as a proxy to find websites that I'd then have to sift through to find the answers to these questions. It was another layer of indirection. Now that I can have an LLM just tell me the answer (you still need to approach it with a skeptical eye, since it can certainly get some things wrong), I don't need to "search" the search results pages themselves and read multiple articles and blog posts to hopefully find the answer to my question.After some experience and testing, I've become well aware not to use LLMs to ask questions like "who did X" and "what is company Y's policy about Z", because they tend to hallucinate responses (even for well-known people).
What I've not yet figured out how to deal with is how to handle being surrounded by a society of people who go ahead and trust LLMs for their factual answers anyway. I think even if I'm careful about selecting my sources, the background noise floor is going to climb up to the point that there's no signal-to-noise ratio left.
People used to criticise Wikipedia for being bad due to being crowdsourced (at least in school they did). Now, Wikipedia looks like one of the best antidotes to LLMs.
The problem with this approach is that LLM gives me unreliable answers. I know this because sometimes I ask things that I used to knew but forgot and needed to refresh my memory - and sometimes the answers were incorrect. So, unfortunately, a search engine validation step is still a necessity.
Asking LLM to provide a link does NOT work, as they hallucinate links just fine, and give links that are either broken or do not contain the information LLM says it should. Using search tools through a LLM (like ChatGPT's "search" function) sort of works (at least the link will be correct - still need to check if the contents means what LLM says it does), but it's quite limited and cannot be fine-tuned (I don't use Google but rather prefer Kagi, and I tend to heavily rely on Kagi's lenses, site: queries and negative terms to scope and refine searches).
In other words: please do NOT trust LLM's answers, even if they sound plausible. Always verify.
I really like having the site where the answer came from so I can instantly judge how likely the answer is to be correct.
Chat GPT does correctly answer your question about airline bags, but I have no way of knowing if it made that answer up or not because so many airlines have the same policy.
Google at least gives you links to the United baggage policies. The AI overview in Google also "cites its sources", which sort of gives you the best of both worlds. (I'm sure the accuracy of Google's AI vs. ChatGPT is up for debate)
I might misunderstand, but can't you just ask for the reference? I've also been using (Gemini) a lot to basically replace my search engine, but I always tell it to give me a reference. I've had pretty good results with this approach.
Gpt has web search with links to the website.
I wonder how many new, strange, surprising and wonderful things you indirectly stumbled into during those sifting exercises. Hyper-optimized search has some downsides. I love getting answers to my specific questions, but that always encompasses the "known unknowns" space. Through skimming and sifting using websites as proxies, I enjoyed surprises from the "unknown unknowns" space.
10 years ago I'd agree with you completely. I definitely get your point and share some of that same sentiment, but search results these past 10 uears have become overwhelming absurd, shallow, and barely tangentially related to what I'm looking for
Same for me. The only thing I still use Google for is for up to date data as LLMs are not great with that yet
Asbestos is killing some people, yet maggots are thriving,