Link without the paywall
web 1.0 was the last good era of the internet
Newsletters making a comeback were the last thing I thought of that could come back.
Just realized a whole generation of kids will have ai links to the web, so if they look for something theyll get the one sanitized link, think the whole skill of searching and sifting through links will be lost (it was thought in schools when I was a kid)
Most of the people I know now never really acquired this skill, can’t really lose what they didn’t have
lol. You’re not wrong that it’ll be way easier to rely on AI to do the sorting for you, but you’re implying Google didn’t sanitize information and only give you results they approve of…
There’s way more to the internet than you can find on search engines.
end of the day its showing you 20 results per page or whatever not just one link and a summary
Like what, why never use examples, why do people always refer to something but not say what it is? If there is more, what do you think I’m missing?
AI bots use existing search engines to get results, it just that the results are now told to you like a conversation instead of a list of links. LLM bots are not search engines and these AI companies are not building search engine bots, they are LLM bots that generate predictive text based on already existing search engines that actually do the indexing. They wouldn’t work at all if it wasn’t for Google and Bing. The referral source may have changed but the SEO strategy is still the same.
Web use is hard to measure, but by one estimate monthly traffic from search engines has fallen by 15% in the past year. Some of the loudest complaints have come from the news media, an industry in which we acknowledge an interest. But the drought is a wider problem. Science and education sites have lost a tenth of their visitors in the past year. Reference sites are down by 15% and health sites by 31%. Some big names are being gutted: Tripadvisor.com, which recommends the best hotels or beaches, is down by a third; Webmd, which offers reassurance (or alarm) to the poorly, has fallen by half.
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As the old model buckles, the web is changing. It is becoming less open, as formerly ad-funded content is hidden from bots, behind paywalls. Content firms are reaching people through channels other than search, from email newsletters to social media and in-person events. They are pushing into audio and video, which are harder for ai to summarise than text. Big brands are striking content-licensing deals with ai companies. Plenty of other transactions and lawsuits are going on. (The Economist Group has yet to license its work for ai training, but has agreed to let Google use select articles for one of its ai services.) Hundreds of millions of small sites—the internet’s collectively invaluable long tail—lack the clout to do this.
No one should expect the web of the future to look just as it does today. ai-powered search will rightly shake up some services: business directories, for instance, face disintermediation as answer-bots field queries such as “emergency plumber” or “houses for sale”. But the evaporation of incentives to create content presents a fundamental problem. If human traffic is drying up, the web will need a new currency
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Bringing a new business model to the web is daunting; it may take a shove from regulators to get started. Yet everyone has an interest in making content-creation pay. Publishers may be the ones complaining now, but if the content tap dries up, ai companies will suffer, too. Some are more vulnerable than others. Whereas Meta can draw on data posted to its social networks and Google owns YouTube, the world’s biggest video vault, Openai relies entirely on others for its content.
If nothing changes, the risk is of a modern-day tragedy of the commons. The shared resource of the open web will be over-exploited, leading to its eventual exhaustion. If that process is not stopped, one of the great common properties of humanity could be gravely diminished. The tragedy of the web would be a tragedy for everyone.
As others have commented, the economist is presenting this as a capitalist issue that requires a monetary fix. The most ironic element to me is that one of the elements of the tragedy of the commons is that is indicates the requirement of a public interest and it’s regulatory interest so the commons can work. So another way to perceive this is that we need a non-capital framework to allow the web to persist. Say perhaps like roads are created as infrastructure to allow the free movement of it’s citizens in a “safe” and organized way, perhaps we should change our perspective on the utility of the we and it’s content. I’m not suggesting that we copy the transportation to the internet as it obviously breaks down, but the need to think outside the capitalist box is apparent. Libraries have been funded both publicly and privately as public interest, and have the capacity to work both for and nonprofit. This adaptation need not just be ‘free’ market driven. Especially as we do not actually live in a free market, but I’ll let others drive down that hole.
I liked the web a lot more when it didn’t have a business model.
YOU KIDS GET THE FUCK OFF MY LAWN!
And that was back when hosting, storage, and bandwidth were expensive. Those are basically free for text-based content now, and getting cheaper for audio and video. Nowadays, anything made by amateurs shouldn’t really need a “business model” at all, and anything made by professionals could be damned cheap, if there were no middlemen taking the majority of the cut.
Almost every website idea nowadays people are like but how will it make money?!?
And it’s like dude, keeping a website afloat is cheaper than pet rent.
remember when we met people from around the globe and it was fun instead of frustrating?
I’m still fucking ashamed, I was 9 and me and my sis had an ICQ friend. He was the same age as our IRL friend, had the same name, except it was a different guy someplace in Germany. Yet somehow the friendship a bit transcended that little nuance.
And I wrote such horribly idiotic stuff.
For a publication based entirely on brainwashed capitalist pseudo-science… every problem is solved by more capitalism.
Kagi’s model is working well for them. A traditional search engine where AI results are limited and optional, and they actively try to filter away slop, images, clickbait, and other low quality results.
I’ve been paying for 3 months and I’ll never go back. I hope they increase their market share as others ratchet up their enshittification cranks.
I despise subscriptions a lot, I also believe that the use of a search engine shouldn’t be something that is run for profit, see where it got us with Google? I also dislike Kagi (and other sites) who refuse to comply with the rules and regulations we have in Europe surrounding prices on sites. They are American iirc which doesn’t help for that and that also means they barely have to make any financial figures public.
I prefer Ecosia (or Qwant), which are making their own search engine together and while they are still funded by ads, it wouldn’t surprise me if in the future (if not already) they get money from the governments. I also prefer actual non-profits (not those American non-profit statuses that can be bough) compared to for profit businesses.
That’s fine if that works for you. My wife doesn’t want the subscription and she also uses Ecosia. Anything non-Google is a win, IMO.
Yeah that’s fair, Kagi should be held accountable for the lack of compliance, but besides that there is nothing wrong with them as far as I know.
And everything non-Google/Microsoft/Amazon etc is a win in my book. I kinda wanna say everything non-American/Chinese, but exceptioins exist
Such bullshit.
“AI is going to fix everything, so we need a new way to make money.”
- AI is nothing but a delusional and unwanted waste of energy.
- The web doesn’t need a business model, period. Money-grubbing billionaires are the only ones who need a business model.
AI as a technology at its core is fine, what is at issue here is the unnecessary scaling up of AI. There were great strides being made in making models as small and efficient as possible before OpenAI fucked up the entire market by becoming a for-profit company. They literally can’t scale the models much further no matter how much data and compute they throw at them nowadays, and the money faucet still hasn’t been turned off to disastrous consequences.
Who pays for your servers and static ip.
The premise of a web business model is that websites must make a profit - either directly or indirectly.
That’s utter bullshit. Some of us are old enough to remember when the web (or for that matter, the pre-web internet) was there for sharing of information, social interaction, and community. Schools, the government, and nonprofits provided hosting for free.
Later on, ISPs started to add hosting as part of their internet service - along with usenet access and an email address. The cost to them was negligible, especially vs. the benefits of being able to say “switch to us and create your own website!”
Nowadays you can run a site from your home PC in a VM, punch a hole through your firewall, and pay a modicum for DDNS to a custom domain for under a hundred bucks a year. If you’re a bigger site with more traffic, maybe you spin it up on AWS and pay ten or twenty bucks a month.
The very idea that “The Web” is a homogeneous, for-profit entity is a profound and fundamental mistake that is made by every money-obsessed organization around - not just the financial rags like Forbes and The Economist, but essentially corporations as well. Take a look at the support site for your favourite product and try to convince yourself that they didn’t just put the minimum required effort in to send customers into the arms of their competitors.
I never heard of an ISP offering a free website to host, the free mail address I do remember sadly.
A lot of what is wrong with the web is the result of governments lacking the ability to stop companies from growing too much. It doesn’t help either that the best country for startups is as corrupt as fuck and has been for decades, including from before the start of the internet.
We all should chose to use parts of the web we want to use, like Lemmy and actual non-profit organisations like Ecosia, Proton and what not.
Just random people with their own money. Basic webhosting is cheaper than a netflix subscription.
Not op, but I pay for my own server, domain and IP (though it is not a static one). And I’ve donated to some of the fediverse platforms that I use, like lemmy.world.
I’m not sure what you are trying to get at?So what’s your public facing site address and we’ll see how we’ll it can hold against the onslaught on the net. You gonna pay to host all the YouTube videos too. Do you host instances for thousands of others to mess with. What SaaS offerings does your site present. If you’re not sure what my point is you’re not informed enough to present a legitimate argument.
fyi, the way you write seems like you are upset over something. It’s somewhat odd to write that on a website that is hosted by volunteers on a shoestring budget for thousands of users “against the onslaught on the net.” So you better understand, anything besides youtube videos (i.e., the majority of the content on the net) is fairly economical to host. Of course it depends on the system, but a small group can easily stand up something dynamic like a lemmy instance, and an individual can host their static blog for basically free -open to the wide internet. Youtube is hard because video uses an incredible amount of bandwidth. Google looses money on it, despite it being plastered with advertising. So even capitalism hasn’t figured out how to do it yet without being subsidized by another revenue stream.
If you’re not sure what my point is you’re not informed enough to present a legitimate argument.
Or maybe you didn’t present your point clearly.
Or maybe you’re just wrong.
These are entirely possible scenarios you might want to consider.
I’m a bit baffled by his hostile response. All I said is that I host and pay for my own server.
Nowhere did I claim that I host YouTube videos on that server, or that it is open to the public. I host that server for personal use, and for me and a few friends of mine. At most there is going to be two people connecting to it at once.I have looked into hosting a peertube instance, but I’ve not really gotten around to figuring out how to set that all up.
You gonna pay to host all the YouTube videos too.
We already pay for this through the time theft and involuntary brainwashing known as “ads”. It’s a very dumb and wasteful way to pay for a shitty product. But that’s capitalism as usual.
What SaaS offerings does your site present.
lol. The internet doesn’t run on marketing buzzwords. Grow up.
I loved the idea of Flattr.
Amusingly enough, The Economist illustrates what I believe to be the new business model that’s already waiting in the wings for the internet.
With admittedly no direct evidence to support it, my theory at the moment is that the “AI” players plan to consolidate and to continue to expand their reach and continue to gain users who rely on the “AI” for information rather than following links to the originals, then, once the "AI"s have killed enough clicks to collapse the ad model and drive the websites out of business (and give them the opportunity to buy up the remains of the businesses, and more importantly, their databases), they’ll put all of the information of which they’re now in sole possession behind paywalls.
Broadly, the goal is to apply the most lucrative if least popular business model to information ,- to monopolize ownership of it in order to sit back and collect money as rent-seeking parasites.
This is part of why it’s so important that people keep information completely free. (aka piracy).
Yes.
Data hoarders are going to really come into their own after the corporations start trying to paywall information - pretty much no matter what it is, there’s somebody out there who has it squirreled away on a drive.
See, that’s a reasonable take I agree with for the most part, but I think it’ll play out a bit differently. Because these AIbro Technofascist dipshit Billionaires are so fucking stupid, instead of just pulling the plug on AI and sitting on the wealth of information like metaphorical dragons, they’ll continue pumping billions into larger and more complex models to try and “automate everything”, all the while fighting each other viciously, until they all run out of money when their AI-Powered techno-utopia where autonomous robots run everything never comes to pass.
Meanwhile, instead of paying for the information hoards of the TechnoFascist Elites, people will begin self-hosting again, like with the Fediverse, because it’s just simply cheaper and more effective at letting people learn as groups and connect with each other.
Considering most of those technofascists are American’s who cannot even have proper payment platforms and proper bank connections I doubt they will actually succeed.
If it is only just them doing this AI movement (spoiler they aren’t), they would also stop at the US borders, because just like a huge part of the American businesses, they don’t care about anybody else
On the first point, I’m not sure. I definitely agree that left to their own devices the AIbros would just keep expanding and battling each other and chasing ever more pie in the sky. But I don’t think they’ll be left to themselves. I think the MBAs will move in and take over, and it’ll shift to standard corporate tactics of buyouts and mergers and bankruptcies and liquidations, and inevitable consolidation.
On the second, I agree. I think the web is actually going to effectively split into a commercial system of monolithic corporations and subscriptions and fixed hardware and a much less formal true web of small servers and self hosting and ad hoc networks.
Can we please just pay a cent or half a cent for each page we vist. Its like 50x what the website would get from our view with ads and its not much. I’m sure it would encourage others to start their own website as well if you could get $1 from 100 page views.
There are so many things like this news article where they want to charge me a few dollars. Bro I cant afford to pay $5 a month for every single platform that would close me 1000s.
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Clickbait is one of the bigger problems on the net. I don’t want to pay for more of it.
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I am much less opposed to being tracked than some people here. But the complete and unavoidable surveillance implied by such a scheme takes it a bit far.
Actually, given Lemmy’s usual knee-jerk reaction to tracking and commercialization, I can only assume that people aren’t thinking through this proposal.
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That immediately makes the Internet basically free for the rich and only partially accessible for the poor. Maybe you’re OK with that, but business models like that are partly what’s wrong with the world. In fact the Internet already has this problem. This would almost certainly move the boundary between who’s relatively rich and who’s relatively poor in the wrong direction.
Also, hosting providers would immediately crank up the prices so that they get as much of that sweet page-visit money as possible ensuring the site owner doesn’t.
The prices would find a level eventually, but it wouldn’t be anywhere near as low as half a cent. We’d be lucky if it was a dollar.
There’s also the question of what constitutes “a page”. What if only part of the screen refreshes? What if you refresh an existing page because it didn’t load properly, or just because? Is that a new payment?
Data caps and charges would be the “better” way to handle all this, but let anyone tell you who’s on a plan that has those, that they’re awful and the money never goes where it needs to. Good luck getting legislation changed so that some of that money goes to the sites that the data ultimately comes from.
That immediately makes the Internet basically free for the rich and only partially accessible for the poor. Maybe you’re OK with that, but business models like that are partly what’s wrong with the world. In fact the Internet already has this problem. This would almost certainly move the boundary between who’s relatively rich and who’s relatively poor in the wrong direction.
Fine have government subsidies that give people $50 credit a month. Or give people the option to opt out. I dont NEED to to exist, I want it to exist. I want an easier way to pay for my internet usage rather than ads. If ads are going to pay someone 0.0014cents for my attention id rather overcut the ad and pay the webhost 0.01cent for no ads.
There’s also the question of what constitutes “a page”. What if only part of the screen refreshes? What if you refresh an existing page because it didn’t load properly, or just because? Is that a new payment?
This is the details and it can be worked out in more detail. At the moment I dont think that is relevant to work out. Just provide a way to opt out and then it can be between the hosts and the users how they set up their payments. If the hosts have prices to high or a scammy model users can switch to paying based on domain vist or choose to not pay at all. Its no different to users choosing to use an adblock when visting a website.
Don’t you already pay to use the Internet? Why does anybody have to make record profits every quarter, fuck all ads. The Internet was much better when corporations were not involved.
Idc about corporations but the internet costs and you cant get away from that. Servers and the infrastructure around them has to be paid for. And I’m happy to pay my share when I vist someones website. My issue is that my share is a few cents not a few dollars like a lot of these newpapers try and charge.
How long have you been using the Internet if I may ask?
20 years
I wish I could take you back 10 years further. It’s like a national forest that someone build a parking lot and strip mall over, and everyone cheers because they finally tore the mall down and put up a giant fence water park with cameras everywhere.
Yes things were different back then. It wasnt a national forest, it was forest in a world where no cities existed anywhere. Nothing had been built on the internet back then. You didnt have websites that served userbases in the 100s of millions. You didnt have to serve images, videos, live streams and other dynamic content. You didnt have the same security overhead now required. If the internet were only text chat over irc I wouldnt be sitting here worrying about internet funding.
I dont go to the cbd of my city and think “I wish they replaced this with a forest” because I know there are plenty of forests outside the city, and people choose to live in the city over the forest. Same for the internet and so we need to think about solving the problem instead of wishing to tear everything down.
Like a functional city made to serve the populous or like a typical American city that only works for the rich?
You don’t pay for the services in it. Storage, computation, bigger channels.
So yes, I think it should be possible to make paid connections to a service, like a paid phone call.
Or to buy storage.
There should be a new stack of web-like (application-layer and up) protocols. To separate requesting storage (put, get), computation (submit a task, get a result) and search (get from index by keywords) into technically different tasks and to make them paid on technical level. Probably make some procedure for aggregated payment for accessing a service. Then the service itself should be on the next level, and probably built from these services on the client.
It should be a client-side decision to “continue to a paid service for N monies”.
People who’ve built the Internet - they were an academic bunch, or in case of Sun founders, an economically inept bunch (yes, I can repeat that ; their period of huge success was mostly when they were making workstations ; though to be honest I liked Bill Joy’s interview on climate and externalia). They didn’t consider this important. They made a library system for a community of peers.
That’s an intermediate version of what I’m dreaming of, except what I’m dreaming of would have uniform infrastructure completely separated from content, so services would serve many applications in a uniform way, storage and computation and search and maybe message relay to another user. The applications themselves would differ from each other, and their differences would exist locally on user machine.
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You are clueless.
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If there’s a way to easily pay directly for pooled resources in the Internet, then you don’t have to use what big companies milking you in some other way provide.
So it would seem that what I’m proposing is less like slavery. But you do you.
And then the new meta instead of making you scroll through a million ads to get to the content it will make you go to page 2 then 3 then 4… to get to the content to get many more cents XD
But yea i do agree that if the websites aked us to pay the same amount that they get from ads to not see them it would cost us a fraction of a penny. Just needs some kind of wallet that either the website or ad provider can take from to delete the ads.
Maybe you could do it as the website sets a suggested price and the user either agrees or chooses their own. I think if the process of paying was seemless enough most people would be happy to pay and the few people putting 0 for everything probably need the money more anyway.
I literally sent a message to google in the ads part of my google account since google is one of the biggest ad provider, about a wallet that would pay automatically to not see the ads. Idk if anyone reads these messages there XD
unfortunately google gains a lot more from getting our data and selling us as potential clients to businesses and would most likely not want to get on that.
Maybe paypal wich already have wallets and widespread addoption could try to replace ads provider.
You do that and the prices will just keep going up. See Netflix/streaming as an example. Enough $ is never enough. Line must go up.
First of all, prices already go up for things like netflix. This isnt aimed at subscription sites like netflix its more for pages where you browse for free at the cost of viewing ads like blogs, youtube, substack, lemmy etc. Yes prices would go up over time no doubt but the idea is that the users providing the money should lower the cost. 1000 humans visting your site should be willing to pay more than an advertiser is to show an ad to those 1000 people. Google generally pays around 5cents to 30cents for 1000 views. I dont know about you but I can split 30 cents between 1000 people, hell i’ll even double it cause im generous. I think if 1000 people are viewing your website you should get paid for providing something interesting enough for 1000 people to enjoy. If everyone gave 1cent thats $100, if everyone paid double what the ad was they’d be paying $0.0003 each.
I dont want people who write a blog that is read by many people to need to subject their readers to ads all only to get a check from google saying heres a few cents bud. We can do better, and I dont think the answer is asking people to pay a $5 a month.
This could unironically be an OK use case for crypto and NFTs on a low energy usage blockchain?
Website asks you to pay a paltry sum, you get an nft that allows visiting for X days
NFT over cookie because then you can keep using the site on your other devices as long as they’re connectes to the wallet too, and you don’t need a user account for every site.
Not a perfect idea but not the worst?
There is this but it looks like its going very slowly. https://www.w3.org/Payments/WG/
This is closer to the idea: https://www.w3.org/TR/1999/WD-Micropayment-Markup-19990825/
The web needs a new web. The internet was never created for privacy and security. People trying to plug the holes isn’t enough.
Don’t put AI in anything and everything because it’s the new .com. That’s the business model that will work
Did you read the article? The part of the web that is having problems with their business model are the sites that are not using AI. They’re sites like news pages, the “sources” for information on the web. The ones that are eating their lunch are the ones that are using AI. They’re the search engines and similar sites that people go to looking for information. Since AI is able to gather the information from those sources and present it to the user without the user having to actually visit that site, that undermines their existing business model.
I read the article and it conveniently glosses over the fact that this will be a problem in the fairly near future for those who are using AI because the use of AI keeps a person on the page longer but doesn’t generally encourage them to view ads or actually click through to products or services. Those business are ad aggregation companies by default for the most part, and they aren’t gonna to survive without clickthroughs, not can the survive off ad revenue that doesn’t exist because people aren’t looking at the ads or clicking through to the products. The AI summary is the same problem that they already gave themselves once when they were trying to make search results more efficient in like 2018. You’d Google, and they would answer the query without you having to click a link at all. You’d get your answer and close the page.
Also, once they’ve starved themselves of user created data (as is posited by the article), they won’t have anything to keep feeding these models.
Those business are ad aggregation companies by default for the most part, and they aren’t gonna to survive without clickthroughs
Yes, this is it exactly. The web pages that depend on ad revenue are the ones in trouble here. They’re being undercut by pages that give people the information they want without going through all that stuff.
You’re confidently predicting that the AI summarizers are going to fail somehow, and then everything will just magically go back to the way they were. I suppose that’s a reassuring thing to believe. Why should I believe it, though? The AI genie is out of the bottle. I can run one locally on my computer if I want. All the existing online summarizers could go bankrupt tomorrow and I’ll still be able to get an AI to distill the information I want from the morass of ads and engagement-harvesting click farms.
This is me quoting my own comments on this article from another post on Lemmy:
I don’t like the way this article is written. There are concepts that it tries to convey that have major caveats it glosses over. Additionally it posits some ideas for alternatives that aren’t new currencies and doesn’t explain how most of them would work. It also seems to ignore the fact that content creators very often get paid in ad revenue by the very same companies that are exacerbating this problem with their GenAI models, as well as companies that are being hit hard by the lack of actual ad generated revenue due to loss of clickthroughs and impressions.
That being said it does actually somewhat explain a lot of the problem with the internet being sustained via ad revenue and ads.
Several of the companies who’s business model is built around ad aggregation are either investing in or developing/have launched GenAI products that are in opposition with their current business model.
They seem content at the moment to starve other places on the internet of the very ad revenue they rely on to make money. This will hurt them in the long run but they are focused on the short term profits they will make in the meantime and they do not seem concerned about the future so long as they can be seen to be on the cutting edge of the new technology.
I don’t really know if this will lead to a downturn in creator made content. A lot of paid creators are so invested in that eco system that they’d rather hop from one service to the next forever than give it up and go get a 9-5.
The pay as you crawl system is going to be difficult to implement, especially when crawlers already ignore the .txt file. The startups are not in a position to necessarily pay to license data and I question if they’d be able to pay as they crawl either. Meaning there will be big conglomerate gate keepers like Meta and Google and MS. The pay as you crawl system also only works if it’s regulated in some way so that normal users and small creators don’t get caught up in being victimized by bots/crawlers ignoring such rules or laws, with those victims unable to have their case taken seriously or heard at all.
As for determining where the information came from and providing attribution. Most people still aren’t going to click through to those pages. This is in part because a lot of them don’t want to see ads in the first place (for security reasons and because ads are an imposition on their increasingly limited time, energy, and attention). It’s also because they already have the information they need. You don’t care if Wikipedia gets your ad revenue so long as you can prove you were right about Brad Pitt’s height or his first job to your friend you made that bet with at the bar last night.
They say sources would be compensated. By who? And how? We have already established that people don’t think there’s a lot of value in paying for chatbots. The vast majority of Gen AI LLM users have shown (through polling, and introductory costs that go up in price later) that they aren’t interested in and don’t find value in pay for them. So conglomerates (many of whom run chatbots at a loss) would be on the hook both for paying for their crawlers and for providing such services to their consumers (corporate or not)? That most definitely is not sustainable.
The other option is licensing but a lot of data has already been crawled and continues to be crawled without licensing or compensation.
I’m not sure that changing this business model will lead to anything good.
Edit: There’s also the problem with DDOS attacks for smaller websites that get crawled. Lemmy has seen this first hand. It’s not the intention of the crawlers to overload the servers but there’s so many of them and the number keeps growing. There’s a whole lot of other issues besides the ones in this comment too.
I should get into the model business
