> ChatGPT, Google, and its competitors are rapidly diverting traffic from publishers. Publishers are fighting to survive through lawsuits, partnerships, paywalls, and micropayments. It’s pretty bleak, but unfortunately I think the situation is far worse than it seems.
> The article focuses mainly on the publishing industry, news and magazine sites that rely primarily on visits to their sites and selling ads.
I'm not sure where this comes from. The way forward for publishers of content like newspapers is subscription fees and has been for a long time.
The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and The Economist revenues are subscription fee dominant, for example.
The argument seems flawed to me: by "killing the web", they refer to the example of a company adding SEO'd information to their website to lure in traffic from web searches.
However, me personally, I don't want to be lured into some web store when I'm looking for some vaguely related information. Luckily, there's tons of information on the web provided not by commercial entities but by volunteers: wikipedia, forum users (e.g. StackOverflow), blogs. (Sure, some people run blogs as a source of income, but I think that's a small percentage of all bloggers.)
Have you ever looked for a specific recipe just to end up on someone's cooking website where they first tell your their life story before - after scrolling for a half a day - you'll finally find what you've actually come there for (the recipe!) at the bottom of their page? Well, if that was gone, I'd say good riddance!
"But you don't get it", you might interject, "it's not that the boilerplate will disappear in the future, the whole goddamn blog page will disappear, including the recipe you're looking for." Yeah, I get it, sure. But I also have an answer for that: "oh, well" (ymmv).
My point is, I don't mind if less commercial stuff is going to be sustainable in a future version of the web. I'm old enough to have experience the geocities version of the early web that consisted of enthusiasts being online not for commercial interests but for fun. It was less polished and less professional, for sure, but less interesting? I don't think so.
I suppose wanting to kill the commercial web is a valid position, although it feels more like grumpy old man yells at kids to get off his lawn than a considered analysis of relative value and impact, but even then I think you're underestimating the impact the AI problem will have on the non-commercial web as well.
Lots of people might be willing to run websites for fun or personal satisfaction or whatever, but how many people will continue to be willing to do so when they don't actually get to present the content to visitors and it's instead just regurgitated by AI? Half the fun of hosting your own website is personalizing it and choosing how to share the content. Even people blogging for fun put a lot of thought into their posts on how to phrase an argument or tell a story. But what's the point when nobody will ever see your actual post, just your thoughts rearranged and presented by AI? Maybe some people only care about the information being out there in any form, but I'd be willing to bet that's yet a smaller subset of even the people who would contribute in a return to geocities version of the web.
This take is wrong. What’s really going to happen is that content creators will still create content, despite the economics making less and less sense.
.. mainly that’s because that’s the only game left
I use copilot for search, in one of two ways. The first is as an advanced search where i use the answer to gauge if it found what i am looking for then follow the links for details.
The second is when i am looking for some information i once knew and i remember some details, like the title of a book i remember the plot points too, then when i find it i go do something with that information.
I can't bring myself to "Google" anything anymore.
Every single time I open up google and try searching for the information... I get frustrated being forced so do the agentic work and sift through the crap... and I fall back on ChatGPT or Gemini.
The content is now created in private chats with AI, probably a trillion tokens per day flow between humans and LLMs. When new AI models are made they will incorporate some experience from past usage. This dataset might be the most valuable source for training AI and solving our tasks. So in case humans decide to abandon publishing, there is a new experience flywheel spinning up.
"Businesses produced and maintained quality content, Google rewarded the businesses with visitors while diverting some to their ads" that's idealistic, I am happy to see Google algorithm losing its monopoly, even if AI seach ends up being a bubble. When search engines will stop reducing website sorting to some stupid algorithm picked because of scalability while neglecting quality, I will start pity them. By the way this is, again, a low quality short opinion article about AI going to HN front page while not deserving it, it's really an annoying trend.
I'm curious what the overlap is between people who use AI tools and people who use ad blockers. Personally, I've been a leech on the ad-funded web my entire adult life; I always block ads. I haven't adopted AI tools. They only seem to work well for content that's readily discoverable anyway, otherwise the risk of hallucination has been far too high in my testing. If I care about the answer, why risk it?
I believe there's strong overlap between technically minded people and ad blockers. Maybe the challenge is that AI search appeals to less technically-minded people, who would have otherwise been exposed to ads?
If we can streamline the generalized information seeking process, that part of the web can dry up and disappear. And then we’d be left with more of the early era web, where you’re visiting websites not because you have a specific question to answer, but because you’re engaging in a social or interactive or otherwise deeper activity.
When it comes to “I have a specific question I need answering and then I’m done” the Web feels horribly clumsy and full of absolute garbage to wade through because they don’t want you to get the answer and go away. They want to milk your eyeballs for impressions and attention.
The early era of the web was an exclusive club for well-paid computer engineers and other computer specialists with a lot of spare time. Which was reflected in information being heavily focused on certain topics and perspectives heavily tilted to certain types of people with a narrow band of ideologies and beliefs. Just like Hacker News is today.
I prefer a million times today's web, which serves everybody and where I can find all kind of thoughts and ideas, without restriction. You just need to make an effort to find it. I prefer a million times a well stocked supermarket with all the ingredients I need to make anything I want, rather than a restaurant which serves only one meal made perfectly.
I don't understand why all these companies want to replace links to human curated high quality information with slightly more convenient to access AI hallucinations. Whenever I have an important question, the AI generated answer is only useful to the extent that it provides links (i.e. search).
Injecting ads into answers will be the next step for the search market. Reddit is doing it already. And unlike reddit post or comment ads, it may be very difficult to block.
Calling SEO content high quality is overestimating the nature and level of an SEO article. The other aspect that it implies is businesses are the reason we get so much high quality content. That is provably wrong. The moment people saw that some kinds of links got them high ranking on google, it resulted in an industry of producing SEO garbage where businesses would publish 1000s of words to answer something which could have been answered in a single word. (usual caveats exist)
People want signal and answers, not the 10 blue links as this post tries to argue.
The other thing is this: most high quality and valuable content can now be produced by individuals and finds distribution on social networks where they can occasionally charge for it as well. The drawback to google indexing those links was also that SEO-companies started targeting these mediums (eg: reddit, medium, forums). We needed an early regulation to minimize the needless hacking of SEO, but we let the market play it out, so it should still play out.
The obvious incentives that’ll reform the market I think will result in more and more “toxic” content. AI agents are user agents. Like users using browsers. Mix ads into your content so hard that you end up getting the AI to use your brand, etc. It won’t be quite that simple, but I think that’s where this will inevitably lead. Just an evolution of the same old same old.
Interesting take on the future of web incentives; even before LLMs, I was often wondering how sustainable the ads model is - it obviously has a ton of tradeoffs.
Maybe we will just go back to pay content as it was before the Internet era? Magazines and such
37 comments
[ 5.0 ms ] story [ 49.6 ms ] thread> The article focuses mainly on the publishing industry, news and magazine sites that rely primarily on visits to their sites and selling ads.
I'm not sure where this comes from. The way forward for publishers of content like newspapers is subscription fees and has been for a long time.
The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and The Economist revenues are subscription fee dominant, for example.
Content can’t be free if you want it to be of any quality.
Good riddance.
However, me personally, I don't want to be lured into some web store when I'm looking for some vaguely related information. Luckily, there's tons of information on the web provided not by commercial entities but by volunteers: wikipedia, forum users (e.g. StackOverflow), blogs. (Sure, some people run blogs as a source of income, but I think that's a small percentage of all bloggers.)
Have you ever looked for a specific recipe just to end up on someone's cooking website where they first tell your their life story before - after scrolling for a half a day - you'll finally find what you've actually come there for (the recipe!) at the bottom of their page? Well, if that was gone, I'd say good riddance!
"But you don't get it", you might interject, "it's not that the boilerplate will disappear in the future, the whole goddamn blog page will disappear, including the recipe you're looking for." Yeah, I get it, sure. But I also have an answer for that: "oh, well" (ymmv).
My point is, I don't mind if less commercial stuff is going to be sustainable in a future version of the web. I'm old enough to have experience the geocities version of the early web that consisted of enthusiasts being online not for commercial interests but for fun. It was less polished and less professional, for sure, but less interesting? I don't think so.
Lots of people might be willing to run websites for fun or personal satisfaction or whatever, but how many people will continue to be willing to do so when they don't actually get to present the content to visitors and it's instead just regurgitated by AI? Half the fun of hosting your own website is personalizing it and choosing how to share the content. Even people blogging for fun put a lot of thought into their posts on how to phrase an argument or tell a story. But what's the point when nobody will ever see your actual post, just your thoughts rearranged and presented by AI? Maybe some people only care about the information being out there in any form, but I'd be willing to bet that's yet a smaller subset of even the people who would contribute in a return to geocities version of the web.
.. mainly that’s because that’s the only game left
Every single time I open up google and try searching for the information... I get frustrated being forced so do the agentic work and sift through the crap... and I fall back on ChatGPT or Gemini.
This hasn't been the case for more than a decade.
It's been seo crap from a long time.
I believe there's strong overlap between technically minded people and ad blockers. Maybe the challenge is that AI search appeals to less technically-minded people, who would have otherwise been exposed to ads?
AI is killing the web – can anything save it? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44623361 - July 2025 (448 comments)
Other related threads?
When it comes to “I have a specific question I need answering and then I’m done” the Web feels horribly clumsy and full of absolute garbage to wade through because they don’t want you to get the answer and go away. They want to milk your eyeballs for impressions and attention.
I prefer a million times today's web, which serves everybody and where I can find all kind of thoughts and ideas, without restriction. You just need to make an effort to find it. I prefer a million times a well stocked supermarket with all the ingredients I need to make anything I want, rather than a restaurant which serves only one meal made perfectly.
This is what killed the web - ads.
The web is unusable without ad blockers.
People want signal and answers, not the 10 blue links as this post tries to argue.
The other thing is this: most high quality and valuable content can now be produced by individuals and finds distribution on social networks where they can occasionally charge for it as well. The drawback to google indexing those links was also that SEO-companies started targeting these mediums (eg: reddit, medium, forums). We needed an early regulation to minimize the needless hacking of SEO, but we let the market play it out, so it should still play out.
Maybe we will just go back to pay content as it was before the Internet era? Magazines and such