So you’re saying the ad driven internet will die? And we will be left with what? Wikipedia and Lemmy? I for one welcome our AI overlords!
Cloudflare CEO warns AI and zero-click internet are killing the web's business model
Submitted 1 month ago by abobla@lemm.ee to technology@lemmy.world
https://www.techspot.com/news/107859-cloudflare-ceo-warns-ai-zero-click-internet-killing.html
Comments
xylogx@lemmy.world 1 month ago
venusaur@lemmy.world 1 month ago
Nah, it’s saying that ad and AI-driven internet will prevail. People only use Google to find an answer and don’t dig deeper, and if they do, it’s often because the links are sponsored. People using GPT’s are even less likely to click a link.
Apologies if you were joking.
kadup@lemmy.world 1 month ago
“what should I do if I’m going through severe emotional distress? How to choose a good psychiatrist?”
ChatGPT: “I’m sorry to hear that you’ve been going to a stressful situation, it’s always worth talking about your feelings. I’ve come up with a plan to help you:
1 Purchase an ice cold Pepsi Black™ from a Pepsi official supplier”
jonathan7luke@lemmy.ml 1 month ago
This is part of a larger problem that AI tools are trained on (and profit off of) content that is produced and hosted by others who are now seeing their traffic change from humans to bots. For content sources that pay for hosting with ads, this means a loss in revenue. For content sources like Wikipedia, they are seeing their hosting costs increase significantly due to the increase in both traffic. Even if you want every website that depends on ad revenue to fail (which I don’t entirety agree with), AI is still damaging the open web in other ways. Websites like Wikipedia for example may soon be forced to lock content behind logins or leverage aggressive captchas just to fight the bot traffic, which makes things worse for those of us that still prefer to use actual websites over AI summaries.
pinkapple@lemmy.ml 1 month ago
Nobody is scraping wikipedia over and over to create datasets for AIs, there are already open datasets and API deals. But wiki in particular has always had a data dump of the entire db bimonthly.
BestBouclettes@jlai.lu 1 month ago
It would be very naïve to think they won’t go against Wikipedia and the fediverse at some point unfortunately…
cupcakezealot@lemmy.blahaj.zone 5 weeks ago
republicans and oligarchs are already going after wikipedia
kibiz0r@midwest.social 1 month ago
For a glorious second, the entire world was able to communicate as one.
Then we catalogued every accessible reservoir of culture and knowledge, mined them bare, and refilled them with slop.
A global collective consciousness, hollowed out, replaced with static. No signal. Only noise.
kadup@lemmy.world 1 month ago
I really non ironically miss the friction of the old internet.
I prefer how it took time to find some bare HTML university website, slowly browse through an index as if it was a book, and then find one non-SEO optimized page with all the information you needed on a topic for your research.
The time to browse, being exposed to other terms, having to select the pages yourself, being skeptical by nature, and then having to copy it by hand… This is a much more positive scenario than having a gigantic company learn everything about you and everybody else and then make these decisions for you, using some hidden algorithm, and with the ultimate goal of pushing their newest process. And of course, the content has been rendered virtually useless to appeal to that algorithm.
A_Random_Idiot@lemmy.world 1 month ago
when the internet was a wild and unexplored frontier, and we were adventurers charting the unknown.
rottingleaf@lemmy.world 5 weeks ago
That’s because real information looks like that. If you can find a shortcut, then it’s fake.
isaakengineer@lemmy.world 1 month ago
Sorry for beginner reaction, can I use this in a website for an open source XHTML-extension I am developing? do I need to credit you somehow or lemmy link is enough or what is the best practice here?
ChillCapybara@discuss.tchncs.de 5 weeks ago
Great prose and truthful. My brain heard it in James Earl Jones’ voice.
gradual@lemmings.world 5 weeks ago
You know, lemmy feels a lot like the old internet at least in the quality of its users and discussion.
The only problem is the censorship, but that should be ironed out over time as the abusive mods get their communities replaced with better ones.
Mubelotix@jlai.lu 1 month ago
Yeah well maybe the web shouldn’t be a business
A_Random_Idiot@lemmy.world 1 month ago
god what I wouldnt give to go back to the days of the mid 90s, when the internet was nothing more than a collection of tech weirdos, with websites being nothing more than passion projects with no advertising, no SEO, no search engines, etc etc.
cupcakezealot@lemmy.blahaj.zone 5 weeks ago
there was plenty of advertising on america online though almost ever keyword was to a business that was an advertisement.
i do agree that web 1.0 and the 90s internet was superior
explodicle@sh.itjust.works 5 weeks ago
Vanilla_PuddinFudge@infosec.pub 5 weeks ago
America: “No money = no purpose”
the o’l capitalist shalamalama ding-dong…
Plebcouncilman@sh.itjust.works 5 weeks ago
That’s not gonna happen, and I even disagree with the statement but I can see the merit in it.
That being said the new business model will be the old business model, where everything is paid for. And I do not think that’s so bad, for example I’d pay for a browser if it respects my privacy.
doodledup@lemmy.world 5 weeks ago
You can’t say something like that without bringing forth some arguments…
db2@lemmy.world 1 month ago
The web doesn’t have a business model, cloudflair, you do. And nobody cares because you suck.
sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works 1 month ago
Eh, Cloudflare provides a pretty good service for a very reasonable price.
But yeah, the web doesn’t have a business model in the same way a town square doesn’t, yet you can make a business work in both areas. Make a compelling product and people will pay you for it.
ThirdConsul@lemmy.ml 1 month ago
Cloudflare provides a pretty good service for a very reasonable price.
You mean selling fingerprinted user data to advertisers?
drmoose@lemmy.world 1 month ago
You mean product that literally makes web unusable for many and tracks your every single step with extremely invasive fingerprinting techniques? That product?
01189998819991197253@infosec.pub 5 weeks ago
Don’t take this the wrong way, but fuck your business model. The internet was supposed to be open and be ours, and you stole it for profit.
aidan@lemmy.world 5 weeks ago
To be honest: you can still make your own website, and in many ways big companies are actually making it easier through open-source projects and stuff like Let’s Encrypt. The web industry is remarkably open compared to what big companies do in other industries. A lot of the standards meetings and stuff you can just go to and give your opinion. Or ignore the standards and fork it yourself. This alarmism I fear will make people not take the actually alarming things like encryption bans or ID requirements seriously.
T156@lemmy.world 5 weeks ago
Only for some things, though. If you host your own e-mail these days, chances are, you’re going to have a very difficult time sending them anywhere without risking them being deleted, or automatically thrown into spam folders.
pyre@lemmy.world 5 weeks ago
also independent of that, fuck cloudflare
01189998819991197253@infosec.pub 5 weeks ago
Lol. Yup 100%
futatorius@lemm.ee 5 weeks ago
And fuck the region-blocking that often comes with cloudflare.
sfled@lemm.ee 5 weeks ago
The first spam email was sent in 1978. It’s been downhill.
wetbeardhairs@lemmy.dbzer0.com 5 weeks ago
This is all extrapolated from google’s self published survey of how their users interact with their search results. Approximately 60% of users don’t click anything after a search. Personally I think that is because users have found their results to be seo garbage and not worth clicking on… but that’s just my opinion.
CubeOfCheese@sopuli.xyz 5 weeks ago
I’ve watched a lot of students do a search after I tell them to research something, look through a few of the summaries, then look at me in defeat. I have to tell them to actually click some links to try and find an answer
Glitterbomb@lemmy.world 5 weeks ago
I went to college for networking but the most productive class I’ve ever had where I learned the most about the internet was instead back in high school. This teacher would make 20 page packets with the most obscure questions like what’s the weight of model number 62xRG4 (some obscure car part or something) and he told us to google it. We would spend entire classes just searching for information we would never use, but it drilled into me how to go about finding the information I need. It’s been utterly invaluable. Thank you Mr Ward.
wetbeardhairs@lemmy.dbzer0.com 5 weeks ago
I mourn for humanity.
Jack_Burton@lemmy.world 5 weeks ago
Of course they don’t click anything. Google search has just become a front-end for Gemini, the answer is “served” up right at the top and most people will just take that for Gospel.
jj4211@lemmy.world 5 weeks ago
Even without Gemini, many of my searches are covered by the few word snippets from the top few results. Most of my searches are quick queries with quick answers, usually not me embarking on some huge research effort.
pinball_wizard@lemmy.zip 5 weeks ago
Letting Google break the law for years with illegal anti-competitive practices is now hurting everyone else’s ability to earn money.
I wonder if we have the combined will to do anything about it, or if we will wait and hope the invisible hand of the market will fix it…
InternetCitizen2@lemmy.world 5 weeks ago
if we will wait and hope the invisible hand of the market will fix it…
Have we lost faith in our handsome businessman? /s
Realitaetsverlust@lemmy.zip 5 weeks ago
Good. Maybe we can go back to paying for our services instead of getting tracked everywhere we go.
muusemuuse@lemm.ee 5 weeks ago
That’s not what will happen. We will have to pay AND be tracked. They are not going to give anything up.
Realitaetsverlust@lemmy.zip 5 weeks ago
Time to look for other services then.
LovableSidekick@lemmy.world 5 weeks ago
When Orwell predicted universal surveillance he never anticipated that the people themselves would install the cameras.
CalipherJones@lemmy.world 5 weeks ago
This sounds more like “everyone is on TikTok and Instagram and will only ever be using TikTok and Instagram”.
gradual@lemmings.world 5 weeks ago
Err… you think you’re not being tracked when you spend money?
Wow.
cardfire@sh.itjust.works 5 weeks ago
The internet was founded on the sponsorship model where content was free and ads were ubiquitous. while I completely agree with you that I would rather pay for the product instead of being the product, at this informs every single sign up I make on the internet, I think it’s self deluding to think there’s any great again to go back to. The philosophy was always there, the execution just wasn’t possible until they had finished building their walled gardens
hopesdead@startrek.website 5 weeks ago
Are they still defending the fact they host Stormfront?
loweffortname@lemmy.blahaj.zone 5 weeks ago
Host_ed_, right? They did drop them at some point, I thought.
drmoose@lemmy.world 1 month ago
Cloudflare already ruined the web way before AI was even a thing.
CalipherJones@lemmy.world 5 weeks ago
In what way?
DragonTypeWyvern@midwest.social 1 month ago
When Google itself is the one stopping you from clicking on a website you’ve got a problem.
devfuuu@lemmy.world [bot] 1 month ago
It needs to get even nastier so that it affects all the big players in a huge way so they get to do something about it. While it only affects the indie web we are all just gonna keep suffering.
AllHailTheSheep@sh.itjust.works 5 weeks ago
maybe their business model. trust me. they’ll find a way to monetize the zero click internet too. then it’s back to square one
e461h@sh.itjust.works 5 weeks ago
I believe this is why tech execs and investors are so hot on pushing AI into everything. They’ll control everyone’s digital experience and you can 100% count on being force fed ads and paid propaganda. Embrace, extend, extinguish
gradual@lemmings.world 5 weeks ago
Yep. They have direct control over the flow of information.
Honestly, Metal Gear Solid 2 was on fucking point.
And so was 4.
futatorius@lemm.ee 5 weeks ago
Yeah, so much for all those promises of disintermediation being a benefit of the web.
PunkRockSportsFan@fanaticus.social 1 month ago
Hey Siri, insert the Donald Glover “GOOD.” meme.
neon_nova@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 month ago
Uhh, dude. Haven’t you heard that Siri is basically useless?
Maybe that’s why she just typed this post instead of inserting the meme.
morrowind@lemmy.ml 1 month ago
Yeah I think we’re going to be grappling with this issue for at least the next decade. The traditional web model falls apart under AI
thejml@lemm.ee 1 month ago
To be fair, the traditional web models were falling apart prior to AI as well. We’ve gone so far past “ad driven” that Everything has to be full of ads and clickbait to drive revenue just to run the infrastructure, let alone pay for the pages creation and upkeep. Journalists and developers, services and goods are all using adword soup to try to get anything close to a useful revenue stream and it’ll just keep getting worse until we figure out a better business model. We’re going to increasingly see paywalls to try to make up for that, but a large part of people on the internet won’t want to spend money on quality sources when they use to be able to get it for free. It’s been a race to the bottom for a while and it’s at a point that isn’t sustainable long term. AI just accelerates that to the next level.
feannag@sh.itjust.works 1 month ago
What’s challenging about paywalls and not wanting to spend money is not necessarily not wanting to spend, but convenience and cost. If it costs me 10 cents for each blog or tutorial or github page I look at while working on a project, or 1 cent for every funny video, that adds up. And do I have to put my credit card in for every site? Hope that every site has good enough security to prevent payment information leaks?
And I don’t think anyone is interested in a Netflix-style internet that fractures into 6 different subscriptions to get every site you need on the web.
doodledup@lemmy.world 5 weeks ago
The traditional web was long gone anyways. There are like a dozent sites you find for any Google query. It’s so hard to find small hidden treasure on the internet.
7rokhym@lemmy.ca 5 weeks ago
Everyone is too busy doomscrolling TikTok to notice.
ssfckdt@lemmy.blahaj.zone 5 weeks ago
Can someone check in with the inventor of the web and ask him what the web’s business model is?
whotookkarl@lemmy.world 5 weeks ago
I’m not buying whatever a billionaire nepo baby CEO monopoly owner is pedaling. Let’s hear what some labor leaders have to say about it for a change.
cupcakezealot@lemmy.blahaj.zone 5 weeks ago
yes but cloudflare defending garbage people who dox trans people is also killing the web
frog_brawler@lemmy.world 5 weeks ago
I didn’t come here for heartwarming stories; yet here I am.
nutsack@lemmy.dbzer0.com 5 weeks ago
i like to publish content so that bots can scrape it and serve it to people without attribution i think it’s good
glitchdx@lemmy.world 5 weeks ago
Trying to comment in this thread and it tells me “Toastify is awesome”? wth?
BradleyUffner@lemmy.world 1 month ago
The Web was much better and more useful back before it had a business model. Good riddance.
Khrux@ttrpg.network 5 weeks ago
I have a surprisingly forgiving opinion on AI. There are many cases that I think it’s purpose is stupid or defeats the point but it has the potential to cause such a large break to employability and capitalism in general that it has it’s upsides.
People are right to take issue with the fact that it is causing people to lose their jobs or be unemployable by no fault of their own, but underlying that issue is the fact that society shouldn’t function on the employment being necessary (which I am aware is an opinion).
Even in its absurd energy and water usage, this is largely an issue with how we currently get our energy and water. Having our technocrats suddenly more invested in new and better forms of energy, even just for powering AI has the potential to be a path to better clean energy options.
AI is fundamentally a neutral tool, but as much as it may be sued for evil, it may accelerate flawed economic and environmental systems to a breaking point where a redesign of those structures will be required, which could be the greatest opportunity to implement better structures that we’ve had since the industrial revolution.
BradleyUffner@lemmy.world 5 weeks ago
I generally agree. My focus was on the “business model” side, where people act like the web exists only to serve business interests. The Web will be just fine, possibly even better, if some of these companies monetizing everything were to fail.