Link without the paywall
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.
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.
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.
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 businesses are ad aggregation companies by default for the most part, and they aren’t gonna to survive without clickthroughs, nor can they 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.
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)
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.
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?
Enjoy.
Yeah the search engines are filled with ways to access the dark web
google “dark web search engine” and google isnt hiding sht
Better off using tor? Reddits a bigger issue here they had heaps of guides and wikis related to it, they banned all that sht before lemmy became a thing`
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.
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?
