Cloudflare CEO warns AI and zero-click internet are killing the web's business model
Cloudflare CEO warns AI and zero-click internet are killing the web's business model
The Web was much better and more useful back before it had a business model. Good riddance.
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.
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.
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!
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. Currently no ads, but just wait.
Apologies if you were joking.
"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"
Normies get AI slop, prosumer uses local llm...
Not sure about social media... Normie is allergic to reading anything beyond daddy's propaganda slop. If it ain't rage bait, he ain't got time for it
This is part of the 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 to pay for hosting. For content sources like Wikipedia, they are seeing their hosting costs increase significantly due to the increase in bot 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.
It would be very naïve to think they won't go against Wikipedia and the fediverse at some point unfortunately..
republicans and oligarchs are already going after wikipedia
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.
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.
when the internet was a wild and unexplored frontier, and we were adventurers charting the unknown.
That's because real information looks like that. If you can find a shortcut, then it's fake.
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?
Great prose and truthful. My brain heard it in James Earl Jones’ voice.
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.
Yeah well maybe the web shouldn't be a business
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.
America: "No money = no purpose"
the o'l capitalist shalamalama ding-dong...
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.
You can't say something like that without bringing forth some arguments...
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.
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.
also independent of that, fuck cloudflare
Lol. Yup 100%
The first spam email was sent in 1978. It's been downhill since.
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.
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
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.
I mourn for humanity.
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.
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.
The web doesn't have a business model, cloudflair, you do. And nobody cares because you suck.
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.
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....
if we will wait and hope the invisible hand of the market will fix it....
Have we lost faith in our handsome businessman? /s
Good. Maybe we can go back to paying for our services instead of getting tracked everywhere we go.
When Orwell predicted universal surveillance he never anticipated that the people themselves would install the cameras, let alone pay a subscription.
This sounds more like "everyone is on TikTok and Instagram and will only ever be using TikTok and Instagram".
Err... you think you're not being tracked when you spend money?
Wow.
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
nobody is going to want to create new content when they get paid nothing or almost nothing for doing so.
that's a lie
so basically back to internet 1.0, sounds good actually.
Old youtube was a pretty cool place and nobody got paid
Agreed.
People create content knowing others are going to get filthy rich off it and they'll get nothing in return. Except total loss of privacy.
Replace "nobody" with "nobody who contributes to society; nobody I gave a shit about in the first place" and you're on track.
just because it's free doesn't mean it's worthless, and charging for content doesn't make it valuable
When Google itself is the one stopping you from clicking on a website you've got a problem.
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.
Cloudflare already ruined the web way before AI was even a thing.
In what way?
Are they still defending the fact they host Stormfront?
Host_ed_, right? They did drop them at some point, I thought.
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
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
Hey Siri, insert the Donald Glover “GOOD.” meme.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
Everyone is too busy doomscrolling TikTok to notice.
Can someone check in with the inventor of the web and ask him what the web's business model is?
Anyone know Al Gore's email?
I didn’t come here for heartwarming stories; yet here I am.
i like to publish content so that bots can scrape it and serve it to people without attribution i think it's good i think ill publish some more interesting stuff right away
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.
i'd like to be a labor leader, but i'm not (yet). Yet here's my opinion:
Knowledge was meant to be free since the beginning. I look at ideas as human-cultivated, carefully cultured viruses. They're packages of information that live within a host.
They're a lot less aggressive than their feral counterparts, but they're still individual beings who want to spread. Holding back knowledge is unnatural, and the internet should be free.
Yeah, the odds are really stacked against businesses when it comes to sharing information.
The fact they've been able to keep such a stranglehold on it for so long is really a testament to how much excess power they have over our societies.
Future generations are laughing at us, and rightfully so.
But it's felony contempt of busoness model!!
Trying to comment in this thread and it tells me "Toastify is awesome"? wth?
edit: nevermind? whatever borked seems to have fixed itself? I don't know.
lmao, I'm laughing so hard at this! It's probably displaying the wrong text for an error.
@dessalines@lemmy.ml do you have more information on this?
yes but cloudflare defending garbage people who dox trans people is also killing the web
I didn't even know about that until now. But how does that affect AI and websites?
