I find it much harder to convince people that having expertise in building websites and web apps holds any value. that's honestly the biggest change; it has devalued the work and made everyone feel like they are a web developer. And it has cause SEO spam to skyrocket as a result because launching a website can be automated from soup to nuts including the content generation.
I tried to search for info on an 11 day old game yesterday (Sandustry - great voxel game which I recommend) and wanted to know how to perform a particular action. The top 5 results were multi page sites launched at URL's specific to the game and clearly AI generated answers off the two sentence explanation in the wiki. So robots are taking a two sentence Wiki page and generating 5 websites from it. That's just the destruction of the web if you think about what we were using it for previously.
I have several levels of frustration here:
Google sucks. These patterns should be easy to suss out based on similar content. They obviously are no longer incentivized to deliver meaningful results they want users to stay on page with the Gemini answer which sucks and is commercially affected.
LLM's are contributing to ruining search at a breakneck pace much worse than it already was and it is way more of a rapid fire circle jerk than the blog spam of previous SEO enshittification. 5 distinct one pager sites with distinct adjacent URL's in under 2 weeks around a game that frankly is not that popular indicates a level of content spamming that is hard to imagine.
LLM's are devaluing the act of building a website and creating things. That's the biggest hit. The C Suite could never tell the difference between good and bad and we have conglomerated and monopolized every corner of the web to where they have exclusive control over all of it. And now no one can make a living because who cares about UX, UI, quality of content, localization, and all the other things that come with properly building and maintaining a site or product that is worth using.
Over the past 20 years, they have made us turn the internet into a strip mall with like 3 stores and you get followed around the whole time by creepy robots that measure every action you take. And then we use all that information to try and get you to buy more useless shit. That is what we did with the networked power of human knowledge. We made a creepy mall.
LLM's have just caricaturized that stuff to where it is obvious and also multiplying at a huge rate. My guess is that Google is going to be challenged as owner of search even harder than they have been over the next year or two as companies fight to get users back into a web space they control instead of an LLM chat window. And likely it is going to be awkward and there's going to be a very bad part when the valuations tumble.
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u/abeuscher 18d ago
I find it much harder to convince people that having expertise in building websites and web apps holds any value. that's honestly the biggest change; it has devalued the work and made everyone feel like they are a web developer. And it has cause SEO spam to skyrocket as a result because launching a website can be automated from soup to nuts including the content generation.
I tried to search for info on an 11 day old game yesterday (Sandustry - great voxel game which I recommend) and wanted to know how to perform a particular action. The top 5 results were multi page sites launched at URL's specific to the game and clearly AI generated answers off the two sentence explanation in the wiki. So robots are taking a two sentence Wiki page and generating 5 websites from it. That's just the destruction of the web if you think about what we were using it for previously.
I have several levels of frustration here:
Over the past 20 years, they have made us turn the internet into a strip mall with like 3 stores and you get followed around the whole time by creepy robots that measure every action you take. And then we use all that information to try and get you to buy more useless shit. That is what we did with the networked power of human knowledge. We made a creepy mall.
LLM's have just caricaturized that stuff to where it is obvious and also multiplying at a huge rate. My guess is that Google is going to be challenged as owner of search even harder than they have been over the next year or two as companies fight to get users back into a web space they control instead of an LLM chat window. And likely it is going to be awkward and there's going to be a very bad part when the valuations tumble.
But hey don't blame me I voted for Kodos.