Quora has sucked for a while now. When the second answer on every question is completely unrelated to the question asked, in some weird attempt to make you look up more content on the site, the site starts losing its usefulness.
Isn't that because ChatGPT is trained on those QA platforms? If real humans aren't answering questions on the Internet, how will LLMs learn the answers to those questions?
Nor does ChatGPT ban you from the entire network because you answered a Palestine question on the politics sub-section. (Happened to me.)
It's like Stack Exchange doesn't want questions and answers any more, just wants to harvest Google traffic and shows ads. Actual content production is too hard.
> Nor does ChatGPT ban you from the entire network because you answered a Palestine question on the politics sub-section. (Happened to me.)
Some Reddit subs (as well as web forums/messageboards) have the same problem. If your views don't align with the majority (or the minority, if they run the sub), you're likely to get banned or lose the ability to post.
Plenty of such things exist, and I (and everyone I know) generally avoid visiting them. There is simply too much spam, trolling, hate speech, wrong information, ads, off-topic conversations..
Turns out moderation is actually useful if you want to have interesting conversations.
um, I would argue overbearing moderation is positive for overall "quality" of content. But not as useful as ChatGPT that will spoon feed you answers and not care about misspellings, bad English, asking the same question, etc. It is truly remarkable how good it is.
The actual trend these days is that if your company struggles, blame AI ;) I can't say about WebMD and Chegg, but Quora and SO started going downhill before this AI (boom or bubble, whatever you call it) due to their policies, politics, and management. IMHO, of course.
Those thing aren't mutually exclusive. You can be on a decline and something comes along and tanks your visits well beyond what a natural decline would have been.
AI is killing my website but in a different way than what's discussed in the article: Content scrapers are completely out of control, spiking my serving costs and degrading performance for human users. There seem to be hundreds of them and they've gotten very good at looking like human users so they're hard to block or throttle. I can't prove they're all AI-related scrapers, but I've been running the site for 25 years and this issue only became problematic starting in, oh, late 2022 or so.
Even my barely visited personal website is using almost 10GB bandwidth per month according to Digital Ocean. My website is 90% text with no video, so I imagine it's just bots and scrapers hitting it all day. I'm very close to password protecting the whole thing aside from the homepage.
I'm on AWS and use their WAF service to do some rudimentary bot blocking, but CDNs (their Cloudflare equivalent, Cloudfront) have been too expensive in the past and the bot control mechanisms they offer have too many false positives. Perhaps I should check it out again.
Part of the problem is the economics of it -- I've chosen to self-fund a high traffic site without ads, and that's on me. But it was possible to do this just a few years ago.
>and the bot control mechanisms they offer have too many false positives. Perhaps I should check it out again.
Cloudflare no longer does CAPTCHAs so even if users get flagged as bots, the user experience isn't terrible. You just have to click on a box and you're on your way. It adds maybe 3s of delay, far better than anti-bot solutions that require you to solve an captcha, or imperva's (?) challenge that requires you to hold a button for 5-10s seconds.
Content marketing is dead. AI has killed it. One of our main marketing channels was writing SEO-oriented articles on our company’s blog. The traffic has steadily decreased over the last year despite huge efforts.
Disagree. The old way of doing SEO blogspam is dead, and good riddance. Well curated, high quality content written by humans, with information and insights you can’t get from LLMs, will reign. Long live curation.
I'm sure I can make a couple of surprising or insightful articles for my current industry, and then I'll run dry.
Most topics require data or information in some form, which requires time to accumulate. You end up rate limited. Even at the scale of a decent sized company, you often can only produce interesting content occasionally.
No it won't. Well curated info is paywalled everywhere besides Wikipedia and Internet Archive. SEO is still serving up content mill blogspam at an unstoppable rate.
I've personally been seeing an overall shift in the direction of a strong dislike for any kind of low-effort content.
People are pretty hostile towards AI-generated content, so any platform wanting to remain relevant is going to have to take measures to keep out AI-generated content. If you allow it in, it'll quickly become 99% of your overall content and all the human consumers will leave.
As a side effect I'm seeing a lot of human-generated content getting labeled as AI-generated because it looks AI-generated. Sure, a lot of blogspam is going to be replaced by AI slop, but even human-written blogspam isn't going to survive the shift, simply because its quality is so poor that it is essentially indistinguishable from AI slop.
Right now we're in an in-between phase. Most people are still using low-quality aggregators like Google. This will inevitably have to change. Either Google & friends somehow get their shit together (I doubt it), or we're going to see a shift towards known-good curated content like 1990s webrings. I wouldn't be surprised to see a vetted-human Web Of Trust, but for content.
What are the effective marketing channels for specialized/niche B2B companies these days, now that - presumably - the long tail search result strategy is no longer effective?
A friend of mine was telling me that his company was very pleased when they were able to ask ChatGPT "what is the best SaaS for X?" where X = their niche, and their company was the first thing it recommended. It surprised me that this was a thing, although in hindsight, it's obvious.
On the flip side, I still have situations where I ask, "what's the best solution for X" and the answer is a company (or Github repo or whatever) that has been entirely hallucinated or was around ten years ago and not any more or something.
I guess a corollary question is, are there methods (i.e. the chatbot version of SEO) to get your company into chatbot recommendations?
> What are the effective marketing channels for specialized/niche B2B companies these days, now that - presumably - the long tail search result strategy is no longer effective?
Lately, they've been sending emails offering $2-500 Amazon gift cards for short sales calls. Some follow through. I'm not helping their KPIs though.
Obviously the correct thing do here is register a company named after the hallucination and offer the solution. Kind of like that guy who looks at what domains are being auctioned for creating new start-ups.
Search engines are dying, because the publicly scrape-able web is being drowned in slop and the search engine purveyors are leaning into it. SEO is dying because search engines have become so useless that even non-tech-adjacent people have noticed.
I'm pretty sure you could drop at least 60% of domains from search engine indexes with no reduction in result quality. (And it would probably be a net quality increase to get rid of all the domains that just copy content from other domains, content-farms, scam sites, etc.)
Apropos of anything else, it's one of the things I like about Kagi for search. You can tune a domain to be heavily bumped, bumped, deranked or heavily deranked.
It's not dead in the sense that companies will stop doing it, it's dead in the sense that there will be much more competition with AI-written articles.
More competition is good though - people are just going to be much more picky and if your content is not distinguishable from AI slop then it deservedly will perish.
This ignores the volume problem. Human written content can be copied and rewritten via AI in a bunch of different ways, instantly. Human content will go away not because it's bad, but because it's immediately drowned out in a way that is unfixable.
A lot of content has been written by Indian content farms anyway. I prefer the AI written content. It gets right to the information you want without restating it's purpose 4 or 5 times and having to scroll down the first 500 words of the article.
I’ve seen this shift in my own usage. I find myself appending “Reddit” to the end of my searches a lot more often, I have pinned Wikipedia to the top of my search results (in kagi) and I haven’t visited stackoverflow in months, although I see that perplexity quotes it quite often when I ask it coding questions…
I’m just a sample of one, but it’s certainly interesting to see how apparently I’m just one of many
It's shocking to me that people would intentionally seek Reddit threads. The quality of the discussion on that site is absolutely appalling beyond belief.
Particularly for product reviews/information, it's the least biased (note: NOT unbiased) source I know of. If you're looking for information on what model of (to pick a recent personal example) toaster isn't complete junk, where do you look?
if you look for non controversial topics it can have some good niche groups. Doesnt have good native search though so you have to use google or something else
I would expect there to be a measurement error here (although maybe not a significant one): individuals and services have repeatedly complained about AI companies engaging in aggressive crawling. Given that, one might expect to see traffic increases to data sources like Wikipedia and Reddit.
the analysis isn't correct, it feels like a forced segregation
- reddit got boost because of google's investment in it, and they're consciously boosting it
- wikipedia clearly doesn't have increase in page views
- substack as a product has been on rise, more authors leading to more views, no actual co-relation with the content on the platform
I've noticed that since I've started using ChatGPT, I've almost entirely stopped using Google (except for the rare case where I need a specific website but don't remember the URL). In addition to a bunch of technical questions related to my work, my ChatGPT chat log has the most mundane things like:
- What is platos frios
- Can you download Netflix videos to your local device
- Who composed the Top Gun theme
- Who have been the most successful American Idol winners
- If I check-in the day before a United Airlines flight, can I still buy additional checked bags when I go to the airport
- If I'm buying a Schwinn IC4 indoor spin bike, do I need a floormat for it also
- What is pisco
- In the US, what is the format for EINs?
- Is it bad to use tap water in your humidifier?
- Which NBA players are on supermax contracts
- What are some of the best steakhouses in Manhattan?
- How much and how long does it take to procure a DUNS number?
- In terms of real estate, what is historic tax credit development
LLMs give me the answers I want immediately. Before, I would use Google basically as a proxy to find websites that I'd then have to sift through to find the answers to these questions. It was another layer of indirection. Now that I can have an LLM just tell me the answer (you still need to approach it with a skeptical eye, since it can certainly get some things wrong), I don't need to "search" the search results pages themselves and read multiple articles and blog posts to hopefully find the answer to my question.
After some experience and testing, I've become well aware not to use LLMs to ask questions like "who did X" and "what is company Y's policy about Z", because they tend to hallucinate responses (even for well-known people).
What I've not yet figured out how to deal with is how to handle being surrounded by a society of people who go ahead and trust LLMs for their factual answers anyway. I think even if I'm careful about selecting my sources, the background noise floor is going to climb up to the point that there's no signal-to-noise ratio left.
I really like having the site where the answer came from so I can instantly judge how likely the answer is to be correct.
Chat GPT does correctly answer your question about airline bags, but I have no way of knowing if it made that answer up or not because so many airlines have the same policy.
Google at least gives you links to the United baggage policies. The AI overview in Google also "cites its sources", which sort of gives you the best of both worlds. (I'm sure the accuracy of Google's AI vs. ChatGPT is up for debate)
I might misunderstand, but can't you just ask for the reference? I've also been using (Gemini) a lot to basically replace my search engine, but I always tell it to give me a reference. I've had pretty good results with this approach.
I wonder how many new, strange, surprising and wonderful things you indirectly stumbled into during those sifting exercises. Hyper-optimized search has some downsides. I love getting answers to my specific questions, but that always encompasses the "known unknowns" space. Through skimming and sifting using websites as proxies, I enjoyed surprises from the "unknown unknowns" space.
10 years ago I'd agree with you completely. I definitely get your point and share some of that same sentiment, but search results these past 10 uears have become overwhelming absurd, shallow, and barely tangentially related to what I'm looking for
The ones that struggle had pre-existing issues :
- quora pivoted from quality content to cheap clickbait
- SO has overbearing moderation. Chatgpt doesn't close your question the second you've submitted it.
And so on. In short, quality platforms are fine.
Quora has sucked for a while now. When the second answer on every question is completely unrelated to the question asked, in some weird attempt to make you look up more content on the site, the site starts losing its usefulness.
True, but Q&A platforms were the prime collateral damage for ChatGPT.
I am not sure that quality content on a Q&A platform would help you much. You’d have to pivot significantly.
Isn't that because ChatGPT is trained on those QA platforms? If real humans aren't answering questions on the Internet, how will LLMs learn the answers to those questions?
Not entirely. LLMs are smart enough to answer questions from documentation or from other sources, even if the exact question wasn't asked anywhere.
But Q&A websites do contain information that might not be in other sources, so there would be some loss.
While true, this doesn’t change the problem that Q&A platforms have a hard time competing with LLMs, and I don’t see how that is likely to change.
It is frankly absurd that they should be expected to
These LLMs could not exist without them, but now they're expected to compete?
If all of the Q&A platforms die off, how are LLM training datasets going to get new information?
This whole AI boom is typical corporate shortsightedness imo. Kill the future in order to have a great next quarter
I hope I'm wrong. If I am right, then I hope we figure this out before AI has bulldozed everything into dust
Make new q&a websites.
SO also has the "eternal September" problem
I think this is true.
I personally hated those Seo clickbait pages for a while, because it was so hard to find the information i'm looking for.
doing all of this with ai now.
On the other hand, I really like to read a good article more than ever before
Nor does ChatGPT ban you from the entire network because you answered a Palestine question on the politics sub-section. (Happened to me.)
It's like Stack Exchange doesn't want questions and answers any more, just wants to harvest Google traffic and shows ads. Actual content production is too hard.
> Nor does ChatGPT ban you from the entire network because you answered a Palestine question on the politics sub-section. (Happened to me.)
Some Reddit subs (as well as web forums/messageboards) have the same problem. If your views don't align with the majority (or the minority, if they run the sub), you're likely to get banned or lose the ability to post.
And then there are subreddit coups where someone ousts the old mods and starts banning people according to a whole new set of opinions . . .
We need P2P social media where bigoted, power hungry mods can't enforce their unilateral views on everyone else.
Plenty of such things exist, and I (and everyone I know) generally avoid visiting them. There is simply too much spam, trolling, hate speech, wrong information, ads, off-topic conversations..
Turns out moderation is actually useful if you want to have interesting conversations.
We get what we've paid for. I wouldn't want the thankless work for free job.
um, I would argue overbearing moderation is positive for overall "quality" of content. But not as useful as ChatGPT that will spoon feed you answers and not care about misspellings, bad English, asking the same question, etc. It is truly remarkable how good it is.
The actual trend these days is that if your company struggles, blame AI ;) I can't say about WebMD and Chegg, but Quora and SO started going downhill before this AI (boom or bubble, whatever you call it) due to their policies, politics, and management. IMHO, of course.
ChatGPT nearly killed Chegg
https://www.reddit.com/r/ArtificialInteligence/comments/1cwq...
Those thing aren't mutually exclusive. You can be on a decline and something comes along and tanks your visits well beyond what a natural decline would have been.
AI is killing my website but in a different way than what's discussed in the article: Content scrapers are completely out of control, spiking my serving costs and degrading performance for human users. There seem to be hundreds of them and they've gotten very good at looking like human users so they're hard to block or throttle. I can't prove they're all AI-related scrapers, but I've been running the site for 25 years and this issue only became problematic starting in, oh, late 2022 or so.
Even my barely visited personal website is using almost 10GB bandwidth per month according to Digital Ocean. My website is 90% text with no video, so I imagine it's just bots and scrapers hitting it all day. I'm very close to password protecting the whole thing aside from the homepage.
Do you use a CDN in front of it?
Would something like Cloudflare help with bot detection?
I'm on AWS and use their WAF service to do some rudimentary bot blocking, but CDNs (their Cloudflare equivalent, Cloudfront) have been too expensive in the past and the bot control mechanisms they offer have too many false positives. Perhaps I should check it out again.
Part of the problem is the economics of it -- I've chosen to self-fund a high traffic site without ads, and that's on me. But it was possible to do this just a few years ago.
>and the bot control mechanisms they offer have too many false positives. Perhaps I should check it out again.
Cloudflare no longer does CAPTCHAs so even if users get flagged as bots, the user experience isn't terrible. You just have to click on a box and you're on your way. It adds maybe 3s of delay, far better than anti-bot solutions that require you to solve an captcha, or imperva's (?) challenge that requires you to hold a button for 5-10s seconds.
Content marketing is dead. AI has killed it. One of our main marketing channels was writing SEO-oriented articles on our company’s blog. The traffic has steadily decreased over the last year despite huge efforts.
That doesn’t mean SEO is dead though.
Disagree. The old way of doing SEO blogspam is dead, and good riddance. Well curated, high quality content written by humans, with information and insights you can’t get from LLMs, will reign. Long live curation.
I'm sure I can make a couple of surprising or insightful articles for my current industry, and then I'll run dry.
Most topics require data or information in some form, which requires time to accumulate. You end up rate limited. Even at the scale of a decent sized company, you often can only produce interesting content occasionally.
No it won't. Well curated info is paywalled everywhere besides Wikipedia and Internet Archive. SEO is still serving up content mill blogspam at an unstoppable rate.
can't get from LLMs for 6 months until the next training run?
I sure hope you’re right.
Disagree. The new way of doing SEO blogspam, which involves LLMs, is the way forward. Sadly, downvoting this comment won't make it not be true.
I've personally been seeing an overall shift in the direction of a strong dislike for any kind of low-effort content.
People are pretty hostile towards AI-generated content, so any platform wanting to remain relevant is going to have to take measures to keep out AI-generated content. If you allow it in, it'll quickly become 99% of your overall content and all the human consumers will leave.
As a side effect I'm seeing a lot of human-generated content getting labeled as AI-generated because it looks AI-generated. Sure, a lot of blogspam is going to be replaced by AI slop, but even human-written blogspam isn't going to survive the shift, simply because its quality is so poor that it is essentially indistinguishable from AI slop.
Right now we're in an in-between phase. Most people are still using low-quality aggregators like Google. This will inevitably have to change. Either Google & friends somehow get their shit together (I doubt it), or we're going to see a shift towards known-good curated content like 1990s webrings. I wouldn't be surprised to see a vetted-human Web Of Trust, but for content.
What are the effective marketing channels for specialized/niche B2B companies these days, now that - presumably - the long tail search result strategy is no longer effective?
A friend of mine was telling me that his company was very pleased when they were able to ask ChatGPT "what is the best SaaS for X?" where X = their niche, and their company was the first thing it recommended. It surprised me that this was a thing, although in hindsight, it's obvious.
On the flip side, I still have situations where I ask, "what's the best solution for X" and the answer is a company (or Github repo or whatever) that has been entirely hallucinated or was around ten years ago and not any more or something.
I guess a corollary question is, are there methods (i.e. the chatbot version of SEO) to get your company into chatbot recommendations?
> What are the effective marketing channels for specialized/niche B2B companies these days, now that - presumably - the long tail search result strategy is no longer effective?
Lately, they've been sending emails offering $2-500 Amazon gift cards for short sales calls. Some follow through. I'm not helping their KPIs though.
Obviously the correct thing do here is register a company named after the hallucination and offer the solution. Kind of like that guy who looks at what domains are being auctioned for creating new start-ups.
Sponsor relevant podcasts?
> I guess a corollary question is, are there methods (i.e. the chatbot version of SEO) to get your company into chatbot recommendations?
It wasn't enough for you lot to ruin search results, now you're seeking ways to pollute AI chat bots?
Search engines are dying, because the publicly scrape-able web is being drowned in slop and the search engine purveyors are leaning into it. SEO is dying because search engines have become so useless that even non-tech-adjacent people have noticed.
>One of our main marketing channels was writing SEO-oriented articles on our company’s blog.
So, blogspam?
> Content marketing is dead.
I mean... good? The quality of search results has gotten increasingly worse over time...
I'm pretty sure you could drop at least 60% of domains from search engine indexes with no reduction in result quality. (And it would probably be a net quality increase to get rid of all the domains that just copy content from other domains, content-farms, scam sites, etc.)
Apropos of anything else, it's one of the things I like about Kagi for search. You can tune a domain to be heavily bumped, bumped, deranked or heavily deranked.
It's not dead in the sense that companies will stop doing it, it's dead in the sense that there will be much more competition with AI-written articles.
It's going to be a way worse situation.
Exactly. Humans can't compete with AI content filters... but AI can.
More competition is good though - people are just going to be much more picky and if your content is not distinguishable from AI slop then it deservedly will perish.
This ignores the volume problem. Human written content can be copied and rewritten via AI in a bunch of different ways, instantly. Human content will go away not because it's bad, but because it's immediately drowned out in a way that is unfixable.
There will be people paying for premium content and people writing it. A new technology doesn't suddenly remove human demand.
A lot of content has been written by Indian content farms anyway. I prefer the AI written content. It gets right to the information you want without restating it's purpose 4 or 5 times and having to scroll down the first 500 words of the article.
ChapGPT enshitification is only waiting to happen (or happening already) through subtle recommendations for businesses that paid to be “listed” well.
I’ve seen this shift in my own usage. I find myself appending “Reddit” to the end of my searches a lot more often, I have pinned Wikipedia to the top of my search results (in kagi) and I haven’t visited stackoverflow in months, although I see that perplexity quotes it quite often when I ask it coding questions…
I’m just a sample of one, but it’s certainly interesting to see how apparently I’m just one of many
It's shocking to me that people would intentionally seek Reddit threads. The quality of the discussion on that site is absolutely appalling beyond belief.
As opposed to what, Yelp? Quora? A Wirecutter article bursting at the seams with affilliate links?
Particularly for product reviews/information, it's the least biased (note: NOT unbiased) source I know of. If you're looking for information on what model of (to pick a recent personal example) toaster isn't complete junk, where do you look?
if you look for non controversial topics it can have some good niche groups. Doesnt have good native search though so you have to use google or something else
I would expect there to be a measurement error here (although maybe not a significant one): individuals and services have repeatedly complained about AI companies engaging in aggressive crawling. Given that, one might expect to see traffic increases to data sources like Wikipedia and Reddit.
the analysis isn't correct, it feels like a forced segregation
- reddit got boost because of google's investment in it, and they're consciously boosting it - wikipedia clearly doesn't have increase in page views - substack as a product has been on rise, more authors leading to more views, no actual co-relation with the content on the platform
I've noticed that since I've started using ChatGPT, I've almost entirely stopped using Google (except for the rare case where I need a specific website but don't remember the URL). In addition to a bunch of technical questions related to my work, my ChatGPT chat log has the most mundane things like:
LLMs give me the answers I want immediately. Before, I would use Google basically as a proxy to find websites that I'd then have to sift through to find the answers to these questions. It was another layer of indirection. Now that I can have an LLM just tell me the answer (you still need to approach it with a skeptical eye, since it can certainly get some things wrong), I don't need to "search" the search results pages themselves and read multiple articles and blog posts to hopefully find the answer to my question.After some experience and testing, I've become well aware not to use LLMs to ask questions like "who did X" and "what is company Y's policy about Z", because they tend to hallucinate responses (even for well-known people).
What I've not yet figured out how to deal with is how to handle being surrounded by a society of people who go ahead and trust LLMs for their factual answers anyway. I think even if I'm careful about selecting my sources, the background noise floor is going to climb up to the point that there's no signal-to-noise ratio left.
I really like having the site where the answer came from so I can instantly judge how likely the answer is to be correct.
Chat GPT does correctly answer your question about airline bags, but I have no way of knowing if it made that answer up or not because so many airlines have the same policy.
Google at least gives you links to the United baggage policies. The AI overview in Google also "cites its sources", which sort of gives you the best of both worlds. (I'm sure the accuracy of Google's AI vs. ChatGPT is up for debate)
I might misunderstand, but can't you just ask for the reference? I've also been using (Gemini) a lot to basically replace my search engine, but I always tell it to give me a reference. I've had pretty good results with this approach.
Gpt has web search with links to the website.
I wonder how many new, strange, surprising and wonderful things you indirectly stumbled into during those sifting exercises. Hyper-optimized search has some downsides. I love getting answers to my specific questions, but that always encompasses the "known unknowns" space. Through skimming and sifting using websites as proxies, I enjoyed surprises from the "unknown unknowns" space.
10 years ago I'd agree with you completely. I definitely get your point and share some of that same sentiment, but search results these past 10 uears have become overwhelming absurd, shallow, and barely tangentially related to what I'm looking for
Same for me. The only thing I still use Google for is for up to date data as LLMs are not great with that yet
Asbestos is killing some people, yet maggots are thriving,