Viewing a single comment thread. View all comments

nobodyisonething OP t1_je751vl wrote

Reply to comment by BigZaddyZ3 in The Rise of AI will Crush The Commons of the Internet by nobodyisonething

I'm expecting a predictable scenario like this:

  1. The growth of freely available information on the internet slows down as proprietary AIs become the go-to for answers.
  2. Proprietary AIs start actively trying to hide information behind paywalls to gain an advantage over their rivals
  3. The golden age of all-you-can-eat information is lost and nobody realized it was happening.
12

Prestigious-Ad-761 t1_je7h76n wrote

In my opinion that part happened already. Except for a few last foci of resistance like wikipedia. Google never gives you more than 400 results per search. And seeing as exact search has been disabled, we effectively lost more than 99% of what once was the internet. Thank god they were forced to use the (real, old, now unavailable to us) internet to train them. At least a little piece of it is saved.

But yeah... Paywalls.

9

VinoVeritable t1_je8is51 wrote

Do you know why exact search has been disabled?

2

Prestigious-Ad-761 t1_jeb5dzx wrote

I imagine the following combination of factors.

  1. Most people were not educated about it, had no clue it existed, let alone how useful it can be. Very few users truly used it (acording to what another search engine told me).

  2. As a corolary of number 1, they felt they could pinch some pennies by removing that function.

  3. When they did, also as a corolary of number 1, they noticed that the outrage was not in sufficient volume to be a threat.

  4. Apple removed the ratings system on the apple store, in order to be able to sell the possibility for rankings to be sold instead of deriving from user satisfaction.

  5. Most people being casuals did not even notice that it was gone. No public outrage.

  6. Corolary of 5 - Google app store followed suit, then Youtube did too, so did Tripadvisor, Imdb (for a while). And little by little, the possibility to filter content according to user preference started to fade. And content started to be prioritised according to commercial guidelines and not number of visitors or external links, perceived respectability, density of content and keyword relevance (which remain a parameter of the algorithm, but at a much lower rung in the ladder than before). Well, on keyword relevance, it's technically gone now that there's no exact search.

  7. Google saw this and applied this commercial outlook to the search engine, not just the app store. They profited immensely.

  8. Nowadays, the shape of the internet changed from a planet to the tip of an iceberg; but many new users weren't born before these changes, many more did not use those functions and even less of them would care.

I imagine.

1

NoGravitasForSure t1_je8rquq wrote

This discussion reminds me of the situation in the 90s. Around 1995 when the internet slowly transformed from a toy for tech nerds into what it is today, There was much talk about commercialisation and how this would impact the freedom we enjoyed so far.

Now we have paywall sites, but also Wikipedia, Stack Overflow and an abundance of free stuff, a lot more than back in the days when the internet was still a tiny playground.

So .. I guess it is just impossible to predict what the future will bring, but I am not overly pessimistic.

4