So this has been an inflection point that has concerned me, specifically in regards to a few types of sites: news and instruction sites.

News sites are already often shit and parasitic. I mean parasitic because if you go to a free news site (say Yahoo news, etc) you often see rewritten articles that originated from paid sites (e.g. NYT). The pure ad-supported sites are typical enshitification that degrades journalism and increases sensationalism because they don't need to write unique articles, but you should sensationalize them to drive up views. You also don't have to hire journalists to get story details. So news most people read degrades and you get very limited views.

The problem here is that this paradigm barely works because you have to pay real people to write those rephrased articles. So while it costs more to run the NYT where you need to hire investigative journalists and send people to physical places, there is a bound on that difference. But if you paste in a NYT article into GPT4 and ask it to summarize it, you'll get very similar quality to yahoo news (or even CNN, MSNBC, or Fox. Which all also do this leeching, but less of an issue). I'm sure people realize how easy it is to scrape NYT and then post the GPT output. This is in spirit no different than if you just used archie.is, but large scale.

The same is true for many tutorial sites or cooking sites, etc. I'm sure many of you also get annoyed at the google search results that are just stackover flow posts embedded on a different site or the Medium articles (especially paid ones) that are also just SO posts and can show up higher in the listing.

The issue becomes: how do we generate and disseminate new information in this paradigm? Okay, free blog posts aren't "hurt" because they have no income, but people build reputation through them and it gets many people jobs. But what about others that do make a living through this? Is this not similar Jack Conte's (Patreon co-founder/CEO and 1/2 of the band Pomplamoose) argument about creating content "for the algorithm" vs for "yourself/your fans/fun/etc". That it is taking some of the human elements out of the art/entertainment/content. (Can totally disagree with his argument btw). Personally I'm on the side of Jack. Our goal shouldn't (now) be to just serve people search results or just generate content for content's sake, but to now focus on serving people high quality content and high quality results. Google indexed the entire internet. People gamed the system (SEO) and now google results are shit, youtube results are shit, and everything is shit. We don't need more content (who uses page 2 on Google?), but we need to have better content. [1]

I think we need to ask: is this what we want? If not, then what are we going to do about it?

If we are okay, then I think someone should create a super-website where you just have information about just about everything. There definitely is utility in it. But the question is at what cost.

[0] https://youtu.be/hwn6-8XpIuE

[1] I think most people want this. But the problem is you're not going to find market forces showing this because there is no product doing this. Or if there are, they aren't well known and could be confusing to use and/or a wide variety of problems (UI/UX do matter). But it requires reading between the lines and market research a la talking to people and finding out what they want, not a la data. You need both.