> Personal experience however shows me that when I look at a recipe site I will first have to skip through the entire backstory to the recipe and then try to parse it inbetween annoying ads in a bloated wordpress page

That's when money comes into view. People were putting time and effort to offer something for free, then some companies told them they could actually earn money from their content. So they put on ads because who don't like some money for already-done work?

Then the same companies told them that they will make less money, and if they wanted to still earn the same amount as before, they will need to put more ads, and to have more visits (so invest heavily in seo).

Those people had already organized themselves (or stopped updating their websites), and had created companies to handle money generated from their websites. In order to keep the companies sustainable, they needed to add more ads on the websites.

Then some people thought that maybe they could buy the companies making the recipes website, and put a bunch more ads to earn even more money.

I think you're thinking about those websites owned by big companies whose only goal is to make money, but author is writing about real websites made by real people who don't show ads on websites they made because they care about their visitors, and not about making money.

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packetlost 3 days ago | parent | next [-]

Semi related, but a decent search engine like Kagi has been a dramatically better experience than "searching" with an LLM. The web is full of corporate interests now, but you can filter that out and still get a pretty good experience.

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martin-t 3 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

It always starts with people doing real positive-sum work and then grifters and parasites come along and ruin it.

We could make advertising illegal: https://simone.org/advertising/

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jama211 a day ago | parent | next [-]

The thing is you can’t regulate word of mouth. It just pushes the money underground, where it can’t be taxed. People will still be paid to promote things, they’ll just pass it off as their own opinion, and it’ll be more insidious. Like it or not, at least advertising now often is clearly advertising. Not always, but often.

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keysdev 2 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Some organization prohibit advertising doing their elections. Best idea ever. USA should try it. Saves a lot money and annoying ads.

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pas 3 days ago | parent | prev [-]

Or just let this LLM mania run to its conclusion, and we'll end up with two webs, one for profit for AI by AI and one where people put their shit for themselves (and don't really care what others think about it, or if they remix it, or ...).

	▲	sodimel 2 days ago \| parent [-]
		There are already a lot of initiatives following this logic (like the small web movement, the indieweb, gemini/gopher protocols...), but the problem here is that people are using the web, not those projects. Even the fediverse is growing slowly, while it's using the web.

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yztest 2 days ago | parent | prev [-]

Sounds like that could be a fun idea for a new search engine/search engine function, only show results of websites without ads/and or paywalls. Sounds like a really run way to experience the passion part of the internet. Could be hard to implement as I would guess with any level of popularity it would quickly end up with people trying to turn such sites into sales funnels.