You're saying that like it's straightforward hard work. But that strategy has been on the decline for years, with no sign of reversing. High-value technical audiences aren't Googling for educational articles, videos, and courses. They're just asking LLMs, and getting answers. Sometimes the LLMs are searching the web, but LLMs approximately never click on the ads.

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pc86 20 minutes ago | parent | next [-]

Something can be both simple to execute and extremely difficult to execute well. Simple and easy are not synonymous.

> High-value technical audiences aren't Googling for educational articles, videos, and courses. They're just asking LLMs, and getting answers.

You're right, but the high-value audiences are also looking at the sources the LLMs cite, guiding the LLMs to use specific source and exclude others (even if it's just "eschew blogspam and listicles" in the prompt). So being one of those sources is still valuable. Perhaps less so, but it's not without value.

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simonw 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I didn't say it was easy. I'm doing this myself at the moment, so I have a sample size of one showing it's possible.

	▲	dfabulich 18 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		I didn't say "easy" either, I said "straightforward hard work." What you're doing is hard work, but it's way more straightforward than building out CSS Tricks. You're a successful marathon runner. CSS Tricks will have to run a marathon with both legs tied together. What makes your subject matter (LLMs) work is that it's a very fast moving topic, much faster moving than CSS, so people come to you for news. Plus, it's difficult to test new models effectively, so people are looking for trusted names to do meta analysis, fast. Is the new OpenAI model better than Claude? Better how? Quality of output? Evaluated how? Even comparing prices can be difficult, as different models (at different settings) can generate different numbers of tokens (and different numbers of cached tokens) for the same tasks. None of that applies to CSS Tricks. CSS fundamentally can't move that fast, as long as changes in CSS require Apple, Google, and Mozilla to all agree on standards. Hardly anybody needs to know about the latest CSS news. Mostly you only need to know about Baseline Widely Available CSS features, which are at least 30 months old by definition. And when you do learn about new CSS features, it's usually pretty obvious (either to you or to an LLM) whether those new CSS features apply to something you're working on. It's going to be very, very hard to keep CSS Tricks alive, even with a lot of hard work.

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2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

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