Get the top HN stories in your inbox every day.
Aboutplants
npilk
Infinite Jest describes a very similar (fictional) development, albeit with network TV. As viewers leave, content producers are ever-more desperate to monetize remaining traffic, which worsens the experience and drives more viewers away, creating even more desperation to monetize... a vicious cycle.
ProllyInfamous
Samizdat, it's her voice, that lady on the radio...
Having read &/or seen both, I would think modern advertising is closer to They Live.
wildrhythms
These news sites run ads that are borderline gore, disturbing images promoting snake oil weight loss or skin care treatments, and wonder why nobody wants to click into their site.
ronsor
But I love internet chum! Don't forget "new law thing"; that's an important category.
wlesieutre
If you live in California, insurance companies don't want you to know this
sudoshred
"internet chum" is a good one, it echoes "slop bowl".
tencentshill
That's bottom of the barrel advertisers. You're being punished because you likely don't allow them to track you.
zeta0134
That the news sites allow bottom of the barrel advertisers on their site primarily reflects negatively on the news site, for not curating their partnerships. They decided to become a tabloid, and should lose an according amount of respect.
visarga
> These news sites run ads that are borderline gore, disturbing images promoting snake oil weight loss or skin care treatments
And that doesn't raise an eye brow, but well worded AI articles based on sources is described as slop
afavour
It's a downward spiral. As views start to decline there's more pressure to make money from the views that remain.
vkou
If views increased, there'd also be more pressure to make more money from them.
The direction of views is irrelevant. What's relevant is the forward passage of time. As t -> infinity, shitty monetization -> infinity.
josephg
It’s not inevitable. It’s just a specific form of leadership failure that comes from grabby short term business people being in charge of everything.
As a counter example, the Economist or the NY Times don’t feel anywhere near this bad. They make you pay. But subscribers get a much nicer product in return.
jmbwell
Yes, and this has been the case for years. Cnet, ZDnet, PCmag have been user-hostile since long before AI summaries. Pop-ups, “before you go,” back jacking, all the worst.
The Verge is a surprise because it is relatively new and was relatively free of this crap for a long time.
They’re all just empty brands now. They totally caved to advertisers, and now only advertisers care about them.
I dare say AI’s popularity is a symptom of all this more than a cause.
hypeatei
Weren't those ads always there, though? The most obvious change is that a little AI popup appears on Google search providing a brief (even if hallucinated) overview of what the user queried.
Unrelated, but I wouldn't expect this take on HN where I assumed everyone knew what an ad-blocker was.
Aboutplants
Yes the ads were always there but that was the most efficient way to get the content/information. That has changed and even with ad blockers, websites are no longer the most efficient way to get to that content/infomation. That is what has changed
hypeatei
Okay, I see what point you were trying to make. I misinterpreted your comment as saying LLMs weren't the catalyst but instead the ads were.
structural
Mobile users (or other locked down devices where adblockers are forbidden) are still a decent chunk of traffic. It's much easier to just read the overview and not click through to the ad infestation, or even use a chatbot of choice as the search engine instead of going to Google, because "websites is how you get spammed with ads".
pocksuppet
> Mobile users (or other locked down devices where adblockers are forbidden)
Just say Apple. They're still allowed on Android, although I don't think you can get them from the Play Store.
politelemon
Ublock origin is a Firefox extension that works on mobile. You don't need a dedicated app for blocking adverts.
vineyardmike
I don’t use ad block.
I find that when it messes with the layout or formatting of a website it’s really annoying, and I consider the volume and type of ads an important signal for a website’s trustworthiness.
Oh and plenty of devices don’t have easy access to ad block, like my work computer.
pousada
I use reader mode 90% of the time, I’m really not interested in fancy layout or formatting for a website. I just want the text readable and looking exactly the same way for every website. Designers probably hate users like me.
JoshTriplett
> and I consider the volume and type of ads an important signal for a website’s trustworthiness
You can get the former from the number showing up in the uBlock Origin icon.
tracerbulletx
My tech tutorials blog never had any ads, still doesnt. Still lost more than half the traffic. That's not the reason, that's an excuse and a distraction from the topic that AI captures everyone's IP and removes a lot of their economic incentive to create it.
ilamont
I used to work as a technology journalist. A guy from the business side always used to say, “there’s no way we are leaving money on the table“ as justification for putting ad modules, video players, lead generation forms and other junk around our articles. We had no say in the matter.
Someone from the financial times did a test about the impact of this garbage on read times and brand loyalty. This was maybe 15 years ago. Of course the more ads shoehorned onto the page, the worse the metrics were.
estsauver
I have a recurring problem where I can't even read one of my favorite recipe websites (seriouseats.com) from my phone because the series of popups completely blocks the page, and can't be dismissed.
But if I ask Claude or Gemini for a nice version of the recipe, it works perfectly. I think there's a lot of own goals out there.
eggbrain
Many of today's news websites (tech or otherwise) cashed in their goodwill / reputation / page rank to sell ads.
The first shoe dropped when news websites realized they weren't generating content fast enough. Hard, in depth journalism takes time, but when people want to know something that happened _today_, they don't want to wait a week for all the facts to come out, and so the major websites started losing traffic to websites that churned out articles fast.
The additional benefit of churning out articles was that you could match against more and more long tail keywords, which lead to more traffic and more ability to sell ads. To keep up, many websites dropped quality for speed, and consumers noticed.
The second shoe then to drop was with affiliate marketing -- articles on CNET / Wirecutter etc were already ranking and rating products, so they figured "[...] why shouldn't we get a cut if someone ends up buying a product we recommend"? The challenge then became that consumers couldn't tell the difference between a product that was recommended because it was good, or because the product gave the biggest "kickback" to the website for using the affiliate link. Thus, people that gave "honest" opinions on products (e.g. people asking on Reddit, at least for a while, as the article suggests) became the new source of truth.
The result of this means that these days, if you read a lot of articles on the major tech websites, they feel more like they've been optimized for speed (e.g. churning out an article fast), SEO, and not much else. Many people have talked about how recipie websites are now short story generators more than food instructions, but it's been common for a while where I go to a tech website to read about something I specifically Googled, only for it to feel more like it was written _specifically_ to capture traffic for a keyword, rather than actually solve the issue or question I came into the website with.
The cherry on top is that AI has none of these problems (so far) -- yes, there's some movement on trying to do SEO for AI, and of course ads will eventually come to AI like it has everything else, but currently, you can get the answers you want, described to you exactly how you'd like to hear it -- who wouldn't want that?
doug_durham
Why do you think that they are pushing so many ads? It is because they have too much money? Most sites are struggling to pay the few employees they have. Fewer ads aren't going to lead to better reporting. Would you be willing to pay a subscription to the website? Probably not.
flakeoil
> you can get the answers you want, described to you exactly how you'd like to hear it
I thought we wanted the truth.
Trav5
Some of us do but many people do not. Source: Married for 22 years.
pocksuppet
Stated and revealed preferences
pousada
You can’t handle the truth
onetokeoverthe
[dead]
xrd
I recently replaced a power supply to upgrade a GPU. I bought the power supply on Cragslist, so it had a jumble of cables and no manual. In the past I would have read an article that I would have found on one of those sites.
This time I conversed entirely with Gemini, sending pictures of the cables and of the components and the motherboard.
I'll not soon forget when I plugged in a cable incorrectly and sent an image of that cable to Gemini.
Gemini said "It is very important that you stop and unplug that cable immediately... Hopefully the power supply's safety precautions kicked in before any permanent damage occurred."
I know that Gemini was conversing with me using plagiarized information from all those sites. But, it was so much better to do this than to try to synthesize that in my brain by reading a bunch of articles.
I don't see a future for tech content because Gemini isn't paying the authors and they don't give me an option to direct payments to them either.
Latty
It's crazy to me that you'd trust the output of an LLM for that. It's something where if you do it wrong it could cause major damage, and LLMs are literally famous for creating plausbile-sounding but wrong output.
If you wanted to use an LLM to identify it, sure, you can validate that, and then find the manufacturer instructions and use those. Just following what it says about the cables without any validation it's correct is just wild to me. These are products with instruction manuals made for them specifically designed for this.
ashleyn
I'd probably view LLM advice like the blind spot indicator on my car. Trust when it's lit. Don't trust when it's not lit.
visarga
> It's crazy to me that you'd trust the output of an LLM for that. It's something where if you do it wrong it could cause major damage,
With critical tasks you need to cross reference multiple AI, start by running 4 deep reports, on Claude, ChatGPT, Gemini and Perplexity, then put all of them into a comparative - critical analysis round. This reduces variance, the models are different, and using different search tools, you can even send them in different directions, one searches blogs, one reddit, etc.
Latty
Or you can ask for a link to the manual. I genuinely can't tell if your post is real advice or sarcasm intended to highlight the insanity of trying to fit square pegs in round holes of using LLMs for everything.
PacificSpecific
If the hardware changes significantly and those sites don't exist in the future wouldn't that mean gemeni would degrade in quality because it has nothing to pull from?
hydrogen7800
Right, that success story is only because there was "organic" (for lack of a better term) information from an original source. What happens when all information is nth generation AI feedback with all links to the original source lost?
Edit: A question from AI/LLM ignorance- Can the source database for an LLM be one-way, in that it does not contain output from itself, or other LLMs? I can imagine a quarantined database used for specific applications that remains curated, but this seems impossible on the open internet.
bigthymer
> Can the source database for an LLM be one-way, in that it does not contain output from itself, or other LLMs?
I think, for public internet data, we can only be reasonably confident for information before the big release of ChatGPT.
nsvd2
Yes, people have likened pre-LLM Internet content to low-background steel.
If in the hypothetical future the continual learning problem gets solved, the AI could just learn from the real world instead of publications and retain that data.
nprateem
One reason why Google made that algorithm to watermark AI output
black_puppydog
That's exactly why text written before the first LLMs has a premium on it these days. So no, all major models suffer from slop in their training data.
andy81
We've all tried to ask the LLM about something outside of its training data by now.
In that situation, they give the (wrong) answer that sounds the most plausible.
PacificSpecific
That's definitely been my experience. I work with a lot of weird code bases that have never been public facing and AI has horrible responses for that stuff.
As soon as I tried to make a todomvc it started working great but I wonder how much value that really brings to the table.
It's great for me though. I can finally make a todomvc tailored to my specific needs.
NoMoreNicksLeft
Once or twice, for me it's deflected rather than answer at all.
On the other hand, they've also surfaced information (later independently confirmed by myself) that I had not been able to find for years. I don't know what to make of it.
visarga
> In that situation, they give the (wrong) answer that sounds the most plausible.
Not if you use web search or deep report, you should not use LLMs as knowledge bases, they are language models - they learn language not information, and are just models not replicas of the training set.
elictronic
This then becomes the hardware manufacturers problem. If their new hardware fails for to many users it will no longer be purchased. If they externalize their problem solving like so many companies, they won't be able to gain market share.
This creates financial incentives to pay companies running the new version of search. Your thinking of this as a problem for these companies, when in reality it is a financial incentive.
visarga
> because it has nothing to pull from?
Chat rooms produce trillions of tokens per day now, interactive tokens, where AI can poke and prod at us, and have its ideas tested in the real world (by us).
esperent
Presumably companies will still provide manuals.
SiempreViernes
It'll be a single sheet of paper with a QR code that redirects to a canned prompt hosted at whichever LLM server paid the most to the manufacturer for their content.
PacificSpecific
If that was adequate then wouldn't there not be supplementary material?
Results vary of course. I have some very wonderful synthesizer manuals.
roxolotl
Yea so I’ve had an issue getting video output after boot on a new AMD R9700 Pro. None of the, albeit free, models from OpenAI/Google/Anthropic have really been helpful. I found the pro drivers myself. They never mentioned them.
Thats not to say AI is bad. It’s great in many cases. More that I’m worried about what happens when the repositories of new knowledge get hollowed out.
Also my favorite response was this gem from Sonnet:
> TL;DR: Move your monitor cable from the motherboard to the graphics card.
nancyminusone
That's more than a little concerning you would put full faith in AI to connect expensive hardware without verifying.
I'd at least ask for a citation to the product manual (even though half the time it cites another fucking AI generated site instead)
BoredPositron
I have never seen a review site or tech blog go into detail about how to wire a specific power supply to a specific motherboard. I would also never go to such a site to get information I can easily get from the manufacturer through a handbook but I would also never ask a chatbot. Really odd use case tbh.
esseph
> Really odd use case tbh.
For 99.99999% of people out there, LLMs are the new search. You can gnash teeth and yell and sob, but it is how things are.
throwaway85825
There is no modular PSU cable standard. Mixing cables between PSUs can destroy your hardware. Even among the same brand there is no standard.
cj
Same experience here: someone at our company had a bricked Macbook Pro. It was previously MDM-managed with JamF, and it wouldn't boot up. Asked ChatGPT to give me steps to fix it.
The first set of steps didn't work, so we iteratively sent pictures of the screen until the steps eventually did work and the issue was fixed.
This saved us from having to call Apple support.
righthand
I see a future just like the seo issue of today, where the well is poisoned and llm information is garbage.
dehrmann
> I'll not soon forget when I plugged in a cable incorrectly
I'm surprised this was a problem. Back in the day, there were things like making sure your two very similar AT power connectors had the black wires next to each other, not forcing in a molex connector upside down, or the same for ribbon cables. These days? The connectors are standardized and keyed, as long as your modular PSU vendor didn't get lazy on their keying.
vel0city
FWIW, things are standardized and keyed on the ATX board side of things. They aren't standardized on the power supply side of a modular power supply. Unless you've absolutely confirmed pinouts, never swap cables between modular power supplies. Fitment doesn't imply its actually going to put the right voltage on the right pins. Even within the same manufacturer pinouts have sometimes been different between models!
delecti
Also, some non-standard hardware looks very standard. (At least some) Dell motherboard/PSU connectors infamously are physically compatible (the plug fits the socket) with the ATX standard, but the wiring is sufficiently different that it can damage or be damaged by other hardware.
NoLinkToMe
Three things are probably true:
1. in the short term this development is great for users. LLMs trained for free on a universe of high-quality human stolen content, and returns relevant parts of it to resolve specific customer questions, without ads, an operation funded by VC.
2. with LLMs redirecting search from knowledge producers (webpages) to knowledge aggregators (LLMs) the incentive to create knowledge is gone, and future knowledge (including that fed into LLMs) will degrade compared to a universe that kept this incentive alive
3. AI is hardware, energy and R&D intensive and VCs will need a business model to recuperate their investments and costs, a key-player has already announced an ad model re-creating part of the issue noted previously that we temporarily resolved
tempodox
Classic tragedy of the commons, this time with major impact on everyone everywhere.
rurp
Agreed on all three points, but I think this is pretty obviously terrible in the long run. The open internet was one of the greatest common goods in human history. That ecosystem is quickly being exploited to death by a handful of tech companies. Those companies are generating a lot of revenue in the short term, and the rest of humanity is losing a great deal.
I can't even begin to count how many times I've found interesting and useful information from an old forum/article/guide that was supported by some ads or simply an avenue to engage with people. Those incentives are now gone.
Tech companies have no ethics and their leaders think it's in their interest to continue the exploitation, so that's what is going to happen. The only effective way to prevent a tragedy of the commons situation on this scale is major government action and there is zero political will for that at this time.
In the long run there will be some sort of reaction, maybe site curation will make a comeback. A few big name sites will probably resist the slop and survive as an institution. But the internet many of us know and love is being pummeled to death before our eyes.
StLCylone
AI has successfully scraped enough of their content so that they are no longer needed. Thanks for creating the content, now someone else will make money with it.
spudlyo
Franky, good riddance. The websites that had SEO optimized their way to the top of Google's search results for queries like "how to change DNS settings", "best free VPN", or "best wireless earbuds under $300" were generally terrible, and I can't say I'm sad that that creating that kind of "content" is no longer economically viable.
There were large categories of information had become extremely difficult to search for thanks to SEO optimized content farms like these. People switching to Reddit for discovery because of this search index pollution was a direct response to this. To me, LLMs feel like a return to the golden age of AltaVista and Google, where the Internet was a place you could reliably find the information you were looking for.
m4tthumphrey
You'll just see it within AI responses instead.
terminalshort
I find that the AI surfaces things from actual manuals and data that were once easy to find in Google search before SEO ruined it.
ssl-3
Certainly so.
But we aren't there quite yet; that's tomorrow's problem. And I still have things that I need to do today.
SketchySeaBeast
Yeah, that's only going to last until the first bad actor.
https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20260218-i-hacked-chatgpt...
marginalia_nu
It seems very easy to manipulate.
Noticed the other day it now heavily cites and sources my one of my blog post to support the claim that yes, AI makes you boring if you google "Does AI make you boring?"
If you search "Does AI make you interesting?", it drums up other sources to support that contradictory claim as well.
rurp
What do you think is going to happen to LLM content after it has replaced the rest of the internet? It sure as hell isn't going to stay relatively unbiased and ad-free. The degradation of Google Search is probably an optimistic comparison.
tempodox
Except when they just hallucinate an answer that is plainly wrong.
paulnpace
[flagged]
esseph
> And now we can enjoy Marxist advertising ("posts") within our discussions on how to replace a TPMS sensor.
Reddit is Marxist? Hilarious.
I can't believe real people believe shit like this. Truly, the state of education is dire.
Marx and Engles must be rolling in their graves as a beacon of capitalistic tech is called "Marixst". What a silly world we live in.
Henchman21
Please, for the class, stand up in front and define "Marxism" for us.
SirMaster
But where will the AI get new information when the websites stop publishing new info?
mjr00
Yet these sites now use AI to generate more "content" (slop) than ever, leveraging their high Google rankings and SEO to lure people in. The people who haven't switched to an LLM for search, anyway.
Truly an ouroboros of garbage.
seydor
good luck in 4 years when the only answer they can give about new hardware is "I don't know"
antisthenes
No worries. We're on track to make consumer hardware unaffordable for the average user in 4 years anyway.
You'll rent it and use whatever is available for the low low price of $79.99/mo*
TonyStr
Many of these websites, I only ever interacted with when doing research either on tech or tech products. I did not appreciate their surface-level reviews and explanations, so in my head I've categorized most of these websites as "noise to wade through whenever I need to look up something". I can't say I'll miss these sites. I would be googling (ddg-ing) way more still if the internet wasn't full of low-effort SEO bait articles that dominate every search result.
Anonyneko
It doesn't help that tech publications and gaming websites keep getting bought out by crypto and gambling companies.
https://aftermath.site/gameshub-clickout-media-seo-gambling-...
g8oz
Yes a lot of these publications produce low quality content. But some of it can be quite useful. If they disappear who is going to document at a consumer level the latest hardware doodad or whatnot? Manufacturers are going to have to invest in online resources that the AI bots can scrape. Perhaps good documentation will become a driver of profit.
dktoao
Can't wait for SEO ..ahem.. AI optimized docs for everything... :/
hbogert
The push from google feeds to go to these sites is absurd. The quality is garbage, they're probably using LLMs heavily themselves.
marginalia_nu
I wonder how this affect Google's bottom line.
Their entire business model was to funnel traffic to websites with their ads.
What is their income source now that they've all but stopped doing that?
coldpie
Ads in the AI results, obviously. Google is now the king of the the SEO spam website game: plagiarize the info from others, slap ads on it, and profit. That is the purpose of LLMs: end copyright law, but only for the 5 tech companies wealthy enough to run these massive models. The rest of us still have to follow the law, of course.
marginalia_nu
But they aren't doing this, are they? How can their ads revenue be constant (as per your sibling comment), while nearly 60% of the traffic is gone (as per the article), before such a scheme has rolled out?
jeffbee
Gemini already drives some really valuable ads. It has, in effect, solved the "best pants" problem. It will use personalized chat to give you attributable shopping links for pants. And they don't have to share that revenue with some SEOmaxxing pants blogger.
glenstein
Nearly 60% of traffic is gone from the tech publications, not gone from Google.
renegat0x0
OpenAI was already found to be integrating ads into API. It is only a matter of time. Enshitiffication is inevitable.
Google participates in AI bubble. When it pops, they will aggressively seek monetization. Be ready to see chatbot output to be populated with popups, video ads, popups, and stuff.
surajrmal
You can see their balance sheet in quarterly earnings reports. Ads revenue has not declined or even come close to it.
pixl97
Ads to you directly without having to pay a middleman.
zvqcMMV6Zcr
> Their entire business model was to funnel traffic to websites with their ads.
This doesn't change, they will still show ads somewhere around AI overview. As part of it if it is both technically feasible and legal.
The part of equation that is gone, is how organic traffic got to sites that published quality content. Now they might as well shutdown or switch to hard paywall. Both won't affect Google for few year, until websites (other than shops) are dead, knowledge stored in LLMs gets outdated and search engines have tiny index, that is a shadow of past size.
NooneAtAll3
wasn't there "ad clicking bots" controversy recently?
nerevarthelame
The results seem plausible, but it's worth noting that the source of their data (Ahrefs) is just a rough estimate. Given that every publication they examined - including several outside of the tech industry - showed declines, I'd hope they would confirm that it's not an artifact of the estimation process. Ahrefs themselves caution against using their data to make these sorts of conclusions:
>While these estimates don’t, and can’t, show you exactly how much organic traffic a website gets, they work incredibly well for comparison. For example, it’s fantastic for learning if your competitors’ websites get more or less organic search traffic than your own.
(https://help.ahrefs.com/en/articles/1863206-what-is-organic-...)
nprateem
Conde nast reported in the last few days their Web traffic is massively down too. Other big publishers have reported it themselves too.
The web and SEO are dead.
onetokeoverthe
[dead]
djoldman
> NerdWallet is publicly traded (NRDS) and its business depends on converting search visitors into financial product referrals. It went from 25M monthly organic visits to 6.8M, a 73% decline.
The above refers to the time until Jan 2026. Here are its financials:
Year Total Revenue Operating Expenses Net Income
2025 $836.6 ~$708.0 $48.7
2024 $687.6 $614.7 $30.4
2023 $599.4 $541.8 ($11.8)
2022 $538.9 $518.1 ($10.2)
2021 $379.6 $390.1 ($42.5)
hydroflame7
They've done a great job capturing their audience into their app. I used to work for one of their top competitors, and they've been decimated.
Get the top HN stories in your inbox every day.
If you’ve visited any of these sites recently it’s obvious that part of the issue is that you’re bombarded with pops, ads everywhere, autoplaying video, etc. It’s nauseating and a horrible user experience. If all I’m looking for is straightforward content/info then I’m naturally using the most efficient way to get that content/information and visiting a website is not the most efficient way anymore