Technology

I'm part of the problem. I now use Le Chat instead of search engines because AI destroyed search engines, thanks to all the content mills that make slop. I wish search engines just worked, and it's a classic example of capitalism creating problems to justify new technology.

And I wonder if it's just AI. I know some people moved to backing up pre-2025 versions of Wikipedia via Kiwix out of fear that the site gets censored. I know now that I've done that, it's a no-brainer to just do my Wikipedia research without using bandwidth.

I am kinda a big hater on AI and what danger it represents to the future of humanity

But. as a hobby programmer, I was surprised at how good these llms can answer very technical questions and provide conceptual insight and suggestions about how to glue different pieces of software together and which are the limitations of each one. I know that if AI knows about this stuff it must have been produced by a human. but considering the shitty state of the internet where copycat website are competing to outrank each other with garbage blocks of text that never answer what you are looking for. the honest blog post is instead burried at the 99 page in google search. I can't see how old school search will win over.

Add to that I have found forums and platforms like stack overflow to be not always very helpful, I have many unanswered questions on stackoverflow piled-up over many years ago. things that llms can answer in details in just seconds without ever being annoyed at me or passing passive aggressive comments.

What?!? That’s crazy!!!

This will be unpopular, but hear me out. Maybe the decline in visitors is only a decline in the folks who are simply looking for a specific word or name and the forgot. Like, that one guy who believed in the survival of the fittest. Um. Let me try to remember. I think he had an epic beard. Ah! Darwin! I just needed a reminder, I didn't want to read the entire article on him because I did that years ago.

Look at your own behaviors on lemmy. How often do you click/tap through to the complete article? What if it's just a headline? What if it's the whole article pasted into the body of the post? Click bait headlines are almost universally hated, but it's a desperate attempt to drive traffic to the site. Sometimes all you need is the article synopsis. Soccer team A beats team B in overtime. Great, that's all I need to know..unless I have a fantasy team.

Every time someone visits Wikipedia they make exactly $0. In fact, it costs them money. Are people still contributing and/or donating? These seem like more important questions to me.

It used to be that the first result to a lot of queries, was a link to the relevant Wikipedia article. But that first result has now been replaced by an ai summary of the relevant Wikipedia article. If people don't need more info than that summary, they don't click through. That Ai summary is a layer of abstraction that wouldn't be able to exist without the source material that it's now making less viable to exist. Kinda like a parasite.

Surly it can't be because of the decline in quality because of deposit admins defending their own personal fiefdoms.