I keep thinking of the problem of LLM companies scraping private websites to the degree that hosting costs make them to expensive to continue.
At what point do we just kind of, move all the human stuff to a kind of dark-web situation?
@vampiress I've been giving serious consideration to setting up gemini (protocol) versions of my sites...
@vampiress Right now orgs seem to be heading towards paywalls that agents (and likely humans) will need to use to access any content. CDNs like Cloudflare are leading the way. It's unfortunate.
@vampiress then could have ai agents infiltrating human content AND then we could have a special set of “hunters” who could run slop tests to find these ai agents and retire them. We could call them instance moderators.
@vampiress this problem doesn’t have a technical solution
it could be handled with regulation, for example LLM companies paying per GB downloaded into a fund, and hosting companies getting paid out of that fund with refunds they have to give to their customers
@thomasfuchs Wait. Guillotines are a technology! Does that count as a technological solution?
@thomasfuchs @vampiress I think this is broadly the direction things will end up going, although with publishers rather than hosting companies setting the fee per-request and receiving the funds. I don’t know that I’m even against it as it could also lead to trivial per-article pricing from news publications rather than their current doomed model of selling ad space and tracking cookies.
@jon @vampiress people have tried to introduce micropayments on the web for 30 years, it’s not going to work this time either
@mauve Yeah I've been seeing cloudflare blocks in front of more and more sites.
@grimmy Yeah, if Gemini was a LITTLE more full featured it'd tempt me more. I know you can customise the look at a client level and it's perfectly legible but... I miss the personal touch of web sites beyond their content? That's what's stopped me. I like seeing the little personal style flourishes you get with HTML sites.
@vampiress Good points. I haven't looked at Gemini too much myself yet. I started looking for servers and wasn't expecting that to be as big of an issue as it is. The biggest issue being how rare SNI support seems to be at least from documentation.
@grimmy I used to keep the browser on my phone, and just trawl through sites late at night, but at a certain point the homogeneity of everything visually just made me lose interest.
@vampiress Ugh yeah that would get old quick. So new protocol then with image maps and crazy layouts? (queue relevant xkcd)