Ahead of schedule you say? The shareholders will be thrilled!

You know, god bless the bots because they're probably soaking up at least some watts of surveillance.

except now they get useless data because they now just datamine bots, who are datamining each other.

As well as unofficial "tourists".

Harambe was the focal point of turn of events.

That's not true. I'll always be here to talk.

I'll. Always. Be here.

I haven't tried them at all but kagi claims to focus on smaller sites first, which would more likely include what they're referencing

I found some sweet places through, ironically, YouTube videos talking about dead internet and how there are people passionate abot old alive internet.

https://youtu.be/tkUgOT22F5s

Neocities.org and theindieweb.com are good places to start. Also seqrch for web revival.

https://baccyflap.com/rsp/

kagi.com/smallweb

readsomethinginteresting.com

I'm guessing since they're reminiscent of the 90s, maybe Yellow Pages?

https://xn--sr8hvo.ws/

Actually yes, indie web sites do organize webrings.

Advertisers are essentially subsidizing many businesses. Costs are higher than you think and most products we enjoy are expensive.

Yes, there is FOSS, but you’re essentially fucking lucky that people that work on those want to do this from the passion they have. Most people don’t, and won’t, do shit like that for free. Hell, look at many here on the internet that want products for free and are unwilling to pay or even do minimal donations for things that they already like.

Like it or not, most people want to be fucking paid for their time and FOSS, as great as it can be, is not the norm for most talent. We can make counter arguments and hate on capitalism, but that is the reality, and until entire cultures change then this is what it is and advertisers are sort of necessary evil in most cases.

Few online platforms flourish without advertisers. Practically all our content on lemmy comes from sites with advertising.

Maybe advertisers are bots too?

Yes because people are cheap.

Literally everything on the internet is paid for by advertising. And without it every site you rely upon will either become a subscription service or simply disappear because it is expensive to run a website.

It would solve a lot, the search engines are willingly making their results less useful, together, in a trust, a shit-trust. While one way is my example, and they are not blameless in allowing these shit results to be displayed, that is only one way they have started to not serve the user of their product but rather their clients.

But, what do you think would solve it? Obviously a search engine, and index, that is open source wouldn't solve everything regarding the internet being taken over by ai and bots, but it would help with a lot, not the only thing we need to do by a long shot.

And it has to be fast. If it takes too long people will leave before it gives results, and thats also expensive.

Oh yeah, 100% true, “amount of traffic does not even remotely map to amount of actual work being done especially on such a horrifically inefficient system” was a point I meant to bring up but I sprung a leak in a blood vessel from sheer rage before I could even get there. Thank you.

Some agent may do 100 queries for 1 user question, but a single scraper bot will do 100 queries every single second of every single day, and costs less to run than the LLM.

Just pay for more cloud compute that will fix it...

Would you like to know more? That's gonna cost ya.