It’s getting really, really bleak out there.

The State Of The Web

There was a time in my memory when the web was a very, very useful place. There were advantages to really understanding search algorithms, keywords, and how to put your hands on the good stuff. Familiarity with solid sites and known-good authors was rewarded with truly useful information. It wasn’t just technical topics (though that was great!). It was how to reset the tire pressure warning on your car. How to replace the heating element in your dryer. How much sun that new plant you liberated from the big box store needed to thrive. You know, things you’d want to know.

But somewhere in the last decade, we lost all of that. Even looking up a simple recipe ends up with the life story of the poster’s maw-maw and as many popups to subscribe to newsletters and autoplay videos as one could handle. Scrolling down the page to get to the recipe ends up with floating ads. There’s more ad code in the page than content. Even Reader view in your browser of choice won’t save you most of the time. I won’t even start on paywalls.

It’s broken. Badly broken.

A Pattern

There’s a lot of “AI Slop” out there too. Most of the technical articles were clearly produced by a LLM. They have obvious errors, missed steps, and the kinds of things that are going to frustrate the kinds of people who really need to find that information. It is, in fact, misinformation. But given the latest GOOG case in Germany, no one believes LLMs anyway so why worry?

All of this crap is going to create a feedback loop that ends up training LLMs on LLM-created bad data. It’s an antipattern. But here we are. This loop only gets worse until it’s all more or less worthless because the effort required to sift through it versus the effort required to simple go out and learn something from scratch will be equivalent. It’s bad news.

But LLMs do adapt. They will have their training optimized. They may even have gasp ethical training sets that contain good information. Hey, anything can happen, right? Which brings me back to what’s bugging me.

The Way Forward?

The new GOOG paradigm of LLM “search” results first is going to be the only way to navigate it. The damage done to the web is severe. The are still lights in the dark and I’ll get to that in a second, but for searching for something, the only real interface will be a LLM. Yeah. You’ll have to ask one of the robots to pull together your searches and provide citations to get anything done because organic search and discovery won’t work.

It’s already where we are. The top of every search engine’s page is an AI summary. You can turn it off, sure, but what are you gaining when the top three search results are all AI generated bullshit anyway? I’m getting kinda fatalistic with all of this, but I’m not sure that I’m wrong.

The experiments that I’m doing with one of the LLMs is showing me that asking for a summary on a topic with N references and full citations with excerpts is actually playing to the strengths of the model. In its reformulation of the bullshit in the post of choice, it pulls me out of the newsletter popups and general noise and at least gets me to the point where I can see whether I’m closer to what I was looking for or not. When dealing with the corporate web of today, it’s ONE solution. I’m simply afraid that it will become the default because nothing else will produce usable results.

The Open Web

But the open web still exists! Blogs are coming back. RSS feeds are flowing. People are self-hosting and eschewing platforms. Or at least the ones who provide the kind of information and writing that I need are. I can see that growing. We may yet get back to an age of blogging before the platforms took over. I can also see a world where we start to treat social media like smoking in the 90s.

“Oh? You use Facebook? I quit years ago. Never been better. You should try it.”

Maybe I’m dreaming with that, but It’s something that I do hear in the wild.

Anyway…

The web itself is badly broken right now. Human usability is dropping like a stone. I don’t see a really happy ending to this from where I’m sitting today. I could be wrong. I’m happy to be wrong. I just don’t think I am. LLMs aren’t going to take anyone’s job. They’re just going to be the next piece of shit we’re sold to unbreak something that didn’t need to be broken. Seems like a thing that happens a lot these days: break something and then pull together an expensive and unnecessary “fix” for it.

Yeah. That sounds too familiar.