I feel like I was just saying this the other day. People don’t write websites or blogs for human readers anymore: They write them for the machines.
The relentless optimizing of pages, words, paragraphs, photos, and hundreds of other variables has led to a wasteland of capital-C Content that is competing for increasingly dwindling Google Search real estate as generative AI rears its head. You’ve seen it before: the awkward subheadings and text that repeats the same phrases a dozen times, the articles that say nothing but which are sprayed with links that in turn direct you to other meaningless pages. Much of the information we find on the web — and much of what’s produced for the web in the first place — is designed to get Google’s attention.
It’s a very good article. LLMs are not new in this regard, their enshitifcation of the web is just finishing a process that is already 90% complete thanks to our reliance on ad-supported algorithmic search as a means of sorting information.
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