Long ago a friend of a friend described a job interview at an ice cream / chocolate shop in a local mall.
The interviewer asked something like "who is our competition here?", and the friend of friend listed off other places in the mall to get ice cream, candy, deserts, etc.
Wrong answer. The ice cream and chocolate store was in competition with every other store in the mall. Time or money spent at the GAP can't be time or money spent here.
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Whether or not people are using LLMs for news specifically, any new, large eater of eyeball-time is going to hurt the business landscape for all other eyeball harvesters.
> Wrong answer. The ice cream and chocolate store was in competition with every other store in the mall. Time or money spent at the GAP can't be time or money spent here.
Was the interviewer a macroeconomics grad student working his way through school at the ice cream shop? Because I can't imagine anyone but a macroeconomics student aggregating all demand into a generic concept of "time and money" without regard for qualitative distinctions between entirely different product categories.
Did he also think the shop was in competition with United Airlines or the local dentist's office, because time and money spent on a trans-Atlantic flight or getting a root canal was time and money that couldn't be spent at the ice cream shop?
> Whether or not people are using LLMs for news specifically, any new, large eater of eyeball-time is going to hurt the business landscape for all other eyeball harvesters.
Which demonstrates that the model of treating the content users are looking for as bait so you can sell their attention to someone else was always an adversarial one in the first place.
Users themselves were never looking for time sinks, they were looking for specific information or experiences that they've had to increasingly endure time sinks to get to due to the perverse incentives in the social media landscape.
AI destroying the viability of "eyeball harvesters" as a business model is an opportunity for people actually creating interesting content, not engagement-maximizing filler, to pivot back to pitching quality directly to their users. That's exactly the point that Tim Ferriss was making in the article: he points out that he already prefers to sell his books to a niche audience of 10,000 readers who actually find value in them than try to engage with 10 million passers-by on social media.
> Wrong answer. The ice cream and chocolate store was in competition with every other store in the mall. Time or money spent at the GAP can't be time or money spent here.
I would have argued that this is also the wrong answer, as without the GAP to bring people to the mall, nobody would be trafficking their little ice cream store at all. Did a mall vendor really not understand the reason they had opened up shop in a mall?
Maybe the ice cream was just that good, and GAP was lucky to be able to sell their polo shirts to ice cream enthusiasts who'd otherwise have bought them at Old Navy.
There are entire websites built around that, several have been posted to HN. There was even one (I think real news channel) who experimented with generating fake video of fake anchors to deliver “news”.
I suspect AI summaries are just reducing peoples need to click through on anything, possibly.
Long ago a friend of a friend described a job interview at an ice cream / chocolate shop in a local mall.
The interviewer asked something like "who is our competition here?", and the friend of friend listed off other places in the mall to get ice cream, candy, deserts, etc.
Wrong answer. The ice cream and chocolate store was in competition with every other store in the mall. Time or money spent at the GAP can't be time or money spent here.
---
Whether or not people are using LLMs for news specifically, any new, large eater of eyeball-time is going to hurt the business landscape for all other eyeball harvesters.
> Wrong answer. The ice cream and chocolate store was in competition with every other store in the mall. Time or money spent at the GAP can't be time or money spent here.
Was the interviewer a macroeconomics grad student working his way through school at the ice cream shop? Because I can't imagine anyone but a macroeconomics student aggregating all demand into a generic concept of "time and money" without regard for qualitative distinctions between entirely different product categories.
Did he also think the shop was in competition with United Airlines or the local dentist's office, because time and money spent on a trans-Atlantic flight or getting a root canal was time and money that couldn't be spent at the ice cream shop?
> Whether or not people are using LLMs for news specifically, any new, large eater of eyeball-time is going to hurt the business landscape for all other eyeball harvesters.
Which demonstrates that the model of treating the content users are looking for as bait so you can sell their attention to someone else was always an adversarial one in the first place.
Users themselves were never looking for time sinks, they were looking for specific information or experiences that they've had to increasingly endure time sinks to get to due to the perverse incentives in the social media landscape.
AI destroying the viability of "eyeball harvesters" as a business model is an opportunity for people actually creating interesting content, not engagement-maximizing filler, to pivot back to pitching quality directly to their users. That's exactly the point that Tim Ferriss was making in the article: he points out that he already prefers to sell his books to a niche audience of 10,000 readers who actually find value in them than try to engage with 10 million passers-by on social media.
> Wrong answer. The ice cream and chocolate store was in competition with every other store in the mall. Time or money spent at the GAP can't be time or money spent here.
I would have argued that this is also the wrong answer, as without the GAP to bring people to the mall, nobody would be trafficking their little ice cream store at all. Did a mall vendor really not understand the reason they had opened up shop in a mall?
Maybe the ice cream was just that good, and GAP was lucky to be able to sell their polo shirts to ice cream enthusiasts who'd otherwise have bought them at Old Navy.
As such I don't. Nevertheless, it explains me what's going on better than the news articles.
Also, I think we have oversold the concept of story-telling. Many news articles start with story telling and take a while before coming to the point.
Remember a few years back when many of us were shocked to learn that...
people use Facebook for news?
There are entire websites built around that, several have been posted to HN. There was even one (I think real news channel) who experimented with generating fake video of fake anchors to deliver “news”.
I don't do news at all. If it's important, someone in my life who spends time on social media will tell me.
Most of it isn't news, it's filtered opinion serving someone's interest