I'm sad to hear your business model didn't survive the march of technology, but at the same time, this is what's been happening to everyone ultimately. And rightfully, no one is entitled to a business model working in perpetuity.
I know this is a real harm to individuals, and bringing this up is not some kind of anti-technological thinking (the luddites were OG with that, and I always argue in favor of them - they had a very valid point).
I also realize that in a few years, I very well may be in the same position here. So will most of us.
But that's a different argument than GP was making, different one from what I replied to. That was about losing culture, and losing a business model is not losing culture.
Also I was with you all the way until the last paragraph:
> AI is consuming an unimaginable amount of searches which is the gateway for so many businesses. It's preventing people from being discovered on the internet.
AI is doing exactly what users want it to - what I too use it for - it bypasses the spam and scams that stand between the user and the solution to their problem. Good riddance, in this.
> Not only that but it's taking everyone's content and selling it back to users while keeping all of the profits.
And that is just bullshit. AI is not "taking everyone's content and selling it back to users", and the vendors are definitely not "keeping all of the profits" - on the contrary, they haven't even begun to figure out how to monetize almost any of the value their inference services provide, because they have zero visibility into how much any stream of tokens ends up being worth for their customers. They cannot tell whether the plumbing advice the LLM generated unclogged my toilet, or prevented a restaurant from having to close for the day; they cannot tell if the code their agent wrote won me a beer from a friend, or unblocked $2 000 000 dollar opportunity for my business. They capture none of the value from this either way.
> And rightfully, no one is entitled to a business model working in perpetuity.
I know, I worked very hard for 20 years to build up this business. I easily put in tens of thousands of hours to document, record and open source pretty much everything I learned and experienced in tech for free to help build up an audience.
It worked great up until AI, then everything went downhill very fast which is solely related to nothing but less traffic coming to my site. I imagine this will affect everyone, not just me.
> And that is just bullshit
It's not, whether or not they are profitable isn't important. The takeaway is AI creators consumed all of this content then they turned around and are actively selling that information to other people. This is the only part of the pipeline that matters, whether it's profitable on a balance sheet for them isn't important to everyone who had their content scraped, stolen and sold. The damage is already done at that point to the original content creator.
To pour even more salt in the wound, the AI creators actively cause content creators to directly lose money on hosting because every time they scrape your site that costs bandwidth. If your hosting provider is metered, then you're paying directly out of pocket.