This honor system mostly worked at scale because interests align, which seems to be no longer the case.

Does information no longer wants to be free now? Maybe internet, just like social media was just a social experiment at the end, albeit a successful one. Thanks GenAI.

I intentionally doesn't keep detailed analytics on my homepage server and my digital garden, because I respect my users and don't want to push unnecessary Javascript on them. The blog platform I use (Mataroa) keeps rudimentary analytics (essentially page hit counters, nothing more) on index, RSS and per post.

Both my blog homepage and posts see mostly human traffic. Sometimes bots crawl the site and they appear as spikes in the analytics.

Looks like my homepage which doesn't have anything but links is pretty popular with crawlers. My digital garden doesn't get much interest from them. All in all, human traffic on my sites are pretty much alive.

I don't believe in missing the bus in anything actually, because I don't write these for others, first. Both my blog (more meta) and digital garden (more technical) are written for myself primarily, and left open. I post links to both when it's appropriate, but they are not made to be popular. If people read it and learn something or solve one of their problems, that's enough for me.

This is why my software is GPLv3, Digital Garden is GFDL and blog is CC BY-NC-SA 2.0. This is why everything is running with absolutely minimum analytics and without any ads whatsoever.

Lastly, this is why I don't want AI crawlers in my site and my data in the models. This thing is made by a human for humans, absolutely for free. It's not OK somebody to sell something designed to be free and make money over it.

if you do analytics, it is not so hard, but then you need to store user data (if not directly, then worse, with a third party), which should be viewed as a liability. I see ~2/3 human traffic, ~1/3 bot traffic (I just parse user agent strings and count whitelisted browsers as human), but my main landing page is all dynamic-populated webgl. I just asked Gemini what it sees on website, and it states "The page appears to be loading, with the text "Loading room data...".[1] There are also labels for "BG", "FG", and "CURSOR", and a background weather animation." -so I can be feel reasonably confident I don't need to worry about AI, for now; it needs a machine-friendly frontend.

you could go proper insanomode, too. remaking The Internet is trivial if you don't care about existing web standards -- replacing HTTP with your own TCP implementation, getting off html/js/css, etc. being greenfield, you can control the protocol, server, and client implementation, and put it in whatever language you want. I made a stateful Internet implementation in Python earlier for proof-of-concept, but I want to port it and expand on it in rust soon (just for fun; I don't do serious biznos). you'll very likely have 100% human traffic then, even if you're the only person curious and trusting enough to run your client.

Many site operators want people to access their content, but prevent AI companies from scraping their sites for training data. People who think like that made tools like Anubis, and it works.

I also want to keep this distinction on the sites I own. I also use licenses to signal that this site is not good to use for AI training, because it's CC BY-NC-SA-2.0.

So, I license my content appropriately (No derivative, Non-commercial, shareable with the same license with attribution), add technical countermeasures on top, because companies doesn't respect these licenses (because monies), and circumvent these mechanisms (because monies), and I'm the one to suck this up and shut-up (because their monies)?

Makes no sense whatsoever.

> […] it's proof that they're doing this, which would be quite damaging to them.

Is it? It's damning, but is it damaging at all?

I'm not getting the impression that anyone's data being available for training if some bot can get to it is just how things are now, rather than an unsettled point of contention. There's too much money invested in this thing for any other outcome, and with the present decline of the rule of law…

If most people quit spending money on Amazon then Amazon stops being worth running.

If most people stop discussing things on HN, and the discussion is indeed one of the major reasons it’s kept running, then HN stops being worth running.

Whats the point of a human coming to a site if all the threads and empty and its front page is a glorified RSS feed for lazy peoples AI agents?

Who cares what you want?

> You’re not obliged to participate in discussion.

Are website owners obligated to serve content to AI agents and/or LLM scrapers?

It was a corollary example

It's not ads. We have ads in paper magazines and newspapers and no one went around with scissors to remove them. It's obnoxious ads, designed to violently grabs your attention and trackers (malware). It's like a newspapers giving your address to a whole crew of salemens that intrudes on your property at 3am and looking at you sleeping and installing cameras in your bathroom. All so that they can jump at you in the street to loudly claim they have the underwear you told your partner you like. If you're going to be that invasive about my person, then I'm going to be that forceful about restrictions.

> And yet people install ad blockers and defend their freedom to not participate in this because they don't want to be annoyed by ads.

I think this is a pretty different scenario. Here the user and the news website are talking directly to each other, but then the user is making a choice around what to do with the content the news website send to them. With AI agents, there is a company inserting themselves between the user and the news website and acting as a middleman.

It seems reasonable to me that the news website might say they only want to deal with users and not middlemen.

If people were forced to pay for websites by the http request people would demand that websites stop loading a ton of externally hosted JS, stop filling sites with ads, and would demand that websites actually have content worth the price.

There are so many links I click on these days that are such trash I'd be demanding refunds constantly.

It's not a development problem, it's an adoption problem. Publishers are desperate to sell us on a $20+/month subscription, they don't want to offer convenient affordable access to single articles.