When you swap in an AI and ask what are the current stories. The AI fetches the front page and every thread and feeds it back to you. You are less likely to participate in discussion because you've already had the info summarized.
Am I supposed to spend money on Amazon.com when I visit the website just because Amazon wants me to?
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.
Are website owners obligated to serve content to AI agents and/or LLM scrapers?
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.
They claim that since they are free to not buy an advertised product, why would they be forced to see ads for it. But Foo news claims that they are also free to not waste bandwidth to serve their free website to people who declare (by using an ad blocker or the modern alternative: AI aummarizera) they won't participate in the funding of the service
People hate obnoxious ads because the money that pays for them is essentially a bribe to artificially elevate content above its deserved ranking. It feels like you're being manipulated into an unfavorable trade.
I never saw people bother with scissors but I've seen people pulling the ads out of the newspaper countless times.
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.
What if my executive assistant reading the news website and giving me a digest?
Would the website owners rather prefer me doing my reading directly?
HTTP/1.1 402 Payment Required
WWW-price: 0.0000001 BTC, 0.000001 ETH, 0.00001 DOGE
you (or AI on your behalf) paid instead. Many sites would probably like it better.
There are so many links I click on these days that are such trash I'd be demanding refunds constantly.
That is why AI "summarization" becomes a necessary intermediate layer. You'd not see nor trash nor ads, and thus the payment instead of being exposed to the ads. AI saves the Internet :)