“Mr. Prince said he was “deeply concerned that the incentives for content creation are dead.”” This definitely resonates with me. Sometimes I wonder why I bother spending so much of my time writing articles that fewer and fewer people read. Yes, AI is to blame, altho I also put a lot of blame on ‘traffic-throttling’ social media like X, LinkedIn, Facebook/Threads. The open web is, sadly, almost devoid of incentives for creators. This is a challenge for fediverse too.

Cloudflare Introduces Default Blocking of A.I. Data Scrapers

The tech company’s customers can automatically block A.I. companies from exploiting their websites, it said, as it moves to protect original cont...

Threads is allegedly part of the fediverse, yet I'm nowhere near the point of being able to ask Threads users to follow my Mastodon profile. Attached is how my Mastodon profile looks over there. Some of the issues: 1. Threads users can follow Mastodon Me *only if* they themselves have turned on fediverse sharing (an arbitrary hurdle). 2. They have to exactly type my Mastodon handle. 3. You can like but not reply. 4. "Some posts may not be visible" (why?!) 5. There's no bio! Any other hurdles?

The web is not thriving for indie publishers. We can only hope Google doesn’t lose sight of small indie websites, and how *they* can earn a living in the AI era. That was the beauty of the Web 2.0 era — there were opportunities for *everyone* to thrive. I see Google, AI companies and big publishers like Reddit thriving in this era…but surely Google knows that isn’t enough for the broader web ecosystem to thrive. Ref: Google’s “from our point of view the web is thriving."

C.IM

Barry Schwartz (@rustybrick@c.im)

Attached: 1 image Google's Nick Fox questions the CTR studies done on AI Overviews and says the web is thriving, @JohnMu echoed that the web is th...