Matthew Prince, CEO of Cloudflare,
talks about AI bots and publishers.
Some of the points he makes are:
AI bots consequences for publishers:
Subs aren't sold
Ads aren't seen
People don't visit the publisher page -> no ego/fame
People create content to:
Make money
Get fame
And here are my considerations:
The more a page has "fame", the more it's crawled by the bots.
The more a page is linked and cited, the more it's crawled by the bots.
The more a page has fame, the more its content has a chance to be in an LLM answer.
And I think sharing the message/opinion/point-of-view
is more important than fame per se.
"Ads aren't seen" and "Subs aren't sold" are the same problem: money.
So, given I don't see the ego/fame point as a problem, everything comes down to the money aspect.
And so, what's the consequence? That you don't earn by writing on the web ⇒
no clickbait, no ads, free content, more independent publishers and less corporate publishers.
Read A Programmable Web: An Unfinished Work, by Aaron Swartz.
It makes a bunch of interesting points related to: openess of data, API design, structure of URLs,
Digest access authentication built-in HTTP, stateless web, robots & crawlers.
I revisited and reshaped a little article about the NAND gate that I wrote 3 years ago: Just a NAND gate
Today I read
Idiosyncrasies of the HTML parser.
To be precise, I read the first two chapters and skimmed the third one.
What I understood is that the HTML parser of browsers is built to handle any type of
"writing style" plus, without ever throwing an error. In the style of:
"Hey, don't worry, however you write it's fine and we are never gonna throw you an error!".
It remembers me of an interview to Brendan Eich where he says that from the first draft
of JS the equality operator == was the strict equality one but then, people persuaded
him to make it loosely equal.
Were these decisions made to let people populate the web in the easiest way possible without
worrying about the programming barrier?
I can draw a parallel with the decision of YouTube to remove the dislike button at the cost
of lowering the quality of the content "to let people express fearlessly".
Translated: to populate YouTube.