Vergecast listeners know I keep saying it feels like a reset moment for the internet, but here’s Om Malik making the direct comparison to the original SEO content farms and what happens next:
Most of what I have written is fairly obvious — this is not an original doomsday scenario. Only a dozen years ago, Demand Media ran “content farms” and went public. It used cheap labor to flood the web with generic websites with fallow information to farm ad dollars. Its main rival, Associated Content, was acquired by Yahoo. Those two companies were pioneers of shallow content and created headaches for legitimate websites and normal people looking for information. It took a while for even Google to beat them back. [...]
Where does fresh content come from in the future? Will we even be incentivized to create something new? Or all future AI refinements be based on erroneous pseudo-babble on social networks like Twitter and Reddit?
[On my Om]
