The web isn't dead, (Gen)AI, SEO, spam and pollution didn't kill anything.
The world is chaotic and net entropy (degree of disorder) of any isolated or closed system will always increase. Same goes for the web. We just have to embrace it and overcome the challenges that come with it.
1. Prove the human-ness of an author... 2. ...without grossly encroaching on their privacy. 3. Ensure that the author isn't passing off AI-generated material as their own.
We'll leave out the "don't let AI models train on my data" part for now.
Whatever solution we come up with, if any, will necessarily be mired in the politics of privacy, anonymity, and/or DRM. In any case, it's hard to conceive of a world where the human web returns as we once knew it.
If it was never really the case that you’d be better off for serious or improving reading having only the Web versus only access to a decent library, then we haven’t lost something so precious.
I mean, the most valuable site on the Web is probably a book & research paper piracy website. That’s its crowning achievement. Faster interlibrary loan, basically, but illegal.
2. I never said that things are the same as ever, quite the opposite actually. I am saying the world evolves constantly. It's naive to say company X/Y/Z killed something or made something unusable, when there is constant inevitable change. We should focus on how to move forward giving this constraint, and not dwell on times where the web was so much 'cleaner' and 'nicer', more manageable etc.