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Comment by dimgl | Hacker News Reader

> Content marketing is dead.

I mean... good? The quality of search results has gotten increasingly worse over time...

I'm pretty sure you could drop at least 60% of domains from search engine indexes with no reduction in result quality. (And it would probably be a net quality increase to get rid of all the domains that just copy content from other domains, content-farms, scam sites, etc.)

Apropos of anything else, it's one of the things I like about Kagi for search. You can tune a domain to be heavily bumped, bumped, deranked or heavily deranked.

It's not dead in the sense that companies will stop doing it, it's dead in the sense that there will be much more competition with AI-written articles.

It's going to be a way worse situation.

Exactly. Humans can't compete with AI content filters... but AI can.

More competition is good though - people are just going to be much more picky and if your content is not distinguishable from AI slop then it deservedly will perish.

This ignores the volume problem. Human written content can be copied and rewritten via AI in a bunch of different ways, instantly. Human content will go away not because it's bad, but because it's immediately drowned out in a way that is unfixable.

I just think people will instead choose to just…disengage instead.

“IRL experiences are the new luxury status indicator” is only the tip of this iceberg.

There will be people paying for premium content and people writing it. A new technology doesn't suddenly remove human demand.

A lot of content has been written by Indian content farms anyway. I prefer the AI written content. It gets right to the information you want without restating it's purpose 4 or 5 times and having to scroll down the first 500 words of the article.

ChapGPT enshitification is only waiting to happen (or happening already) through subtle recommendations for businesses that paid to be “listed” well.

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