Discord. Private Facebook groups. Telegram. I could go on and on, but I’ve noticed that these days, more and more content is not being seen by search engines.
The internet used to be built on public pages anyone could find. Now, so much of the conversation happens behind logins or in apps that Google can’t crawl.
That means AI doesn’t need to write better than humans to dominate search results. It just needs to be visible where human content isn’t.
You see this with Beat Saber.
Most mods and setup guides, like how to mod it on Meta Quest, are shared in Discord servers. Tips come up in Twitch streams or YouTube comments. But none of that shows up on Google.
YouTube transcripts are still hit or miss in search. The subreddit is somewhat active but misses a lot of the real info.
Beat Saber has millions of players and tons of human created content. Yet almost all of it is hidden from search engines.
It is the same with smaller games. I played one where the whole community uses Discord. Patch notes, guides, developer updates, everything happens there. No website. No public forums. If you are not in the server, you are out of luck. Get banned and you lose access to everything.
AI does not need to write better than humans. It just needs to be where the data still is, on the open web. While we move our conversations elsewhere, AI stays visible.
Most of my favourite blogs aren’t ones that I find by searching though, but through word of mouth of some sort. This can come in the form of someone sharing a blog post to a link aggregator social media like Lemmy, or by blogs you already follow including a blog roll on their page, or being a part of a webring.
I was seeing a resurgence in personal blogs even before AI oozed onto the scene, and the people who were a part of it overwhelmingly understood that blogging today is different than it was back in the day. Hell, many of these people actually had blogs back then, when SEO hadn’t yet fucked the internet in the way it has, and we’ve all been herded into isolated, walled gardens. For the people who are writing blogs today, AI has changed very little, because most of them were never expecting to get much search engine traffic anyway. That problem is even worse now, sure, but that seems to make people even more steadfastly determined to make something human and meaningful online
Personally, it happens to me quite frequently that I encounter a niche problem, Google it, and find the solution in an obscure blog from 2007.
However, for more recent content, I’ve found it increasingly difficult. For example, with older brute-force chess engines, I can easily search online and find abundant documentation, forum posts, and personal experiences. In contrast, for modern chess engines, like those based on neural networks, I’ve found it significantly harder to locate what I’m looking for through Google, because much of the technical discussion and support takes place on private Discord servers.
Moreover, I often limit my searches to specific blogs or forums, like Fedora forums or my favorite personal blogs, but this approach doesn’t work when the information is confined to Discord.
Funnily enough, I’m not blaming AI by any means. Closed walled gardens are a modern problem, stemming from the decline of forums and independent blogs. AI didn’t cause it; the issue already existed. In fact, you might argue that closed gardens like Discord are pissing off everyone: AI companies dislike them because they make access to training data more difficult, and members of this community dislike them because they make it harder to find human-written content online through search engines like Google.