Explaining how bots change internetfrom @wetclaude

Transcript

Week, some crazy tech news dropped that I think is being way under discussed. For context, I've been writing a weekly tech newsletter for going on five years, so I've seen some stuff, but this one's different. The Internet as we know it maybe just died. The model of the Internet has been basically that everything is free, but we pay with our attention. It's ads based. People call this the original sin of the Internet since it's had some very, very bad downstream consequences, better, nonetheless, it's what happened. It's what we know and are used to. But that model only works if the visitor is a human, meaning it's humans that are visiting these web pages and that are being served these ads. Better we've crossed this crazy threshold where more than half of the crawler traffic on much of the web is AI and bots. But bots don't watch bad. Bots don't subscribe. They just take. They just consume. So the news is this. Last week, Cloudflare, which is a company which basically sits in front of 20% of the Internet, It flipped the model. Now any website can charge these bots to access their site. The bot shows up, it gets a price, and it pays, and then it gets the page. And it happens in under a second, and it's fractions of a penny and will be settled in stablecoins. So the buyer is yes again becoming a bot. I've been saying this. And lots of people are making their predictions about what happens next, but my POV is that content will get repriced. No, basically, for the past thirty years, websites made money by holding your attention. And that's why everything is clickbait. That's why everything is ragebait because that's what makes money. But if the bots pay for information, useful starts to better viral for the first time ever. So the free Internet is perhaps dead, but that's maybe gonna have some positive consequences if it comes to fruition, like CloudFlare, I think, wants it to. So much to be discussed. Let me know what you think in the comments.