# R.I.P, Internet I'm very worried about the internet. Not the Gen-Z internet, with its endlessly scrolling streams of stories. I'm worried about the OG internet, the one full of rabbit holes, dark corners and quirky spots. The internet of blogs and forums. The _interesting internet_. Countless people spent countless hours over the past two and a half decades meticulously grooming, snipping, watering and weeding their digital gardens, resulting in the (mostly) beautiful tapestry of today's internet. These creators/curators have been rewarded either financially, through advertising or subscription revenue stemming from their content, or in clout and prestige, through readers who grew to know and admire the authors they read online. In 2024, creators no longer have either incentive to create content for the internet. Over the past year, their content has been leveraged to train increasingly powerful LLMs that answer questions on behalf of users automatically, without referring traffic to any 3rd party site. These LLMs - ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude - benefit from the content created by countless human authors, but crucially, *do not incentivize further creation of that content*, because they do not refer traffic (readers, eyeballs) back to their original benefactors. I thought this phenomenon will take a few years to unravel, but it's happening way, way faster than I realized. Stack Overflow contributions have already [fallen by 25%](https://academic.oup.com/pnasnexus/article/3/9/pgae400/7754871) since the introduction of ChatGPT: > Within 6 months of ChatGPT’s release, activity on Stack Overflow decreased by 25% relative to its Russian and Chinese counterparts, where access to ChatGPT is limited, and to similar forums for mathematics, where ChatGPT is less capable. And things are about to get even worse. The first generation of search, or Search 1.0, was all about ***finding content*** relevant for their search queries. In a Search 1.0 world, both search engines (Google) and content creators (Kottke, Daring Fireball, etc) benefited - Google by displaying ads and creators by enjoying traffic. Search 2.0 is all about ***generating content***. ChatGPT doesn't find text, it generates it. Future versions of Search 2.0 products will create entire websites from the ground up designed to answer users' queries. This isn't science fiction: products like Arc Search already do this. When AI routinely generates new websites in response to queries, it's game over for independent online content creators. I'm not sure what can be done about this. But I really hope we can find some way to save the internet.