It seems to me that the AI hype killed the web for good, but not for the reasons we immediately associate with it.
Search engines now rank links full of slop at the top, which ironically make LLM summaries acceptable, not because they are better than what we had before (they are not), but because they at least mention the good links which are now buried at the bottom of the page. Also, they've been rate limiting ordinary users like crazy: more often than I'd like to, Google and DuckDuckGo now either show me either an error message or tell me to wait a bit. Sometimes I waste at least a minute refreshing the page and waiting for a result.
I also can't browse GitHub freely without being logged in. Anubis is now everywhere, occasionally blocking me. I feel like my productivity has actually gone down thanks to all of that.
