Lobsters thread: how AI traffic is degrading the web for human developers
vboykis · x · 2026-11-08
A 51-comment Lobsters discussion by tmcb on AI's side effects for the web:
- Search degradation & rate limits: slop ranks first, ironically making LLM summaries tolerable since they at least surface buried good links; Google and DuckDuckGo now aggressively rate-limit ordinary users, costing minutes of refreshing.
- Anti-bot walls hitting humans: GitHub barely browsable logged-out, Anubis challenges everywhere.
- OP rebuts "read books instead": a 5-year-old book can't explain why new-chipset firmware won't boot — web bug reports can.
- Marginalia Search's author replies that AI mostly exacerbated pre-existing web decay, urging people to treat this as a fun engineering problem; vboykis calls it the most interesting set of new engineering/product problems in the agentic-web era.
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