What _content_ will bots/LLMs actually have access to in... 3 years? PubMed, Wikipedia, and various company's sales decks and documentation? What incentives exist in the future for people to actually produce content? The existing framework is being disrupted and a lot of the creator/publisher economy's revenue is, seemingly, anticipated to flow into Anthropic/OpenAI.

I like the premise of Cloudflare's "pay-per-crawl" as a bridge to preserve publisher incentives, but that only really works if you assume repeat access and not storage? I just don't really understand what the next paradigm of attention-revenue will look like. There are two edges: large publishing deals, ultimately symbolizing collective bargaining against bot traffic, and trusted curation: is this best represented by substack?

I remember when the online community was up in arms around Google's Accelerated Mobile Pages product and the degree to which it dis-intermediated content creators and hosts. At least in that plan, publishers still retained the "click." AMP underwent some major changes due to regulatory (anti-trust) pressure and publisher feedback (if memory serves), specifically around the promotion of publishers that _utilized_ AMP.

Many of us lament the degree to which content is valuable to producers simply because it draws attention (clickbait, outrage slop). Is metered-rate access to content actually going to disentangle Attention from the Producer's incentives? Will content be monetized on the degree to which it is useful? Does this more cleanly separate "entertainment" from "information?" What outrageous politics/economics will be involved in a provider becoming "trusted source" for LLMs?

The social impact of the transition I'm projecting here depends a _lot_ on whether chat services / LLM providers are able to _resist_ the revenue (or performance metrics) that is/are available to companies that experiment their way into being outrage machines and echo chambers. LLMs don't inherently provide any solution to this problem and, in fact, _facilitate_ sycophancy in mind-numbing and society-altering new ways.

From the perspective of... "information health?" this could theoretically be an amazing step forward -- information is as useful as it is accurate. Realistically, we are just shifting the attention incentives onto the model/system provider who have a far greater capacity to "tune" their "algorithm" towards delighting their customers by manipulating prompts. See: sycophancy. Attention optimization per user. How will answer-engine optimization (AEO) end up re-articulating the lessons of SEO?

To try to clean this up, there are two massive "incentive geometry" transitions at work: 1. monetization of content production for bot-driven access 2. incentive structure of the consumption interface

Production monetization lives and dies by the _perishability_ of the published information.

The consumption interface relocates the attention pathology upstream and potentially weaponizes it for an audience of one, entirely within the closed walls of a model provider. What can possibly counterbalance the raw economic forces at work other than civic effort (regulation, collective action, cultural norms)? Is it meant to be competition?

Can "information quality" be a market signal when the buyer (model providers or chat interface providers) have entirely different incentives than the end user? Didn't we already answer this conclusively with SEO?

I'm curious what other HN readers think is likely, given the current social, political, and educational climate.