Comment by aspenmayer

11 days ago

I mean, I wouldn't care who referred the paying user. I would optimize my blog to serve free and paying users to the best of my ability. I would hope that I could do that but I don't know what you are trying to do with your blog. Most blogs could probably be self-hosted with some caching and static layout where possible to perhaps avoid needing to use Cloudflare. I guess you already have to be using CF to have access to these paying AI crawlers.

Do you think that there is $25 of value in the creation of your blog, to say nothing of value that AI may be able to extract from it? (I'm speaking hypothetically, as I haven't looked at your profile to see if you link your blog, but I will do so now.)

Edit: I have checked, and I've read your blog before. I think the answer to the question depends on who is asking but I don't know how you feel about the matter. I think asking for folks to pay for free things is a different value proposition than a pay-per-use fee, so the economics are different. You're also offering something different when you give away a blog and monetize access to a community or something similar, which is different still to accepting donations and so on. I don't know what you do for work or if you do your blog full time, but I think it's cool that you make it all the same.

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aspenmayer

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JimDabell  11 days ago

> Do you think that there is $25 of value in the creation of your blog, to say nothing of value that AI may be able to extract from it?

I think the more pertinent question is: Can an AI company determine the value of that content automatically without seeing it? Because if they can’t, why would they pay for it?

  • aspenmayer  11 days ago

    If they have lots of reasons to believe it could be relevant due to requests for content by name or reference, as well as citations and other knowledge graph links, I think they could run some kind of A/B test to see what the market will bear based on what they estimate the crawls per billing period would be.

  • soatok  11 days ago

    If they won't pay for it, they can also kindly fuck off and not crawl my blog. Both are fine outcomes for me.

some_furry  11 days ago

I pay $300/year for the privilege of being able to write what I want without the pressure to monetize or surveil my readers.

Some of my blog posts are linked by programming language docs for cryptography. Others have helped queer folks transition to a higher-paying tech career.

It's difficult to quantify either of those things in a dollar value. I've opted to not ever do so. But if I can make the AI slop machines pay to view my furry/tech ramblings, I will do enthusiastically.