Invasive tracking and pay-for-play search engines has broken the internet. It’s time to reclaim our independence with the Small Web.
this post was submitted on 29 May 2025
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To me, the hardest part seems to be - how do you keep your small web from being infected by AI slop? Currently the slop spammers aren't focusing on these small web rings and web 1.0 communities. But if they did start to become popular, the AI slop would inevitably follow.
Perhaps such sites need to run on a 100% no-advertising model. Individual hobby sites or those supported by subscriptions and donations only. That would cut out most of the vast, vast majority of the slop. AI slop currently can't produce content that people are actually willing to pay to subscribe to. If sloppers can't bring in revenue via ad impressions, they won't have any incentive to create slop AI 1.0 sites.
Honestly escaping AI slop may be the hardest part of any situations (nevermind just the small web) soon if this anti-human distributed-denial-of-service attack on our awareness continues the way it's going. There will always be spammers with little to lose and more to gain, even if it's not financial gain they're after there can be benefits to simply increasing the level of noise in an environment, whether it's to hide something else they're doing or to weaken opposition to some goal.
The bots and scrapers are most definitely going after anything and everything - I’ve got about 10+ bots trying to scrape my site every day according to my logs. Quite honestly it shocked me considering I do zero SEO and it’s mostly random shit on my site.
There’s stuff being developed - ai robots blocklists, ai tar pits, poisoning the images and other media.
It’s a pita to implement a lot of this however, just for a small personal site.