The death of search traffic is a chance for the return of old-school internet ru en

There is steadily growing whining about the negative impact of AI answers in Google Search (and other AI tools) on website traffic. Stack Overflow seems dead already; Reddit is planning to wall itself off and hide posts behind a login.

According to platform owners, death is coming for everyone. Pretty much like it was when Google started showing snippets from posts directly in search results. Only scarier and more deadly.

As I see it, this is not a problem, but an opportunity.

• Obviously, communication platforms won't go extinct — people still need to talk with each other somewhere — it is a basic need.
• Last time (and the time before that, and the time before that), dinosaurs that refused to adapt died, while the young and energetic survived.
• Erecting artificial walls has never helped anyone. Except maybe for CEOs who could get another year or two of bonuses for hitting outdated KPIs before retirement.

So, we need to find a new model for platforms.

And to me, it is obvious: social platforms should be about social interaction. Not about silent feed consumption.

People who want to communicate on your platform simply cannot go anywhere else as long as they want to communicate within the ecosystem you created.

People who are (pro)active (that is, who interact with others) are worth more and matter more to advertisers — they are opinion leaders and a source of feedback. Targeting ads at them may be more profitable. They may also have more money to spend.

From that POV, public access to your content and its summaries in search are a good thing: they spread the word about you and bring (motivated) people to you.

Google, OpenAI, and others aren't your competitors, since they are not social platforms — they are personal tools. Google, for example, tried several times to become such a platform (Google+, experiments with Google Reader) and failed.

Optimization for views has enshittified the internet, exactly as you'd expect from over-optimization for the wrong KPI.

The death of passive user monetization gives the internet a chance to heal. And, of course, a chance for new major platforms to emerge.

In other words, we need to shift our KPIs from "how much content users consume" to something like "how actively users interact with each other" => make it easier for people to interact/communicate.

P.S. By the way, if a person posts something to the internet, they usually want their opinion to be seen by as many people as possible. Therefore, restricting access to a platform will only lead to a gradual decrease in the number of people who post/respond.