@benpate
Well, do you want people to "find" your site via AI, then read the accompanying AI summary, and never actually look at your site because the AI hallucinated something about your site that turned them off? Or said your site has something they're looking for but your site doesn't actually have it?

To me, that kind of defeats the purpose of allowing AI searches of your site.

@benpate I think it depends entirely on how you want the site to be discovered.

I've worked with customers on this. They've previously gotten most business through search engines and linking from other sites. Those visitors basically stopped showing up all together because of AI summaries and search. They had no choice but to optimise for those new channels to at all keep getting traffic.

If bandwagon and its users do not already rely on such traffic you're probably fine to continue blocking

Hard block. Everyone you get because of credulous dolts using AI is ten people you lose because the techbros analyze your data to figure out how to make you more invisible, and them more visible.

It's like trying to compete with Walmart by making it easier for people to shop at Walmart.

@benpate I don’t want anything to do with genAI and as much as I appreciate BW, I would probably entirely opt-out from BW if it made any accommodations for slop machines.

@benpate
Loads of people use non-AI search, which returns real results.
Many use Qwant.

@benpate Being invisible to AI search engines is a feature. They do not drive traffic to my site anyway: at best they regurgtitate what they scraped.

No thanks.

People can find my software and other things through the Fediverse, word of mouth, or my Codeberg mirror. I have been pretty much invisible to the major search engines for years at this point, and I'm yet to see a downside.

@benpate I like the bot-poisoning ideas that @algernon has put into iocaine. While nobody will ever care, I plan to implement something along those lines myself.

@benpate@mastodon.social as an artist I can say that discoverability is important, but not that important.

ultimately unless you have a distributor, online discovery isnt the primary method most people use to get the word out. personally, 15 years in industry of making art has shown me that word of mouth locally goes far farther than online discoverability.

@benpate As an artist on Bandwagon (https://bandwagon.fm/@bloodlessgirls) I fully support the hard ban on AI crawlers.

@benpate I can't speak for anyone else, but I'm totally fine with AI not being able to find me. I prefer it that way, and I'm thankful for any platform available to take a stand against it.

@benpate I view bandwagon as a part of the non-corporate internet built by and for people. If someone uses "AI" to search the internet, they are outside of this effort, and I don't think you should cater to them.

(I generally don't want to tell you what to do with your own project, but you asked 😀)

@benpate I think there are times and contexts for compromise, and others where one must uphold a principle unwaveringly. Slop is so extremely harmful and abusive, in so many aspects from its very fundaments, that I believe we must say "No AI ever."

@benpate Being scraped for inference does not suggest that the person receiving that output of that inference will come to your site. I highly doubt allowing agents will result in increased human traffic. If we are talking genuinely agenetic operation here, there isn't even going to be someone seeing the output, let alone following it to the site.

I think unblocking them will likely just increase hosting costs.

@benpate Every step towards normalizing AI is a step to normalizing AI. Please don't. :)

Be the counterrevolution.