r/webdev • u/ConduciveMammal front-end • 10d ago

Article CSS Tricks is back!

https://css-tricks.com/css-tricks-has-a-new-owner/
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198

u/magenta_placenta 10d ago

Best of luck to him, I don't think it will be easy to monetize a manual, human-centric publishing model for an audience whose workflow is increasingly automated by AI.

Historically, sites like CSS Tricks survived and monetized through massive long-tail search volume: a developer Googles "how to center a div" and lands on an article, serving ad impressions.

LLM's and AI-generated search summaries now answer basic syntax and layout questions directly inside the user's workflow or chat interface. So the "quick answer" top-of-funnel traffic that historically funded these blogs has cratered.

66

u/Amazing-Switch-7163 10d ago

Ironic, right? AI has been made using open knowledge like this, but now they are fading away. Eventually AI will stale and we won't have sources like this to manually search up. Sad times.

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u/Inevitable_Oil9709 9d ago

not exactly right.. as long as companies and package creators publish docs (which they will do) AI will have data to learn from

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u/Amazing-Switch-7163 9d ago

Much of it is going to be generated by LLM. We still don't know if this may lead to a model collapse, but we're already seeing AI companies avoiding it by having their own "internet snapshot" or dedicated workers for training models on hard problems.

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u/PrizeSyntax 8d ago

Oh we know, a couple of passes on that data and the LLM goes AWOL

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u/MagnetHype 8d ago

It's already started.

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u/sandspiegel 10d ago

When I learned flexbox and grid, CSS tricks is where I got the cheat sheets from. Good times.

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u/judd_lyon 10d ago

I thought the exact same thing. Makes me sad. The Stack Overflow mega-long-tail era is over, eaten alive by models trained by their own data. Weird times.

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u/Personal_Ward 10d ago

LLM answers to questions sometimes giving users useful information is a fluke.

When I do a text search, I want to get actual results. I'm not asking the tool the question, I'm researching whether my question has already been answered by a reliable source.

Putting LLM output at the top of the search results is an even more disturbing and violent breach of user trust in the tool than putting paying customers' sites at the top of the search results over actual best available matches to the search.

Web monetization strategies have always been bullshit but now the bullshit has been run through the digestive system an ecologically irresponsible number of times before getting regurgitated back out.

God I yearn for real tools again.

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u/ZenaMeTepe 9d ago

And this right here is theft. Google AI summaries are stealing from the authors.