Training data producers and consumers

Tom MacWright:

the norms of publishing open source software and publishing writing on the web were mostly community and interpersonal norms, not legal or technical ones. Before, you could rip off someone's code, but you'd be an asshole for doing it and the community would judge you [...]

Now there just isn't a way to opt out. Whatever software you publish will be cloned and whatever you write on the internet will be scraped. The people involved don't really care and their investors don't either. Web scrapers disregard robots.txt and do nearly DDoS-levels of traffic nowadays to feed the machine.

We’re all kind of asking, “What’s the point anymore?” It’s hard to see how the traditional “being a good citizen” of the web gains you anything.

trying hard is kind of a waste - your project will just get cloned, your ideas whitelabeled. Might as well ship a bunch of vibecoded projects with no new ideas instead, who cares.

It’s easy to be a good citizen of the web when you’re incentivized to do so.

It takes an act of will to be a good citizen in the face of an incentive structure that cuts against you.

Fight. Fight against the dying of the web.