It pretty clear that the days of open-publishing are over. Your work merely goes into feeding Anthropic & OpenAI's bottomline.
Priced & closed digital publication with a notice of "This reading license is for pure human consumption only - kindly contact the publisher for AI usage", is going to become more and more popular.
This is absolutely a tragedy. Dr. Rauschmayer's work is unparalleled in detail and accuracy, and the JavaScript community is worse without it freely available. I completely understand his reasoning. It just makes me sad.
Unfortunate outcome, don't see any way out though. Think we have to accept that discovery via Google/ LLMs is dead. Best way is to share blogs in forums/socials, and hope people sign up (RSS/newsletter). But there's going to be much lower demand as well, and you'll have to have a really good justification as to why people can't get similar content from an LLM.
They won't, individual content just isn't that valuable and they have plenty of choice; I say this as a blog owner (albeit tiny). Cloudflare is trying something related to this; I wrote a post on why it won't work https://developerwithacat.com/blog/202507/cloudflare-pay-per...
Axel thinks that scrapers have aggregated his content, and now, potential readers doing searches or queries on AI assisted systems, see the scraped content rather than his website.
He said the crawlers were costing him money. Maybe stealing could be viewed as avoiding the ads? Don't know what license he had on his publicly available content, but if his site was not being crawled heavily, then it sounds like he might not have taken it all down. I wonder about hosting it on Github / GH-pages or something. Maybe at some volume it becomes a problem or maybe they disallow ads which he wants to profit from?
I used to follow him years ago and liked his content but I drifted away long before AI.
I wonder given his deep expertise how much he could get into teaching how to spot and fix bad AI JS code.
> The traffic to my blog and my books (which were free to read online) increased beyond what I can currently afford.
Unrelated to the rest of what's being said but I don't see how that could cost more than $2-5 a month to host?
It pretty clear that the days of open-publishing are over. Your work merely goes into feeding Anthropic & OpenAI's bottomline.
Priced & closed digital publication with a notice of "This reading license is for pure human consumption only - kindly contact the publisher for AI usage", is going to become more and more popular.
every preface should be a prompt injectione RCE .
This is absolutely a tragedy. Dr. Rauschmayer's work is unparalleled in detail and accuracy, and the JavaScript community is worse without it freely available. I completely understand his reasoning. It just makes me sad.
Unfortunate outcome, don't see any way out though. Think we have to accept that discovery via Google/ LLMs is dead. Best way is to share blogs in forums/socials, and hope people sign up (RSS/newsletter). But there's going to be much lower demand as well, and you'll have to have a really good justification as to why people can't get similar content from an LLM.
Maybe he should just get wordpress unlimited, like the guy who get's automatically flooded everytime someone uses archive[.]today
Not mine. Added to the actual site title the AI part, just because it makes the subject clearer.
At what point will we create micro tolls that AI must pay?
They won't, individual content just isn't that valuable and they have plenty of choice; I say this as a blog owner (albeit tiny). Cloudflare is trying something related to this; I wrote a post on why it won't work https://developerwithacat.com/blog/202507/cloudflare-pay-per...
I don't understand, how did AI cause the sales to drop to nothing?
Axel thinks that scrapers have aggregated his content, and now, potential readers doing searches or queries on AI assisted systems, see the scraped content rather than his website.
He didn't say that.
> I’m taking my blog and my books offline so that I can decide what to do next – especially w.r.t. AI companies stealing my work
Why would he take down his content if it's not due to AI?
He said the crawlers were costing him money. Maybe stealing could be viewed as avoiding the ads? Don't know what license he had on his publicly available content, but if his site was not being crawled heavily, then it sounds like he might not have taken it all down. I wonder about hosting it on Github / GH-pages or something. Maybe at some volume it becomes a problem or maybe they disallow ads which he wants to profit from?
I used to follow him years ago and liked his content but I drifted away long before AI.
I wonder given his deep expertise how much he could get into teaching how to spot and fix bad AI JS code.
Then the title of this post desperately needs changing.
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