Via Kottke, a story of what happens when bots + LLMs + coding agents + prediction markets collide with plain old fashioned websites.
The open web was built on assumptions such as that visitors are mostly human, that traffic roughly tracks readership, and that the cost of serving your site is related to the value you get from serving it. Every one of those assumptions is now out of date.
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A beloved, useful, free website, run carefully by a competent, honest person for nearly thirty years, was crushed between two features of the new AI economy. Unsustainable machine traffic hammered it from above, and in all likelihood a financially motivated intruder, operating in a world where breaking into websites has never been easier, took it down.
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The web is full of independent archives, hobby databases, local news sites, forums, reference works. Decades of accumulated human effort, running on old code, maintained by small teams or single individuals, quietly holding up far more of our shared knowledge than anyone acknowledges.