Discord. Private Facebook groups. Telegram. I could go on and on, but I've noticed that these days, more and more content is not being seen by search engines.
The internet used to be built on public pages anyone could find. Now, so much of the conversation happens behind logins or in apps that Google can't crawl.
That means AI doesn't need to write better than humans to dominate search results. It just needs to be visible where human content isn't.
You see this with Beat Saber.
Most mods and setup guides, like how to mod it on Meta Quest, are shared in Discord servers. Tips come up in Twitch streams or YouTube comments. But none of that shows up on Google.
YouTube transcripts are still hit or miss in search. The subreddit is somewhat active but misses a lot of the real info.
Beat Saber has millions of players and tons of human created content. Yet almost all of it is hidden from search engines.
It is the same with smaller games. I played one where the whole community uses Discord. Patch notes, guides, developer updates, everything happens there. No website. No public forums. If you are not in the server, you are out of luck. Get banned and you lose access to everything.
AI does not need to write better than humans. It just needs to be where the data still is, on the open web. While we move our conversations elsewhere, AI stays visible.
I suspect they've been cooking up their own models. They'll be selling the data outside of logins
I mean, how hard is it to make a bot lurk in forums?
It’s not technically that hard to scrape content from the most popular Discord servers. The real issue is that you can’t legally share those findings publicly on the open web because of copyright concerns.