- Posts
- 5,979
- Likes
- 20,530
Donation button?
- Posts
- 7,980
- Likes
- 27,939
Tony C.
··Ωf Jury memberA deficit?!! How on earth are you able to rationalize the continued funding of my $50/joke fee?
Would $35 (-30%) help? 😀
Would $35 (-30%) help? 😀
Edited:
- Posts
- 33,160
- Likes
- 37,892
dsio
··Ash @ ΩFA deficit?!! How on earth are you able to rationalize the continued funding of my $50/joke fee?
Would $35 (-30%) help? 😀
- Posts
- 23,127
- Likes
- 51,629
Dan S
·So this link should now work, @Trev is working on making it a bit cleaner looking and adding a board to recognise people for it.
https://omegaforums.net/pages/donate-to-omega-forums/
- Posts
- 968
- Likes
- 1,727
Emeister
·Each person that supports the site helps a lot
Would posting fewer pictures or editing their size before OF hosts them make any significant difference?
Does clicking on the odd advert make any difference? Most that I see seem to be linked closely to my viewing history anyway.
If I could donate smaller amounts fortnightly that equalled a subscription over the year would you lose out a lot in fees? Are donations Aussie tax deductible?
Edited:
- Posts
- 7,980
- Likes
- 27,939
Tony C.
··Ωf Jury memberEach person that supports the site helps a lot, just for perspective a frequent regular user being a subscriber and not seeing ads is worth about a hundred times as much as the ads would pay from that same user being shown them
- Posts
- 33,160
- Likes
- 37,892
dsio
··Ash @ ΩFIs there anything we can do from alternative approachs; possibly adjusting our posting habits?
Would posting fewer pictures or editing their size before OF hosts them make any significant difference?
Does clicking on the odd advert make any difference? Most that I see seem to be linked closely to my viewing history anyway.
If I could donate smaller amounts fortnightly that equalled a subscription over the year would you lose out a lot in fees? Are donations Aussie tax deductible?
Just ad interaction in general isn’t actually helpful as actual conversions are what matter most not just people clicking, so it’s best to not modify your behaviour. What pays the best is having a broad and fresh range of new guest users, even more so than regulars so the Google AI changes hurt that as all of those small questions our pages used to answer now get intercepted by Google.
It wouldn’t be tax deductive in AU but I can ask Trev about monthly rather than annual and see how that works too
- Posts
- 3,472
- Likes
- 8,067
bgrisso
·Currently we’re running about a 3k per month deficit, next month will be higher, closer to 4k because of Bytedance’s behaviour over the last month but it should be back to around 3k after that, we’re down about 30k-35k for the year as we had duplicated servers for part of the year while getting the new version of the site live which is why I’m still going to move on that A386 too
- Posts
- 33,160
- Likes
- 37,892
dsio
··Ash @ ΩFI had no idea you were running that kind of operational shortfall. I have no idea the financial situation behind this site, or how much you guys even want to disclose finances about the site, but it doesn't seem right you should have to shoulder those kind of operational losses. I don't know if you have any way to monetize this site in the longer term, or eventually sell it, etc. I assume you and others must put in a huge amount of hours for free all these years, that's one thing, I can understand having a passion for this hobby, and that is very noble, but having to sell some of your own really nice watches to keep the lights on seems unfair? Not sure what to do about it, I already have a paid sub and can't do more at the moment, but just thinking out loud here. Anyhow thanks for all you guys do to make this site possible, I've spent a lot of time here the last 11 years.
While on one hand we have to hope to some extent that people will reject the idea of losing what the internet was, and being fed a supply of AI generated slop with no human interaction or knowledge being contributed, that is currently the business model being chased by the most important players, and there are hyper-profits to be made by those companies for doing it.
One change in behaviour that does help everyone, not just us is to support human creators, news sites that do not use AI generated articles, youtube videos that were made by person, not generated. When you're looking something up, be skeptical of the AI provided answer and verify by checking source websites it pulled it from. Once the human creators, journalists and websites are gone for AI to train off, it will just be AI training off AI slop, and quality and accuracy will get rapidly worse than it is even now.
https://www.theguardian.com/media/2...e-use-ai-search-upended-web-publishers-models
- Posts
- 3,472
- Likes
- 8,067
bgrisso
·We're not the only ones in this position, it really is most of the internet that's in a similar position, especially sites that have to pay staff for content creation like news sites. We're working in a few directions to develop our way to a better solution in the long term, leveraging what we have with more of a focus on education and learning as well as a few other approaches.
While on one hand we have to hope to some extent that people will reject the idea of losing what the internet was, and being fed a supply of AI generated slop with no human interaction or knowledge being contributed, that is currently the business model being chased by the most important players, and there are hyper-profits to be made by those companies for doing it.
One change in behaviour that does help everyone, not just us is to support human creators, news sites that do not use AI generated articles, youtube videos that were made by person, not generated. When you're looking something up, be skeptical of the AI provided answer and verify by checking source websites it pulled it from. Once the human creators, journalists and websites are gone for AI to train off, it will just be AI training off AI slop, and quality and accuracy will get rapidly worse than it is even now.
https://www.theguardian.com/media/2...e-use-ai-search-upended-web-publishers-models
Or is all the content on this site copyright protected from that kind of use?
- Posts
- 5,979
- Likes
- 20,530
pdxleaf
·We're not the only ones in this position, it really is most of the internet that's in a similar position, especially sites that have to pay staff for content creation like news sites. We're working in a few directions to develop our way to a better solution in the long term, leveraging what we have with more of a focus on education and learning as well as a few other approaches.
While on one hand we have to hope to some extent that people will reject the idea of losing what the internet was, and being fed a supply of AI generated slop with no human interaction or knowledge being contributed, that is currently the business model being chased by the most important players, and there are hyper-profits to be made by those companies for doing it.
One change in behaviour that does help everyone, not just us is to support human creators, news sites that do not use AI generated articles, youtube videos that were made by person, not generated. When you're looking something up, be skeptical of the AI provided answer and verify by checking source websites it pulled it from. Once the human creators, journalists and websites are gone for AI to train off, it will just be AI training off AI slop, and quality and accuracy will get rapidly worse than it is even now.
https://www.theguardian.com/media/2...e-use-ai-search-upended-web-publishers-models
I'd like to say something witty or sarcastic about AI and robots taking over but it's too exhausting.
- Posts
- 33,160
- Likes
- 37,892
dsio
··Ash @ ΩFI don't understand how this all works, can whomevers AI model train itself and use all the content on this website for free? Which also reduces traffic to the site, if people just go off the AI summary?
Or is all the content on this site copyright protected from that kind of use?
To train their models, they use bots to scrape, or download every single page and image on our site (and every site) to add our data and knowledge to their model. This is Google (Gemini), Amazon (Q), Bytedance (TikTok), OpenAI (ChatGPT), Microsoft (Copilot), Anthropic (Claude) and countless others.
Normally their bots identify themselves, so while they don’t ask before stealing all of our public data, they can be blocked easily.
In recent months, many of them have stopped identifying as bots and are pretending to be real users with normal web browsers from a range of countries, making them extremely hard to block without blocking real people as well. We had 4k-25k guests online for many months because we couldn’t get rid of them.
At times they hit us so hard that we would have millions of requests in sudden spikes, even Cloudflare was struggling to protect us and they’re the market leader. We’re a step ahead for now which is why guests is back to a real number for the time being but that’s a major cost to us dealing with and mitigating them.
The other side is the massive drop in ad revenue and guest traffic flow from Google. This too is because so many simple questions are answers by Google’s AI before coming to our site like they used to.
For countless watch questions, the AI gives wrong answers, we had a guy message us after buying a 21mm bracelet for his 20mm lug Planet Ocean since it gave him wrong info. We had another guy complain that his dad’s 1950s Seamaster leaked when he washed the dishes with it, AI had told him Seamasters were “waterproof”.
People wanting answers to those simple questions used to come here, sometimes be annoying but were given good advice, but far more often they saw a thread where their question was answered in an existing thread.
That traffic being fresh guests provided about half of our revenue, it’s gone now thanks to that Google AI web result feature, along with many other AI generated sites tailoring their SEO to Google.
So that’s the squeeze, on one hand these companies don’t respect copyright, rules, or the sites they hammer into the ground with their training scrapers. Then on the other hand, AI answer give bad advice and take away the most valuable traffic.
They’re doing this to us, news sites, independent journalists, authors, film makers, everyone.
Some are fighting back but getting into legal battles with companies worth more than nation states isn’t for the feint of heart.
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2025/jun/26/microsoft-ai-authors-lawsuit
https://www.afr.com/companies/media...-news-sites-10-times-a-second-20250806-p5mkop
Edited:
- Posts
- 3,472
- Likes
- 8,067
bgrisso
·These companies are all training their own models to compete with the market leader (OpenAI’s ChatGPT).
To train their models, they use bots to scrape, or download every single page and image on our site (and every site) to add our data and knowledge to their model. This is Google (Gemini), Amazon (Q), Bytedance (TikTok), OpenAI (ChatGPT), Microsoft (Copilot), Anthropic (Claude) and countless others.
Normally their bots identify themselves, so while they don’t ask before stealing all of our public data, they can be blocked easily.
In recent months, many of them have stopped identifying as bots and are pretending to be real users with normal web browsers from a range of countries, making them extremely hard to block without blocking real people as well. We had 4k-25k guests online for many months because we couldn’t get rid of them.
At times they hit us so hard that we would have millions of requests in sudden spikes, even Cloudflare was struggling to protect us and they’re the market leader. We’re a step ahead for now which is why guests is back to a real number for the time being but that’s a major cost to us dealing with and mitigating them.
The other side is the massive drop in ad revenue and guest traffic flow from Google. This too is because so many simple questions are answers by Google’s AI before coming to our site like they used to.
For countless watch questions, the AI gives wrong answers, we had a guy message us after buying a 21mm bracelet for his 20mm lug Planet Ocean since it gave him wrong info. We had another guy complain that his dad’s 1950s Seamaster leaked when he washed the dishes with it, AI had told him Seamasters were “waterproof”.
People wanting answers to those simple questions used to come here, sometimes be annoying but were given good advice, but far more often they saw a thread where their question was answered in an existing thread.
That traffic being fresh guests provided about half of our revenue, it’s gone now thanks to that Google AI web result feature, along with many other AI generated sites tailoring their SEO to Google.
So that’s the squeeze, on one hand these companies don’t respect copyright, rules, or the sites they hammer into the ground with their training scrapers. Then on the other hand, AI answer give bad advice and take away the most valuable traffic.
They’re doing this to us, news sites, independent journalists, authors, film makers, everyone.
Some are fighting back but getting into legal battles with companies worth more than nation states isn’t for the feint of heart.
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2025/jun/26/microsoft-ai-authors-lawsuit
- Posts
- 33,160
- Likes
- 37,892
dsio
··Ash @ ΩFwow, I had no idea this was going on. Thank you for explaining. It sounds like a serious situation. So wait, they are scraping the site for data and that ends up costing you bandwidth/hosting fees?! That's just adding insult to injury.
Two of them, Amazon and Bytedance have taken this site down for brief periods of time. They don’t intend to, it’s just a result of their bots getting confused by our site structure and going haywire at times, but it isn’t their problem and they know there isn’t anything we can do about it.
This is when Amazon's scaper bots got confused and made Omega Forums inaccessible 8 times in a single day, we had to make some further upgrades following this incident.
- Posts
- 3,472
- Likes
- 8,067
bgrisso
·Correct, and the additional costs from Cloudflare we have to spend beyond our previous plan for advanced features and usage to block them.
Two of them, Amazon and Bytedance have taken this site down for brief periods of time. They don’t intend to, it’s just a result of their bots getting confused by our site structure and going haywire at times, but it isn’t their problem and they know there isn’t anything we can do about it.
This is when Amazon's scaper bots got confused and made Omega Forums inaccessible 8 times in a single day, we had to make some further upgrades following this incident.
- Posts
- 5,979
- Likes
- 20,530
- Posts
- 2,646
- Likes
- 4,219
sheepdoll
·I noticed in the last week Google (or as I call it giggle) will only serve up 10 results. Even when I set the num=100 parameter. So they are actively removing content from the small blogs and such in favor of the AI summaries.
Tried bing but it pretty much served up the same garbage.
I have one of the older active domains on the net which is going on 30 years. So when I search on subjects that are in my blogs, giggle rgugitates my own stuff back to me. Just did a vanity search and now am getting 10 results even though I asked for 100. Often when I request 100 I get a captcha asking me if I am a robot.
I also noticed, that my rss feeds are being blocked. I heard this was a cloudfare thing do to block the scrapebots. BBC also has implemented a paywall, so all I can see are headlines. Only the volcano doom and gloom wordpress seems to leak through.
Most of my consulting work has dried up do to wait and see what may happen. Even my main one is on the rocks, as it almost got shut down this week. For another potential project I had to quote 20 grand for what they probably feel is worth a couple hundered bucks. Needless to say this will not happen.
Just turned 65 earlier in the year which does not help. Have been addicted to information overload. Helping family members out has exposed me to the endless doom scroll.
Even though I do not have an account, it watches and probably listens to stuff on this IP address and probably MAC address traffic. Ironically I use wireshark, as the pipe organ relays use UDP packets. So I have an idea just how much stuff is out there for bots to scrape. What I am seeing is a skinner type system of reward and denial. So there will be a burst of interesting stuff, then hours of looking for similar things, which tend not to be served up. The only thing missing are the electrical shocks.
Even weirder was someone seriously asked me this week, why I thought the moon landing was real. And they of a similar age to myself and should have seen the live broadcast. Or were they watching Dark Shadows and I love Lucy? I worked with the people who made the cameras what took the images. They beleved it to be real. Know the people photographing mars. Even once held a moon rock a friend who was high up in the program gave his wife. So I think the evidence is pretty much in favor that 12 people walked on the moon.
Not sure though how the new economy is supposed to work? If only a few hold all the capitol, then what is the point of advertising to those who can not afford the product? If half the people are fired from work, and the other half willing or forced to work for free, then where does the funding of the ponzi pyramid come from?
Tried bing but it pretty much served up the same garbage.
I have one of the older active domains on the net which is going on 30 years. So when I search on subjects that are in my blogs, giggle rgugitates my own stuff back to me. Just did a vanity search and now am getting 10 results even though I asked for 100. Often when I request 100 I get a captcha asking me if I am a robot.
I also noticed, that my rss feeds are being blocked. I heard this was a cloudfare thing do to block the scrapebots. BBC also has implemented a paywall, so all I can see are headlines. Only the volcano doom and gloom wordpress seems to leak through.
Most of my consulting work has dried up do to wait and see what may happen. Even my main one is on the rocks, as it almost got shut down this week. For another potential project I had to quote 20 grand for what they probably feel is worth a couple hundered bucks. Needless to say this will not happen.
Just turned 65 earlier in the year which does not help. Have been addicted to information overload. Helping family members out has exposed me to the endless doom scroll.
Even though I do not have an account, it watches and probably listens to stuff on this IP address and probably MAC address traffic. Ironically I use wireshark, as the pipe organ relays use UDP packets. So I have an idea just how much stuff is out there for bots to scrape. What I am seeing is a skinner type system of reward and denial. So there will be a burst of interesting stuff, then hours of looking for similar things, which tend not to be served up. The only thing missing are the electrical shocks.
Even weirder was someone seriously asked me this week, why I thought the moon landing was real. And they of a similar age to myself and should have seen the live broadcast. Or were they watching Dark Shadows and I love Lucy? I worked with the people who made the cameras what took the images. They beleved it to be real. Know the people photographing mars. Even once held a moon rock a friend who was high up in the program gave his wife. So I think the evidence is pretty much in favor that 12 people walked on the moon.
Not sure though how the new economy is supposed to work? If only a few hold all the capitol, then what is the point of advertising to those who can not afford the product? If half the people are fired from work, and the other half willing or forced to work for free, then where does the funding of the ponzi pyramid come from?
Edited:
- Posts
- 5,979
- Likes
- 20,530
pdxleaf
·Not sure though how the new economy is supposed to work? If only a few hold all the capitol, then what is the point of advertising to those who can not afford the product? If half the people are fired from work, and the other half willing or forced to work for free, then where does the funding of the ponzi pyramid come from?
All these companies racing to build AI data centers. They need enormous amounts of capital and energy. The little solar panels on my roof are laughable. These data centers are going to be like turning the oven up to broil. And for what? Marketing. They want eyeballs on their content. What's the content? Cat videos, self-portraits of a person looking older or younger with glasses or a different hat.
And people are rushing to fund it. All the workers' savings going into ETFs and 401ks that buy stock in anything related to AI, seemingly without thought of the impact other than their portfolio, feeding the machine that's choking off their existence.
I feel like the crazy old guy who people laugh at as they go about their day. But the future looks so depressing, and it never did before. I was always a glass half full guy. I'm looking for some good news and the only thing to make me feel better are cat videos.
I don't understand how IT architecture works. What you and Ash describe doesn't translate to me. But I don't need to understand the details to understand the impact, and it's frightening.
It feels like I just woke up with a plug in the back of my head. Author Chris Hedges has said the world is made up of Corporations and Oligarchs, who are struggling against each other for dominance. The Corporations want stability so they can continue to operate and enrich themselves. The Oligarchs are the IT entrepreneurs who want to destroy the current public power in order to allow private equity to run the world in what they believe will be more efficiently. The public thinks it's in a democracy and is fighting each other to get a foothold and doesn't know that they are powerless.
This all seems real and insane at the same time, like the plot of the Matrix.
Sorry, can't sleep. Wonder what the bots will do with this. Maybe change my red light to green just when a semi is coming through the intersection. That of course is crazy talk, but it sure feels like we're headed that way.
All this from a watch forum. Feel free to delete this, probably better.
Edited:
- Posts
- 2,646
- Likes
- 4,219
sheepdoll
·I was always a glass half full guy.
Prime (at least my feed) Is streaming both the Halis/Batchelor Animal Farm, and the Bill Moyers Joseph Campbell interviews. Not sure Matrix is in cycle at the moment.
Found I was misquoting Lewis Carol. "Anything you tell me three times is true" comes from the hunting of the snark. Also learned that "I believe six impossible things for breakfast," what the white queen said. The red queen was "the faster you go, the more you stay in once place."
- Posts
- 5,979
- Likes
- 20,530
pdxleaf
·It is. Nothing new under the sun.
Prime (at least my feed) Is streaming both the Halis/Batchelor Animal Farm, and the Bill Moyers Joseph Campbell interviews. Not sure Matrix is in cycle at the moment.
Found I was misquoting Lewis Carol. "Anything you tell me three times is true" comes from the hunting of the snark. Also learned that "I believe six impossible things for breakfast," what the white queen said. The red queen was "the faster you go, the more you stay in once place."
