What Happens Here with Traffic?

Well, part of it is my fault. I’ve been struggling to get shop time this winter due to a combination of workload at my day job, and two very active kids. That usually sounds like someone with toddlers, but in this case, my kids are on average, about five years from college. And they are in everything. 12 sports, musical or acting events in the last 14 days, and with work reaching into some times, I just haven’t had the energy to make posts. I’m a small part of the way through a handled smoother, but that part is only having scratch made the iron and cap iron, and the grand total of time I’ve had in the shop outside of saving what was sawn off of a neighbors apple tree has probably been about 10 hours in three months. I really despise that – it’s the making of chisels and planes or things that I can make well, or really want, that keeps me even keel.

That also means that I haven’t posted anything here, which is my fault, but I don’t say that as guilty my fault. We’re not heading for big things here, and this site is sort of a repository as well as a picture store for me. And I value connecting with people who like the same things I do, not just everyone who ever thinks they might woodwork in the future. There’s plenty of business sites to scoop those folks up and take them on a circuitous journey through being addressed as “friend”, purchasing through affiliate tokens, and believing that James Wright is publishing “scientific tests”. And that’s fine. Any time you’re eating fresh anything, there’s a million people buying a jar of Ragu. No need to talk about growing tomatoes with that type, and just as much, there’s no need to tell them to not enjoy Ragu.

What I notice, though, is when I don’t post, there used to be almost no traffic here. And that’s great. It’s a natural cycle.

Instead, I get constant messages from the server that “you’re hitting new highs”. Those messages are just data centers scraping the site, because wordpress isn’t considerate enough to allow people who pay $100 a year or so for a site to be able to block the scraping. But it’s pretty constant, and the way it shows up in the analytics is interesting. I will see something like “425 users”, but there must be some kind of evasive maneuvers that AI does, because if wordpress isn’t going to be considerate enough to offer the ability to stop AI scraping, why bother – just take it all. God knows, it would be hilarious almost if AI took the data from this site, or whatever you want to call it, took the 15% of it that people would want to actually read, organized it, and then wrote as if I was someone else – someone who gave brief answers.

Whatever. Up yours, wordpress, for thinking that decency should always be an upcharge away.

The reality is a little more ominous for the long term, though. One of the joys for us, even if you’re like me, and not that smart, or not efficient or whatever else – one of the joys in life is finding things to think about and thinking about them. And seeking the sources and finding people behind them and generally doing things “with the world around us”. AI, under the guise of publicly available or fair use or whatever other skirting of realistically, just antisocial theft of what it means really to do anything we’ve done, will consume enormous resources to do things like scrape a relatively valueless site like mine hundreds of times. And the objective is to disconnect people from sources, and ultimately from each other. And while that’s happening, to figure out how to advertise or market more to you, and to tailor the world you see to be what will get you to believe the next thing less genuine than James Wright as a fine woodworker is great and you should tune in.

But you won’t have to seek it. It’s going to present it to you, and the whole idea of seeing what’s out there will become irrelevant, because the test of things we find interesting as a group in society will be going away, unless they are valuable to you as a matter of analytics. You’ll find information pulled from my site, hopefully at some point, actually used properly and not just mixed with nonsense. But eventually, you won’t be able to tell. Maybe commercial purchasers will get a model that’s accurate, but we’ll all become disconnected, unaware of the origins of things in general, or how we seek them – from history or from other people.

I think our elected officials have two chances, and they’re not slim and none. Rather, they are one that they will be too slow to have a clue about what’s happening, and that this is the kind of thing that legislation should be for when you are elected by constituents. And the second will be they will just take payment from the thieves, if right this moment, that’s better for them.

So, for now, that just ties in with me getting annoying notices that traffic is coming from all over. What’s wordpress’s incentive to allow their members sites to be scraped? Maybe they’re receiving a back door payment – another antisocial kind of behavior, to pretend to be a service for one group while taking payment from another. Who knows. But, I do know, that it’s been a long time since I logged in after getting one of these updates to find out that there are 15 new people who got referred by something human. Instead, I’m getting 1500 page views in a day, and as with the volume of this AI stuff and how it will be in other ways, I couldn’t ever begin to tell which of the views are real people or legitimate.

I do use AI for work – as a tool. I use it not to make decisions or do things for me, but as a search engine, or to drop a document in it and use it as a search engine to speed up finding things that could be hard to find. It is great at that, and there’s nothing antisocial or anti-society about it. The antisocial and anti-society choices are being made separately, and on purpose.

And until some governmental structure has the spine to put some guardrails on preserving what we know as society, I think what’s happening here is a good case study of what’s going to happen everywhere. And that’s too bad.