David Thompson
SophieMy website is for humans, and I don't want Google's AI ramen
Marijke Luttekes@sophie An AI could not appreciate those awesome themes you’ve made for your site!
They amaze me every time.
@mahryekuh thank you!
s427@mahryekuh @sophie I absolutely love the loading animation for the Netscape icon. 😁
Ufal Salman@sophie Amazing blog post! I'll refer it to some friends to read it.
Scott ⁂@sophie Great post and love your beautiful themes!
I see you are using 11ty! In my starter project I have tried to discourage AI bots using this little trick: https://github.com/scottsweb/elva/blob/main/content/_data/badbots.js which gets output here: https://github.com/scottsweb/elva/blob/main/elva/templates/robots.njk. I'm not sure if many of these companies are respecting robots.txt but it might be worth a try.
rood@sophie could you put text in white on white, and some in black on white to fool an AI scrape?
gnyrfta@sophie Really like the theme choosers on your website!
softwarehubpro
Emily Moran Barwick@sophie loved this post. Also, you really drew me in with “Google’s AI Ramen”. Now that itself is a delightfully human-generated turn of phrase. 😊
I can’t count how many times people have told me how “easy and quick” it is to write/generate/etc anything with AI. I always kindly point out that that “ease” and “speed” are built off the blood, sweat, tears, and creative energy of countless humans…that there is nothing easy and quick about actual genuine creation.
YourShadowDaniLove that you have multiple styles for the site in the upper right, very cool feature!
Ella@sophie ramen?
faehnrich (weird)@EllaMadelineK @sophie yeah I saw an add too I think on tv where someone points their phone at a bowl of ramen to get the recipe (oddly enough I tried google search to find it but it turned up nothing)
It's just sad, food is such a social thing and this ad shows you never have to interact with another human. Very dystopic.
@sophie whenever I search for recipes of something like chikpea wraps, I get sites along the lines of "The Carrot & The Pringle" by what looks like a food influencer mom, but she writes on her own site with its own domain and RSS feed, so she is my comrade on the human web.
nixCraft 🐧@sophie very cool looking site. are you blocking LLM agents?
ChiaChatter@sophie You are my hero of the day! This. Is. PERFECT and I will be sharing the link everywhere!
Apostolos K.@sophie Aaahhhh. geocities/angelhost aesthetic! #nostalgia :-) - now how can I have a site like this? ;-)
arclight@sophie This. So much this.
Thank you for taking the time and effort to write and share it with other people.
Jared White (ResistanceNet ✊)@sophie This human appreciates your post very much! 👏
Fae Empress@sophie Love the domain name.
knaaaaaack@sophie I love everything about this website, especially the Netscape theme.
Jonathan Yu@sophie Am I human? Or am I dancer?
Pete Prodoehl 🍕@sophie Consider this human subscribed! (via RSS.)
Large Heydon Collider@sophie wicked post, love it
marcelfox@sophie Your website is a relief! Made me want to change my own and Improve the way I express myself! And I enjoyed a lot your post! I need to paste this quote from it:
"ChatGPT will give you an approximation of a recipe made up from the average of lots of recipes, but they lack the personality of each individual recipe"
Wouldn't lie, I use AI a lot, but for insights, like a rubber duck.
Karpour@sophie added your site to my list of sites to add to my RSS reader once I finally get around to self-host one!
Toad64@sophie Nice blog post, totally agree. Added to my RSS reader!
Piti^^ the little Light@sophie It has very cute and nice styles!
Lucho@sophie localghost is such a cool name. Also loved the theme switcher thingy on the header. Every theme looks great!
waynewerwolf@sophie Thank you for the powerful post. Love the designs!
Mia (web luddite)
Chris Ferdinandi@sophie the aesthetics of this are incredible!
@cferdinandi thank you!
@sophie I literally just wrote about wanting more of "the weird web" last week, and I'm sorry I didn't know about your site when I wrote it. It's exactly the kind of thing I want more of!
The Weird Web
Something I’ve been noticing a lot lately is that over time, so many content creators become caricatures of themselves. You start off kind of eclectic, writing or talking about stuff you enjoy. One little slice of what you talk about really resonates, so you start doing more of it. Over time, you start making money from it, and it becomes a bit of a business. And now, you’re kind of locked in.
@cferdinandi I love it!
Ricard Torres 📷@sophie Great post!
I'm lucky I don't make my living out of writing blog posts, otherwise I'd be pissed and/or scared. Probably both.
Like you, I blog because I want to, for me first and foremost.
I don't know where this is going, but I don't like it. Not sure what we can do about it, we're the minority here. The rest of the planet seems to love switching search engines for LLMs.
Christopher Kirk-Nielsen@sophie Excellent as always!
Charles FevalHey @sophie, can I suggest to update your robots.txt? Right now it tells any scraper that it's fine to roam you cute little garden.
@Cfe84 The reason I haven't is because I didn't think that was very effective at actually keeping the LLM scrapers out - they seem to just do what they want
@sophie that's fair, open AI and anthropic seem to not care at all, Google seem to respect it. I think it's more of a matter of displaying the "no trespassing" sign, people might still ignore it but at least they can't claim ignorance.
(with that being said I agree with 100% of your article).
luna, friend of eggbug@sophie just an fyi, the
overscroll-behavior: none on the root <html> element has a side-effect of disabling two-finger-horizontal-scroll trackpad gestures for navigating back/forward; might be worth using overscroll-behavior-y to avoid that@luna ty, will have a look
Victor@sophie This was so well written and echos a lot of my same feelings when it comes to enjoying the personality of someone’s website, writing. I know a lot of people who read my site do so in RSS and have no need to visit the site itself, but I personally will click through from time to time just to see what the person has added or changed, what new colors they’ve introduced. I grew up with a quirky blog roll collection of favorites and miss when that defined the way most people used the web.
@victor thanks!
Dan Schnau@sophie I found your post on hacker news this morning, and i enjoyed reading it.
Ji Fu (Domestic Terrorist)