alt Hacker NewsAgents don't click through or interact with ads or get influenced by things like lightning deals, snap promotions, "others who bought X bought Y" and such the same way a human does. This is likely a large portion of the reasoning.
This is just going to get worse before it gets better. More large sites are likely going to block or attempt to block agents because they're so reliant on ads for revenue or exploiting human psychology.
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It’s funny watching all these large tech firms with so much resource commit the sin of innovation: starting with the tech and not the customer + economics of it all.
I get it. It’s tempting and alluring. But no - reimagining something takes a lot more work than sticky taping an agent on. Impatiently waiting for all this agent stuff to fek off.
Of course they will be influencable. It is already possible to poison LLM output. It will happen with agents too.
Its a very good point. There are lots of orgs in company's whose whole job is to push shit from all possible points in the website - its probably called "real estate" internally.
These orgs have a lot to lose. But the company? Not so much, they will make it up and more - agents are great to use.
And yes ads are hard to place because agents let you bypass all this and give you a nice filtered view of exactly what you need.
Where do you think the world will head? Maybe Amazon will sell their inventory for agents at a hefty API price?
Yeah subscriptions are another big one. So many profits today are generated by bleeding off customers that just can't deal with the hoops they need to jump through to get unsubscribed. Tasking that to an agent would destroy the whole model.