[HN Gopher] Ask HN: How can we keep (part of) the web human?
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Ask HN: How can we keep (part of) the web human?
Any ideas for how we can keep the web (or at least part of it)
human? It feels like every time I do a web search, more and more
of the results are AI generated nonsense. I'm worried that it's
going to become much more difficult to find the human-generated
content. How can we keep a part of the web human? Any ideas? (I'm
not keen on Sam Altman's eyeball-scanning Orb being the
"solution.")
Author : pajamasam
Score : 29 points
Date : 2025-06-20 18:57 UTC (4 hours ago)
| lee-rhapsody wrote:
| Going back to forums locked behind accounts would be a good first
| step.
| pajamasam wrote:
| Like Reddit, you mean? Or with some extra authentication
| mechanism?
| burnt-resistor wrote:
| Sounds about right. Prove you're a real human through some
| sort of identification verification process. Probably would
| lead to better conversations, especially if each person could
| have only one account.
| ranger_danger wrote:
| I am quite skeptical it would help. The majority of users
| on forums already aren't AI, and from my personal
| experience in the last couple decades on many different
| forums, there's already an abundance of egotistical,
| dogmatic god complexes around to make the experience
| insufferable enough already.
| vincnetas wrote:
| And there also adversaries who are paid to post. Proper
| reputation system is needed to fight that.
| sunrunner wrote:
| > an abundance of egotistical, dogmatic god complexes
| around to make the experience insufferable enough
| already.
|
| And you can find a curated list of these people on
| r/LinkedInLunatics, though I'm not sure the curation is
| necessary as it seems like pretty much the _entirety_ of
| LinkedIn posts are the kind that make you question
| whether the poster is human.
|
| There's marketing and building a personal brand, and then
| there's whatever the heck LinkedIn in 2025 is...
| tayo42 wrote:
| They typical Instagram and Facebook comment section proves
| this wrong lol
| sunrunner wrote:
| > Prove you're a real human
|
| Ah, so Worldcoin then?
| ASalazarMX wrote:
| New AI service idea: this human doesn't exist, complete
| with plausible fictional ids.
|
| uh... for security awareness.
| egypturnash wrote:
| hahaha god Reddit is fucking _full_ of people who are clearly
| using AI to write or edit their posts, I get _so_ many people
| trying to glaze me like ChatGPT does now and it 's so fucking
| creepy.
| pajamasam wrote:
| Yeah, that's why I asked to get clarity on what exactly
| they meant with accounts.
| jay_kyburz wrote:
| I imagine people will soon have AI post here and other logged
| in forums on behalf of them. Try and rack up Karma or build
| reputation.
| onemoresoop wrote:
| I think some are already doing this.
| onemoresoop wrote:
| > Going back to forums locked behind accounts would be a good
| first step.
|
| How do you ensure the accounts aren't AI bots or people who
| scrap and serve it all back to the AI soup pot? The identity
| seems to be quite a problem online.
| JohnMakin wrote:
| Yes, and account creation automation is quite trivial in the
| majority of cases.
| selfhoster11 wrote:
| Invite-only, the way private torrent trackers still do it.
| Which has its own problems, but if you limit the number of
| invitees a given user can bring in and other such
| restrictions, it makes it practically impossible to for bots
| to make up a good chunk of the userbase.
| pajamasam wrote:
| Invite-only sounds like a good idea. Especially if you need
| multiple people to approve invites. However, one or a few
| people might get greedy and add bots.
| selfhoster11 wrote:
| A lot of invite-only trackers solve that with a
| reputation system: if your invitees get banned, you also
| get warned or banned.
| ASalazarMX wrote:
| Forums worked (and still do) because they're small niches, like
| the budding Internet. As soon as they become big, they lose
| their sense of community, and become profitable to spam.
|
| So, maybe we have to choose between isolated human islands vs.
| an ad-and-SEO-infested world?
| pajamasam wrote:
| > isolated human islands Good point. But how does one find
| these? Through word-of-mouth, I guess?
| egypturnash wrote:
| Get a job at someone pushing AI. Sabotage. You're smart, you can
| do it subtly enough that it just looks like you're kind of
| incompetent.
| onemoresoop wrote:
| Too bad these jobs pay well and attract people who are quite
| myopic and drink all the koolaid.
| egypturnash wrote:
| Yeah, the first challenge is learning how to sound like
| someone who's drunk the koolaid without letting it actually
| affect you.
| pajamasam wrote:
| I think sometimes it's naivety, unfortunately, in young
| graduates especially. With a touch of greediness and
| ambition. I guess the greediness takes precedence once
| they're not so naive anymore.
| Animats wrote:
| Go back to Facebook's Real Names rule. Require Know Your Customer
| validation. No fake name postings. Maybe allow explicit anonymous
| posting, but readers can block.
| onemoresoop wrote:
| Facebook or any other corpo is not to be trusted with anything
| again.
| selfhoster11 wrote:
| No, thank you. I'd sooner cancel my Internet contract.
| codingdave wrote:
| Step back a few more steps. Maybe the web has run its course, and
| we need to engage with each other in other ways. Even aside from
| the obvious IRL options, maybe voice and real-time interaction
| should gain traction again. Maybe we need completely new
| inventions to help us share content and thoughts. Maybe the web
| can go the way of gopher and become the subject of future story-
| telling: "Man, remember back when that was how we interacted?
| Crazy, right?"
|
| We should move forward, not sideways.
| onemoresoop wrote:
| All these ways are very harvestable by AI companies. I think
| the only way is IRL and more people spaces where technology
| only exists on devices and everything is decentralized.
| mbauman wrote:
| A highly relevant must-watch here is Bret Victor's
| Computational Public Space:
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PixPSNRDNMU
| selfhoster11 wrote:
| Given that the old web was as much of a repository of
| information as a way to connect, the new thing shouldn't
| involve unsearchable, temporary comms that work only in real
| time. Forcing the new thing to be synchronous or near-
| synchronous would be a terrible waste of subject matter
| experts' time too.
| pajamasam wrote:
| I like your thinking! Thank you for taking the time to give
| your thoughts :)
| dannyobrien wrote:
| "It feels like" -- the first step I would make is to try and
| better understand what you're seeing. How often does this happen,
| compared to what you assume is human? Is it increasing? At what
| rate? Are there papers that confirm your assessment?
| pajamasam wrote:
| This sounds like an AI-generated reply haha
| jay_kyburz wrote:
| I'd be interested in building a curated and moderated web. A
| special browser with an address whitelist. Some kind of
| democratic curation of content with a small paywall to reduce the
| noise.
|
| Or alternatively, improve pagerank to exclude low quality content
| and pages that contain ads.
| qznc wrote:
| Could be just a browser plugin to show a quality mark (or the
| opposite)?
| pajamasam wrote:
| Agreed. And the paywall would hopefully help keep (some) of the
| bots out.
|
| On the democratic curation though, how do you ensure that bots
| aren't voting?
|
| I guess you can start with a super small group of curators who
| you know personally and then slowly branch out?
| stego-tech wrote:
| Virtual networks (dn42, tor, etc) or Virtual Private Networks
| (Tailscale, Wireguard) would be my knee-jerk recommendation.
| Adding a core abstraction at the network layer immediately fouls
| up all but the most diligently-coded AI bots out there, as does
| an abstraction at the Transport layer that's different from the
| traditional internet. In the short-term, I expect more humans to
| retreat into these sorts of enclaves as scrapers and AI slop make
| the public internet untenable to use.
|
| In the long run...I couldn't tell you. This feels like the sort
| of schism Cyberpunk stories are made of, when a utopia of data
| sharing is perverted into a swamp of automated bots and agents,
| blindly following obsolete programming and untethered from the
| controls of their creators, harming whatever infrastructure is
| connected to the public internet without adequate security. I'd
| like to think smarter people than myself (shoutout to Xe Iaso for
| Anubis) will create tools to protect humans and our online
| presence from the bots, but I'm not super hopeful of their
| success in the face of present profit-motives for AI Companies to
| defeat them.
|
| Perhaps the answer is to simply devalue the internet as an
| entity, and thereby destroy incentive to scrape or pollute it at
| such a scale. Maybe it's yanking services offline and putting
| them back in the real world, or privacy laws and insurance
| companies making data hoarding untenable and unaffordable for
| companies to engage in. Maybe it's identity validation at the
| point of connectivity, verifying smart cards or identification
| before you're allowed online (incredibly dystopian and the stuff
| of Pal*ntir's wet dreams).
|
| I honestly couldn't tell you right now what the long game looks
| like. Only to find your humans, build your digital fortresses,
| and help each other as best you can.
| pajamasam wrote:
| Great answer, thank you.
| dogleash wrote:
| Even before AI the human element was being drown out.
|
| The neat internet thing was neat for a while because power hadn't
| worked out how to exploit it for their own ends. They have now,
| the genie doesn't go back in the bottle.
| pajamasam wrote:
| Does that mean we need to invent some new thing or rather go
| back to IRL? And what about news, media, etc. Do we create
| physical copies again?
| anxoo wrote:
| if you can't think of a way to reliably distinguish AIs from
| humans, that observation alone should raise great concerns which
| eclipse "spam comments on forums" or "bad results on google"
| mbauman wrote:
| OP (and I) can definitely distinguish the two. The trouble is
| that I can no longer find the humans who are actually posting
| valuable information.
| JohnMakin wrote:
| https://cyberpunk.fandom.com/wiki/Blackwall
| BaudouinVH wrote:
| all the Gemini-verse feels more human than the web to me
| nowadays. My two cents.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gemini_(protocol)
| sim04ful wrote:
| What if we shifted our focus entirely from the source of
| information to how useful and accurate it is?
|
| I can't see how the prevalent value system could avoid being
| "sapio-supremacist" ? is "future proof" to include intelligences
| that are artificial but whose "sentience" is otherwise human
| equivalent or "greater"
| bbarnett wrote:
| Setup web forums, include ToS which indicates service is denied
| using automated tools.
|
| People have been charged with telecommunication related crimes
| for hscking, and the tos csn indicate access denial.
|
| This gated access won't stop AI, but will make account usage
| illegal.
|
| People have been convicted for far less. May as well use such
| laws to our advantage for once.
|
| That's the best path I can see.
| zeroCalories wrote:
| Is this an argument for AI? First, AI slop sucks. Second, even
| if it stopped sucking, it would need good input data, which it
| will need for a top 5 dish soap recommendation until it can do
| my dishes for me. Third, I want more than just useful
| information.
| pajamasam wrote:
| I don't just want useful and accurate information. I want fun,
| creative, funny content that I can relate to.
| pajamasam wrote:
| Also, multiple perspectives.
| Apreche wrote:
| A lot of the web is human. You just can't discover it. It doesn't
| rank highly in search results. It doesn't go viral on social
| networks. It doesn't get wildly upvoted on aggregator sites like
| this one.
|
| That's the fundamental dilemma of not just the web, but the
| Internet, as a pull medium opposed to a push medium like
| television or radio. A human can not remember every URL. From
| your blank web browser you can only go to URLs you know. Then the
| only web pages you will ever see are ones that are linked,
| directly or indirectly, from the ones you know.
|
| Most people only know Google, Facebook, etc. Anything that isn't
| linked to from those sites effectively does not exist.
|
| But it does exist. It's a whole forest full of trees falling and
| not making a sound. It's up to you to do what you can to find it.
| mathgeek wrote:
| Perhaps some examples would help? The human-centric web I
| remember was centered on sharing things you found.
| ge96 wrote:
| I wonder if registrars provide lists of bought domain names vs.
| trying to map IPV4 which has multiple domains pointing to same
| ip
|
| would be interesting to do mapping yourself though probably
| pointless with how much effort/time it would take
|
| does remind me of this fun video
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JcJSW7Rprio
| pajamasam wrote:
| I don't quite understand what would be the goal behind this?
| ge96 wrote:
| The video or my comment?
|
| My comment is about finding random websites that exist
| regardless of ranking, just randomly find stuff on the
| Internet.
| pajamasam wrote:
| For sure. I agree. Maybe I should rephrase to "how can we make
| the human stuff discoverable again?" Or, can we make tools to
| help people to find it? Because if people can't find it, less
| and less people will use it and then it will later become
| inactive. Or, should we tell people by word of mouth again?
| tolerance wrote:
| Make friends in real life and only use the internet as a
| commerce/information exchange platform.
| petemilly wrote:
| https://blogroll.org is a neat project that curates personal
| blogs. One of the curators (Manu) also has a weekly blogger
| interview series that I enjoy: https://peopleandblogs.com
| pajamasam wrote:
| Looks nice, thank you!
| o-o- wrote:
| We're missing a piece of middleware technology. Imagine a network
| like Reddit or IMDB that:
|
| a) offers posting under anonymity, b) allows users to associate
| with exactly one physical passport, c) has no knowledge of who an
| account belongs to, d) allows for filtering on content by
| passport-authenticated users.
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(page generated 2025-06-20 23:02 UTC)