[HN Gopher] The dead Internet is not a theory anymore
___________________________________________________________________
The dead Internet is not a theory anymore
Author : hubraumhugo
Score : 297 points
Date : 2026-03-11 20:20 UTC (2 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.adriankrebs.ch)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.adriankrebs.ch)
| artemonster wrote:
| I think next step will be an isolated version of invite-only
| internet where you have to be physically present with your
| invitee to give them access. There will be a beautiful navigation
| widget where you can access a unified "addon" to any page:
| community moderated comment section, version history of that
| page, backlinks, carefully curated "related" section(so that you
| can continue browsing beautiful human written content on 1910 era
| steam locomotives, similar to 90s era webrings), donate button so
| that you can support he author and much more! Oh, the dream
| artemonster wrote:
| optional de-centralized hosting, unified cryptocurrency as
| payment tokens, single open LLM as summary and search-indexing
| tool, specialized toolkits for journals and social networks
| (livejournal, early twitter, early fb). Most importantly: you
| can post anonymously where its allowed (there could be areas
| where it can be disallowed entirely, like a public square), but
| your account will take the punishment, so no edgy shitposting
| behind throwaways.
| jeandejean wrote:
| Next step is: we get back to speaking to each other in the real
| world. That would successfully close the loop.
| sebastiennight wrote:
| I think this will be a tiny minority who is already currently
| not terminally online (so, no big change for them).
|
| And the vast majority will just be driven to more AI-mediated
| interactions.
| tines wrote:
| I think it's a symptom of being terminally online to think
| that most other people are also terminally online. The
| internet has a way of convincing you that most of the
| [interesting] events in the world happen on the internet. But
| I think this isn't the case; most stuff happens in the real
| world, most people live in the real world most of the time,
| and a tiny fraction of trite drama happens online.
| ticulatedspline wrote:
| Dunnow, everyone is in a bubble of some sorts. I'm online a
| good bit but rarely on my phone, If I'm away from my desk
| I'm offline. My social circle is similar so I would
| naturally have bias for what I experience.
|
| Year or so ago I took an Uber and was mesmerized by the
| driver. He had his phone up mounted on the left and was
| pretty constantly interacting with it. Checking for new
| rides, watching a video, checking facebook. It was quite
| impressive how much content he consumed while at a red
| light and how dexterously he navigated to and through like
| 10 different apps.
|
| I very much got the feeling that this was a person that was
| terminally online and suspected that he's not alone. A bit
| alienating really, living in the same country speaking the
| same language but realizing there's this huge
| cultural/behavior divide between us.
| pixl97 wrote:
| >being terminally online to think that most other people
| are also terminally online.
|
| 50% of US teenagers describe themselves as terminally
| online.
|
| Go any place where people work and have time to goof, and
| you'll see them online.
|
| Go to a bar/club, you see people with a phone in front of
| their face.
|
| The idea there is an online and offline is crumbling
| further every day. Cameras are small, bandwidth is high in
| relation to our compression algorithms. Anything happening
| in the world can be broadcast live. More and more types of
| machines are coming online that accept digital instructions
| that make things happen in real life.
|
| Furthermore it's an odd rejection of the printing press on
| your part. That methods of information exchange affect the
| real world around them. If the book brought about the
| industrial revolution, what does an always available global
| communications network bring?
|
| At least based on your writing here on HN it seems like
| you're probably an introvert, or at least a person that
| likes quiet pondering and reflections. Reading a book would
| be far more interesting than most online activities, right?
| If I'm right and that is the case, then you may be missing
| just how many people are horrifically addicted to being on
| social media all the time.
| Ancalagon wrote:
| Hey it's what executives want. Fake everything. Slop and robots
| everywhere. Have at it, I say. Maybe then people will go outside
| again
| jsbisviewtiful wrote:
| My household just bought The Brick to start taking control of
| our phones and online usage. We've been very online for 15+
| years but are hoping to break the addiction cycle by simply
| blocking our devices from access. The timing feels right,
| mostly because sites like Instagram and Reddit are too
| braindead and spam+ad heavy these days. The executives and
| shareholders' desire for profits have already killed two of my
| biggest online pastimes.
| tartoran wrote:
| I heard of The brick and sounds very effective. Not many
| people realize the're addicted to their devices and most
| tragic of all is that kids who grew always online have no
| baseline to return to. As the OP mentions, I too hope that
| when it'll all become a junk pile people will eventually
| return to offline mode.
| tartoran wrote:
| Eventually that's what's going to happen if things keep on
| going in this direction and it looks like there's nothing
| stopping it so yeah, we're moving in circles. Old things will
| become new again.
| Oras wrote:
| I wish going outside again were possible, but what if most of
| the people you actually want to hang out with aren't in the
| same area?
|
| And for those who are near, the cost of having a coffee or a
| drink is too much now on top of expenses that are already
| stretching,
| Ancalagon wrote:
| go for a walk with your friends and a bottle of water
| pixl97 wrote:
| It's becoming rarer and rarer for people to have friends
| that are physically close to them unless they've stayed in
| the town they were born in.
|
| Modern technology kind of broke friendship in the sense
| that not very long ago maintaining friendships over any
| distance was expensive. That is it costs long distance
| fees, gas, or letter writing. Because of those expenses it
| was very common to make friends locally pretty quickly.
|
| But the internet broke that, especially modern social
| media. Wherever you moved your friends were a free website
| away, and long distance calling was gone. At first this
| seemed fine because sites connected you to your friends,
| but as the lock in happened it became a contest of getting
| you pissed off and showing you ads.
|
| Going to take a long time to socially fix this problem.
| Especially as some large number of people are going to talk
| to AI instead.
| BobBagwill wrote:
| Hi Friend, are you looking for a <insert product>bottled
| water</>? Here are the top 1000 brands of delicious bottled
| water! Water is very good for you! You are an ugly bag of
| mostly water! You do not have to enter your payment
| details, I remember them! Be assured that 1000 cases of
| 1000 brands of delicious bottled water are on their way to
| you now [Shipping charges may apply] at Peach Trees 2026,
| Sector 13, Mega-City One! Have an adequate day!!!
| bsaul wrote:
| I only see two outcomes for this problem : an internet of
| verified identities (start by uploading your ID card). Or a paid
| internet, where it doesn't matter who you are, but since you're
| going to pay for that email or that reddit account, the
| probability that it's AI spam is greatly reduced.
|
| And i'm looking forward to none of them.
| Invictus0 wrote:
| You could have easily said this twenty years ago when
| photoshopped photos were going viral on the early internet.
| Turns out people are completely fine with ai content and
| photoshop.
| csallen wrote:
| There's a huge difference between fake content and fake
| authors.
| crab_galaxy wrote:
| Fine in what way? What people?
|
| I have not seen or heard of a single person who is excited
| about AI generated blog posts, or TikToks, or commercials, or
| images. In fact it's the opposite, the internet coined the
| term AI slop, and my non-internet addicted friends hate the
| fact that chatGPT is killing the environment.
|
| The _only_ people I've ever seen champion AI are the few who
| are excited by the bleeding edge, and the many _many_
| peddlers
| officeplant wrote:
| The most common people just seem to be the elderly who
| don't care / don't know any better. The same ones who told
| us never to believe anything from the internet. They seem
| to be hooked on weird AI jesus facebook posts, daily AI
| generated motivational content, talking to the chatbot in
| Whatsapp, etc.
| Invictus0 wrote:
| There are probably more than 10^17 AI model executions
| occurring per day. I know in ye olde HN there are many
| Purists that are Too Good For AI, but the majority of the
| human race is consuming AI at a blinding rate, and if they
| really didn't like it, they would stop.
| girvo wrote:
| > and if they really didn't like it, they would stop.
|
| I can't really articulate why, but this doesn't feel true
| to me. There are plenty of things humans do especially at
| scale that we don't like, or we do that we don't like
| others doing, and don't stop
| pixl97 wrote:
| >The "Moloch problem" or "Moloch trap" refers to a
| scenario where individual, rational self-interest leads
| to a collective outcome that is disastrous for everyone.
| It describes competitive, zero-sum dynamics--often called
| a "race to the bottom"--where participants sacrifice
| long-term sustainability for short-term gains, resulting
| in a loss for all involved.
|
| Hence why we have to keep feeding the orphan crushing
| machine.
| pseudalopex wrote:
| Who wrote what you quoted?
| AngryData wrote:
| And how much of that consumption is voluntary or willful?
| I don't want to get AI slop in my search results or in my
| forum discussions, it muddys the water with shallow at
| best information, often in excessively verbose ways that
| helps hide its more subtle falsehoods that it picked up.
| gdulli wrote:
| Your comment doesn't make sense because the fact that "dead
| internet" has been coined since then (along with the
| popularization of "slop" and "hallucination") means there is
| a line and we have crossed it. Denial doesn't stand up to any
| scrutiny.
|
| It's too bad we weren't more skeptical about the ways
| emerging technologies would eventually be used against us.
| Some warned about it but many (including me) ignored them.
| Perhaps we could be forgiven for that naivete, but there's no
| excuse to be ignorant of what's going on now.
| yakattak wrote:
| Honestly the $10 barrier to SomethingAwful back in the day (and
| I guess now since it's still around) definitely made a huge
| difference. I hate the idea of subscribing to a site like HN or
| Reddit... but one time $10 to post? I'd accept that if it meant
| less bots.
| bonesss wrote:
| A $10 one time not-an-asshole fee is totally reasonable.
|
| History also shows you can take a $10 fee and maintain
| quality on SomethingAwful for quite some time.
| pndy wrote:
| Didn't that fee allowed to change account names of other
| users or something like that?
| yakattak wrote:
| You could pay another $10 (or maybe $15?) to change
| someone else's avatar.
| hinkley wrote:
| I wonder how much that functions as an age gate since kids
| usually don't have credit cards?
| ryandrake wrote:
| I would probably not pay $10 to post on HN, but many
| spammers who expect some kind of tangible return would pay
| that, so the fee just makes the problem worse.
| munk-a wrote:
| The spammers wouldn't pay it once though - the idea is
| that it's a good way to scale moderation. Each time an
| admin needs to ban a user there is a 10$ subsidy
| supporting that action - and if the bots come back then
| they get to pay 10$ to be banned again.
|
| Assuming the money isn't wasted and is actually used to
| fund moderation 10$ is probably comfortably above the
| cost to detect and ban most malicious users.
| jnettome wrote:
| That's basically what Valve does on cheaters with premier
| accounts on cs:go/cs2. And the revenue still growing up.
| AngryData wrote:
| Yeah, I love HN, but I wouldn't pay and I know many if
| not the majority of other people wouldn't. It would
| increase quality for awhile for sure, but what happens a
| year or two down the road? It would kill the user count
| and reduce comments and become less valuable over time.
| geek_at wrote:
| reminds me of Bill Gates in the 90s when asked about email
| spam. He said it would make sense to make an email cost like
| 1 cent so the spammers can't spam as much but this didn't sit
| right with the mindset of the people at the time.
| ryandrake wrote:
| Also, while real people probably would not be willing to
| pay to E-mail, spammers who are making money _would_ pay
| and consider it a cost of doing business. So the fee is
| having the opposite of its intended effect.
| 650 wrote:
| community idea:
|
| "my2cents"
|
| 0.02 to post or send a message
| selfsimilar wrote:
| Hashcash was a proof-of-work system that would have put a
| computational tax on email. I don't know what kept it from
| getting more traction other than simple chicken-and-egg
| network effects, but it's a good idea, and worth
| resurrecting.
|
| http://www.hashcash.org
| ramses0 wrote:
| Email2000 is the only answer:
| https://cr.yp.to/im2000.html
|
| TLDR: Mail storage is the sender's responsibility. The
| message isn't copied to the receiver. All the receiver
| needs is a brief notification that a message is
| available.
| apazzolini wrote:
| It's a beautiful system. And if you were a dipshit and got
| banned, you paid another $10 and hopefully learned your
| lesson.
| jacquesm wrote:
| Exponential backoff: second time is $100 etc.
| morkalork wrote:
| Now we could only pay $$ to overwrite people's social media
| pfps, now that'd be fun.
| zem wrote:
| I think metafilter had a similar system and it was definitely
| one of the higher quality forums
| entrox wrote:
| Given how easy it was to get banned, the :tenbux: were almost
| like a subscription.
| bakugo wrote:
| Odds are it would harm real discussions more than it would
| harm bot spam.
|
| The bots exist for a reason, usually to covertly advertise a
| product, and by themselves already cost money to run. Someone
| looking to astroturf their AI B2B SaaS would probably be more
| willing to pay $10 to post than a random user from a less
| wealthy country who just wants to leave a comment on an
| interesting discussion.
| twentyfiveoh1 wrote:
| payment would need a delay too. Pay $10 and then wait a week
| or so for the payment to clear without it being reversed.
| Hopefully that stops the card stealers from dumping as much
| as possible before getting booted.
|
| Could we just add complex and varied captcha to the comment &
| posting forms?
| QQ00 wrote:
| Someone, somewhere, salivating at the idea of combining both
| ideas. A paid for digital ID service that you can use as
| authentication for the web.
|
| Actually, if I'm thinking about it. Social Media platforms
| already started this with the paid blue badge for verification,
| and it's also monthly subscription. But it's for their
| respective platform only, not universal.
| geek_at wrote:
| Would that work though? Unless it checks your pulse every 30
| minutes I don't see how that would make it better. Bots would
| use stolen IDs for that. It would only contain it at a
| smaller scale probably
| booi wrote:
| There's definitely a price where it doesn't scale and that
| price is almost certainly lower than what people would be
| willing to pay once for themselves.
| pphysch wrote:
| It would have to integrate with some kind of official
| government ID, so that there can be extremely serious
| criminal penalties for ID theft. But that's something for
| the next republic, because the current one's justice system
| is unlikely to be up to the task.
| roxolotl wrote:
| Isn't this what World Coin is? Definitively not a fan of the
| project but I think the general goal is to get people to
| verify they are human and then somehow "waves hands
| blockchain" that can be carried with them on the internet.
| bakugo wrote:
| This 3-year old meme video is becoming more and more relevant
| by the day: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-gGLvg0n-uY
| jacquesm wrote:
| Friend of a friend verification could side-step that, if there
| is a good way to penalize bad actors willing to violate the
| principle.
| rpcope1 wrote:
| I guess we're coming full circle back to red offbrand Hacker
| News
| kubb wrote:
| I want cool cryptography where I can, e.g. verify where I'm
| writing from and what my age is without giving away any other
| information.
|
| Or if I want, I can verify that I'm myself, and eschew
| anonymity, and certain platforms should only accept
| contributions from people who don't hide their identity.
|
| Everyone knows who you are in the town square.
| retrocog wrote:
| IMHO, this is the exact instinct and there's a way to verify
| identity, location, and age without even having to share
| those directly.
| soco wrote:
| Switzerland just voted recently to officially implement
| Selective Disclosure JWT, which does exactly all that.
| Social network registration can ask "are you 18?" and run
| with that - and only that. Or the club entrance. Or
| whatever, because it's all controlled by yourself in your
| app.
| nathancahill wrote:
| I think this was the premise of Keybase?
| youainti wrote:
| Still jaded that went nowhere...
| jsheard wrote:
| It's kind of bizarre that Zoom is still bothering to keep
| the lights on at Keybase when it's been completely
| fossilized for six years now. The writing is so obviously
| on the wall that nobody should be relying on it for
| anything, and yet they just won't let it die.
| midtake wrote:
| It's not fossilized, it's just that no one uses it. Put
| hot chicks on there or make it mandatory for logging into
| Slack and suddenly everyone will be using keybase.io, and
| honestly I think web of trust is a good idea and if a
| webapp can make it seem easy or intuitive then I'm all
| for it.
|
| We're scratching our heads wondering why there's no
| forward motion when it's simply that no one is pushing
| it.
| jsheard wrote:
| Looks pretty fossilized to me: https://keybase.io/blog
|
| They haven't added or really changed anything since the
| acquisition AFAICT, it's just trucking along exactly as
| it was the day Zoom bought them out. Twitter account
| proofs were broken by the API changes years ago and
| nobody is at the wheel to fix or even just deprecate
| them.
|
| https://github.com/keybase/keybase-issues/issues/4200
| wizzwizz4 wrote:
| I don't hide my identity, but I've yet to find a "non-
| anonymous" platform that actually _accepts_ my identity.
| meowkit wrote:
| Zero Knowledge Proof schemes
|
| Applied ZKPs are being actively worked on in the blockchain
| sphere.
| littlestymaar wrote:
| Anonymity is important for many things. But on the flip side
| it's responsible of many issues with the internet today,
| because it makes moderation pretty much impossible (anyone
| can always just create a new account).
|
| What we're missing is a way to have cryptographically secure
| pseudonymity: you log in to a website, you don't give any
| information whatsoever, but you cannot make two different
| accounts.
| pixl97 wrote:
| Most likely because your second sentence is impossible in
| one way or another.
|
| Even if it's some kind of government encoded key,
| governments cannot be trusted to create imaginary people
| and hand them out to companies like palantir for large
| scale population manipulation.
| ekropotin wrote:
| What stops someone from handing over their idendity's private
| keys to an agent?
| gr8tyeah wrote:
| I pay for my ISP and the financial institution the money comes
| from has age verification
|
| Social media, HN and the rest of internet first business can go
| broke
|
| I don't see anyone out there propping me up directly. Why would
| I give crap if some open source hacker or etsy dealer doesn't
| have a home next month? Yeah I don't because they're not caring
| in the same way
|
| Thoughts and prayers everyone else but your effort is clear,
| not going to be 1984'd into caring for people who clearly don't
| care back.
| hinkley wrote:
| Verified entities defecting by using AI to generate their
| content for them will break this.
| Pigalowda wrote:
| We can use verification mountain dew cans. No big deal.
| hinkley wrote:
| I can't recall the last time I did the Dew. Should I turn
| myself in to a reeducation camp?
| rpcope1 wrote:
| I recall a WSJ article during the 2024 election that was
| about the fact that Tim Walz and JD Vance were both big
| consumers of Diet Mountain Dew, and how basically America
| ran across the board on various types of Mountain Dew.
| Can you really call yourself "American" if you're not
| doing the dew?
| hinkley wrote:
| I drank enough for three people in college. My lifetime
| average is probably still in the margin of error.
| armchairhacker wrote:
| There's a third option: web-of-trust. https://lobste.rs/ has
| some problems but not bot spam.
| dehsge wrote:
| Members only comment blogs. Where you need an invite to comment
| also solves the problem. You need to know a real human to get
| access.
| MeetingsBrowser wrote:
| That might raise the initial barrier, but it assumes every
| user behaves appropriately.
|
| All it takes is one invited user to open the door to bots.
| Bombthecat wrote:
| Then we go back to torrent sites.
|
| Invite only. You get a number of invites per year etc. And
| once a year an open door or so
| throwaway94275 wrote:
| Blog admin sees who invited the bots and recursively kicks
| that account and any invited by it.
| MeetingsBrowser wrote:
| I invite myself multiple times in addition to other real
| humans. Then I use my duplicate accounts to invite bots.
| NoMoreNicksLeft wrote:
| >Where you need an invite to comment also solves the problem.
| You need to know a real human to get access.
|
| Bittorrent trackers, as absolute retarded as they are, have
| performed this experiment for us and the lesson we're
| supposed to learn is that this does not work. Someone,
| somewhere, has an incentive to invite the wrong sort
| eventually, which because of the social network graph math
| stuff, eventually means "soon". Once that happens, that bot
| will invite 10 trillion other bots.
| DiskoHexyl wrote:
| Actually it does work for those invite-only trackers,
| especially in niche fields.
|
| Unlike most public trackers which are either dead or on a
| life-support, member-only and invite-only sites are still
| kicking.
|
| And you are personally responsible for your invitee
| TacticalCoder wrote:
| > Members only comment blogs.
|
| There, sadly, needs to be some gatekeeping and then it can
| work.
|
| For example I'm member, since years, of a petrolhead forum
| where it works like that: a fancy car brand, with lots of
| "tifosi" (and you don't necessarily want all these would-be
| owners on the forum). To be part of the forum you must be
| introduced by some other members who have met you in real-
| life and who confirm that you did show up with a car of that
| brand.
|
| If you're not a "confirmed owner", you can only access the
| forum in read-only mode.
|
| It's not 100% foolproof but it does greatly raise the bar.
|
| It's international too: people do travel and they organize
| meetups / see each others at cars and coffee, etc.
|
| Or take a real extreme, maybe the most expensive social
| network: the Bloomberg terminal. People/companies paying
| $30K/year or so per seat each year probably won't be going to
| let employees hook a LLM to chat for them and risk screwing
| their reputation. Although I take it you never know.
|
| It is the way it is but gatekeeping does exist and it does
| work.
| hackingonempty wrote:
| > an internet of verified identities (start by uploading your
| ID card)
|
| That is Facebook. I hear it is full of bots posting under
| verified identities.
| basch wrote:
| How would you overcome a local llm embedded into a keyboard?
| apitman wrote:
| People can also move to smaller communities
| drdaeman wrote:
| Neither of those solves it, just tries to conserve the status
| quo.
|
| The issue, as I understand it, is literally a new Eternal
| November, just that instead of "noobs" there are "clankers"
| this time.
|
| Personally, I don't give a flying fuck about things like
| gender, organs (like skin or genitalia) or absence thereof, or
| anything alike when someone posts something online, unless
| posted content is strongly related to one of those topics.
| Ideas matter no matter who or what produces them. Species fit
| into the same aspects-I-don't-care-about list just fine - on
| the Internet nobody knows^W cares you're a dog. Or a bunch of
| matrices in a trench coat. As long as you behave socially
| appropriate.
|
| The problem with bots is that they're not just noobs - unlike
| us meatbags they don't just do wrong and stupid things but
| can't possibly learn to stop (because models are static).
| Solving that, I think, is the true solution, bringing Internet
| back to life. Anything else seems to be just addressing the
| correlations to the symptoms.
|
| (Yea, I'm leaning towards technooptimist and transhumanist
| views - I was raised in culture that had a lot of those, and
| was sold a dream of a progress that transcends worlds, and
| haven't found a reason to denounce that. Your mileage may
| vary.)
| raincole wrote:
| It turns out that Twitter selling the blue marks is the correct
| direction, but no one would admit it.
| agumonkey wrote:
| I wonder what would be the effect of a minuscule tax (0,01c) on
| network use. Could reuse addiction, abuse, create a fund to
| finance other things.
| JohnMakin wrote:
| Paid option doesn't really deter this behavior, it encourages
| it - a botter will see a price tag on a "real" account (see
| what happened to twitter's blue checkmark sub) and go oh goody,
| I can pay for people to think I'm real.
|
| If you make the price high enough sure, but I'm unsure you can
| find the right price to simultaneously 1) deter bot traffic and
| 2) be appealing to actual users.
| ticulatedspline wrote:
| Kinda been dead a while, also not dead there's still good stuff
| out there. Lots of it, but it's in the corners and under the
| carpets. Things created in the original spirit of the "let me
| show you my interests" that the older web was built on.
|
| While back was toying with the idea of building out a new web on
| a new protocol (not http based). Thus no existing browser would
| understand it. Deliberately obscure to force a "Reset" button of
| sorts.
|
| Though would be short lived, over time we've learned to ruin
| stuff faster and faster. I'm not sure there's any network so
| alien that it could hold on to that golden era of innocence from
| the past, it would be found then expediently and expertly
| exploited.
| moritz wrote:
| https://geminiprotocol.net/docs/specification.gmi
|
| [no, not that gemini]
| drykiss wrote:
| Maybe the only parts of a future internet people will actually
| hang out in is going to be one where any profit-making is
| completely de-incentivized. No recommendations. No product
| reviews. No opinions on companies or services. More slow web.
| Maybe we'll slowly head back to what websites used to look like
| when Yahoo was the biggest search engine.
| bonesss wrote:
| Back then the day Yahoo was a manually curated index of
| submitted & verified sites with search capabilities.
|
| Wild-ass business idea: what if Yahoo 2026 recreated Yahoo 1996
| and also any of the video sites it bought up back in the day
| get relaunched as deshittified ad-selling mechanisms to fund
| the whole thing... there's gotta be Yahoo 1996 money in
| whatever scraps YouTube is missing.
|
| It used to be faster and easier to follow actual content.
| PaulKeeble wrote:
| An index is also a lot more discoverable for content like the
| others. The issues of classification still exist its not a
| tree like they tried to make it but indexes based on human
| effort on value I think still have their place
| Computer0 wrote:
| Just yesterday in a local non profit organization's Signal
| groupchat a user who had just offered to take meeting minutes the
| day prior emitted an open claw error message to the chat. They
| are now banned from the organization.
| toddmorey wrote:
| I see many, many startups that promise to be an automated
| marketing agent that will do this exact thing: scour sites for
| conversations and post links to your product.
|
| Obviously that burns down the human Internet, but it's also a
| business that will have a short lifespan and bring about its own
| demise.
|
| I guess they don't care about anything enduring as long as they
| can grab some quick cash on the way out.
| girvo wrote:
| > I guess they don't care about anything enduring as long as
| they can grab some quick cash on the way out.
|
| As far as I can tell, that is basically all AI-related
| businesses. Including those non-AI ones jumping on the
| bandwagon to throw all their employees in the bin and expect
| 10x productivity somehow: if they are right and these tools do
| become that good, well the economy as we know it is over as
| white collar knowledge work disappears.
|
| But hey, we made money in those few years right!
| pixl97 wrote:
| At least in the US very few industries actually seem to be
| about making a product.
|
| A good example is this, car companies don't make cars for the
| most part, they make loans. Financial companies first, car
| companies second.
|
| Consolidation, collusion, and rent-seeking behaviors by
| companies are going out of control too. The fact AI companies
| can do what they are doing has much to do with the previous
| brick and mortar businesses weakening any business
| regulations down to nothing.
| D13Fd wrote:
| > A good example is this, car companies don't make cars for
| the most part, they make loans. Financial companies first,
| car companies second.
|
| I get that this is true from a certain point of view. But
| car companies clearly compete in a very healthy way on
| features and quality.
|
| In fact, cars are a great example of a market where the
| companies clearly care about making the product, and the
| competition between them has driven that products to
| incredible heights. Cars these days are vastly better than
| they were in the past.
| august- wrote:
| do you think small, invite-only communities will end up being the
| last holdout for genuine human conversation online? or will bots
| eventually infiltrate those too?
| levkk wrote:
| Lobsters is like that, basically a ghost town compared to
| Reddit. If you block engagement, you will succeed.
| esseph wrote:
| > Lobsters
|
| Invite only, very exclusionary. Private club with public
| posting? Worst of both worlds.
| daedrdev wrote:
| It's absolutely why discord is popular.
| floatrock wrote:
| Bots will absolutely infiltrate them eventually, but I think
| it's the only solution.
|
| Internet promised ability to connect with anyone anywhere
| around the world. It felt limitless and infinite.
|
| Turns out in an infinite world, the loudest voices are the
| ragebaits, the algorithmically-amplified, or the outright
| scammers.
|
| Human social brain doesn't work in an infinite world, it works
| for a Dunbar's Number world. And we all like our psuedo-
| anonymous soapboxes (I'm standing on one right now), but trick
| will be to realize that the glitter of infinite quantity isn't
| the same as small-scale connection.
| pixl97 wrote:
| At least for some time I imagine a hybridization may pop up.
| For example you grow a community of humans that keeps bots
| under control. Because of this all actors are humans, and
| valuable because of that.
|
| Hence you'll end up with defectors getting paid to siphon off
| all the conversations to some ad companies that will work on
| tying them with real world identities and then serving them
| more detailed ads in the places they cannot avoid interfacing
| with the open internet.
| knaik94 wrote:
| I think most small communities will stand bot-free because
| there's little incentive to have bot engage with it.
|
| But I wonder if there's a size of conversation after which
| people will still choose AI assisted summaries. Discord
| had/(has?) a feature where it used LLMs summarize and then
| notify you about a discussion happening.
| d--b wrote:
| Well, it's not such terrible news, is it?
|
| I get nostalgia for the 90s/00s, but that time was never coming
| back anyways.
|
| The best we can hope now is for people to be less online. And if
| it comes from people drowning in AI crap, I think it's kind of
| funny.
| righthand wrote:
| I don't think people are going to get offline and the best we
| can probably do is create free and open p2p platforms that
| don't require registration necessarily to use. And allow people
| to control their own databases. A lot of communication is
| locked behind corporations that run the services that are
| building these tracking and identification databases.
|
| I actually think it's more about getting people off browsers
| and other tracking software.
| pixl97 wrote:
| >create free and open p2p platforms that don't require
| registration necessarily to use
|
| And how do you create this without it being overran by bots,
| spam, and people posting gargantuan amounts of porn?
|
| >allow people to control their own databases
|
| There are two types of people that want to control databases.
| 1: The freedom seeking type who want information sovereignty.
| 2: The type of people that want to hoover up as much data as
| possible for money and power.
|
| Guess who has more ability to control the world out of those
| two.
|
| Lastly, most people want to use curated websites free of spam
| and content they don't want. _Almost nobody_ wants to do that
| curation themselves. Hence curated platforms will attract the
| most people via network effects.
|
| ah shoot, that wasn't lastly...
|
| > getting people off browsers
|
| and putting them on what exactly? phone apps, that's not
| better at all. Multimedia attracts people like flies to poop.
| It's seemingly a natural human response to move to an
| application that is more visually interesting _regardless_ of
| it 's security safety.
| chuckadams wrote:
| The funny thing about the LinkedIn post is that the parody is
| dead-on as to the kind of mindless slop a human on LI would post.
| LinkedIn was the Dead Internet before LLMs were even a thing. And
| I guess AI doesn't even have to be posting everything for Dead
| Internet Theory to hold, it just has to be the default perception
| in order to cause everything to be treated skeptically.
|
| I think I'll just take up blacksmithing.
| halyconWays wrote:
| The only place that reminds me of the old Internet is VRChat,
| funny enough. You're guaranteed to be interacting with a nerdy,
| culturally similar human who's present in the moment.
| amiantos wrote:
| Why is it being called dead internet theory when, as far as I can
| tell, what's really happening is that big centralized systems are
| being overrun with bots? The internet existed and was pretty
| great before these large centralized systems came into being.
|
| Anyone can still run a blog/website, and/or their own discourse
| server. There's no need to mourn for these centralized systems
| that largely existed only to exploit us in some way. Let's
| celebrate "small internet theory", an internet where exploitation
| is effectively impossible because every company that tries it is
| overrun with AI bots. That sounds awesome to me personally, but I
| was also up late last night watching clips of Conan O'Brien from
| 1999 and the nostalgia for that era / what the internet was like
| back then hit me so hard it was almost painful.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _Why is it being called dead internet theory_
|
| "A social networking system simulates a user using a language
| model trained using training data generated from user
| interactions performed by that user. The language model may be
| used for simulating the user when the user is absent from the
| social networking system, for example, when the user takes a
| long break or if the user is deceased" [1].
|
| (More seriously:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dead_Internet_theory)
|
| [1] https://patents.google.com/patent/US12513102B2
| amiantos wrote:
| So why isn't it called "dead social media theory"? The
| internet is not only social media services, though I
| understand a lot of people seem to think that without
| centralized social media services there is no reason to use
| the internet.
| pixl97 wrote:
| Have you been on the internet at large lately? With google
| you may get one authoritative site on something and 50 bot
| copies of the site on different domains. Sometimes the
| stolen site is the number one return. Also, if you ran
| sites years/decades ago, you realized way back then the any
| local user posting was getting overran by spammers/bots.
| Now is so much worse that it's not worth doing in most
| cases.
|
| So, most posts on social media aren't real.
|
| Most user posts on non-social media are spam/not real.
|
| Most websites in searches are copies/ad spam.
|
| So yea, dead internet reality.
| amiantos wrote:
| I spend all day every day on the Internet and I don't
| share your perspective. I might dislike centralized
| social media and yearn for a bygone era, but just in the
| past two days I had a very positive interaction with
| multiple real humans in the Commodore 64 subreddit that
| helped solve a problem I was having that isn't documented
| anywhere else on the internet yet. So then I went on my
| personal blog and blogged about it, which will get it out
| there on Google and help others. In this way, I am
| helping to keep the internet alive, I guess. "Be the
| change you want to see in the world," and all that.
| dylan604 wrote:
| > So then I went on my personal blog and blogged about
| it, which will get it out there on Google and help
| others.
|
| That's some of the boldest optimism I think I've seen in
| awhile. Maybe your blog is more popular than I assume,
| but still
| amiantos wrote:
| Traffic stats for my primary blog are public (I only
| started using simple analytics in December so there's
| only two full months of data):
| https://dashboard.simpleanalytics.com/amiantos.net
| pixl97 wrote:
| "You can do everything right and still lose".
|
| At the end of the day there is no real penalty for being
| a bad actor on the internet. They get unlimited retries
| on spamming and otherwise causing problems. In many ways
| this helps Google entrench itself as the search/ad
| company. No one else has the money or compute resources
| to continuously update the internet. Furthermore they
| have told us it's their job to shove unskippable ads in
| our faces. They'll gladly let the public internet die in
| the future if they can push out their own version of
| "SafeInternet by Google/now with more ads!".
| amiantos wrote:
| Every single one of your comments in this thread is some
| slippery slope stuff where you think corporations and
| federal government are going to work together to kill off
| the (public?) internet. It's okay that you feel that way,
| even if it's just a big ol' fallacy, but you don't need
| to repeat it in six different places. You made your
| point, you think the internet is doomed no matter what
| happens, great, let's move on.
| TitaRusell wrote:
| It is inevitable that in a few years we can't even tell a
| real user from a bot without forensic analysis.
|
| When AI can post a million times a day the internet is
| FUBAR.
| bfeist wrote:
| 100% agree that this is what it should be called. To argue
| that big websites being big makes them equivalent to the
| whole Internet is absurd. Besides, I love the idea of the
| only recourse to be to go back to independently run
| information websites.
| dylan604 wrote:
| For the younger generation, social sites _are_ the
| internet. They open an app on their device, they don 't
| go to sites by searching the web. I've seen people
| perform a web search in an app store thinking it was the
| same thing.
| jareklupinski wrote:
| commercial internet services would prefer that you forget
| the internet without them can in fact exist
| burnto wrote:
| Yeah I agree. It's an acute problem on social media
| platforms where there's a market force incentivizing it. If
| you're mostly engaging in specific niche interactions with
| known communities or people, it's not nearly so prevalent.
| The internet still works fine as a whole.
| genpfault wrote:
| > A social networking system simulates a user using a
| language model trained using training data generated from
| user interactions performed by that user
|
| Google People[1]?
|
| [1]: https://qntm.org/perso
| Lerc wrote:
| It reminds me of the cartoon of two people on an escalator that
| stops working and one says to the other "Last time this
| happened I was stuck for four hours"
|
| I'm thinking there might have been a deeper message than the
| moment of ridiculousness.
| robotswantdata wrote:
| How would the small internet fight the bots?
|
| Aggressive moderation? Disable UGC?
| amiantos wrote:
| In an ideal/fantasy world under "small internet theory",
| every online friend group would have their own Discourse
| server set up (similar to how friend groups use Discord now),
| and traffic/usage of that Discourse server is so small that
| it would be a waste of resources to try to swamp it with bot
| traffic, and on top of that, everyone on the Discourse server
| are friends who can vouch for new members who join, so no bot
| could join the Discourse server because no one would know who
| they are.
|
| I understand that some may feel we are losing something, by
| not being able to go onto a website and anonymously talk to
| 1000s of other anonymous people we do not know, but I do not
| think that has actually been a net positive and this bot
| issue demonstrates the issue quite well: if you do not know
| who you are talking to, you do not know if they are telling
| the truth, or if they are someone you should even listen to
| at all, and now they might not even be human. So why do it? I
| would rather talk to my friends, people I've met in meatspace
| or over voice chat in a game, people who I can vouch for and
| that I know I can respect and trust.
|
| Let's build small communities of real friends who recognize
| each other and spend time with them on the internet, in that
| way the internet will never die.
| pixl97 wrote:
| >Let's build small communities of
|
| And 10 minutes later Texas demands you identify all your
| users age when someone posts a porn image somewhere.
| Facebook will gleefully laugh all the way to the court
| saying we need such internet ID to entrench themselves.
|
| >, in that way the internet will never die.
|
| You mean in the exact way the internet used to be... then
| died?
|
| I'm guessing your GenX or a Xennial, it's how we think.
| Relationships and friendships are hard things to acquire
| and keep and you have to work to do it otherwise friends
| disappear. The thing is the younger generations mostly
| don't think that way. They have mostly always lived in a
| world where connections are cheap and easy to maintain.
| Attempting to move to a system that is more difficult will
| be very difficult for them.
| ianbutler wrote:
| > Attempting to move to a system that is more difficult
| will be very difficult for them.
|
| That doesn't make it wrong, it just might make the last
| 20 years a mistake.
| pixl97 wrote:
| Large scale mistakes are very difficult to fix and have
| entrenched groups to ensure they continue. See: Internal
| combustion engines, Cigarettes.
| thesz wrote:
| HashCash.
| kjkjadksj wrote:
| It would be interesting if we had some sort of local
| verification in the real world. As in picking up some key
| from some physical place or having it sent to some physical
| place. Some services like nextdoor are set up like this and
| mail out account auth to make sure the user is local to their
| next door group. Obviously you can imagine how it might be
| abused but it is impossible to do so at the scale you can
| abuse digital only methods.
| robotswantdata wrote:
| Pokemon go was ahead of its time
| ahofmann wrote:
| Small internet isn't very attractive for most bots. Also, I
| use websites that are invite-only. This is effectively a web
| of trust. This works pretty well, bots aren't a real problem
| there.
| jasondigitized wrote:
| Run your site like an old school BBS. You only run into these
| problems when you invite the world to your site and want big
| numbers. You don't have to do that.
| ambicapter wrote:
| Anyone can run a blog/website and be subject to AI bot crawlers
| using terabytes of your bandwidth for no reason, yeah.
| ahofmann wrote:
| Bandwidth is only expensive in the US, somehow. Here in
| Germany I didn't bother about bots and their additional
| traffic since 1998 (there are other annoying things about
| bots though).
| idop wrote:
| More than that, it's practically impossible to find good
| specialized, human-written websites. Search engines don't
| find them, all results are AI garbage. With no real ability
| to be discovered, there's no incentive to maintain such
| websites too, and so the cycle of slop continues.
| dwedge wrote:
| Kagi small Web, though their rss only seems to show 5
| updates a day across thousands of sites. Also search for
| indieweb
| dwedge wrote:
| If this encourages those people to stop sending hundreds of
| megabytes of crap per page load of their text content, it
| might be a good thing
| xdennis wrote:
| > Let's celebrate "small internet theory", an internet where
| exploitation is effectively impossible because every company
| that tries it is overrun with AI bots.
|
| But isn't it even harder for small forums to resist the robot
| onslaught without the trillion dollar valuations to fund it?
|
| Although, part of the reason Facebook/Linkedin/Twitch/etc have
| bots is because those companies secretly want them, in order to
| inflate their usage numbers.
| chistev wrote:
| > Although, part of the reason Facebook/Linkedin/Twitch/etc
| have bots is because those companies secretly want them, in
| order to inflate their usage numbers.
|
| Yes, they are disincentivized to get rid of bots.
| pixl97 wrote:
| The people that want to get rid of the bots get crushed
| because said botting technology is hyper advanced and cheap
| to use because of the massive scale of social media. This
| ends up with huge numbers of them getting put behind
| services like cloudflare further consolidating the
| internet.
| Retr0id wrote:
| We're talking right now on a centralized system that's slowly
| being overrun by bots. We can survive without, but I'll miss
| it.
| georgemcbay wrote:
| I understand your concern!
|
| Would you like me to help you create a copy of this
| centralized system with a CAPTCHA to filter out the bots?
| jasondigitized wrote:
| Bring back BBS. Getting into the good ones was a process back
| in the day.
| amiantos wrote:
| It's funny you mention this, I got a Commodore 64 Ultimate
| the other day and one of the first things I did was load up
| the BBS client and browse some BBSes. Those are from before
| my time (my first PC was a Compaq Pentium 166) so I never got
| to experience them for real. But if the rest of the internet
| collapses under the weight of bot traffic, BBSes are quite
| nice.
| glimshe wrote:
| BBSs have been in theory replaced, but in reality they
| haven't even been approached by modern social media. Small
| forums full of dedicated users, often local. So many great
| memories.
| gpderetta wrote:
| signal/noise
| Krei-se wrote:
| Your welcome to link your proven human page with mine.
|
| Id even run a dedicated UT99 server lol
| raincole wrote:
| > Anyone can still run a blog/website, and/or their own
| discourse server
|
| Including bots.
| obsidianbases1 wrote:
| > what's really happening is that big centralized systems are
| being overrun with bots? The internet existed and was pretty
| great before these large centralized systems came into being.
|
| This is a great point. Suddenly, I'm looking forward to this
| xorvoid wrote:
| I generally agree with this, but I think the small internet
| hasn't succeeded in building social replacements for the
| "centralized systems". The internet is a social technology. So
| for this to be viable, the small internet needs an answer.
|
| Occasionally, someone mentions RSS as a solution. That's only a
| small component of the solution.
| zedlasso wrote:
| it was originally called zombie web but that didn't catch so it
| turned into this.
| keithnz wrote:
| No, the old internet wasn't that great. There were so many
| problems. Finding things was hard, buying things was hard,
| integrating things was hard, compatibility was hard, everything
| was super fractured. It felt great at the time because you
| discovered all these random things and it was all novel at the
| time. Centralized (Or decentralized collaborative services like
| IRC or Usenet) really unlocked the power of the internet.
| raw_anon_1111 wrote:
| And who is going to know your blog exists? If they search on
| Google they are going to get an answer from AI and stop
| dwedge wrote:
| Kagi small web, for one
| amiantos wrote:
| Who cares if anyone knows my blog exists? I'm not writing my
| blog to farm engagement as I do not run ads on my blog. I
| write on my blog because I want to write my thoughts down and
| project them into the world. Whether or not anyone sees them
| is pretty unimportant.
|
| If my writing helps someone via them hitting my blog directly
| or them getting the answer via AI aggregation, mission
| accomplished.
| AngryData wrote:
| In my experience AI doesn't give the answer you want because
| it gives the most shallow and basic, many times so basic as
| to be worthless, response. Then I either scroll through 20
| results hoping I see one that isn't an AI writeup of the
| exact same incomplete source, or I give up and search out a
| specific site I know exists that isn't AI written for that
| information.
| dwedge wrote:
| In some ways it might be positive. My girlfriend had a small
| addiction to Instagram reels. The flood of AI generated videos
| on there just killed the magic for her and she stopped using it
| E-Reverance wrote:
| Happy to hear of this anecdata, as it gives me hope something
| similar will happen to my family
| coldtea wrote:
| > _Anyone can still run a blog /website, and/or their own
| discourse server._
|
| And those will also get chocked with fake bot "members" and bot
| comments.
|
| Plus, if "anyone can still run a blog/website", this includes
| bots. AI created and operated blogs/websites, luring in people
| who think they're reading actual human posts.
| tracerbulletx wrote:
| Parasitic zombie internet.
| _pdp_ wrote:
| The Internet was always full of bots. Not chatbots, but bots like
| crawlers, scrapers, automated scripts. That was fine.
|
| What the OP is talking about is bots that participate in public
| discourse. That's the actual problem.
|
| I think it can be handled to a degree though. Private
| communities, private Internet on top of existing Internet, and
| social media platforms without public APIs and with strict,
| enforceable ToS would all help.
| alex1138 wrote:
| 1) Holy fuck I'd borderline forgotten about Numa Numa
|
| 2) Reddit... doesn't have much of an incentive to fix the
| astroturf issue. The site "organically" censors, a lot
| aerhardt wrote:
| I have to use LinkedIn to sell. I only occasionally look at the
| feed but I am ruthlessly muting or blocking anyone who is
| blatantly foisting their AI drivel on other humans. I've had
| enough of this shit.
| robotswantdata wrote:
| unfollow works too
| aerhardt wrote:
| I've been unfollowing people for a while and the issue is
| rarely from within my network anymore... the feed shows a lot
| of posts from AI foisters who I don't even follow.
| robotswantdata wrote:
| Same. LinkedIn is now unusable for me. Will try blocking!
| empath75 wrote:
| Reddit in particular is overwhelmed by bots. There are small
| niche communities where it's mostly people talking to people, but
| the vast majority of popular posts are made by bots, voted on by
| bots and commented on by bots.
|
| It's not even like commercial astroturfing, it's just karma
| farming and public sentiment manipulation.
| demaga wrote:
| I think it makes sense, since most people don't post anything
| or at least don't post much. So someone (something) must fill
| in this void.
| TitaRusell wrote:
| Presumably advertisers still want real human eyeballs?
|
| Or maybe we have finally accepted that our entire economy is
| the naked emperor.
| rustystump wrote:
| Everyone here is so far from a normie it is almost painful. Dead
| internet is an outcome of supply and demand.
|
| The fundamental issue is that a plurality of humans pref the
| direction things have gone and are moving in. Is it a good
| direction? By this crowd's standards, no.
|
| To be clear, i dont like either but when i watch the speed kids
| swap between 5 insta accounts and 3 reddit accounts, it seems the
| majority are happy with it.
| twoodfin wrote:
| Let's not kid ourselves: Every day, multiple "I just asked the
| LLM to clean up my notes" posts are voted up to the front page
| here, often with highly engaged, appreciative comment sections.
|
| LLM's for all their faults are well-trained to produce what we
| want.
| kmbfjr wrote:
| Lots of interesting ideas to fix it, I'll offer mine: let it die.
|
| The grand bargain of the web is gone and it ain't coming back.
| pixl97 wrote:
| Dead internet prophecy.
| alexchantavy wrote:
| Vrei sa pleci dar numa numa iei numa numa iei numa numa numa iei
|
| bring back the old internet
| wrs wrote:
| > And of course let's not forget AI spamming OSS repos with
| nonsensical PRs. What's even funnier is when the reviewer turns
| out to be AI too.
|
| What's even funnier is this is literally how "agent teams" (the
| latest hotness) work. They just do it all on your laptop rather
| than spamming GitHub.
| jesse_dot_id wrote:
| Thankfully, humans excel at finding solutions to problems.
| pixl97 wrote:
| Most of the time, by making more problems.
| floathub wrote:
| Emacs will solve this too:
|
| https://github.com/tanrax/org-social
|
| :-)
| starkeeper wrote:
| I just searched for a video game tip: "Bannerlord II where to
| sell clay?" and google's top result was an AI generated page FOR
| THIS GAME that directed me to ebay.
|
| Also, I forgot to mention: google AI overview included the AI
| garbage page as it's answer.
|
| It's dead Jim.
| dom96 wrote:
| I think that we are going to see more and more of this. To the
| point where most interactions you have online will likely be with
| bots. So I started building something that actually has a chance
| of fixing it: a social network for only humans.
|
| I wrote about it here: https://blog.picheta.me/post/the-future-
| of-social-media-is-h...
| jruohonen wrote:
| So, as I share his thoughts, I've been wondering: why haven't we
| seen any real innovations in this space?
|
| Mastodon wasn't really it and neither was Substack, although
| maybe it got slightly closer. TikTok and Telegram, maybe, for
| different reasons, but they'll face the same destiny.
|
| I'd suppose the much despised "mainstream media" might be a
| winner here eventually. But beyond that, I am thinking about
| something like the following:
|
| https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2026/mar/10/uk-societ...
| talkingtab wrote:
| It is the corporate internet - the one by the corporation, for
| the corporation that is dead. Or at least everything in it is
| dead. The death blow is AI, but it was almost there anyway.
|
| The good news is that the community internet - for the community,
| by the community - is just starting.
|
| What is a community internet? The internet is layered protocols.
| UDP, ICMP, TCP, HTTP, HTTPS etc. The community internet is just a
| new layer of protocols. Coming soon.
| chewbacha wrote:
| Sure, but just for reference: https://xkcd.com/927/
| nszceta wrote:
| This is the founding thesis of the dead internet theory:
| https://forum.agoraroad.com/index.php?threads/dead-internet-...
| Kapura wrote:
| People need to look long and hard at how they are using
| technology, and ask how technology should be used. Every single
| technological trend for the past 10 years has been smoke and
| mirrors, promising utility of an iPhone but with deliverables
| closer to a blockchain full of links to jpegs.
| mrkramer wrote:
| Tbh I don't care if I speak to a human or a bot as long as they
| are "useful"; by useful I mean if they provide me useful
| information but then again humans can provide unique information
| that bots can not. But I think identity is not relevant anymore,
| what's relevant is reputation. People think internet bots are bad
| per se but we need to build useful bots, just like there are chat
| bots that are useful on various platforms like Telegram, Discord
| or whatever other platforms people use.
| ninjagoo wrote:
| This is a great point. In the past and present, sites like
| slashdot and HN depend on the users to achieve that moderation
| to surface useful comments and keep 'spam' down.
|
| Now, there are tools to achieve that kind of moderation
| automagically, and even better, consistently. This is an
| opportunity to build out a community that is useful for
| everyone. The first platform that guarantees anonymity
| supported by human-independent moderation will likely attract
| significant and persistent user support.
|
| There is still the issue of cost - how does the community pay
| for such a platform? Perhaps like the Google of yore - very
| limited ads? Avoiding enshittification can be done through the
| Wikipedia model - non-profit to manage the whole thing?
| vivid242 wrote:
| In nature, sometimes death is the prerequisite of life: Think of
| the dead leaves on the forest ground.
|
| I think the age of algorithmic curation is dead - but it may,
| through a ,,RenaiSSance", bring back true human connection.
| butterlesstoast wrote:
| Really makes me wonder. Is there anything we can do to revive the
| internet or is it time to let the golden age go? : (
| nwhnwh wrote:
| What is wrong with real life?
| abcde666777 wrote:
| For a while video was a holdout of sorts - e.g. if someone posted
| video content of themselves or their voice you could trust a real
| person was behind it.
|
| But now convincing fake video generation is easily accessible, so
| one more holdout stands to fall.
|
| It does seem like some kind of ID system is going to be the only
| way. Sucky but inevitable.
|
| I often have the following thought: technological advancement,
| for all its boons, inevitably leads down destructive roads in the
| long run. Sooner or later we open a pandora's box.
| bytehowl wrote:
| The technology isn't inherently evil. The actual problem is the
| way our societies are set up, ironically incentivizing
| sociopathic behaviour even among members of a single nation,
| nevermind when geopolitics get involved.
| mvdtnz wrote:
| > convincing fake video generation is easily accessible, so one
| more holdout stands to fall.
|
| Is it though? I have absolutely no doubt we'll get there but I
| haven't seen any evidence of this in the wild. My Youtube feed
| is becoming overrun with content with clearly generated scripts
| and often generated narration. But I haven't seen a single
| instance (that I'm aware of) of generated video being passed
| off as real.
|
| Yes I have seen hundreds of tweets and reddit posts showcasing
| game-changing video technologies like AI face replacement and
| yes they look incredible in the 45 second demo reels, but every
| instance I have seen of real-world usage was comically bad.
| RobRivera wrote:
| Maybe we should get more Jannies. They only cost zero dollars and
| zero cents
| irusensei wrote:
| I imagine soon there will be small scale Tailscale style semi
| private networks popping up with no AI content and no regards to
| draconic identity collection laws.
| Bombthecat wrote:
| We are closing in on the "personal bubble internet" bots create
| news, videos and comments for your personal liking.
| protocolture wrote:
| I reckon we are going find an inverse metcalfes at some stage
| where the value of a network is proportional to the square of its
| connected users, minus the square of the number of connected
| bots. Heck I would be surprised if meta hadnt figured this out,
| or wasnt on the way to figuring it out.
| lovich wrote:
| Ironic that there's a dead bot comment at the bottom of this
| article trying to pose as a human
| sebringj wrote:
| Isn't this more about identity crisis? Not in the psychological
| sense but in the internet sense? Who is real who isn't? Crypto
| proof of work idk? Your profile like d LinkedIn or Hacker News or
| something gives your clawbot x credits worth of legit automated
| queries or rate limits on your behalf? It could be flipped upside
| down where we don't spend our eyes off on reading websites
| anymore, it just goes and gets it for us but I may be
| hallucinating.
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