Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

AI: Markets for Lemons, and the Great Logging Off

fortressofdoors.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

231–240 of 292 posts

Re: AI: Markets for Lemons, and the Great Logging Off

#231

Post by pessimizer »

LarryMullins wrote: post #209
wyldfire wrote: post #2

> Second, I think people will start to put a premium on accounts being "verified" as genuinely human. IMO this is long overdue. And I think people should/will eventually even pay for this feature. > Powerful nation states will be more than eager to assist them in this regard. I agree - world governments could consider even subsidizing this in some way in order to foster fewer anonymous botnets sowing discord. The web…

I think as soon as people see "verified humans" posting things they utterly disagree with, the temptation to call those people "bots" will be too great to resist. A substantial portion of internet commenters will sooner call a human verification system into disrepute than admit that some real people really do earnestly disagree with them. They'll spin conspiracy yarns about how "the other side" controls the verificat…

You're just poisoning the well.

edit: I find it very bizarre and very fashionable to defend the integrity of a verification service that does not exist, and to already dismiss the non-existent people who could suspect that this hypothetical system of verification was corrupt as conspiracy theorists.

Re: AI: Markets for Lemons, and the Great Logging Off

#232

Post by burnished »

moffkalast wrote: post #122
angarg12 wrote: post #25

Regarding the Third point, I can already see part of this movement. I've become disenchanted with the quality of the discourse. Specifically as I've entered a more senior stage of my career, I'm looking to mingle with like-minded folks in similar situations. Thing is, these folks don't usually lurk online, and even if they do, their voices get overwhelmed by the flood of (mostly low quality) content. I'd be happy to…

> I'd be happy to pay a fee to become a member of a community with vetted participants You better start believing in vetted online communities Miss Turner, you're in one! It may not be vetting by moderators, but HN's dated frontend definitely acts as a forcefield against many kinds of people.

Genuinely, what do you see as dated? My only other point of comparison is Reddit so I suspect I’m behind the times.

Re: AI: Markets for Lemons, and the Great Logging Off

#233

Post by pessimizer »

bilbo0s wrote: post #212
swader999 wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yep, a functioning society that benefits the most needs some form of anonymous dissent.

You guys are misunderstanding how things are developing here. The danger is not that you'll lose anonymity. The danger is that if you use anonymity, no one will listen to you. I'd wager a lot of algorithms will just shadow ban you. This is because you become viewed, effectively, the same way as the AI agent generating brand placement tweets for Bob's Bargain Basement Bar-B-Que and Bitcoin. No one will know the differ…

> Only the verifiable humans will end up with opinions that anyone pays any attention to.

This depends on people valuing who is saying something rather than what is being said. I'm not saying you're wrong, but I'm saying that if we're just trading in celebrity rather than ideas that I'm pretty sure we can also create celebrity AIs people would listen to.

Re: AI: Markets for Lemons, and the Great Logging Off

#234

Post by OkayPhysicist »

swader999 wrote: post #151
angarg12 wrote: post #25

Regarding the Third point, I can already see part of this movement. I've become disenchanted with the quality of the discourse. Specifically as I've entered a more senior stage of my career, I'm looking to mingle with like-minded folks in similar situations. Thing is, these folks don't usually lurk online, and even if they do, their voices get overwhelmed by the flood of (mostly low quality) content. I'd be happy to…

These closed groups seem to be too inbred, too like minded. For some things that's probably ok and good, but for creative solutions, I find I need to hear it all and see it from many angles.

The trick is to find a broad enough frontier that you still have a mix of discourse, while still excluding people who will tend towards unproductive garbage. For example, my service organization at university: As a whole, the group leaned firmly socialist (selecting for people who were enthused about feeding the homeless tends to do that), but the firm "someone will veto this person's membership nomination" line was somewhere around the middle of the Democratic party: "We need to fix things, but maybe that doesn't require revolution". Thus we ended up with a perfectly wide range of discourse, between the just-left of Obama and the anarchists, without including people who were fundamentally at odds with the groups mission of affecting positive change.

Re: AI: Markets for Lemons, and the Great Logging Off

#235

Post by Analemma_ »

seydor wrote: post #24
woeirua wrote: post #9

This article gets it. ChatGPT heralds the end of free user comments, forums and social media. Because when everything and everyone online is fake, why even log on to Insta or FB or Twitter? The internet will still be useful, but Web 2.0 will go the way of the dodo unless it adapts and the easiest way to cut down on spam is to charge users money for access. Spam campaigns are a lot less lucrative when it costs money t…

There is as much spam as there is email. Did people quit email?

Yes, they did. Both my work and personal email inboxes are pretty much exclusively various kinds of automated messages (order details, newsletters, announcements from various tools), I get essentially zero personal communication over it anymore; that all happens on other platforms. Email has more or less gone the way of regular mail: still used for various businesses to get in touch with you, but for personal communication it is dead.

Re: AI: Markets for Lemons, and the Great Logging Off

#236

Post by OkayPhysicist »

groestl wrote: post #88
brundolf wrote: post #67

For me this feels spot-on. But I wanted to comment on one thing: > Fourth, we'll see a resurgence and even fetishization of explicitly "offline" culture, where the "Great Logging Off" becomes literal I actually think the author undersold this a bit, because even once you've siloed into social buckets with people you already know- as long as it's digital communication, you can't quite be sure it's really them . Even i…

> So at some point only physical contact will be fully reliable But then there are twins, so... The "problem" pre-existed.

It doesn't need to be perfect, it just needs to be good enough. In real life, the likelihood of twins perfectly emulating each other, and then using that to deceive others for anything but playful intent is low enough to be acceptable. If a solution is good enough that exceptional corner cases are rare and typically harmless, then it's good enough for adoption.

Re: AI: Markets for Lemons, and the Great Logging Off

#237

Post by [deleted] »

blueridge wrote: post #199
angarg12 wrote: post #25

Regarding the Third point, I can already see part of this movement. I've become disenchanted with the quality of the discourse. Specifically as I've entered a more senior stage of my career, I'm looking to mingle with like-minded folks in similar situations. Thing is, these folks don't usually lurk online, and even if they do, their voices get overwhelmed by the flood of (mostly low quality) content. I'd be happy to…

I ran a private online bookclub a few years ago, really tried to filter and vet the people who wanted to join. Ended up with a decently sized group of wonderful people and lots of long form written discussion—we read good books and talked about good books, it was lovely. I approached the screening/vetting process as if I was hiring. I got some angry emails about the approach, made it seem "exclusive" and elitist, but…

[deleted]

Re: AI: Markets for Lemons, and the Great Logging Off

#238

Post by burnished »

jlarocco wrote: post #213
pavel_lishin wrote: post #193

> What happens when most "people" you interact with on the internet are fake? I think people start logging off. I don't necessarily think that's the case. Remember the old "nobody on the internet knows you're a dog" cartoon? Well, I think that for a lot of things, nobody cares if they're talking to a dog. People only care about people on the internet being fake in certain contexts. They'll very much care if all of th…

There's a lot of "I don't think" in there. Have you actually asked anybody? I haven't, but my impression and anecdotal data is exactly opposite.

Picking at “I don’t think” feels like point scoring behavior, and generally unwise - we want people to share their confidence level and source right? Dropping it makes your argument harder to nitpick and sound more authoritative at the expense of important information/honesty.

Suggested remediation: just, like, disagree :) this is a self serving recommendation though because I really enjoy seeing people’s differing perspectives

Re: AI: Markets for Lemons, and the Great Logging Off

#239

Post by yunwal »

Firmwarrior wrote: post #54
AussieWog93 wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>If it can comment as well as a human, our experience of using social networks will not be degraded. We still get the same experience as before. I think you're massively underestimating how important motivations are. Bot accounts that can perfectly mask as human but whose prime directive is to recommend their sponsors' products would ruin trust in a heartbeat.

Half of the Reddit front page is this already. Dudes are swimming in millions of upvotes while blatantly advertising

But you can tell that it's happening. And also it's still only half, and not the entire internet, because human marketers don't scale as much as AI.

Re: AI: Markets for Lemons, and the Great Logging Off

#240

Post by Ensorceled »

seydor wrote: post #177
Ensorceled wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> the purpose of the internet as an open forum The purpose of the internet hasn't been to be an open forum since sysadmins were blocking the talk.* hierarchy and kicking entire nodes off of usenet for spam or abuse.

yet here we are

yet here we are and "here" is not an "open forum"
Post reply on HN