Good post, Thank you.
May I say Dead, Toxic Internet? With social media adding the toxicity.
The Enshittification theory by Cory Doctorow sums up the process of how this unfolds (look it up on Wikipedia).
Dead Internet Theory
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Re: Dead Internet Theory
#22Re: Dead Internet Theory
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Re: Dead Internet Theory
#24> The notorious “you are absolutely right”, which no-living human ever used before, at-least not that I know of What should we conclude from those two extraneous dashes....
The funny thing is I knew people that used the phrase 'you're absolutely right' very commonly... They were sales people, and part of the pitch was getting the buyer to come to a particular idea "all on their own" then make them feel good on how smart they were. The other funny thing on EM dashes is there are a number of HN'ers that use them, and I've seen them called bots. But when you dig deep in their posts they've…
I'm a confessing user of em-dashes (or en-dashes in fonts that feature overly accentuated em-dashes). It's actually kind of hard to not use them, if you've ever worked with typography and know your dashes and hyphenations. —[sic!] Also, those dashes are conveniently accessible on a Mac keyboard. There may be some Win/PC bias in the em-dash giveaway theory.
Re: Dead Internet Theory
#25Earlier quoted context omitted.
The funny thing is I knew people that used the phrase 'you're absolutely right' very commonly... They were sales people, and part of the pitch was getting the buyer to come to a particular idea "all on their own" then make them feel good on how smart they were. The other funny thing on EM dashes is there are a number of HN'ers that use them, and I've seen them called bots. But when you dig deep in their posts they've…
I use them -but I generally use the short version (I'm lazy), while AI likes the long version (which is correct -my version is not).
You don't use em dashes then, you use en dash.
Re: Dead Internet Theory
#26In one hand, we are past the Turing Test definition if we can't distinguish if we are talking with an AI or a real human or more things that were rampant on internet previously, like spam and scam campaigns, targeted opinion manipulation, or a lot of other things that weren't, let's say, an honest opinion of the single person that could be identified with an account.
In the other hand, that we can't tell don't speak so good about AIs as speak so bad about most of our (at least online) interaction. How much of the (Thinking Fast and Slow) System 2 I'm putting in this words? How much is repeating and combining patterns giving a direction pretty much like a LLM does? In the end, that is what most of internet interactions are comprised of, done directly by humans, algorithms or other ways.
There are bits and pieces of exceptions to that rule, and maybe closer to the beginning, before widespread use, there was a bigger percentage, but today, in the big numbers the usage is not so different from what LLMs does.
Re: Dead Internet Theory
#27Earlier quoted context omitted.
I use them -but I generally use the short version (I'm lazy), while AI likes the long version (which is correct -my version is not).
You don't use em dashes then, you use en dash.
I think they are saying they are using an en dash where they should use an em dash.
Re: Dead Internet Theory
#28Bots have ruined reddit but that is what the owners wanted. The API protest in 2023 took away tools from moderators. I noticed increased bot activity after that. The IPO in 2024 means that they need to increase revenue to justify the stock price. So they allow even more bots to increase traffic which drives up ad revenue. I think they purposely make the search engine bad to encourage people to make more posts which i…
Isn't showing ads to bots...pointless?
Re: Dead Internet Theory
#29Re: Dead Internet Theory
#30I’m a bit scared of this theory, i think it will be true, ai will eat the internet, then they’ll paywall it. Innovation outside of rich coorps will end. No one will visit forums, innovation will die in a vacuum, only the richest will have access to what the internet was, raw innovation will be mined through EULAs, people striving to make things will just have ideas stolen as a matter of course.
That’s why we need a parallel internet.
What would stop them from scraping it and infecting it?