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Dead Internet Theory

kudmitry.com

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Re: Dead Internet Theory

#151

Post by TacticalCoder »

BLKNSLVR wrote: post #97

I'm not really replying to the article, just going tangentially from the "dead internet theory" topic, but I was thinking about when we might see the equivalent for roads: the dead road theory. In X amount of time a significant majority of road traffic will be bots in the drivers seat (figuratively), and a majority of said traffic won't even have a human on-board. It will be deliveries of goods and food. I look forwa…

> In x amount of time a significant majority of road traffic will be bots in the drivers seat (figuratively), and a majority of said traffic won't even have a human on-board. It will be deliveries of goods and food.

Nah. That's assuming most cars today, with literal, not figurative, humans are delivering goods and food. But they're not: most cars during traffic hours and by very very very far are just delivering groceries-less people from point A to point B. In the morning: delivering human (usually by said human) to work. Delivering human to school. Delivering human back to home. Delivering human back from school.

Re: Dead Internet Theory

#152

Post by carbocation »

jasonhansel wrote: post #134
makingstuffs wrote: post #120

Think the notion that ‘no one’ uses em dashes is a bit misguided. I’ve personally used them in text for as long as I can remember. Also on the phrase “you’re absolute right”, it’s definitely a phrase my friends and I use a lot, albeit in a sorta of sarcastic manner when one of us says something which is obvious but, nonetheless, we use it. We also tend to use “Well, you’re not wrong” again in a sarcastic manner for s…

Em-dashes may be hard to type on a laptop, but they're extremely easy to type on iOS—you just hold down the "-" key, as with many other special characters—so I use them fairly frequently when typing on that platform.

Em-dashes are easy to type on a macos laptop for what it's worth: option-shift-minus.

Re: Dead Internet Theory

#153

Post by GMoromisato »

Most of this is caused by incentives:

YouTube and others pay for clicks/views, so obviously you can maximize this by producing lots of mediocre content.

LinkedIn is a place to sell, either a service/product to companies or yourself to a future employer. Again, the incentive is to produce more content for less effort.

Even HN has the incentive of promoting people's startups.

Is it possible to create a social network (or "discussion community", if you prefer) that doesn't have any incentive except human-to-human interaction? I don't mean a place where AI is banned, I mean a place where AI is useless, so people don't bother.

The closest thing would probably be private friend groups, but that's probably already well-served by text messaging and in-person gatherings. Are there any other possibilities?

Re: Dead Internet Theory

#154

Post by mmooss »

The problem is not the Internet but the author and those like them, acting like social network participants in following the herd - embracing despair and hopelessness, and victimhood - they don't realize they're the problem, not the victims. Another problem is their ignorance and their post-truth attitude, not caring whether their words are actually accurate:

> What if people DO USE em-dashes in real life?

They do and have, for a long time. I know someone who for many years (much longer than LLMs have been available) has complained about their overuse.

> hence, you often see -- in HackerNews comments, where the author is probably used to Markdown renderer

Using two dashes for an em-dash goes back to typewriter keyboards, which had only what we now call printable ASCII and where it was much harder add to add non-ASCII characters than it is on your computer - no special key combos. (Which also means that em-dashes existed in the typewriter era.)

Re: Dead Internet Theory

#155

Post by femto »

therobots927 wrote: post #127
femto wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The "old" Internet is still there in parallel with the "new" Internet. It's just been swamped by the large volume of "new" stuff. In the 90s the Internet was small and before crawler based search engines you had to find things manually and maintain your own list of URLs to get back to things. Ignore the search engines, ignore all the large companies and you're left with the "Old Internet". It's inconvenient and it's…

Well then in that case, maybe we need a “vetted internet”. Like the opposite of the dark web, this would only index vetted websites, scanned for AI slop, and with optional parental controls, equipped with customized filters that leverage LLMs to classify content into unwanted categories. It would require a monthly subscription fee to maintain but would be a nonprofit model.

That's the original "Yahoo Directory", which was a manually curated page.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yahoo#Founding

The original Yahoo doesn't exist (outside archive.org), but I'm guessing would be a keen person or two out there maintaining a replacement. It would probably be disappointing, as manually curated lists work best when the curator's interests are similar to your own.

What you want might be Kagi Search with the AI filtering on? I've never used Kagi, so I could be off with that suggestion.

Re: Dead Internet Theory

#156

Post by bigmeme »

neilv wrote: post #128

Sunday evening musings regarding bot comments and HN... I'm sure it's happening, but I don't know how much. Surely some people are running bots on HN to establish sockpuppets for use later, and to manipulate sentiment now, just like on any other influential social media. And some people are probably running bots on HN just for amusement, with no application in mind. And some others, who were advised to have an HN pre…

Holy based

Re: Dead Internet Theory

#157

Post by amake »

mmooss wrote: post #154

The problem is not the Internet but the author and those like them, acting like social network participants in following the herd - embracing despair and hopelessness, and victimhood - they don't realize they're the problem, not the victims. Another problem is their ignorance and their post-truth attitude, not caring whether their words are actually accurate: > What if people DO USE em-dashes in real life? They do an…

How is the author the problem? What is the problem, in your view?

Re: Dead Internet Theory

#158

Post by GMoromisato »

neilv wrote: post #128

Sunday evening musings regarding bot comments and HN... I'm sure it's happening, but I don't know how much. Surely some people are running bots on HN to establish sockpuppets for use later, and to manipulate sentiment now, just like on any other influential social media. And some people are probably running bots on HN just for amusement, with no application in mind. And some others, who were advised to have an HN pre…

I thought you were going for 2^15-1 and an LLM messed up the math.

Re: Dead Internet Theory

#159

Post by brandonmb »

chongli wrote: post #42
SchemaLoad wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The biggest change reddit made was ignoring subscriptions and just showing anything the algorithm thinks you will like. Resulting in complete no name subreddits showing on your front page. Meaning moderators no longer control content for quality, which is both a good and bad thing, but it means more garbage makes it to your front page.

I can't remember the last time I was on the Reddit front page and I use the site pretty much daily. I only look at specific subreddit pages (barely a fraction of what I'm subscribed to). These are some pretty niche communities with only a few dozen comments per day at most. If Reddit becomes inhospitable to them then I'll abandon the site entirely.

This is my current Reddit use case. I unsubscribed from everything other than a dozen or so niche communities. I’ve turned off all outside recommendations so my homepage is just that content (though there is feed algorithm there). It’s quick enough to sign in every day or two and view almost all the content and move on.

Re: Dead Internet Theory

#160

Post by chongli »

__turbobrew__ wrote: post #123
chongli wrote: post #49

I prefer a Dark Forest theory [1] of the internet. Rather than being completely dead and saturated with bots, the internet has little pockets of human activity like bits of flotsam in a stream of slop. And that's how it is going to be from here on out. Occasionally the bots will find those communities and they'll either find a way to ban them or the community will be abandoned for another safe harbour. To that end, I…

Discord fills some of the pockets of human interaction. We really need more invite only platforms.

I like the design of Discord but I don't like that it's owned by one company. At any point they could decide to pursue a full enshittification strategy and start selling everyone's data to train AIs. They could sell the rights to 3rd party spambots and disallow users from banning the bots from their private servers.

It may be great right now but the users do not control their own destinies. It looks like there are tools users can use to export their data but if Discord goes the enshittification route they could preemptively block such tools, just as Reddit shut down their APIs.

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