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

Dead Internet Theory

kudmitry.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

591–600 of 735 posts

Re: Dead Internet Theory

#591

Post by rhines »

skwee357 wrote: post #340
GMoromisato wrote: post #153

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 (…

I remember participating on *free* phpBB forums, or IRC channels. I was amazed that I could chat with people smarter than me, on a wide range of topics, all for the cost of having an internet subscription. It's only recently, when I was considering to revive the old-school forum interaction, that I have realized that while I got the platforms for free, there were people behind them who paid for the hosting and the st…

Something that's been on my mind for a while now is shared moderation - instead of having a few moderators who deal with everything, distribute the moderation load across all users. Every user might only have to review a couple posts a day or whatever, so it should be a negligible burden, and send each post that requires moderation to multiple users so that if there's disagreement it can be pushed to more senior/trusted users.

This is specifically in the context of a niche hobby website where the rules are simple and identifying rule-breaking content is easy. I'm not sure it would work on something with universal scope like Reddit or Facebook, but I'd rather we see more focused communities anyway.

Re: Dead Internet Theory

#592

Post by eudamoniac »

NoMoreNicksLeft wrote: post #581
eudamoniac wrote: post #569

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think people will eventually learn to not trust any videos or stories they see online. I think the much bigger issue will be what happens when the LLM providers encode "alignment" into the models to insist on certain worldviews, opinions, or even falsehoods. Trust in LLMs and usage of them is increasing. "Great question! No, we have always been at war with Eurasia. Can I help with anything else?"

"Eventually" does alot of heavy lifting in your prediction. This is like saying that if you feed poison to panda bears, they will eventually become immune to poison. On what timescale though? 8 million years from now, if the species survived, and if I've been feeding that poison to each and every generation... sure. If I just feed it to 10 pandas, today, they're all dead. And I suspect that humanity's position in thi…

People stopped falling for photoshopped pictures and staged Chinese reels pretty quickly. I think people will pretty quickly decide anything outrageous is probably AI. And by people I mean the right half of the bell curve, which is all you can hope for. The left half will have problems in the world as they always have.

Re: Dead Internet Theory

#593

Post by amanaplanacanal »

self_awareness wrote: post #477
nkmnz wrote: post #392

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is a video documenting racist behavior a racist or an anti-racist video? Is faking a video documenting racist behavior (that never happened) a racist or an anti-racist video? Is the act of faking a video documenting racist behavior (that never happened) or anti-racist behavior?

Video showing racist behavior is racist and anti-racist at the same time. A racist will be happy watching it, and anti-racist will forward it to forward their anti-racist message. Faking a racist video that never happend is, first of all, faking. Second, it's the same: racist and anti-racist at the same time. Third, it's falsifying the prevalence of occurrence. If you'll add to the video a disclaimer: "this video has…

That's not necessarily just a leftist thing. Plenty of politicians are perfectly fine with saying things they know are lies for what they believe are good reasons. We see it daily with the current US administration.

Re: Dead Internet Theory

#594

Post by sqquima »

fallinditch wrote: post #211
sheept wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

a reliable giveaway for AI generated videos is just a quick glance at the account's post history—the videos will look frequent, repetitive, and lack a consistent subject/background—and that's not something that'll go away when AI videos get better

A giveaway for detecting AI-generated text is the use of em-dashes, as noted in op - you are caught bang to rights!

My AI generator loves to write ergo, concordantly, and vis-a-vis.

Re: Dead Internet Theory

#595

Post by DrScientist »

groundzeros2015 wrote: post #555
DrScientist wrote: post #472

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Until you realize that this is the root of the problem, that the whole system is built to make people angry at each other, you are only contributing to the anger and division. It's not built to make people angry per se - it's built to optimise for revenue generation - which so happens to be content that makes people angry. People have discovered that creating and posting such content makes them money, and the reven…

> it's built to optimise for revenue generation I think blaming it all on money ignores that this also serve political goals. Groups spend money to manipulate public opinion. It’s a goal in and of itself that has value rather than a money making scheme.

Sure -it's a mix - but to be honest I think it's over-emphasized - in that in the US most of that kind of money driving politics operates in plain sight.

For example, the 'Russian interference' in the 2016 US election, was I suspect mostly people trying to make money, and more importantly, was completely dwarfed by US direct political spending.

There is also a potentially equally, if not larger problem, in the politicisation of the 'anti-disinformation' campaigns.

To be honest I'm not sure if there is much of a difference between a grifter being directly paid to promote a certain point of view, and somebody being paid indirectly ( by ads ).

In both cases neither really believes in the political point they are making they are just following the money.

These platforms are enabling both.

Re: Dead Internet Theory

#596

Post by bee_rider »

topaz0 wrote: post #558
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…

I'm in your camp, that both of these are appropriate for some situations. In particular I like starting with a variation on "you're absolutely right" when it appears my interlocutor has identified the wrong disagreement, before realigning the conversation to a more useful direction (though of course there are many phrases that accomplish that). It's still frequently identifiable in (current-generation) LLM text by th…

You’re absolutely right. It’s not just a writing style, it’s how the ideas are expressed.

Re: Dead Internet Theory

#597

Post by butlike »

gooob wrote: post #530
spicyusername wrote: post #522

Earlier quoted context omitted.

divisiveness this kind of stuff will create I'm pretty sure we're already decades in to the world of "has created". Everyone I know has strong opinions on every little thing, based exclusively their emotional reactions and feed consumption. Basically no one has the requisite expertise commensurate with their conviction, but being informed is not required to be opinionated or exasperated. And who can blame them (us).…

it's malware in the mind. it was happening before deep fakes was possible. news outlets and journalists have always had incentive to present extreme takes to get people angry, cause that sells. now we have tools that pretty much just accelerate and automate that process. it's interesting. it would be helpful to figure out how to prevent people (especially upcoming generations) from getting swept away by all this.

I think fatigue will set in and the next generation will 'tock' back from this 'tick.' Getting outraged by things is already feeling antiquated to me, and I'm in my 30's.

Re: Dead Internet Theory

#598

Post by fullstop »

vlachen wrote: post #556
fullstop wrote: post #523

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes. Whatsapp requires a phone number and Discord does not. The tweens who do not have a phone yet can join Discord with their siblings / friends. The other part of this is that Discord has official University hubs, so the college kids are all in there. You need an email address from that Univeristy to join: https://support.discord.com/hc/en-us/articles/4406046651927-...

Having been out of university since before Discord was much of a thing, that's news to me. It also is eerily reminiscent of Facebook's beginning sign up requirements.

I guess that depends on the University and whether or not you get to keep your email address after you graduate. From what I understand from my college-aged kids, most people get kicked out of the hub after they graduate.

It's similar in Apple's strategy of trying to get Macintosh into the classrooms (in the 80s/90s), and student discounts on Adobe products.

I am not a huge fan of Discord, although I do use it. It's very good at what it does, and the communities it houses are well moderated, at least the ones that I have joined. I dislike that they've taken over communities and walled them off from the "searchable" internet.

Re: Dead Internet Theory

#599

Post by Anthony-G »

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…

On my side of the Atlantic using en-dashes with spaces on either side of the dash is acceptable writing style so that’s what I use (instead of em-dashes). However, many people can’t tell the difference between the two so some might confuse my writing from that of an LLM. But I’m not going to let that dictate my writing style.

For the past 15 years, I’ve used the Unicycle Vim plugin¹ which makes it very easy to add proper typographic quotes and dashes in Insert mode. As something of a typography nerd, I’ve extended it to include other Unicode characters, e.g., prime and double-prime characters to represent minutes and seconds.

At the same time, I’ve always used a Firefox extension that launches GVim when editing a text box; currently, I’m using Tridactyl for this purpose.

¹ https://www.vim.org/scripts/script.php?script_id=1384

Re: Dead Internet Theory

#600

Post by rhines »

MarginalGainz wrote: post #514

We are seeing this exact 'hostile information environment' play out aggressively in e-commerce search. The 'Dead Internet' (specifically AI-generated SEO slop) has effectively broken traditional keyword search (BM25/TF-IDF). Bad actors can now generate thousands of product descriptions that mathematically match a user's query perfectly but are semantically garbage/fake. We had to pivot our entire discovery stack to S…

I'm not sure I agree - on the one hand yes, it's trivial to generate pages stuffed with keywords. But on the other hand Google is already interpreting search intent, and while this is okay for some things it is extraordinarily frustrating when trying to look for something specific.

Often I do want exact matches, and Google refuses to show them no matter what special characters you use to try to modify the search behaviour.

Personally I'd rather search engines continue to return exact matches and just de-rank content that has poor reputation, and if I want to have a more free-form experience I'll use LLMs instead.

Post reply on HN