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The Post-AI Internet Doesn't Look Great

jordangoodman.xyz

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Re: The Post-AI Internet Doesn't Look Great

#81

Post by pixl97 »

krapp wrote: post #74
pixl97 wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yea, that internet was great, but that internet wasn't real. Or to put it in a better way, that internet wasn't in equilibrium with reality. While social media may have ruined the internet, think of that as more of hitting the ground after falling off a cliff. It was the constant connection that really started changing everything. Instead of getting on the internet and disconnecting from the internet, we were always…

>Simply put there is no route back to those early days. Sure there is. Make another internet and keep the normies and capitalists away from it: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49541705

Lol, in your dreams.

This is no different than saying make a huge pitre dish and ensure no mold ever lands on it and grows. Aka: a completely unrealistic view on how systems work.

Re: The Post-AI Internet Doesn't Look Great

#82

Post by icedchai »

pixl97 wrote: post #72
icedchai wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's happening everywhere. We have people using AI to generate documents, then using the same AI to read/summarize them. What is the point? The writing itself, especially with recent Claude models, is often incredibly awkward.

>What is the point? What is the point is a question to a whole lot of human practices outside of AI, well, that I should say that AI is pointing out. Huge numbers of us have mostly useless jobs. That's not to say they are completely useless, but maybe like at most 50% of the job is useful. The rest just gets filled with busy work and worthless text generation and TPS reports.

Agreed, a ton of white-collar job activity is useless: writing reports nobody wants to write for people who don't actually want to read them anyway. Mass AI-induced unemployment is a real possibility within 5 to 10 years, maybe sooner.

Re: The Post-AI Internet Doesn't Look Great

#83

Post by krapp »

pixl97 wrote: post #81
krapp wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Simply put there is no route back to those early days. Sure there is. Make another internet and keep the normies and capitalists away from it: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49541705

Lol, in your dreams. This is no different than saying make a huge pitre dish and ensure no mold ever lands on it and grows. Aka: a completely unrealistic view on how systems work.

It's more like saying make a small petri dish for only a single culture and maintain proper contamination protocols. Anything from the outside dies on contact. What people liked about the old internet was its exclusivity, and that's what alternatives like Gemini provide. By design, it will never be useful to the mainstream. Even most people on HN think it's a bit too ascetic. That's exactly why it will survive when even HN gets eaten by the grey goo.

And if contamination is inevitable, just burn down the lab and start the experiment again elsewhere.

Re: The Post-AI Internet Doesn't Look Great

#84

Post by pixl97 »

krapp wrote: post #83
pixl97 wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Lol, in your dreams. This is no different than saying make a huge pitre dish and ensure no mold ever lands on it and grows. Aka: a completely unrealistic view on how systems work.

It's more like saying make a small petri dish for only a single culture and maintain proper contamination protocols. Anything from the outside dies on contact. What people liked about the old internet was its exclusivity, and that's what alternatives like Gemini provide. By design, it will never be useful to the mainstream. Even most people on HN think it's a bit too ascetic. That's exactly why it will survive when e…

You're missing what made the old internet exclusive, lack of a computer/telephone line. Effectively a pretty large financial and skill barrier.

If I had any reason to I could pump out thousands of Gemini slop sites and turn the ratio of real sites to slop up to 1 to a million. Then publish article after article on how all Gemini is is junk and for the most part it will be true.

Re: The Post-AI Internet Doesn't Look Great

#85

Post by glouwbug »

pixl97 wrote: post #80
p0w3n3d wrote: post #35

Is there no-AI internet? Like anti-nuclear shelters?

How would that even be possible? The internet is a digital creation, how do you plan on banning a digital entity from it? Analog internet when?

We have an analog internet. See: the radio. Stations would even let you call in and voice your opinion like a commenter would with OP. You even had trolls call in. Stations would lock down call ins for months at a time if they got unruly like Reddit mods. Forums like HN and Reddit are no different than a public square. We just need to revert to doing things in public and in person.

Re: The Post-AI Internet Doesn't Look Great

#86

Post by krapp »

pixl97 wrote: post #84
krapp wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's more like saying make a small petri dish for only a single culture and maintain proper contamination protocols. Anything from the outside dies on contact. What people liked about the old internet was its exclusivity, and that's what alternatives like Gemini provide. By design, it will never be useful to the mainstream. Even most people on HN think it's a bit too ascetic. That's exactly why it will survive when e…

You're missing what made the old internet exclusive, lack of a computer/telephone line. Effectively a pretty large financial and skill barrier. If I had any reason to I could pump out thousands of Gemini slop sites and turn the ratio of real sites to slop up to 1 to a million. Then publish article after article on how all Gemini is is junk and for the most part it will be true.

>If I had any reason to I could pump out thousands of Gemini slop sites and turn the ratio of real sites to slop up to 1 to a million.

Yeah but you don't. It literally isn't worth the effort. We're talking about a few thousand people at most, less than the userbase of HN. And if you did, those sites would just go ignored. And no one would read those articles because no one outside of geminispace actually cares about geminispace. It would be like trying to kill a housefly with a cannon.

Even if we were talking about the fediverse, which provides a much bigger target, people just wouldn't federate with the slop. The decentralized architecture guarantees that the community splits and fractures as it grows, so you can have greater inclusivity across the board, but exclusivity within instances. Go ahead and pump out thousands of instances. No one has to care. So far self-limiting and opt-in architectures do work to hold back the tide.

Re: The Post-AI Internet Doesn't Look Great

#87

Post by EveryonePoops »

Really?

Twitter was human slop paradise before Elon's ex wife told him to buy it to quiet the liberals:

"Social media platforms are being bombarded with slop posts from bots. For that reason, I have deactivated most of my accounts, especially X."

It took you until "AI slop" to stop liking the dumpster fire of X to deactivate your account ?

Really?

Re: The Post-AI Internet Doesn't Look Great

#88

Post by bot403 »

notpachet wrote: post #15
phishin wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your comment’s load-bearing property, asserts on the geometry that states it.

You've hit on something important, and it's real, not cosmetic.

The decision to copy-edit ai output is genuinely yours.

Re: The Post-AI Internet Doesn't Look Great

#89

Post by jstummbillig »

gonzalohm wrote: post #76
jstummbillig wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What exact problem? Verbosity? Quality?

The quality is eroded by the verbosity

I have no idea how one would have to slice their data to conclude that GPT 5.6 is not a significantly better writer than GPT 3.

Re: The Post-AI Internet Doesn't Look Great

#90

Post by 72deluxe »

postalcoder wrote: post #12

Don't romanticize the internet. The modern internet has torn society apart at the seams. It's made the world less tolerable and made civic discourse impossible. If AI forces people to re-weight their priorities (i.e. be less on the internet), perhaps that's a good thing?

I don't understand why people talk about "the internet" as if it was a static thing. The internet when I grew up using it prior to the dotcom bust in the late nineties and early two thousands was a set of GeoCities websites where people made their own content. I remember reading the green "great websites" HTML book with examples of beautiful websites (with backgrounds that looked liked notebooks etc).

The modern internet has just become privacy scraping and adverts if you visit websites that do such things and serve such content, but that doesn't stop anyone setting up and running their own domain, which is what the old internet was? If anything, it's easier than ever to "be on the Internet" with your own VPS or Pi at home. Far easier than it ever was. Just stop putting all your content into someone else's locker.

The lack of discoverability has always been a problem on the internet, which is why Yahoo had their category pages and why search engines exist.

People keep talking as if "the internet" is a thing that came and suddenly disappeared. But it hasn't. The only thing that has appeared are apps that use specific domains, where the services behind those domains are colossal vacuums of data. A lot of people use those apps, but it doesn't mean I need to. And it doesn't mean I can't go and search for some specific website holding specific data about a given topic. People keep talking as if that was lost? Am I missing something?

As for it "tearing society apart", society has always been fractured. It just means more people can speak now, and more people can listen; if they're not choosing who they listen to or weighing concepts in their own mind, that isn't the "internet's" fault - that's their own, any more than someone writing a newspaper article in the 1980s would be held responsible for "tearing society apart"?

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