You can't trust the internet anymore
nicole.express
You can't trust the internet anymore
1–10 of 191 posts
Re: You can't trust the internet anymore
#2It is the failure mode of incorrect trust that has changed.
Previously you might get burned with some bad information or incorrect data or get taken in by a clever hoax once in a while.
Now you get overwhelmed by regurgitation, which itself gets fed back into the machine.
The ratio of people to bots reading is crashed to near zero.
We have burned the web.
Re: You can't trust the internet anymore
#3The internet has gone from a high-trust society to a low-trust society, all in the span of a couple of decades.
Enshittification strikes again.
And it doesn't have appear to have any means to rid itself of the bad apples. A sad situation all around.
Re: You can't trust the internet anymore
#4The internet has gone from a high-trust society to a low-trust society, all in the span of a couple of decades. Enshittification strikes again. And it doesn't have appear to have any means to rid itself of the bad apples. A sad situation all around.
It might be more accurate to say that a lot of low-trust societies have become connected to the Internet which weren't nearly as online a couple of decades ago.
For example, a huge fraction of the world's spam originates from Russia, India and Bangladesh. And we know that a lot of the romance scams are perpetrated by Chinese gangs operating out of quasi-lawless parts of Myanmar. Not so much from, say, Switzerland.
Re: You can't trust the internet anymore
#5It is the failure mode of incorrect trust that has changed. Previously you might get burned with some bad information or incorrect data or get taken in by a clever hoax once in a while. Now you get overwhelmed by regurgitation, which itself gets fed back into the machine. The ratio of people to bots reading is crashed to near zero. We have burned the web.
I've been miserable over the last few weeks after coming to that same conclusion. Its so bad that i doubt the people that were pulling the strings can even tell whats going on anymore.
Re: You can't trust the internet anymore
#6Tangentially related, I have a hunch, but cannot prove, that prediction markets are the driving force behind a lot of the bad information online, since they essentially monetarily incentivize making people misjudge the state of the world.
There's been a huge uptick in this sort of brigade like behavior around current events. First noted it around LK99, that failed room temperature semiconductor in 2023, but it just keeps happening.
Used to be we only saw it around elections and crypto pump and dumps, now it's cropping up in the weirdest places.
Re: You can't trust the internet anymore
#7"You really think someone would do that? Just go on the Internet and tell lies?"
https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/just-go-on-the-internet-and-t...
Re: You can't trust the internet anymore
#8The internet has gone from a high-trust society to a low-trust society, all in the span of a couple of decades. Enshittification strikes again. And it doesn't have appear to have any means to rid itself of the bad apples. A sad situation all around.
The WWW has never been a high-trust place. Some smaller communities, sure, but anyone has always been able to write basically what they want on the internet, true or false, as long as it is not illegal in the country hosting it, which is close to nothing in the US.
The difference is that there historically weren't much to be gained by annoying or misleading people on the internet, so trolling is mainly motivated by personal satisfaction. Two things changed since then: (1) most people now use the internet as the primary information source, and (2) the cost of creating bullshit has fallen precipitously.
Re: You can't trust the internet anymore
#9Signal to noise ratio is getting *lower (EDIT: was higher) than ever. I don't see a way out of this other than "human certified" digitally signed authorship (e.g. by using eIDAS in EU). There could be a proxy to at least retain pseudo-anonymity, but trackable to a human. Tragedy of commons strikes again.
Re: You can't trust the internet anymore
#10"You really think someone would do that? Just go on the Internet and tell lies?" https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/just-go-on-the-internet-and-t...
A big part of my annoyance is that in the past, something like Phantasy Star Fukkokuban would not really be worth lying about; people need a reason to lie.