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The most talented person in the world

matt.sh

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Re: The most talented person in the world

#11

Post by Terr_ »

api wrote: post #3

This kind of spam was already destroying the web before LLMs came along. Now it’s being accelerated by thousands of times. Mainstream web search is probably cooked. Kagi and other niche players might have a chance if the fact that they are not beholden to advertisers lets them introduce features to do things like downrank content with ads. Kagi has “small web” which I think includes this in its weighting. Open social…

I think we'll end up moving away from shallow signifiers of trustworthiness to reputational networks and evidence someone has invested into an identity or entity.

That's not to say it's a solved problem, even in the real world with thousands of years of battle tested strategies.

A very simple example would be a web browser where I could blacklist chronically-unhelpful sites, and share that metadata among friends.

Re: The most talented person in the world

#12

Post by yen223 »

raymondgh wrote: post #10

Maybe a social endorsement scheme could be an alternative to an invasive proof system.

If there's a social endorsement scheme that doesn't involve real-world identity, I don't see how you won't end up with a situation where Bot_A is counted as legit, being endorsed by Bot_B...Bot_Z

Re: The most talented person in the world

#13

Post by munificent »

dalemhurley wrote: post #9

Google has an incentive to keep these links going. Google makes money by you continually returning back to Google. If you get the prefect result on your first click, then you move on with your day. If you get junk, then you go back to Google and click the next junk link and repeat. Each time someone visits one of these content farms and returns back to Google, then it is more advertising dollars for Google.

This is a classic argument and appears in many many forms:

* "Psychologists don't want to fix your problems because then you'll stop needing therapy every week."

* "Dating sites don't actually want you to find a long-term partner because then you'll stop using the site."

* "The mechanic's not trying to actually fix your car, just get it running for a few weeks so it breaks down again and you come back."

Etc. etc.

Any time there is information asymmetry and leaving a customer not fully satisfied might lead to future sales, this old canard comes up.

I'm sure in some cases it's true. But, like, people aren't entirely stupid. Consumers generally won't keep repeatedly going back to the same business if the service is kinda sucky. And businesses generally figure out that reputation matters and the most economically viable long-term strategy is just to give people what they want.

Re: The most talented person in the world

#14

Post by roughly »

The reason all of this exists - the reason the entire Internet turned into an unusable amalgam of horseshit - is because we built the entire commercial side of the internet off ad revenue. It might be a death spiral at this point - I can’t imagine anyone actually being willing to Pay for whatever the fuck Google or Facebook have become, so there’s nothing left to do but keep inventing new ways to generate bullshit and new bots to view it for you.

Re: The most talented person in the world

#15

Post by keyboardJones »

api wrote: post #3

This kind of spam was already destroying the web before LLMs came along. Now it’s being accelerated by thousands of times. Mainstream web search is probably cooked. Kagi and other niche players might have a chance if the fact that they are not beholden to advertisers lets them introduce features to do things like downrank content with ads. Kagi has “small web” which I think includes this in its weighting. Open social…

My strategy been to put my money where my mouth is and start paying for services that provide value to me (Kagi is one example - I’m a paying customer, and actually found this article using their small web site)

Re: The most talented person in the world

#16

Post by xyzzy123 »

munificent wrote: post #13
dalemhurley wrote: post #9

Google has an incentive to keep these links going. Google makes money by you continually returning back to Google. If you get the prefect result on your first click, then you move on with your day. If you get junk, then you go back to Google and click the next junk link and repeat. Each time someone visits one of these content farms and returns back to Google, then it is more advertising dollars for Google.

This is a classic argument and appears in many many forms: * "Psychologists don't want to fix your problems because then you'll stop needing therapy every week." * "Dating sites don't actually want you to find a long-term partner because then you'll stop using the site." * "The mechanic's not trying to actually fix your car, just get it running for a few weeks so it breaks down again and you come back." Etc. etc. Any…

Both things can be true at the same time, it depends on the time preference of the business owner.

Re: The most talented person in the world

#17

Post by roughly »

munificent wrote: post #13
dalemhurley wrote: post #9

Google has an incentive to keep these links going. Google makes money by you continually returning back to Google. If you get the prefect result on your first click, then you move on with your day. If you get junk, then you go back to Google and click the next junk link and repeat. Each time someone visits one of these content farms and returns back to Google, then it is more advertising dollars for Google.

This is a classic argument and appears in many many forms: * "Psychologists don't want to fix your problems because then you'll stop needing therapy every week." * "Dating sites don't actually want you to find a long-term partner because then you'll stop using the site." * "The mechanic's not trying to actually fix your car, just get it running for a few weeks so it breaks down again and you come back." Etc. etc. Any…

> long-term strategy

This is where the theory falls apart. When “long-term strategy” and “short-term quarterly earnings” get into the boardroom together at a public company, it ain’t “long-term strategy” that’s walking out.

Re: The most talented person in the world

#18

Post by munificent »

api wrote: post #3

This kind of spam was already destroying the web before LLMs came along. Now it’s being accelerated by thousands of times. Mainstream web search is probably cooked. Kagi and other niche players might have a chance if the fact that they are not beholden to advertisers lets them introduce features to do things like downrank content with ads. Kagi has “small web” which I think includes this in its weighting. Open social…

The hyper-enshittification stages look like:

1. People get on the web and make real content with care because they're just excited to share stuff with each other.

2. Advertisers talk them into putting some ads on their pages so they can get some compensation for their work.

3. Shitty people figure out you can just make content where the main incentive is to get people to go to the page and see the ads.

4. Those people then outsource writing the content to the lowest bidder.

5. The lowest bidder becomes an LLM.

6. Search engines cut out the middle-man entirely and just send your search query to an LLM, stuff some ads in, and show the result to the user without ever hitting the web (except to periodically scrape it for model training).

7. Because of 6, people stop putting new content on the web at all. The models get shittier and stupider with regards to current events.

8. To counter that, LLM companies make deals with news organizations and other primary source information provides and pay them to have direct access to content to train their models.

9. Those organizations get such a large fraction of their income from those deals that eventually they get out of the business of giving human readers direct access to it because it's not worth the effort. Newspapers become B2B companies.

10. The only way to get information is via a handful of giant tech companies sitting on top of huge LLMs saying who-knows-what trained on a slurry of actual information and giant piles of ads.

I hope that somewhere in the process people start to get tired of talking to machines all day and hop off the ride entirely and starting calling up their friends and getting information the old fashioned way.

The only consolation I have is the belief that people have a deep seated desire to connect to actual humans and know the real truth about the world.

Re: The most talented person in the world

#19

Post by ms-menardi »

yen223 wrote: post #12
raymondgh wrote: post #10

Maybe a social endorsement scheme could be an alternative to an invasive proof system.

If there's a social endorsement scheme that doesn't involve real-world identity, I don't see how you won't end up with a situation where Bot_A is counted as legit, being endorsed by Bot_B...Bot_Z

because once Bot_J and Bot_Q are discovered to be bots, then everyone they've authenticated suddenly needs new people to vouch for them.

problem is, how do you figure out someone's a bot? Ah well maybe someone will make an AI tool for that, we humans are too busy doing groceries and putting round cubes into square holes.

Re: The most talented person in the world

#20

Post by worstspotgain »

api wrote: post #3

This kind of spam was already destroying the web before LLMs came along. Now it’s being accelerated by thousands of times. Mainstream web search is probably cooked. Kagi and other niche players might have a chance if the fact that they are not beholden to advertisers lets them introduce features to do things like downrank content with ads. Kagi has “small web” which I think includes this in its weighting. Open social…

You're assuming that LLMs will boost spam and scams more than LLMs will tone them down by marginalizing them automatically. I have the opposite view. SMTP spam used to be mostly unavoidable, then one day it was not.

IMO, the number of engineers and moderators needed to offset one scammer is about to take a huge dive.

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