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PhysicsForums and the Dead Internet Theory

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Re: PhysicsForums and the Dead Internet Theory

#101

Post by numpad0 »

daveguy wrote: post #96
egypturnash wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People who submit blog posts here sure do love opening their blogs with AI image slop. I have taken to assuming that the text is also AI slop, and closing the tab and leaving a comment saying such. Sometimes this comment gets a ton of upvotes. Sometimes it gets indignant replies insisting it's real writing. I need to come up with a good standard response to the latter.

> I need to come up with a good standard response to the latter. How about, "I'm sorry, but if you're willing to use AI image slop, how should I know you wouldn't also use AI text slop? AI text content isn't reliable, and I don't have time to personally vet every assertion."

Trying to gaslight your enemy is certainly an option for something, not always the best nor the one in line with HN guideline. Frankly it just rarely reduce undesirable behaviors even if you're in the mood to be manipulative.

Re: PhysicsForums and the Dead Internet Theory

#102

Post by encom »

tomrod wrote: post #16
Rodeoclash wrote: post #4

The ShackNews forum: https://www.shacknews.com/chatty was similar - go back in time on on it and you can find posts about 9/11 unfolding.

Ars Technica started with comms forums + this new idea to report tech news. The forums are still there but not nearly the camaraderie of the early days.

It's been a long time since I visited the Ars forums, but the news article commenters today are absolutely deranged. It makes me want to not engage with the forums again.

Re: PhysicsForums and the Dead Internet Theory

#103

Post by nateglims »

Scoundreller wrote: post #25

> It had fairly steady growth until 2012, before petering out throughout the 2010s and 2020s in lieu of more centralized sites like StackExchange, and by 2025, only a small community was left This timeline tracks with my own blogging. Google slowly stopped ranking traditional forum posts and blogs as well around that time, regardless of quality, unless it was a “major”. > But, unlike so many other fora from back in t…

I remember several traditional programming forums I frequented in the 00s getting hit hard by the Google Panda update around 2013. It ruined their SEO and they started to go into decline. Forums and blogs had a culture that isn't replicated by reddit, social media, etc. It's a shame to lose it.

Re: PhysicsForums and the Dead Internet Theory

#104

Post by numpad0 »

onemoresoop wrote: post #93
tayo42 wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Despite what people think there is a sort of art to getting interesting images out of an ai model.

That’s not the issue though, it should be marked as such or be found in a section people looking for it can easily find it instead of shoving it everywhere. To me placing that generated content in human spaces is a strong signal for low effort. On the other hand generated content can be extremely interesting and useful and indeed there’s an art to it

They know everyone, especially the ones they seek attention from, has such labels in their muted keywords list.

Re: PhysicsForums and the Dead Internet Theory

#105

Post by econ »

I like the assumption that it was a real account originally.

It all seems so unthinkable but when running a forum or a blog with an active comment section.. what would you do/think if your users show up, browse around and not say anything for a week? You start out by making topics in your own name, write helpful replies.. until you look like an idiot talking to yourself.

Forums with good traffic and lots of spammy advertisement no doubt consider it when visitors leave because nothing new happened.

I once upon a time, on a rather stale forum, created two similarly named accounts from the same ip and argued with myself. At first I thought the owner or one of the other users would notice but I quickly learned that no behaviour is weird enough for it to be ever considered.

Re: PhysicsForums and the Dead Internet Theory

#106

Post by Scoundreller »

layer8 wrote: post #97
lkramer wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is interesting. I wonder why it's not visible by default.

Maybe it is/was an A/B test, to see if it hurts ad revenue (it probably does). The option appeared randomly for me on a search, and I took immediately note of the udm number. :)

Ran through the lower numbers that hit something interesting:

8 = jobs (but doesn't return any results) 15 = attractions (but doesn't return any results)

Re: PhysicsForums and the Dead Internet Theory

#107

Post by pbronez »

firesteelrain wrote: post #87
inasio wrote: post #70

Talk about burying the lede! Near the bottom of the story the site owner confirms that it was him that added the backdated AI comments (perhaps it should have been obvious...)

I couldn’t find it. He was trying to seed the site ?

Experimenting with using AI bots to respond to questions that had been open for a long time with no response.

Re: PhysicsForums and the Dead Internet Theory

#108

Post by Balgair »

COAGULOPATH wrote: post #27

Something I'm increasingly noticing about LLM-generated content is that...nobody wants it. (I mean "nobody" in the sense of "nobody likes Nickelback". ie, not literally nobody.) If I want to talk to an AI, I can talk to an AI. If I'm reading a blog or a discussion forum, it's because I want to see writing by humans . I don't want to read a wall of copy+pasted LLM slop posted under a human's name. I now spend dismayin…

> (I mean "nobody" in the sense of "nobody likes Nickelback". ie, not literally nobody.)

Reminds me of the old Yogi Berra quote: Nobody goes there anymore, its too crowded.

Re: PhysicsForums and the Dead Internet Theory

#109

Post by RiverCrochet »

segasaturn wrote: post #17

Money quote: > There’s also a social contract: when we create an account in an online community, we do it with the expectation that people we are going to interact with are primarily people. Oh, there will be shills, and bots, and advertisers, but the agreement between the users and the community provider is that they are going to try to defend us from that, and that in exchange we will provide our engagement and con…

Well, the end of open, public UGC content anyway.

I have heard of Discord servers where admins won't assign you roles giving you access to all channels unless you've personally met them, someone in the group can vouch for you, or you have a video chat with them and "verify."

This is the future. We need something like Discord that also has a webpage-like mechanism built into it (a space for a whole collection of documents, not just posts) and is accessible via a browser.

Of course, depending on discovery mechanisms, this means this new "Internet" is no longer an easy escape from a given reality or place, and that was a major driver of its use in the 90's and 00's - curious people wanting to explore new things not available in their local communities. To be honest, the old, reliable Google was probably the major driver of that.

And it sucks for truly anti-social people who simply don't want to deal with other people for anything, but maybe those types will flourish with AI everywhere.

If the gated hubs of a possible new group-x-group human Internet maintain open lobbies, maybe the best of both worlds can be had.

Re: PhysicsForums and the Dead Internet Theory

#110

Post by tayo42 »

chowells wrote: post #86
tayo42 wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Rephrasing can be beneficial. It can make things clearer to understand and learn from. Like in math something like khan academy or the 3blue 1 brown YouTube channel isn't presenting anything new, just rephrasing math in a different way that makes it easier for some to understand. If llms could take the giant overwhelming manual in my car and get out the answer to what oil to use, that woukd be useful and not new info…

I have to protest. A lot of 3b1b is new. Not the math itself, but the animated graphical presentation is. That's where the value from his channel comes in. He provides a lot of tools to visualize problems in ways that haven't been done before.

I guess the way I think of the visualizations and video as a whole as a type of rephrasing. He's not the first person to try to visualize math concepts
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