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You can't trust the internet anymore

nicole.express

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Re: You can't trust the internet anymore

#111

Post by forgetfreeman »

digiown wrote: post #25
marginalia_nu wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's the same as with crypto rug pulls, nobody is going to fall for that several times. Was still money to make in that before everyone and their grandma wisened up.

I don't think prediction markets work well for that. It is a market and you can't really prevent anyone else from benefitting from the same victims, which dilutes your earnings.

You don't need a perfect oracle to win on prediction markets. All it takes is enough influence to tip % in your favor. Card counting is very effective.

Re: You can't trust the internet anymore

#112

Post by bossyTeacher »

cortesoft wrote: post #28
WD-42 wrote: post #16

This is why my friends and I are setting up a mesh network in our town. The open internet has been going downhill for a while, but LLMs are absolutely accelerating it's demise. I was in denial for the last few years but at this point I've accepted that the internet I grew up on as a kid in the late 90s to mid 2000s is dead. I am grateful for having experienced it but the time has come to move on. The future for peopl…

This seems like solving the problem at the wrong layer? The issue isn’t the actual network connection between people, it is the content. You could easily create your own forum or something and only include people you trust. You don’t need an entirely separate internet.

> This seems like solving the problem at the wrong layer? The issue isn’t the actual network connection between people, it is the content.

Classic HN. Focus on the tech to avoid looking at the problem.

Re: You can't trust the internet anymore

#113

Post by afpx »

cortesoft wrote: post #28
WD-42 wrote: post #16

This is why my friends and I are setting up a mesh network in our town. The open internet has been going downhill for a while, but LLMs are absolutely accelerating it's demise. I was in denial for the last few years but at this point I've accepted that the internet I grew up on as a kid in the late 90s to mid 2000s is dead. I am grateful for having experienced it but the time has come to move on. The future for peopl…

This seems like solving the problem at the wrong layer? The issue isn’t the actual network connection between people, it is the content. You could easily create your own forum or something and only include people you trust. You don’t need an entirely separate internet.

I'd like a semi-anonymous private network. Something like: I go to local post office and purchase a sealed token. I use the token to generate a reusable “verified human credential” with limited reuses. The credential allows me to connect to the private network.

Re: You can't trust the internet anymore

#114

Post by armchairhacker »

PaulDavisThe1st wrote: post #72
armchairhacker wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There’s a lot of debate under your linked comment. My understanding is that people tend to cooperate in smaller numbers or when reputation is persistent (the larger the group, the more reliable reputation has to be), otherwise the (uncommon) low-trust actors ruin everything. Most humans are altruistic and trusting by default, but a large enough group will have a few sociopaths and misunderstood interactions; which cr…

> Most humans are altruistic and trusting by default ... ... towards an in-group, yes. Not towards out-groups, as far as I can tell. Though for some reason this tends not to apply to solo travellers in many, many parts of the world. Lots of debate, yes, but very little about the basic fact that Hardin's formulation of "the tragedy of the commons" doesn't describe actual historical events in pretty any well documented…

Wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tragedy_of_the_commons#Example...) does have global examples where tragedy of the commons has applied, like mass extinctions and climate change. These are ongoing but have already caused permanent damage.

Although, there are other large-scale examples where tragedy of the commons has been (practically) avoided: ozone depletion and Polio eradication. Wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tragedy_of_the_commons#Non-gov...) also mentions Elinor Ostrom, but her examples involve "smaller numbers".

Re: You can't trust the internet anymore

#115

Post by krapp »

PaulDavisThe1st wrote: post #105
krapp wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>to be boring, the term "enshittification" was invented by one individual, recently, and has a specific meaning. it does not refer to "things just get worse" It literally started meaning that hours after it was first posted to HN and being used. Sorry, that's just how language works. Enshittification got enshittified. Deal with it and move on.

that's literally meaningless. also ahistorical, both in that this is not what happened hours after it was first posted to HN (which was months after it was originated), and also in that "things become shittier" was and is still a perfectly common expression, the source of Doctorow's neologism and much closer to what the loose use of it is trying to get at.

>that's literally meaningless. also ahistorical, both in that this is not what happened hours after it was first posted to HN (which was months after it was originated)

Maybe it wasn't literally hours, but it was really fast. I remember noting how quickly people began to complain about it being used "improperly." The earliest instance I could find was this thread[0] from 2023 where user Gunax complained about it. I couldn't find an earlier reference in Algolia, it probably exists but I honestly don't care enough to put in the effort.

[0]https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36297336

>and also in that "things become shittier" was and is still a perfectly common expression

...perfectly encapsulated and described by the term "enshittification." Which is why people use it for that now. It's more descriptive in the general sense than it is as a specific term of art. You're complaining that a word that means "the process of turning to shit" is being used to describe "the process of turning to shit." What did people expect to happen? If you want to keep it as a precise and technical term of art, keep calling it "platform decay." A shit joke is not a technical, precise term of art.

You can be as much of a prescriptivist crank about this as you want, it doesn't matter. "Enshittification" now refers to any process by which things "turn to shit."

Re: You can't trust the internet anymore

#116

Post by bombcar »

3eb7988a1663 wrote: post #32

I was recently running into this while playing the latest Hollow Knight game. Several sloppified sites which obviously were trying to tailor mechanics/items of the original game into the new one. The new release is only ~six months old, so there is just not that much hard content available to reference. My question is -why? Is it really worth the ad revenue to trick a few people looking into a few niche topics? Say y…

If you live in a VLCOL country, and have access to free tooling (via various means) you only need a very small return to make it entirely worth your while.

Re: You can't trust the internet anymore

#117

Post by marginalia_nu »

forgetfreeman wrote: post #111
digiown wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think prediction markets work well for that. It is a market and you can't really prevent anyone else from benefitting from the same victims, which dilutes your earnings.

You don't need a perfect oracle to win on prediction markets. All it takes is enough influence to tip % in your favor. Card counting is very effective.

Yeah, as long as it's reasonably reliable, compound interest also adds up to turn even small ROIs into big wins across multiple investments.

Re: You can't trust the internet anymore

#118

Post by benhurmarcel »

neom wrote: post #37

I thought a lot last night about how we could protect HN, I didn't come up with a good answer except maybe you'll need to have someone with a higher reputation vouch aka invites. My internet community journey has mostly just been irc -> dA -> twitter -> HN. Too frequently these days I feel I might be putting emotional energy into something that isn't human on this site, hard to express how that makes me feel, but it'…

HN with invites is basically https://lobste.rs/

Re: You can't trust the internet anymore

#119

Post by PaulDavisThe1st »

krapp wrote: post #115
PaulDavisThe1st wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

that's literally meaningless. also ahistorical, both in that this is not what happened hours after it was first posted to HN (which was months after it was originated), and also in that "things become shittier" was and is still a perfectly common expression, the source of Doctorow's neologism and much closer to what the loose use of it is trying to get at.

>that's literally meaningless. also ahistorical, both in that this is not what happened hours after it was first posted to HN (which was months after it was originated) Maybe it wasn't literally hours, but it was really fast. I remember noting how quickly people began to complain about it being used "improperly." The earliest instance I could find was this thread[0] from 2023 where user Gunax complained about it. I c…

I'm not a prescriptivist over any sane time scale (say, 5-10 years and upwards).

But here's what you're basically implying:

A writer was thinking about the ways things get shittier, decided that there was an actual pattern (at least when it came to online services) that came up again and again, such that "shittified" or "shittier" didn't really describe the most insidious part of it, and coined "enshittification" as a neologism that captured both the "shittier/shittified" aspects and also the academic overtones of "enXXXXication" ...

... and within less than 3 years, sloppy use of the neologism rendered it undifferentiatable from its roots, and the language without a simple term to describe the specific, capitalistic, corporatist process that the writer had noticed.

I can be anti-prescriptivist in general without losing my opposition to that specific process.

Re: You can't trust the internet anymore

#120

Post by krapp »

PaulDavisThe1st wrote: post #119
krapp wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>that's literally meaningless. also ahistorical, both in that this is not what happened hours after it was first posted to HN (which was months after it was originated) Maybe it wasn't literally hours, but it was really fast. I remember noting how quickly people began to complain about it being used "improperly." The earliest instance I could find was this thread[0] from 2023 where user Gunax complained about it. I c…

I'm not a prescriptivist over any sane time scale (say, 5-10 years and upwards). But here's what you're basically implying: A writer was thinking about the ways things get shittier, decided that there was an actual pattern (at least when it came to online services) that came up again and again, such that "shittified" or "shittier" didn't really describe the most insidious part of it, and coined "enshittification" as…

It's already happened to "vibe coding," which no longer refers to the specific process described by Andrej Karpathy but any use of AI assisted development.

The process of language drift is accelerated exponentially by the internet. 5-10 years and upwards is an obsolete timescale, these changes can happen in months now, sometimes faster depending on the community.

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