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The dead Internet is not a theory anymore

adriankrebs.ch

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Re: The dead Internet is not a theory anymore

#111

Post by midtake »

jsheard wrote: post #95
nathancahill wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think this was the premise of Keybase?

It's kind of bizarre that Zoom is still bothering to keep the lights on at Keybase when it's been completely fossilized for six years now. The writing is so obviously on the wall that nobody should be relying on it for anything, and yet they just won't let it die.

It's not fossilized, it's just that no one uses it. Put hot chicks on there or make it mandatory for logging into Slack and suddenly everyone will be using keybase.io, and honestly I think web of trust is a good idea and if a webapp can make it seem easy or intuitive then I'm all for it.

We're scratching our heads wondering why there's no forward motion when it's simply that no one is pushing it.

Re: The dead Internet is not a theory anymore

#112

Post by amiantos »

pixl97 wrote: post #101
amiantos wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So why isn't it called "dead social media theory"? The internet is not only social media services, though I understand a lot of people seem to think that without centralized social media services there is no reason to use the internet.

Have you been on the internet at large lately? With google you may get one authoritative site on something and 50 bot copies of the site on different domains. Sometimes the stolen site is the number one return. Also, if you ran sites years/decades ago, you realized way back then the any local user posting was getting overran by spammers/bots. Now is so much worse that it's not worth doing in most cases. So, most post…

I spend all day every day on the Internet and I don't share your perspective. I might dislike centralized social media and yearn for a bygone era, but just in the past two days I had a very positive interaction with multiple real humans in the Commodore 64 subreddit that helped solve a problem I was having that isn't documented anywhere else on the internet yet. So then I went on my personal blog and blogged about it, which will get it out there on Google and help others. In this way, I am helping to keep the internet alive, I guess. "Be the change you want to see in the world," and all that.

Re: The dead Internet is not a theory anymore

#113

Post by kjkjadksj »

robotswantdata wrote: post #86
amiantos wrote: post #51

Why is it being called dead internet theory when, as far as I can tell, what's really happening is that big centralized systems are being overrun with bots? The internet existed and was pretty great before these large centralized systems came into being. Anyone can still run a blog/website, and/or their own discourse server. There's no need to mourn for these centralized systems that largely existed only to exploit u…

How would the small internet fight the bots? Aggressive moderation? Disable UGC?

It would be interesting if we had some sort of local verification in the real world. As in picking up some key from some physical place or having it sent to some physical place. Some services like nextdoor are set up like this and mail out account auth to make sure the user is local to their next door group. Obviously you can imagine how it might be abused but it is impossible to do so at the scale you can abuse digital only methods.

Re: The dead Internet is not a theory anymore

#114

Post by chistev »

xdennis wrote: post #105
amiantos wrote: post #51

Why is it being called dead internet theory when, as far as I can tell, what's really happening is that big centralized systems are being overrun with bots? The internet existed and was pretty great before these large centralized systems came into being. Anyone can still run a blog/website, and/or their own discourse server. There's no need to mourn for these centralized systems that largely existed only to exploit u…

> Let's celebrate "small internet theory", an internet where exploitation is effectively impossible because every company that tries it is overrun with AI bots. But isn't it even harder for small forums to resist the robot onslaught without the trillion dollar valuations to fund it? Although, part of the reason Facebook/Linkedin/Twitch/etc have bots is because those companies secretly want them, in order to inflate t…

> Although, part of the reason Facebook/Linkedin/Twitch/etc have bots is because those companies secretly want them, in order to inflate their usage numbers.

Yes, they are disincentivized to get rid of bots.

Re: The dead Internet is not a theory anymore

#115

Post by jsheard »

midtake wrote: post #111
jsheard wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's kind of bizarre that Zoom is still bothering to keep the lights on at Keybase when it's been completely fossilized for six years now. The writing is so obviously on the wall that nobody should be relying on it for anything, and yet they just won't let it die.

It's not fossilized, it's just that no one uses it. Put hot chicks on there or make it mandatory for logging into Slack and suddenly everyone will be using keybase.io, and honestly I think web of trust is a good idea and if a webapp can make it seem easy or intuitive then I'm all for it. We're scratching our heads wondering why there's no forward motion when it's simply that no one is pushing it.

Looks pretty fossilized to me: https://keybase.io/blog

They haven't added or really changed anything since the acquisition AFAICT, it's just trucking along exactly as it was the day Zoom bought them out. Twitter account proofs were broken by the API changes years ago and nobody is at the wheel to fix or even just deprecate them.

https://github.com/keybase/keybase-issues/issues/4200

Re: The dead Internet is not a theory anymore

#116

Post by pixl97 »

amiantos wrote: post #100
robotswantdata wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How would the small internet fight the bots? Aggressive moderation? Disable UGC?

In an ideal/fantasy world under "small internet theory", every online friend group would have their own Discourse server set up (similar to how friend groups use Discord now), and traffic/usage of that Discourse server is so small that it would be a waste of resources to try to swamp it with bot traffic, and on top of that, everyone on the Discourse server are friends who can vouch for new members who join, so no bot…

>Let's build small communities of

And 10 minutes later Texas demands you identify all your users age when someone posts a porn image somewhere. Facebook will gleefully laugh all the way to the court saying we need such internet ID to entrench themselves.

>, in that way the internet will never die.

You mean in the exact way the internet used to be... then died?

I'm guessing your GenX or a Xennial, it's how we think. Relationships and friendships are hard things to acquire and keep and you have to work to do it otherwise friends disappear. The thing is the younger generations mostly don't think that way. They have mostly always lived in a world where connections are cheap and easy to maintain. Attempting to move to a system that is more difficult will be very difficult for them.

Re: The dead Internet is not a theory anymore

#118

Post by robotswantdata »

kjkjadksj wrote: post #113
robotswantdata wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How would the small internet fight the bots? Aggressive moderation? Disable UGC?

It would be interesting if we had some sort of local verification in the real world. As in picking up some key from some physical place or having it sent to some physical place. Some services like nextdoor are set up like this and mail out account auth to make sure the user is local to their next door group. Obviously you can imagine how it might be abused but it is impossible to do so at the scale you can abuse digi…

Pokémon go was ahead of its time

Re: The dead Internet is not a theory anymore

#119

Post by Retr0id »

amiantos wrote: post #51

Why is it being called dead internet theory when, as far as I can tell, what's really happening is that big centralized systems are being overrun with bots? The internet existed and was pretty great before these large centralized systems came into being. Anyone can still run a blog/website, and/or their own discourse server. There's no need to mourn for these centralized systems that largely existed only to exploit u…

We're talking right now on a centralized system that's slowly being overrun by bots. We can survive without, but I'll miss it.

Re: The dead Internet is not a theory anymore

#120

Post by pixl97 »

chistev wrote: post #114
xdennis wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Let's celebrate "small internet theory", an internet where exploitation is effectively impossible because every company that tries it is overrun with AI bots. But isn't it even harder for small forums to resist the robot onslaught without the trillion dollar valuations to fund it? Although, part of the reason Facebook/Linkedin/Twitch/etc have bots is because those companies secretly want them, in order to inflate t…

> Although, part of the reason Facebook/Linkedin/Twitch/etc have bots is because those companies secretly want them, in order to inflate their usage numbers. Yes, they are disincentivized to get rid of bots.

The people that want to get rid of the bots get crushed because said botting technology is hyper advanced and cheap to use because of the massive scale of social media. This ends up with huge numbers of them getting put behind services like cloudflare further consolidating the internet.
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