Emacs will solve this too:
https://github.com/tanrax/org-social
:-)
The dead Internet is not a theory anymore
121–130 of 318 posts
Re: The dead Internet is not a theory anymore
#122I only see two outcomes for this problem : an internet of verified identities (start by uploading your ID card). Or a paid internet, where it doesn't matter who you are, but since you're going to pay for that email or that reddit account, the probability that it's AI spam is greatly reduced. And i'm looking forward to none of them.
Members only comment blogs. Where you need an invite to comment also solves the problem. You need to know a real human to get access.
> Members only comment blogs.
There, sadly, needs to be some gatekeeping and then it can work.
For example I'm member, since years, of a petrolhead forum where it works like that: a fancy car brand, with lots of "tifosi" (and you don't necessarily want all these would-be owners on the forum). To be part of the forum you must be introduced by some other members who have met you in real-life and who confirm that you did show up with a car of that brand.
If you're not a "confirmed owner", you can only access the forum in read-only mode.
It's not 100% foolproof but it does greatly raise the bar.
It's international too: people do travel and they organize meetups / see each others at cars and coffee, etc.
Or take a real extreme, maybe the most expensive social network: the Bloomberg terminal. People/companies paying $30K/year or so per seat each year probably won't be going to let employees hook a LLM to chat for them and risk screwing their reputation. Although I take it you never know.
It is the way it is but gatekeeping does exist and it does work.
Re: The dead Internet is not a theory anymore
#123Earlier quoted context omitted.
I want cool cryptography where I can, e.g. verify where I'm writing from and what my age is without giving away any other information. Or if I want, I can verify that I'm myself, and eschew anonymity, and certain platforms should only accept contributions from people who don't hide their identity. Everyone knows who you are in the town square.
IMHO, this is the exact instinct and there's a way to verify identity, location, and age without even having to share those directly.
Switzerland just voted recently to officially implement Selective Disclosure JWT, which does exactly all that. Social network registration can ask "are you 18?" and run with that - and only that. Or the club entrance. Or whatever, because it's all controlled by yourself in your app.
Re: The dead Internet is not a theory anymore
#124I only see two outcomes for this problem : an internet of verified identities (start by uploading your ID card). Or a paid internet, where it doesn't matter who you are, but since you're going to pay for that email or that reddit account, the probability that it's AI spam is greatly reduced. And i'm looking forward to none of them.
I want cool cryptography where I can, e.g. verify where I'm writing from and what my age is without giving away any other information. Or if I want, I can verify that I'm myself, and eschew anonymity, and certain platforms should only accept contributions from people who don't hide their identity. Everyone knows who you are in the town square.
What stops someone from handing over their idendity’s private keys to an agent?
Re: The dead Internet is not a theory anymore
#125Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
> So then I went on my personal blog and blogged about it, which will get it out there on Google and help others.
That's some of the boldest optimism I think I've seen in awhile. Maybe your blog is more popular than I assume, but still
Re: The dead Internet is not a theory anymore
#126Why 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…
Anyone can run a blog/website and be subject to AI bot crawlers using terabytes of your bandwidth for no reason, yeah.
Bandwidth is only expensive in the US, somehow. Here in Germany I didn't bother about bots and their additional traffic since 1998 (there are other annoying things about bots though).
Re: The dead Internet is not a theory anymore
#127Earlier quoted context omitted.
I want cool cryptography where I can, e.g. verify where I'm writing from and what my age is without giving away any other information. Or if I want, I can verify that I'm myself, and eschew anonymity, and certain platforms should only accept contributions from people who don't hide their identity. Everyone knows who you are in the town square.
Anonymity is important for many things. But on the flip side it's responsible of many issues with the internet today, because it makes moderation pretty much impossible (anyone can always just create a new account). What we're missing is a way to have cryptographically secure pseudonymity: you log in to a website, you don't give any information whatsoever, but you cannot make two different accounts.
Most likely because your second sentence is impossible in one way or another.
Even if it's some kind of government encoded key, governments cannot be trusted to create imaginary people and hand them out to companies like palantir for large scale population manipulation.
Re: The dead Internet is not a theory anymore
#128Earlier 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.
100% agree that this is what it should be called. To argue that big websites being big makes them equivalent to the whole Internet is absurd. Besides, I love the idea of the only recourse to be to go back to independently run information websites.
For the younger generation, social sites are the internet. They open an app on their device, they don't go to sites by searching the web. I've seen people perform a web search in an app store thinking it was the same thing.
Re: The dead Internet is not a theory anymore
#129Why 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?
Small internet isn't very attractive for most bots. Also, I use websites that are invite-only. This is effectively a web of trust. This works pretty well, bots aren't a real problem there.
Re: The dead Internet is not a theory anymore
#130Why 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…
Bring back BBS. Getting into the good ones was a process back in the day.