141–150 of 318 posts
I wrote about it here: https://blog.picheta.me/post/the-future-of-social-media-is-h...
I see many, many startups that promise to be an automated marketing agent that will do this exact thing: scour sites for conversations and post links to your product. Obviously that burns down the human Internet, but it’s also a business that will have a short lifespan and bring about its own demise. I guess they don’t care about anything enduring as long as they can grab some quick cash on the way out.
> I guess they don’t care about anything enduring as long as they can grab some quick cash on the way out. As far as I can tell, that is basically all AI-related businesses. Including those non-AI ones jumping on the bandwagon to throw all their employees in the bin and expect 10x productivity somehow: if they are right and these tools do become that good, well the economy as we know it is over as white collar knowle…
A good example is this, car companies don't make cars for the most part, they make loans. Financial companies first, car companies second.
Consolidation, collusion, and rent-seeking behaviors by companies are going out of control too. The fact AI companies can do what they are doing has much to do with the previous brick and mortar businesses weakening any business regulations down to nothing.
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…
Including bots.
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.
Maybe the only parts of a future internet people will actually hang out in is going to be one where any profit-making is completely de-incentivized. No recommendations. No product reviews. No opinions on companies or services. More slow web. Maybe we'll slowly head back to what websites used to look like when Yahoo was the biggest search engine.
Back then the day Yahoo was a manually curated index of submitted & verified sites with search capabilities. Wild-ass business idea: what if Yahoo 2026 recreated Yahoo 1996 and also any of the video sites it bought up back in the day get relaunched as deshittified ad-selling mechanisms to fund the whole thing… there’s gotta be Yahoo 1996 money in whatever scraps YouTube is missing. It used to be faster and easier to…
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…
When AI can post a million times a day the internet is FUBAR.
I 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.
Hey it’s what executives want. Fake everything. Slop and robots everywhere. Have at it, I say. Maybe then people will go outside again
I wish going outside again were possible, but what if most of the people you actually want to hang out with aren't in the same area? And for those who are near, the cost of having a coffee or a drink is too much now on top of expenses that are already stretching,
do you think small, invite-only communities will end up being the last holdout for genuine human conversation online? or will bots eventually infiltrate those too?
Bots will absolutely infiltrate them eventually, but I think it's the only solution. Internet promised ability to connect with anyone anywhere around the world. It felt limitless and infinite. Turns out in an infinite world, the loudest voices are the ragebaits, the algorithmically-amplified, or the outright scammers. Human social brain doesn't work in an infinite world, it works for a Dunbar's Number world. And we a…
Hence you'll end up with defectors getting paid to siphon off all the conversations to some ad companies that will work on tying them with real world identities and then serving them more detailed ads in the places they cannot avoid interfacing with the open internet.
Mastodon wasn't really it and neither was Substack, although maybe it got slightly closer. TikTok and Telegram, maybe, for different reasons, but they'll face the same destiny.
I'd suppose the much despised "mainstream media" might be a winner here eventually. But beyond that, I am thinking about something like the following:
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2026/mar/10/uk-societ...