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PhysicsForums and the Dead Internet Theory

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Re: PhysicsForums and the Dead Internet Theory

#151

Post by nullc »

robswc wrote: post #31
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…

100%. So far (thankfully) I've noticed this stuff get voted down on social media but it is blowing my mind people think pasting in a ChatGPT response is productive. I've seen people on reddit say stuff like "I don't know but here's what ChatGPT said." Or worse, presenting ChatGPT copy-paste as their own. Its funny because you can tell, the text reads like an HR person wrote it.

It's particularly funny/annoying when they're convinced that the fact they got it from the "AI" makes it more likely to be correct than other commenters who actually know what the heck they're talking about.

It makes me wonder how shallow a person's knowledge of all areas must be that they could use an LLM for more than a little while without encountering something where it is flagrantly wrong yet continued with its same tone of absolute confidence and authority. ... but it's mostly just a particularly aggressive form of Gell-Mann amnesia.

Re: PhysicsForums and the Dead Internet Theory

#152

Post by tomrod »

0xDEAFBEAD wrote: post #89
r58lf wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Same with siliconinvestor.com It was an early stock discussion forum. It grew rapidly when search engines started indexing everything and this forum had a URL for each message that was easily indexable. It's still around, but nothing like the old days.

I find these old school forums fascinating. How does that even work, to have a thread of 192,211 posts about Qualcomm? https://www.siliconinvestor.com/subject.aspx?subjectid=36035 Suppose the average post is about 1 paragraph long. One paragraph is about 150 words. So 192211 * 150 = about 29 million words. For comparison, the Lord of the Rings trilogy is only around half a million words. It wouldn't surprise me if th…

People like to talk at scale, even if no one is listening.

Re: PhysicsForums and the Dead Internet Theory

#153

Post by tomrod »

0xDEAFBEAD wrote: post #81
tomrod wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

reddit had camaraderie in the early days too. Is there anywhere on the internet that still has camaraderie?

I enjoy Hacker News even with its recent growth.

Other places seem to either not have critical mass to stick around (datatau), or become troll sites (econjobrumors, reddit).

Re: PhysicsForums and the Dead Internet Theory

#154

Post by tomrod »

encom wrote: post #102
tomrod wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Why?

Re: PhysicsForums and the Dead Internet Theory

#155

Post by BlueTemplar »

RiverCrochet wrote: post #109
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 docum…

Discord, or the Death of Lore :

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35050858

(Even when something like a wiki exists, most of actual information will still be contained in the lore, itself blackholed by a deep web platform like Discord.)

Re: PhysicsForums and the Dead Internet Theory

#156

Post by BlueTemplar »

econ wrote: post #105

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 ad…

I think I would rather post alone than my current experience (on 2 forums already) of other posters being overwhelmingly spam bots.

Re: PhysicsForums and the Dead Internet Theory

#157

Post by BobbyTables2 »

kjs3 wrote: post #133
scoofy wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This has been a constant back and forth for me. My personal project https://golfcourse.wiki was built on the idea that I wanted to make a wiki for golf nerds because nobody pays attention to 95% of fun golf courses because those courses don't have a marketing department in touch with social media. I basically decided that using AI content would waste everyone's time. However, it's a real chicken-or-egg problem in con…

This is a really interesting conundrum. And I'm a golfer, so... Of the top of my head I wonder if there's a way to have AI generate a summary from existing (on-line) information about a course with a very explicit "this is what AI says about this course" or some similar disclosure until you get 'real' local insight. No one could then say 'it's just AI slop', but you're still providing value as there's something about…

But AI will just summarize v other humans’ work here. It has no understanding of golf…

Re: PhysicsForums and the Dead Internet Theory

#158

Post by kjkjadksj »

Gracana wrote: post #77
Sharlin wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> but it's obvious to everyone that they're not very reliable. Hopefully to everyone on HN, but definitely not to everyone on the greater Internet. There are plenty of horror stories of people who apparently 100% blindly trust whatever ChatGPT says.

Yeah that's fair, I suppose I see that sort of thing on reddit fairly regularly, especially in the "here's a story about my messed-up life" types of subreddits.

There was a post from one of those am I the asshole subreddits, about how OP had some issue with an overweight person trying to claim their seat on a plane. Thousands of upvotes and comments ensued supporting OP and blaming the overweight person.

Then 10 hours later OP edited the post and dropped the bomb. The screenshot of their prompt “make a story for the am I the asshole subreddit that makes a fat person look bad.” Followed by the post they pasted directly from chatgpt. Only one comment was about the edit and it completely missed the point and instead blamed OP for tricking them. Not the fact that probably every post on that subreddit and others like it is AI slop.

Re: PhysicsForums and the Dead Internet Theory

#159

Post by hintymad »

A trajectory observation: People from the US and maybe Europe seem love having all kinds of niche forums, like PhysicsForum. On the contrary, Chinese people seemed love having a centralized place. Case in point, Zhihu(zhihu.com) was a clone of Quora, yet now Zhihu is the largest site for finding deep discussion of practically everything, maths, machine learning, history, physics, engineering, general science, just name a few. Tons of researchers and experts and hobbyists are there to share their insights. In contrasts, the quality of Quora seems have been deteriorating over the years, and most of the experts are in all kinds of niche forums anyway.

I wonder why there is such a difference.

Re: PhysicsForums and the Dead Internet Theory

#160

Post by upghost »

I'm also noticing there's a dead economy theory or at least dead job market theory. AI sending resumes, AI reading/rejecting resumes. Humans wanting to talk to real humans, but all we get is slop. If we ever develop AGI I guess we'll have to go back to completely offline just to talk to real humans.
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