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Digg is gone again

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Re: Digg is gone again

#171

Post by tlonny »

kdheiwns wrote: post #107
mikeocool wrote: post #51

Kinda seems like we’re rapidly headed for the complete collapse of the internet as we know it. Every site that is driven by user posting seems to be headed towards being overrun by AI bots chatting with each other, either for sake of promoting something or farming karma. And there’s really not much point in publishing good content anymore, since AI is just going slurp it up and regurgitate it without driving you any…

With AI running rampant, it seems security through obscurity is basically the best thing we have. Everyone knows reddit, facebook, xitter, etc so any clown can and does have bots running loose. HN is "obscure" in that most normies don't know about this place, and so it's relatively safe from the floods of spam. But I think it's just a matter of time until non-tech people start looking for those few bastions of human…

HN may not be “mainstream” but it is certainly _very_ vulnerable to bot spam given the topics discussed and the make-up of the audience.

You can already see it happening now - at least the bots that write like vanilla Claude/ChatGPT. Presumably there is a much larger hidden cohort of bots that are instructed to talk more naturally and thus are better adept at flying under the radar…

Re: Digg is gone again

#172

Post by armchairhacker »

shellfishgene wrote: post #134
mikeocool wrote: post #51

Kinda seems like we’re rapidly headed for the complete collapse of the internet as we know it. Every site that is driven by user posting seems to be headed towards being overrun by AI bots chatting with each other, either for sake of promoting something or farming karma. And there’s really not much point in publishing good content anymore, since AI is just going slurp it up and regurgitate it without driving you any…

This could be positive. So far things were gamed and manipulated to some extent, with some fake content, but it was never too obvious, and a bit of a cat and mouse game with filters and whatnot. Now, it's so easy to fake content that robust systems will have to evolve, or most social media sites will become worthless, and advertisers will catch up eventually when they are paying for bot-only sites. The downside of co…

Web of trust weakens anonymity, but doesn’t eliminate it.

- You know who your online invitees are, but not your invitees-of-invitees-of-…

- You can create an account, get it invited, then create an alt account and invite it. Now the alt account is still linked to you, but others don’t know whether it’s your friend or yourself. (Importantly, you can’t evade bans with alts; if your invited users keep getting banned, you’ll be prevented from inviting more if not banned yourself)

Re: Digg is gone again

#173

Post by flomo »

JimDabell wrote: post #149
deanc wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The bot problem cannot be solved. Even if you strongly authenticate, people are letting bots act on their behalf (moltbook is a great example of this) and what's to stop people doing that in the future. Build your identity and reputation autonomously with the benefits that come with that. This happens now on Onlyfans too. Content creators hire agencies which in the best case outsource chatting to "customers" to armie…

> people are letting bots act on their behalf (moltbook is a great example of this) and what's to stop people doing that in the future. Verifiable credentials; services can get persistent pseudonymous identifiers that are linked to a real-world identity. Ban them once and they stay banned. It doesn’t matter if a person lets a bot post inauthentic content using their identity if, when they are caught, that person cann…

IMO this is inevitable. HN is freaking about about the end of the anonymous internet, but it's already over and we're just figuring it out. Eventually the bots will find their 90s cyberpunk cosplay IRC channel too.

Re: Digg is gone again

#174

Post by dijit »

guerrilla wrote: post #143
ThalesX wrote: post #135

I recently activated my account on there and went to the forum for my country. It was already taken over by moderators. Then I looked at the mod and he took all real estate that is already available on Reddit that is related to said country. So in a way, he was probably the first account on there and became god-king for eternity for the subreddits related to the country. I had no idea who he was, what he stood for, w…

Yes. Subforums should elect mods democratically.

sadly, a nice idea that is painfully naive with how computers are used in reality.

One need only remember how easy it was to take over IRC channels with a few hundred bots to see the endgame of this rationale… it cannot be patched out, it’s inherent to the internet.

That which would make a vote valid; can (and will) be gamed.

Re: Digg is gone again

#175

Post by tlonny »

Terr_ wrote: post #151
JimDabell wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> people are letting bots act on their behalf (moltbook is a great example of this) and what's to stop people doing that in the future. Verifiable credentials; services can get persistent pseudonymous identifiers that are linked to a real-world identity. Ban them once and they stay banned. It doesn’t matter if a person lets a bot post inauthentic content using their identity if, when they are caught, that person cann…

I'd rather have a system where there's a small investment cost to making an account, but you could always make another. Imagine A system where there's a vending machine outside City Hall, you spend $X on a charity for choice, and you get a one-time, anonymous token. You can "spend" it with a forum to indicate "this is probably a person or close enough to it." Misuse of the system could be curbed by making it so that…

I’d love something like this implemented for email.

Sending an unsolicited email to a random person X requires you to pay a small toll (something like 50p).

Subsequent emails can then be sent for free - however person X can “revoke” your access any time necessitating a further toll payment.

You would of course be able to pre-authorise friends/family/transactional emails from various services that you’ve signed up for.

This would nuke spam economics and be minimally disruptive for other use cases of email IMO…

Re: Digg is gone again

#176

Post by armchairhacker »

ahofmann wrote: post #128
r721 wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Dang told me in 2019 that HN gets 150M page views a month, so it's not that obscure actually: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21201120

150m page views a month is peanuts and very far away from the "social" networks numbers. I don't have those numbers, but I know how many page views we had 2011 while running a german browser game community.

The internet seems to have grown massively within the past couple years (unfortunately, almost certainly because of bots). I bet the number today is orders of magnitude higher.

Re: Digg is gone again

#177

Post by rambambram »

Gud wrote: post #146
october8140 wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The future is human curated content. Provide the same experience people get today but without the noise. Give them just the good stuff and don't let just anyone make a post. A book has an author, a movie has a director, maybe websites can have webmasters again who filter through the garbage for you.

It’s what I’m trying to accomplish with my website(link is in my profile). Just trying to crank up the signal to noise ratio.

Nice. I like how clicking a tag also makes the word 'tag' light up.

Re: Digg is gone again

#178

Post by tlonny »

deanc wrote: post #120
mikeocool wrote: post #51

Kinda seems like we’re rapidly headed for the complete collapse of the internet as we know it. Every site that is driven by user posting seems to be headed towards being overrun by AI bots chatting with each other, either for sake of promoting something or farming karma. And there’s really not much point in publishing good content anymore, since AI is just going slurp it up and regurgitate it without driving you any…

The bot problem cannot be solved. Even if you strongly authenticate, people are letting bots act on their behalf (moltbook is a great example of this) and what's to stop people doing that in the future. Build your identity and reputation autonomously with the benefits that come with that. This happens now on Onlyfans too. Content creators hire agencies which in the best case outsource chatting to "customers" to armie…

Indeed - the future is RL meet-ups and small, intimate online communities.

Perhaps not the worst thing in the world?

Re: Digg is gone again

#180

Post by nativeit »

mikeocool wrote: post #51

Kinda seems like we’re rapidly headed for the complete collapse of the internet as we know it. Every site that is driven by user posting seems to be headed towards being overrun by AI bots chatting with each other, either for sake of promoting something or farming karma. And there’s really not much point in publishing good content anymore, since AI is just going slurp it up and regurgitate it without driving you any…

As someone who came of age before “the internet as you know it”, I am looking forward to all of the cancerous Web 2.0 OG slop and narcissism factories succumbing to their own fates. Let me tell you, the internet as we know it sucks, and the internet it ate 25-years ago is a marked improvement. We should be so lucky. Now go write a personal blog in plain text, and rejoice.
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