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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

#211

Post by AngryData »

Invictus0 wrote: post #53
crab_galaxy wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fine in what way? What people? I have not seen or heard of a single person who is excited about AI generated blog posts, or TikToks, or commercials, or images. In fact it’s the opposite, the internet coined the term AI slop, and my non-internet addicted friends hate the fact that chatGPT is killing the environment. The only people I’ve ever seen champion AI are the few who are excited by the bleeding edge, and the ma…

There are probably more than 10^17 AI model executions occurring per day. I know in ye olde HN there are many Purists that are Too Good For AI, but the majority of the human race is consuming AI at a blinding rate, and if they really didn't like it, they would stop.

And how much of that consumption is voluntary or willful? I don't want to get AI slop in my search results or in my forum discussions, it muddys the water with shallow at best information, often in excessively verbose ways that helps hide its more subtle falsehoods that it picked up.

Re: The dead Internet is not a theory anymore

#212

Post by burnto »

amiantos wrote: post #81
JumpCrisscross wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Why is it being called dead internet theory “A social networking system simulates a user using a language model trained using training data generated from user interactions performed by that user. The language model may be used for simulating the user when the user is absent from the social networking system, for example, when the user takes a long break or if the user is deceased” [1]. (More seriously: https://en.…

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.

Yeah I agree. It’s an acute problem on social media platforms where there’s a market force incentivizing it. If you’re mostly engaging in specific niche interactions with known communities or people, it’s not nearly so prevalent. The internet still works fine as a whole.

Re: The dead Internet is not a theory anymore

#213

Post by spr93 »

keithnz wrote: post #171
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…

No, the old internet wasn't that great. There were so many problems. Finding things was hard, buying things was hard, integrating things was hard, compatibility was hard, everything was super fractured. It felt great at the time because you discovered all these random things and it was all novel at the time. Centralized (Or decentralized collaborative services like IRC or Usenet) really unlocked the power of the inte…

usenet and irc are quite old. how are they examples of some mythical point at which the internet was unlocked by services?

centralized and decentralized would include almost any service. your comment is so vague and ambiguous as to be meaningless. (that's a hallmark of LLM output. are you a bot?)

it was easier to find authoritative answers 20-30 years ago. google and, before that, altavista and yahoo, were quite good at directing queries to things like university-run information sites or legitimate, curated commercial sites. for the last decade the first google page has been crammed with useless SEO optimized fluff.

as for shopping, that was the first dotcom boom. what really took it mainstream was covid. not centralized or decentralized collaborative nonsense.

Re: The dead Internet is not a theory anymore

#214

Post by taskpod »

The real problem isn't that bots exist — it's that we have no trust infrastructure for the internet. We can verify domains with SSL, authenticate users with OAuth, but we have zero standard for verifying that an AI agent is good at what it claims. The dead internet is a discovery/trust problem, not just a spam problem.

Re: The dead Internet is not a theory anymore

#215

Post by raw_anon_1111 »

AngryData wrote: post #203
raw_anon_1111 wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And who is going to know your blog exists? If they search on Google they are going to get an answer from AI and stop

In my experience AI doesn't give the answer you want because it gives the most shallow and basic, many times so basic as to be worthless, response. Then I either scroll through 20 results hoping I see one that isn't an AI writeup of the exact same incomplete source, or I give up and search out a specific site I know exists that isn't AI written for that information.

Thats not exactly making an argument for the discovery of blogs

Re: The dead Internet is not a theory anymore

#216

Post by orbital-decay »

keithnz wrote: post #171
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…

No, the old internet wasn't that great. There were so many problems. Finding things was hard, buying things was hard, integrating things was hard, compatibility was hard, everything was super fractured. It felt great at the time because you discovered all these random things and it was all novel at the time. Centralized (Or decentralized collaborative services like IRC or Usenet) really unlocked the power of the inte…

Reasonable fragmentation and friction is a feature, not a bug. Global-scale social networks with zero resistance have turned the information superhighway into the information superconductor carrying infinite current, otherwise known as a short circuit.

> buying things was hard

This one is not a problem anymore.

Re: The dead Internet is not a theory anymore

#217

Post by keithnz »

spr93 wrote: post #213
keithnz wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, the old internet wasn't that great. There were so many problems. Finding things was hard, buying things was hard, integrating things was hard, compatibility was hard, everything was super fractured. It felt great at the time because you discovered all these random things and it was all novel at the time. Centralized (Or decentralized collaborative services like IRC or Usenet) really unlocked the power of the inte…

usenet and irc are quite old. how are they examples of some mythical point at which the internet was unlocked by services? centralized and decentralized would include almost any service. your comment is so vague and ambiguous as to be meaningless. (that's a hallmark of LLM output. are you a bot?) it was easier to find authoritative answers 20-30 years ago. google and, before that, altavista and yahoo, were quite good…

no.... not a bot, and please see HN FAQ before making comments like this.... I'm talking about decentralized common services, like IRC, Usenet, email, same service and they all interact together. But the old internet was super fractured when we got websites, nearly everything did things completely different, was very hard to trust anything. It was not easier finding authoritive answer 20 to 30 years ago, I started in 91, and it was hard to find anything. Search engines were a great improvement, but kind of hard to find what you wanted, things drastically improved with google and page rank, but that brought in other problems

Re: The dead Internet is not a theory anymore

#219

Post by pixl97 »

pseudalopex wrote: post #200
pixl97 wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>The "Moloch problem" or "Moloch trap" refers to a scenario where individual, rational self-interest leads to a collective outcome that is disastrous for everyone. It describes competitive, zero-sum dynamics—often called a "race to the bottom"—where participants sacrifice long-term sustainability for short-term gains, resulting in a loss for all involved. Hence why we have to keep feeding the orphan crushing machine.

Who wrote what you quoted?

Instead of getting judgy about Google responses, read the original story.

https://www.slatestarcodexabridged.com/Meditations-On-Moloch

Re: The dead Internet is not a theory anymore

#220

Post by ruszki »

TitaRusell wrote: post #146
pixl97 wrote: post #101

Earlier 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…

It is inevitable that in a few years we can't even tell a real user from a bot without forensic analysis. When AI can post a million times a day the internet is FUBAR.

The problem is that average people cannot tell even now. Heck, I'm quite sure that /r/all is completely bot driven, yet I still check it occasionally. I'm not even sure about HN, but I didn't find yet so obvious manipulation than on Reddit.
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