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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

#221

Post by pixl97 »

amiantos wrote: post #209
pixl97 wrote: post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"You can do everything right and still lose". At the end of the day there is no real penalty for being a bad actor on the internet. They get unlimited retries on spamming and otherwise causing problems. In many ways this helps Google entrench itself as the search/ad company. No one else has the money or compute resources to continuously update the internet. Furthermore they have told us it's their job to shove unskip…

Every single one of your comments in this thread is some slippery slope stuff where you think corporations and federal government are going to work together to kill off the (public?) internet. It's okay that you feel that way, even if it's just a big ol' fallacy, but you don't need to repeat it in six different places. You made your point, you think the internet is doomed no matter what happens, great, let's move on.

>even if it's just a big ol' fallacy

Really?

https://www.cnbc.com/2026/03/08/social-media-child-safety-in...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_media_age_verification_...

Please wake up, won't be long before someone fires off a lawsuit at HN and we'll have to give identification here.

Re: The dead Internet is not a theory anymore

#222

Post by rglover »

I'm here for it in the short-term. As the market continues to saturate, most of the people building this stuff will flame out. Eventually, I suspect we hit a tipping point where the ROI is too low (not enough real human engagement, just other bots) and the flood dials back.

Re: The dead Internet is not a theory anymore

#223

Post by dylan604 »

amiantos wrote: post #187
dylan604 wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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

Traffic stats for my primary blog are public (I only started using simple analytics in December so there's only two full months of data): https://dashboard.simpleanalytics.com/amiantos.net

If you think a site with only 209 visitors in the past 30 days is going to move the needle, then I've got news for you. Especially if bots are the main source of that visitors count. That's very very close to the number of people visiting your site being you, you, and maybe your mom type of numbers. After that, it'll be skiddies and bots. Anybody that's run their own site has been there, but let's not make it out to be some grandiose site that will determine Google page ranking.

Re: The dead Internet is not a theory anymore

#224

Post by pseudalopex »

pixl97 wrote: post #219
pseudalopex wrote: post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Who wrote what you quoted?

Instead of getting judgy about Google responses, read the original story. https://www.slatestarcodexabridged.com/Meditations-On-Moloch

I read the story before. Don't post generated comments or AI-edited comments. HN is for conversation between humans.[1]

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Re: The dead Internet is not a theory anymore

#225

Post by righthand »

pixl97 wrote: post #87
righthand wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t think people are going to get offline and the best we can probably do is create free and open p2p platforms that don’t require registration necessarily to use. And allow people to control their own databases. A lot of communication is locked behind corporations that run the services that are building these tracking and identification databases. I actually think it’s more about getting people off browsers and…

>create free and open p2p platforms that don’t require registration necessarily to use And how do you create this without it being overran by bots, spam, and people posting gargantuan amounts of porn? >allow people to control their own databases There are two types of people that want to control databases. 1: The freedom seeking type who want information sovereignty. 2: The type of people that want to hoover up as mu…

> And how do you create this without it being overran by bots, spam, and people posting gargantuan amounts of porn?

By not creating public networks out of it.

The only database people want to control is their personal information and who they communicate with and when. So we should enable low barrier to entry to communicate.

I cannot solve for the social media side of it, but we can enable people to at least have low friction when getting online. Somewhere to turn to that is not a data harvesting service.

The displacement effort has to come from those that believe in those freedoms. It’s not easy, maybe impossible in some circumstances but this status quo right now cannot be it, in my opinion.

Re: The dead Internet is not a theory anymore

#226

Post by krapp »

jruohonen wrote: post #150

So, as I share his thoughts, I've been wondering: why haven't we seen any real innovations in this space? 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 t…

Mastodon has been an obvious innovation and success, along with decentralized platforms and protocols in general.

Re: The dead Internet is not a theory anymore

#227

Post by abcde666777 »

bytehowl wrote: post #192
abcde666777 wrote: post #168

For a while video was a holdout of sorts - e.g. if someone posted video content of themselves or their voice you could trust a real person was behind it. But now convincing fake video generation is easily accessible, so one more holdout stands to fall. It does seem like some kind of ID system is going to be the only way. Sucky but inevitable. I often have the following thought: technological advancement, for all its…

The technology isn't inherently evil. The actual problem is the way our societies are set up, ironically incentivizing sociopathic behaviour even among members of a single nation, nevermind when geopolitics get involved.

I essentially see it like this: imagine giving a hand grenade to a three year old. The grenade isn't inherently evil, but it raises the existential stakes for that three year old and anyone in their vicinity.

There comes some hypothetical point where technology has advanced so much that anyone has the power to destroy the world.

Re: The dead Internet is not a theory anymore

#228

Post by throwaway94275 »

MeetingsBrowser wrote: post #182
throwaway94275 wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Blog admin sees who invited the bots and recursively kicks that account and any invited by it.

I invite myself multiple times in addition to other real humans. Then I use my duplicate accounts to invite bots.

I'm assuming there's tracking on the invites. So a recursive kick on X and all who X invited would still do the trick. If an IP address appears more than 5 times in an invite tree, ban the /24 or ASN if not from a friendly country for 10 minutes or other reasonable timeframe.

Re: The dead Internet is not a theory anymore

#229

Post by TitaRusell »

ruszki wrote: post #220
TitaRusell wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It's funny when people start accusing eachother of being chatGPT.

Re: The dead Internet is not a theory anymore

#230

Post by nwhnwh »

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…

You can create a blog, yeah. But you also can write the blog with AI. So, you still need to filter the content. Over time, people will find that "The signal-to-noise ratio has hit a breaking point where the cost of verification exceeds the expected value of engagement." https://arnon.dk/the-trust-collapse-infinite-ai-content-is-a...
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