231–240 of 318 posts
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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.
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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…
I spend all day every day on the Internet and I don't share your perspective. I might dislike centralized social media and yearn for a bygone era, but just in the past two days I had a very positive interaction with multiple real humans in the Commodore 64 subreddit that helped solve a problem I was having that isn't documented anywhere else on the internet yet. So then I went on my personal blog and blogged about it…
And check these books "Superbloom: How Technologies of Connection Tear Us Apart" and "No Sense of Place", maybe it would help you to see the overall effects of the internet (and other communication mediums) and forget this simplistic view that a lot of programmers have. The nature of the communication medium doesn't just affect the message, it shapes everything in society. Ignoring that because you had a good experience here and there won't change anything.
It's a shame though that this is gonna kill so many sites and projects. Sure we have ChatGPT, but also with things like Google AI summary getting so much better traffic to sites is going to plummet. Without people visiting I think the incentive, heck even motivation, for a ton of the sites is gone. We've seen it with sites like Stack Overflow, but it's probably going to happen to just about everything..
Things are definitely going to change in significant ways. The internet of the past is definitely dead, it just doesn't know it yet.
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…
In some ways it might be positive. My girlfriend had a small addiction to Instagram reels. The flood of AI generated videos on there just killed the magic for her and she stopped using it
But it's not about the current generation of addicts. It's a play to capture the next generation.
It remains to be seen whether they'll get caught or not but it's important to remember that even if all of us mature humans find this new AI social media weird and gross, children don't have our preconceptions.
Meta is going to do everything in their power to train the next generation of young, immature brains into finding AI social media normal and addictive.
They (along with TikTok) already managed to do that to the last two generations so they have a scary track record here.
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"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.
You've (unironically?) restated the crux of the Dead Internet Theory.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dead_Internet_theory
Authentic human activity has been completely overwhelmed by bots and slop. Discerning signal from noise becomes too burdensome to bother with.
Of course the physical medium continues to exist.
Of course there are still humans, such as yourself, producing free content, to be harvested and regurgitated by parasites.
But authentic human activity is increasingly going out of band, no longer discoverable. Whatsapp, discord, private groups. Exactly as the theory predicted.
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How would the small internet fight the bots? Aggressive moderation? Disable UGC?
In an ideal/fantasy world under "small internet theory", every online friend group would have their own Discourse server set up (similar to how friend groups use Discord now), and traffic/usage of that Discourse server is so small that it would be a waste of resources to try to swamp it with bot traffic, and on top of that, everyone on the Discourse server are friends who can vouch for new members who join, so no bot…
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…
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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…
I do not know what "move the needle" means or why you think I am trying to do that. Your excessive negativity and pessimism is unwarranted and I dislike it. Honestly between you and that other guy replying to my comments with seemingly thinly veiled vitriol for my perspective, it's just further proof of my point that being able to communicate with large groups of anonymous people is typically a net negative. Most anonymous people seem to be quite nasty. I'd rather write on my blog where no one like you will see it, and if you do see it, you likely won't go out of your way to send me an email with your negative comments because it's likely you do this for public attention.
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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.
How far up the tree do you kick? Going too far up makes it so malicious people can "sabotage" by botting to get huge swatch of legitimate users banned.
Going to shallow means I just need to create N+1 distance between myself and my bot accounts