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The dead Internet is not a theory anymore

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Re: The dead Internet is not a theory anymore

#271

Post by Bender »

robotswantdata wrote: post #86
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…

How would the small internet fight the bots? Aggressive moderation? Disable UGC?

Aggressive moderation?

That is a simple method in phpBB. Using ranks one can set new accounts to be able to post and nobody can see their message until verified by a moderator. For small groups and semi-private (invite only) forums this is fairly easy to manage. Spammers and grifters influence nobody. Only cranky old bastards like me see the message. There are other means to keep bots off a tiny site but that is a longer topic. Even better one can send a header to redirect those using the Torbrowser to the Tor link and when states come along and demand some third party process, one simply disables the Clear-Web access. More friction, less data leakage and no corporate capture. This also eliminates the people that can't handle an extra step to access the site and eliminates lazy governments that need money trails.

Re: The dead Internet is not a theory anymore

#272

Post by tim333 »

sebringj wrote: post #210

Isn't this more about identity crisis? Not in the psychological sense but in the internet sense? Who is real who isn't? Crypto proof of work idk? Your profile like d LinkedIn or Hacker News or something gives your clawbot x credits worth of legit automated queries or rate limits on your behalf? It could be flipped upside down where we don't spend our eyes off on reading websites anymore, it just goes and gets it for…

They tried Worldcoin as a solution to proof of human but it never took off. I guess linking to social media as you say? I haven't had much issue with AIs but so many human scammers often with bot accounts. On Xitter 90% of my followers are those.

Re: The dead Internet is not a theory anymore

#273

Post by tim333 »

The internet is not dead though - it's bursting with life, both human and LLM claw like. It's only going to get more so as time goes on. Re:

>Can we go back to an internet like this? I guess we can’t.

Gary Brolsma is still at it with Numa Numa (2023) https://youtu.be/ZBKm1MBsTbk. There's just a bunch of other stuff out there too.

Re: The dead Internet is not a theory anymore

#274

Post by raxxorraxor »

bsaul wrote: post #5

I only see two outcomes for this problem : an internet of verified identities (start by uploading your ID card). Or a paid internet, where it doesn't matter who you are, but since you're going to pay for that email or that reddit account, the probability that it's AI spam is greatly reduced. And i'm looking forward to none of them.

Me neither. A paid internet isn't anonymous either, your ID is as verified as the verified net.

In that case, I will certainly embrace the slop net. Perhaps this is even good because many don't dare to venture beyond the black wall.

Re: The dead Internet is not a theory anymore

#276

Post by obruchez »

Rapzid wrote: post #233

You know.. I keep thinking this might be a good thing in some ways. AI spam could save us from the worst of the current social media status quo, the toxicity of the attention "economy", but flooding it so thoroughly nobody wants to engage with it anymore. Maybe the world can collectively "wake up" and "go outside" by turning towards local and more intimate communities for social interactions.. It's a shame though tha…

> 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..

As I see it, this is just an extra step in a long series of tools to just serve information more quickly. Search snippets for search results have always (?) been displayed for each link/page returned. If the information you were looking for was included in those snippets, then you wouldn't need to visit the actual site.

Then at some point there were knowledge cards/panels. Again, if the information you were looking for was in those cards/panels, then you didn't need to click on the links.

Now with LLMs/Gemini, the information is sometimes summarized at the top of the page. You need even less to visit the search results.

Google has always been a kind of cache for the Internet. It's just way more efficient at extracting and displaying information from that cache now.

So, yes, traffic keeps going down. But new knowledge will still need to be produced, right?

Re: The dead Internet is not a theory anymore

#277

Post by rchaud »

I have a decent-enough filter for AI-written nonsense:

- banner blindness to blue check accounts (instantly scroll past, the blue check is extremely prominent visually)

- a very long Ublock Origin text filter regex for emojis (green check mark in particular) and $currentHotTopic keywords where the signal to noise ratio is close to 0.

Re: The dead Internet is not a theory anymore

#278

Post by retrocog »

soco wrote: post #123
retrocog wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IMHO, this is the exact instinct and there's a way to verify identity, location, and age without even having to share those directly.

Switzerland just voted recently to officially implement Selective Disclosure JWT, which does exactly all that. Social network registration can ask "are you 18?" and run with that - and only that. Or the club entrance. Or whatever, because it's all controlled by yourself in your app.

That seems like a good idea. The question is how the JWT is generated. A standard one would be more akin to a traditional crypto keypair. That is a "signal" key insomuch as it tells us who controls an account. It can't tell us the owner is the controller and that is the current weakness of crypto right now. To know the owner, we need another type of keypair to go alongside the traditional kind. That would be a "tone key" and is generated by a refreshing seed derived from the entropy of long-running, unfakeable conversations. The same way a friend might recognize us as being ourselves.

Re: The dead Internet is not a theory anymore

#279

Post by rchaud »

mfru wrote: post #265
kubb wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I want cool cryptography where I can, e.g. verify where I'm writing from and what my age is without giving away any other information. Or if I want, I can verify that I'm myself, and eschew anonymity, and certain platforms should only accept contributions from people who don't hide their identity. Everyone knows who you are in the town square.

People in the town square only see my face, they do not automatically have my name, birth date and ID available unless I give it to them or they go to lengths obtaining those (il)legally.

The smart glasses industry is working hard to change that.

Re: The dead Internet is not a theory anymore

#280

Post by looselygoosy »

pllbnk wrote: post #268
bsaul wrote: post #5

I only see two outcomes for this problem : an internet of verified identities (start by uploading your ID card). Or a paid internet, where it doesn't matter who you are, but since you're going to pay for that email or that reddit account, the probability that it's AI spam is greatly reduced. And i'm looking forward to none of them.

Maybe some proof-of-work scheme where uploading content would require the uploader to solve a cryptographic puzzle, hence reducing overall number of posts? The PoW difficulty should somehow be correlated to economics where it wouldn't be too expensive but also wouldn't make sense to do mass uploading via bot farms?

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