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Michael Sayman, the creator of SocialAI, said it best on a recent episode of The Vergecast. "We used to talk _through_ the Internet. Now we talk _to_ the Internet." The host was as taken by the sentiment as I was. It's so succinct. I gotta say, the episode got me to try SocialAI — literally "what if twitter was just bots". And it's like yeah — this is what we've made. This is indistinguishable from modern twitter. It…
That said... the "dead internet conversation" has been going for a while. Current versions tend to be "gpt . I kind of think LLMs may just replace a lot of internet media, without the contrivance.
We still don't know how or if people will accept AI therapy, friendship, art or whatnot. Where or why being produced by a person matters. Online media (HN, reddit, twitter, etc) seems like the easier entry point. People like their friends and therapists. Most seem to hate the online media we are addicted to.
Is an LLM generated subreddit, to your tastes and interests something we would read? I suspect yes. It's a quicker sell, if you are replacing something people hate.
Media transitions (as we are already experiencing) have a lot of good and bad disruptive potential, typically. I'm beginning to suspect "media" will be LLMs' first major disruption.
Pre-1990s : Early internet era
1990s -2005: WWW/Nerd era
2005-2020 : Unwashed Masses era
2020-present: Dead Internet era
2025? : Custom content eraRecently I needed to create a facebook account to join a group for some volunteer related work. I haven’t had a facebook account for probably 8 years. I knew the memes that facebook has become a bit of a wasteland but I was genuinely shocked by how bad it is. The “new account” experience is wild, having zero friends on an account just results in a torrent of spammy content. Sexist comics, AI generated garbage, just r…
My wife hadn’t had Facebook for years. She tried to make an account to use marketplace and it got immediately banned with no explanation. I don’t know what’s going on with Facebook but I guess if you didn’t start using it 10+ years ago it’s too late now.
I remember back in the day these ad companies would pay you directly to run an ad bar on your screen.
I think they had another where they would give you a PC but you couldn't uninstall the ad bar.
This thing we call The Internet has always been "funny smelling" if not a bit crap. Dead? Not really. Just more and more obvious about the nature of the creation.
It is the ultimate duality. Correct use requires holding two can-be-seen-as-divergent ideas in your head at once and then making a decision as to which better applies to the current situation. It simultaneously holds a lot of information -- asymptotically approaching the sum of all human knowledge. It is also a dark mirror, containing all the assorted sins and vagaries of humankind.
To say The Internet is Dead is, in a way, to say that Humanity is Dead. Maybe, in the minority, it is. Maybe that minority is encroaching on the majority and will reach parity. Or even surpass it.
This view is an easy path towards Nihilism. It is a struggle to acknowledge the negative and push back against it anyway.
I'm curious if there is anyone who has any resources or anecdotal observations on why and how individuals/groups are spinning up bots that seems to be pushing the internet to this new reality. I've found a pretty interesting analysis of Meliorator[1], which is specific to foreign influence. But it seems like there are pieces missing for me. Is engagement and ad revenue so great that it's worth setting up infrastructu…
A lot of social media, but especially FB, is being deluged with low-effort AI slop. Man-made horrors beyond your comprehension, and tens of thousands of bots upvoting or commenting the slop ("amen"). I see some interesting article on any of the major news papers, head to the comment section on their FB page, which is filled with pro-Trump posts from users with south-Asian or African locations. There's just bots absol…
Facebook is literally paying to have it made:
https://archive.is/https://www.404media.co/where-facebooks-a... (https://archive.is/YLUOK):
> Much like similar programs at TikTok and Twitter, Facebook’s Creator Bonus Program makes direct payments to people who successfully go viral on Meta platforms, and is meant to incentivize influencers and content creators to post high-quality content on Facebook, Instagram, and Threads. Meta’s bonus program is “invite only,” but countless of the instructional videos I saw show that consistent posting over time will eventually get an account or page invited to the program.
> ...
> I sent Meta a series of AI-generated pages and content that had gone megaviral on my feed, as well as a series of questions about the creators program bonus and its stance on AI content. This included AI-generated images of Jesus that had 100,000 likes, an image of a family crying outside of a hut in the pouring rain, and AI images of Wonder Woman with semen in her hair and face. A Meta spokesperson told me that some of this content is not in violation of its policies, that payouts for the content I sent them were low, and that, while some of the images violated its content policies, many of them did not. They said that as long as the content is being consumed and liked by real people, is not being boosted inauthentically (with bots, for example) and does not violate Facebook’s community standards, then the program is working as intended.
> "We encourage creators to use AI tools to produce high-quality content that meets all our Community Standards, and we take action against those who attempt to drive traffic using inauthentic engagement whether they use AI or not,” the Meta spokesperson said in a statement. “We know bad actors adapt their tactics to evade our rules, so we are always working to improve our detection and enforcement."
The dead internet theory is very quickly becoming a reality on Twitter. Every clout chasing bluecheck now has their account wired up to an LLM which replies to others posts automatically to boost their engagement - Tweets are so short that they barely cost any tokens, so they can generate those replies by the thousands for next to nothing. https://x.com/levelsio/status/1839992260341182647 https://x.com/levelsio/statu…
Giant wall of cunning metaphors to attract reader's attention just to end with a literal flop at the end:
> For now, I suppose, we can carry on...
people have been saying this since we first migrated away from listserv. look, the corporate influence on the internet has absolutely made it worse and continues to make it less accessible to humans but the authors overarching world view is leaking in here. its not the "woke mind virus" its profit motive pure and simple. the dead internet theory is often best viewed through platforms owned and operated by people who…
“Transfixed, I sat watching the almost hypnotic rumblings of a transgender alt-right, conservative, Republican who was anti-trans rights. It was immaterial whether I agreed with them or not—the simple fact of knowing such outright interesting, transgressive voices even existed”
Outright interesting, transgressive voices. Lol. So outright interesting being yet another alt-right reactionary on the internet. Give me a break. I find this viewpoint forced on me on Youtube by watching gaming videos. I have no idea what they find so refreshing about it.