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Dead Internet Theory

kudmitry.com

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Re: Dead Internet Theory

#41

Post by swed420 »

lizknope wrote: post #5

Bots have ruined reddit but that is what the owners wanted. The API protest in 2023 took away tools from moderators. I noticed increased bot activity after that. The IPO in 2024 means that they need to increase revenue to justify the stock price. So they allow even more bots to increase traffic which drives up ad revenue. I think they purposely make the search engine bad to encourage people to make more posts which i…

> Bots have ruined reddit but that is what the owners wanted.

Adding the option to hide profile comments/posts was also a terrible move for several reasons.

Re: Dead Internet Theory

#42

Post by chongli »

SchemaLoad wrote: post #31
lizknope wrote: post #5

Bots have ruined reddit but that is what the owners wanted. The API protest in 2023 took away tools from moderators. I noticed increased bot activity after that. The IPO in 2024 means that they need to increase revenue to justify the stock price. So they allow even more bots to increase traffic which drives up ad revenue. I think they purposely make the search engine bad to encourage people to make more posts which i…

The biggest change reddit made was ignoring subscriptions and just showing anything the algorithm thinks you will like. Resulting in complete no name subreddits showing on your front page. Meaning moderators no longer control content for quality, which is both a good and bad thing, but it means more garbage makes it to your front page.

I can't remember the last time I was on the Reddit front page and I use the site pretty much daily. I only look at specific subreddit pages (barely a fraction of what I'm subscribed to).

These are some pretty niche communities with only a few dozen comments per day at most. If Reddit becomes inhospitable to them then I'll abandon the site entirely.

Re: Dead Internet Theory

#44

Post by f311a »

> The use of em-dashes, which on most keyboard require a special key-combination that most people don’t know

Most people probably don't know, but I think on HN at least half of the users know how to do it.

It sucks to do this on Windows, but at least on Mac it's super easy and the shortcut makes perfect sense.

Re: Dead Internet Theory

#46

Post by bakugo »

f311a wrote: post #44

> The use of em-dashes, which on most keyboard require a special key-combination that most people don’t know Most people probably don't know, but I think on HN at least half of the users know how to do it. It sucks to do this on Windows, but at least on Mac it's super easy and the shortcut makes perfect sense.

Now I'm actually curious to see statistics regarding the usage of em-dashes on HN before and after AI took over. The data is public, right? I'd do it myself, but unfortunately I'm lazy.

Re: Dead Internet Theory

#47

Post by chao- »

f311a wrote: post #44

> The use of em-dashes, which on most keyboard require a special key-combination that most people don’t know Most people probably don't know, but I think on HN at least half of the users know how to do it. It sucks to do this on Windows, but at least on Mac it's super easy and the shortcut makes perfect sense.

I don't have strong negative feelings about the era of LLM writing, but I resent that it has taken the em-dash from me. I have long used them as a strong disjunctive pause, stronger than a semicolon. I have gone back to semicolons after many instances of my comments or writing being dismissed as AI.

I will still sometimes use a pair of them for an abrupt appositive that stands out more than commas, as this seems to trigger people's AI radar less?

Re: Dead Internet Theory

#48

Post by E39M5S62 »

rickcarlino wrote: post #38

Much like someone from Schaumburg Illinois can say they are from Chicago, Hacker News can call itself social media. You fly that flag. Don’t let anyone stop you.

If you can ride the Metra from your city to Chicago proper, you're in Chicago!

Re: Dead Internet Theory

#49

Post by chongli »

I prefer a Dark Forest theory [1] of the internet. Rather than being completely dead and saturated with bots, the internet has little pockets of human activity like bits of flotsam in a stream of slop. And that's how it is going to be from here on out. Occasionally the bots will find those communities and they'll either find a way to ban them or the community will be abandoned for another safe harbour.

To that end, I think people will work on increasingly elaborate methods of blocking AI scrapers and perhaps even search engine crawlers. To find these sites, people will have to resort to human curation and word-of-mouth rather than search.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_forest_hypothesis

Re: Dead Internet Theory

#50

Post by Mordisquitos »

malfist wrote: post #25
ChrisMarshallNY wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I use them -but I generally use the short version (I'm lazy), while AI likes the long version (which is correct -my version is not).

You don't use em dashes then, you use en dash.

They don't use the en dash, at least not in their comment—they are using the hyphen-minus as en dash–em dash substitute.
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