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You can't trust the internet anymore

nicole.express

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Re: You can't trust the internet anymore

#41

Post by sky2224 »

cortesoft wrote: post #28
WD-42 wrote: post #16

This is why my friends and I are setting up a mesh network in our town. The open internet has been going downhill for a while, but LLMs are absolutely accelerating it's demise. I was in denial for the last few years but at this point I've accepted that the internet I grew up on as a kid in the late 90s to mid 2000s is dead. I am grateful for having experienced it but the time has come to move on. The future for peopl…

This seems like solving the problem at the wrong layer? The issue isn’t the actual network connection between people, it is the content. You could easily create your own forum or something and only include people you trust. You don’t need an entirely separate internet.

There's only so much you can do to detect and block content that's AI generated. At the end of the day, the content starts with the people creating it.

Jumping to an invite only network isn't the most ridiculous idea imo.

Re: You can't trust the internet anymore

#42

Post by PaulDavisThe1st »

LPisGood wrote: post #29
PaulDavisThe1st wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

to be boring, the term "enshittification" was invented by one individual, recently, and has a specific meaning. it does not refer to "things just get worse" but describes a specific strategy adopted by corporations using the internet for commercial purposes.

Words change meaning as they are used. Especially negative words that may start rather specific tend to get used more generally until the specificity is lost.

"enshittification" was invented within the last couple of years and its inventor is still alive.

I'd normally be the first to agree with and push your point about language evolving, but it's not time to apply that to a neologism this young.

Re: You can't trust the internet anymore

#43

Post by PaulDavisThe1st »

pdonis wrote: post #34
PaulDavisThe1st wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

to be boring, the term "enshittification" was invented by one individual, recently, and has a specific meaning. it does not refer to "things just get worse" but describes a specific strategy adopted by corporations using the internet for commercial purposes.

> a specific strategy adopted by corporations using the internet for commercial purposes. Isn't that what's driving the pollution of the Internet by LLMs?

No. The specific strategy is not about using LLMs or polluting the internet. Enshittification is ... ah screw it, let's turn to wikipedia:

> Enshittification, also known as crapification and platform decay, is a process in which two-sided online products and services decline in quality over time. Initially, vendors create high-quality offerings to attract users, then they degrade those offerings to better serve business customers, and finally degrade their services to both users and business customers to maximize short-term profits for shareholders.

Re: You can't trust the internet anymore

#44

Post by kolinko »

sky2224 wrote: post #41
cortesoft wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This seems like solving the problem at the wrong layer? The issue isn’t the actual network connection between people, it is the content. You could easily create your own forum or something and only include people you trust. You don’t need an entirely separate internet.

There's only so much you can do to detect and block content that's AI generated. At the end of the day, the content starts with the people creating it. Jumping to an invite only network isn't the most ridiculous idea imo.

What parent means is that you can with no problem build over the classic tcp/ip.

Re: You can't trust the internet anymore

#45

Post by kgeist »

PessimalDecimal wrote: post #4
ninjagoo wrote: post #3

The internet has gone from a high-trust society to a low-trust society, all in the span of a couple of decades. Enshittification strikes again. And it doesn't have appear to have any means to rid itself of the bad apples. A sad situation all around.

It might be more accurate to say that a lot of low-trust societies have become connected to the Internet which weren't nearly as online a couple of decades ago. For example, a huge fraction of the world's spam originates from Russia, India and Bangladesh. And we know that a lot of the romance scams are perpetrated by Chinese gangs operating out of quasi-lawless parts of Myanmar. Not so much from, say, Switzerland.

Russia has been among the top sources of spam since the early 2000s, it's not like anything changed lately. Mail-order bride scams and similar peaked in like 2005. It doesn't take a lot of people to send spam, I don't think it's correlated with the general population's online presence. I'd actually say it's quite the opposite: in 2026, Russia has never been more disconnected from the Western parts of the Internet than it is now (the Russian Internet watchdog blocks like 30% of foreign resources since a few years ago, while Russian IPs are routinely banned on Western sites after 2022, I can barely open anything without a VPN).

For that reason, and because of limited English proficiency, Russian netizens rarely visit foreign resources these days, except for a few platforms without a good Russian replacement like Instagram and YouTube (both banned btw, only via a VPN), where they usually stay mostly within their Russian-speaking communities. I'm not sure why any of them would be the reason the Internet as a whole has supposedly become low-trust. The OP in question is some SEO company using an LLM to churn out sites with "unique content." We already had this stuff 20 years ago, except the "unique content" was generated by scripts that replaced words with synonyms. Nothing really new here.

Re: You can't trust the internet anymore

#46

Post by xantronix »

purpleKiwi wrote: post #39
xantronix wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've been looking into building some sort of Wireguard mesh service since many of my friends are distributed all across the world. I wish you the very best in your endeavours!

How would that look like in practice? I've just heard about the term and I like the description of it, especially the possibilities it gives

That's a great question; it's something I still need to explore, but it would involve some sort of distributed public key database and IP address directory, then a routing table on top of that as people add more resources to the mesh. Wireguard is particularly good at transparent roaming, so it's trivial to use on portable devices or if you need to migrate your server from one provider to another.

Re: You can't trust the internet anymore

#47

Post by kolinko »

willturman wrote: post #31
cortesoft wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This seems like solving the problem at the wrong layer? The issue isn’t the actual network connection between people, it is the content. You could easily create your own forum or something and only include people you trust. You don’t need an entirely separate internet.

Perhaps, but it also, by default, excludes that entire class of authentication problems that are only manifested in a non-local network. I love the idea. It's also interesting in that a local mesh doesn't necessarily need to operate using the TCP/IP/HTTP stack that has been compromised at every layer by advertising and privacy intrusions.

You’re probably getting downvoted because what you said about TCP/IP/HTTP doesn’t make sense.

Re: You can't trust the internet anymore

#48

Post by drysart »

sky2224 wrote: post #41
cortesoft wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This seems like solving the problem at the wrong layer? The issue isn’t the actual network connection between people, it is the content. You could easily create your own forum or something and only include people you trust. You don’t need an entirely separate internet.

There's only so much you can do to detect and block content that's AI generated. At the end of the day, the content starts with the people creating it. Jumping to an invite only network isn't the most ridiculous idea imo.

The best solution for dealing with AI content slop flooding your eyeballs is to hang out in places small enough to be a community -- like a local area mesh network.

AI slop thrives in anonymity. In a community that's developed its own established norms and people who know each other, AI content trying to be passed off as genuine stands out like a sore thumb and is easily eradicated before it gets a chance to take root.

It doesn't have to be invite-only, per se, but it needs to have its own flavor that newcomers can adapt to, and AI slop doesn't.

Re: You can't trust the internet anymore

#49

Post by xoxxala »

PaulDavisThe1st wrote: post #24
WD-42 wrote: post #16

This is why my friends and I are setting up a mesh network in our town. The open internet has been going downhill for a while, but LLMs are absolutely accelerating it's demise. I was in denial for the last few years but at this point I've accepted that the internet I grew up on as a kid in the late 90s to mid 2000s is dead. I am grateful for having experienced it but the time has come to move on. The future for peopl…

I "got online" in 1985. I don't recall a single point in time that a geographically local internet was ever useful or of interest to me.

I got a 300 baud modem right around the same time. There were a few local BBSs that ran meetups, scavenger hunts, warez parties and the like. I got to know a bunch of the regulars from the area. Pretty cool time.

Re: You can't trust the internet anymore

#50

Post by anigbrowl »

WD-42 wrote: post #16

This is why my friends and I are setting up a mesh network in our town. The open internet has been going downhill for a while, but LLMs are absolutely accelerating it's demise. I was in denial for the last few years but at this point I've accepted that the internet I grew up on as a kid in the late 90s to mid 2000s is dead. I am grateful for having experienced it but the time has come to move on. The future for peopl…

This will be about as impactful as printing out the best web articles you encounter and building a shed to shelve them in binders.
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