You never could trust the internet. The difference is that now the problem is so widespread that it's finally spurring us into action, and hopefully a good "web of trust" or similar solution will emerge.
You can't trust the internet anymore
51–60 of 191 posts
Re: You can't trust the internet anymore
#52This 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.
Even if it was a "network connection" issue creating an overlay network on top of the Internet (with VPN tunnels and mesh routing, for example) would yield wildly better bandwidth and latency characteristics.
You can still make that overlay network geofenced and vetted. Heck, running it over a local ISP's last mile would probably yield wonderful latency.
We need vetted webrings on the existing Internet, not a new Internet.
Re: You can't trust the internet anymore
#53It comes down to Google's failure. Rather than outright defeating the SEO eldridge abomination by adopting a zero-tolerance policy to those tactics, Google made a mutually advantageous bargain with them of - course, leaving out a third party: us. They could do this because they had no competition. Now, the culture of enabling bad actors is, unfortunately, set. Google did all the innovation it needed to and ever is go…
It would be in Google's ultimate interest to label AI-generated websites and potentially rank them lower in search results.
AI needs to be kept up to date with training data. But that same training data is now poisoned with AI hallucination. Labelling AI generated media helps reduce the amount of AI poison in the training set, and keeps the AI more useful.
It also simply undermines the quality of search, both for human users and for AI tool use.
Re: You can't trust the internet anymore
#54Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
You're right. I didn't think that through. The stack doesn't imply that a local network is somehow exposed to those concerns.
Re: You can't trust the internet anymore
#55When I first started using the Internet there were 3 rules that were pounded into my head repeatedly. 1. Don't believe everything or anything you read or see on the Internet. 2. Never share personal information about yourself online. 3. Every man was a man, every woman was a man and every teenager is an FBI agent. I have yet to find a problem with the Internet thats isn't because of breaking one of the above rules. M…
Yeah when I was 10 someone told me not to believe everything I read too. But guess what, that's kinda useless advice because consulting reference material is a necessity and there are wide variations in the quality of reference material. This sort of 'don't trust anyone' heuristic can just as easily lead to conclusions that the earth is flat, the moon landing never happened, vaccinations are the leading cause of disease etc.
Re: You can't trust the internet anymore
#56Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 tha…
Prigozhin falling out of the metaphorical window also seems to have tempered the amount of political stuff coming directly from Russia.
Re: You can't trust the internet anymore
#57This 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…
If you'd like, flip an email my way. We've been thinking similarly.
Email in profile (deref a few times)
Re: You can't trust the internet anymore
#58It comes down to Google's failure. Rather than outright defeating the SEO eldridge abomination by adopting a zero-tolerance policy to those tactics, Google made a mutually advantageous bargain with them of - course, leaving out a third party: us. They could do this because they had no competition. Now, the culture of enabling bad actors is, unfortunately, set. Google did all the innovation it needed to and ever is go…
> Rather than outright defeating the SEO...
SEO is a slippery slope on both sides because a little bit is good for everyone. Google wanted pages it could easily extract meaning from, publishers wanted traffic, and users wanted relevant search results. Now there's a prisoners dilemma where once someone starts abusing SEO, it's a race to the bottom.
Re: You can't trust the internet anymore
#59Earlier 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.
how about we put some effort into actually picking the correct words and not just handwaving everything? Especially since the whole topic of discussion here is 'internet research is increasingly less reliable because people just wrote/publish any old BS for clicks.'
Re: You can't trust the internet anymore
#60This 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.
Bbs. Downloaded first shareware version of doom. Was it 4mb or something? I remember I had like 5kb/s and paid 5 cents a minute. My parents weren't happy those days. Now they are :)