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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

#71

Post by bonesss »

klysm wrote: post #65
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…

What does a mesh network have to do with this?

HAM & pirate radio vs corporate broadcasting.

Re: You can't trust the internet anymore

#72

Post by PaulDavisThe1st »

armchairhacker wrote: post #63
PaulDavisThe1st wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Tragedy of commons" is a false concept that obscures greed and selfishness and often lawlessness. Even its originator (Hardin) accepts that it does not describe actual history. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46623359

There’s a lot of debate under your linked comment. My understanding is that people tend to cooperate in smaller numbers or when reputation is persistent (the larger the group, the more reliable reputation has to be), otherwise the (uncommon) low-trust actors ruin everything. Most humans are altruistic and trusting by default, but a large enough group will have a few sociopaths and misunderstood interactions; which cr…

> Most humans are altruistic and trusting by default ...

... towards an in-group, yes. Not towards out-groups, as far as I can tell.

Though for some reason this tends not to apply to solo travellers in many, many parts of the world.

Lots of debate, yes, but very little about the basic fact that Hardin's formulation of "the tragedy of the commons" doesn't describe actual historical events in pretty any well documented case.

Re: You can't trust the internet anymore

#73

Post by marginalia_nu »

Devasta wrote: post #64

The future of the internet is going to be invite-only enclaves. I sometimes wonder is anyone working on the next generation of discussion forums, or if it'll be a return to PHPBB.

lobste.rs is already kinda that I think, makes an interesting contrast to HN, which has a similar crowd but is open to anyone.

Re: You can't trust the internet anymore

#74

Post by ninjagoo »

PaulDavisThe1st wrote: post #43
pdonis wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 busin…

Feels like there is a case to be made here that the decline of The Internet rather precisely fits those definitions, with the exception that it is a collective of those products and services undergoing enshittification, since high-quality internet-based products/services no longer exist in quantity.

Also see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enshittification#Impact which talks of the broadening of the usage of that term.

Re: You can't trust the internet anymore

#75

Post by underlipton »

dehrmann wrote: post #58
underlipton wrote: post #35

It 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.

>SEO is a slippery slope on both sides because a little bit is good for everyone

I reject this emphatically. Google should never have been in the business of shaping internet content. Perhaps they should have even gone out of their way to avoid doing so. Without Google (or a better-performing competitor) acquiescing to the game, there is no SEO market.

Re: You can't trust the internet anymore

#76

Post by expedition32 »

kgeist wrote: post #45
PessimalDecimal wrote: post #4

Earlier 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…

Yeah blaming Russians and Chinese for the internet turning to shit is ludicrous.

Chinese have their own internet anyway- it was a shock to me at first just how little the average Chinese citizen really cares about Western culture or society. They have their own problems ofcourse but it has nothing to do with us

No it's the tens of billions of mostly American capital going into AI data centers and large bullshit models.

Re: You can't trust the internet anymore

#77

Post by krapp »

PaulDavisThe1st wrote: post #23
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.

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.

>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"

It literally started meaning that hours after it was first posted to HN and being used. Sorry, that's just how language works. Enshittification got enshittified. Deal with it and move on.

Re: You can't trust the internet anymore

#78

Post by LPisGood »

anigbrowl wrote: post #59
LPisGood wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.'

I don’t think it’s necessarily handwaving. I don’t think anyone has a monopoly on the way language is used and broadening terms is a very natural thing that happens as language evolves

Re: You can't trust the internet anymore

#79

Post by LPisGood »

PaulDavisThe1st wrote: post #42
LPisGood wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I think the fact that it’s primarily an Internet related term that gets used a lot on the Internet, has something to do with the acceleration in the broadening of its meaning

Re: You can't trust the internet anymore

#80

Post by krapp »

neom wrote: post #37

I thought a lot last night about how we could protect HN, I didn't come up with a good answer except maybe you'll need to have someone with a higher reputation vouch aka invites. My internet community journey has mostly just been irc -> dA -> twitter -> HN. Too frequently these days I feel I might be putting emotional energy into something that isn't human on this site, hard to express how that makes me feel, but it'…

We can't. This forum is run by the company that used to be run by Sam Altman and it's already full of people who work in the industry that's driving AI adoption and who use and aggressively believe in AI to the point of religion. There are already bot accounts posting, and humans posting comments filtered by AI. Most Show HNs are vibe coded.

There's nothing anyone can do about it. No matter how many guidelines dang deploys, no matter how much negative social pressure we apply (and we could apply much more but doing so would just run afoul of the tone policing of the guidelines) people will use AI because they want to, and because it's a part of their identity politics, specifically to spite people who don't want to see it. They currently bother to mention when they use ChatGPT for a comment. It's just a matter of time until people don't even bother, because it's so normalized.

The Fediverse is currently good, the culture there is rabidly anti-capitalist and anti-AI. I like Mastodon. But that will eventually, inevitably get ruined as well, and we'll just have to move on to the next thing.

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