71–80 of 318 posts
do you think small, invite-only communities will end up being the last holdout for genuine human conversation online? or will bots eventually infiltrate those too?
Lobsters is like that, basically a ghost town compared to Reddit. If you block engagement, you will succeed.
Invite only, very exclusionary. Private club with public posting? Worst of both worlds.
Hey it’s what executives want. Fake everything. Slop and robots everywhere. Have at it, I say. Maybe then people will go outside again
My household just bought The Brick to start taking control of our phones and online usage. We've been very online for 15+ years but are hoping to break the addiction cycle by simply blocking our devices from access. The timing feels right, mostly because sites like Instagram and Reddit are too braindead and spam+ad heavy these days. The executives and shareholders' desire for profits have already killed two of my big…
The fundamental issue is that a plurality of humans pref the direction things have gone and are moving in. Is it a good direction? By this crowd’s standards, no.
To be clear, i dont like either but when i watch the speed kids swap between 5 insta accounts and 3 reddit accounts, it seems the majority are happy with it.
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Honestly the $10 barrier to SomethingAwful back in the day (and I guess now since it’s still around) definitely made a huge difference. I hate the idea of subscribing to a site like HN or Reddit… but one time $10 to post? I’d accept that if it meant less bots.
A $10 one time not-an-asshole fee is totally reasonable. History also shows you can take a $10 fee and maintain quality on SomethingAwful for quite some time.
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Fine in what way? What people? I have not seen or heard of a single person who is excited about AI generated blog posts, or TikToks, or commercials, or images. In fact it’s the opposite, the internet coined the term AI slop, and my non-internet addicted friends hate the fact that chatGPT is killing the environment. The only people I’ve ever seen champion AI are the few who are excited by the bleeding edge, and the ma…
There are probably more than 10^17 AI model executions occurring per day. I know in ye olde HN there are many Purists that are Too Good For AI, but the majority of the human race is consuming AI at a blinding rate, and if they really didn't like it, they would stop.
I can’t really articulate why, but this doesn’t feel true to me. There are plenty of things humans do especially at scale that we don’t like, or we do that we don’t like others doing, and don’t stop
Maybe the only parts of a future internet people will actually hang out in is going to be one where any profit-making is completely de-incentivized. No recommendations. No product reviews. No opinions on companies or services. More slow web. Maybe we'll slowly head back to what websites used to look like when Yahoo was the biggest search engine.
Wild-ass business idea: what if Yahoo 2026 recreated Yahoo 1996 and also any of the video sites it bought up back in the day get relaunched as deshittified ad-selling mechanisms to fund the whole thing… there’s gotta be Yahoo 1996 money in whatever scraps YouTube is missing.
It used to be faster and easier to follow actual content.
I only see two outcomes for this problem : an internet of verified identities (start by uploading your ID card). Or a paid internet, where it doesn't matter who you are, but since you're going to pay for that email or that reddit account, the probability that it's AI spam is greatly reduced. And i'm looking forward to none of them.
I want cool cryptography where I can, e.g. verify where I'm writing from and what my age is without giving away any other information. Or if I want, I can verify that I'm myself, and eschew anonymity, and certain platforms should only accept contributions from people who don't hide their identity. Everyone knows who you are in the town square.
What we're missing is a way to have cryptographically secure pseudonymity: you log in to a website, you don't give any information whatsoever, but you cannot make two different accounts.
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Honestly the $10 barrier to SomethingAwful back in the day (and I guess now since it’s still around) definitely made a huge difference. I hate the idea of subscribing to a site like HN or Reddit… but one time $10 to post? I’d accept that if it meant less bots.
reminds me of Bill Gates in the 90s when asked about email spam. He said it would make sense to make an email cost like 1 cent so the spammers can't spam as much but this didn't sit right with the mindset of the people at the time.
I only see two outcomes for this problem : an internet of verified identities (start by uploading your ID card). Or a paid internet, where it doesn't matter who you are, but since you're going to pay for that email or that reddit account, the probability that it's AI spam is greatly reduced. And i'm looking forward to none of them.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Honestly the $10 barrier to SomethingAwful back in the day (and I guess now since it’s still around) definitely made a huge difference. I hate the idea of subscribing to a site like HN or Reddit… but one time $10 to post? I’d accept that if it meant less bots.
reminds me of Bill Gates in the 90s when asked about email spam. He said it would make sense to make an email cost like 1 cent so the spammers can't spam as much but this didn't sit right with the mindset of the people at the time.
"my2cents"
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