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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

#91

Post by pphysch »

3eb7988a1663 wrote: post #38
marginalia_nu wrote: post #6

Tangentially related, I have a hunch, but cannot prove, that prediction markets are the driving force behind a lot of the bad information online, since they essentially monetarily incentivize making people misjudge the state of the world. There's been a huge uptick in this sort of brigade like behavior around current events. First noted it around LK99, that failed room temperature semiconductor in 2023, but it just k…

That seems really high effort. I assume most events are things which are hard to influence, so at best you are hoping to tilt the wager odds into your favor. Which could backfire if you are betting on the wrong outcome.

There's plenty of "high effort" market information manipulation going on, even before LLMs. Spread (justified, researched) FUD about a company your fund is shorting.

Re: You can't trust the internet anymore

#92

Post by pixl97 »

3eb7988a1663 wrote: post #32

I was recently running into this while playing the latest Hollow Knight game. Several sloppified sites which obviously were trying to tailor mechanics/items of the original game into the new one. The new release is only ~six months old, so there is just not that much hard content available to reference. My question is -why? Is it really worth the ad revenue to trick a few people looking into a few niche topics? Say y…

>Is it really worth the ad revenue to trick a few people looking into a few niche topics?

Maybe it's problem space exploration via pollution? Said creators of pollution (bullshit asymmetry theory in practice) have very little cost in creating said pollution and there is the possibility of a payback larger than that cost.

Re: You can't trust the internet anymore

#93

Post by wizardforhire »

EvanAnderson wrote: post #52
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.

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 Int…

Reading this back and forth so far I think you’re spot on… which leads to this open question, wheres the consolidated stack that makes this accessible?

Also I think the name vetted webrings or just the vetted web is simple enough to be a movement.

As in the vetted web movement.

… gotta start somewhere.

Re: You can't trust the internet anymore

#94

Post by marginalia_nu »

expedition32 wrote: post #76
kgeist wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 model…

It's not completely unfounded. A lot of cyber crime adjacent stuff targeting the west is coming from China and Russia. This is a consequence of these countries not having functioning law enforcement cooperation with the west, as well as chilly bordering on hostile diplomatic relations. It's not (always) sanctioned by the governments of these countries, but it's not entirely unwelcome either.

Though all that stuff is a very different thing from what's being discussed in this thread.

Re: You can't trust the internet anymore

#95

Post by lowtidebridge »

noosphr wrote: post #66
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.

>The issue isn’t the actual network connection between people, it is the content. Everyone serving a website is being ddos by AI agents right now. A local mesh network is one way to make sure that no one with a terabit network can index you.

You could set up two way TLS with client certificates

Re: You can't trust the internet anymore

#96

Post by majicDave »

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 think the same thing, came to the same conclusion, and started working on a solution a few months back. It's getting there, I'm just trying to polish up an mp3 player at the moment based on the network, and then I have quite a few plans. Still early days, still very buggy, and I am yet to really announce it, but I'm optimistic that something like this could help a lot. https://github.com/mjdave/katipo

Re: You can't trust the internet anymore

#97

Post by ninjagoo »

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.

Having thought about your note some more, perhaps this would be a better encapsulation of what I was trying to say:

The consumer internet has become platformized, and the dominant platforms are going through enshittification: early user subsidy, then advertiser/seller favoritism, now rent extraction that is degrading outcomes for everyone.

Re: You can't trust the internet anymore

#98

Post by sunaookami »

marginalia_nu wrote: post #94
expedition32 wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 model…

It's not completely unfounded. A lot of cyber crime adjacent stuff targeting the west is coming from China and Russia. This is a consequence of these countries not having functioning law enforcement cooperation with the west, as well as chilly bordering on hostile diplomatic relations. It's not (always) sanctioned by the governments of these countries, but it's not entirely unwelcome either. Though all that stuff is…

>A lot of cyber crime adjacent stuff targeting the west is coming from China and Russia.

If you trust your government's propaganda that is used to jusitfy "hackbacks" and buying 0-days on the darkweb that fucks us all.

Re: You can't trust the internet anymore

#99

Post by amelius »

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…

You don't need to create a mesh network to start a new internet.

You could also, for instance, develop your own DNS alternative.

Re: You can't trust the internet anymore

#100

Post by [deleted] »

PaulDavisThe1st wrote: post #72
armchairhacker wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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