Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

As AI eats the web, the internet’s collective memory is disappearing

thewalrus.ca

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

901–910 of 912 posts

Re: As AI eats the web, the internet’s collective memory is disappearing

#901

Post by shimman »

flir wrote: post #872
shimman wrote: post #704

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This discounting how many of the 100s of worker owned newspapers/magazines that were in circulation. Not everything was controlled by a select few. How did you think labor movements in America during the 1800s collectively organized across the country sharing literal war stories?

I'm not discounting it by any means. And I know about the pamphlet era that was enabled by the invention of the printing press, and the profound effect it had on Europe. But what's the typical reach of one of those worker-owned newspapers, compared to the reach of a mass circulation newspaper? I think you missed my point: printing at scale needs a support system and a distribution system, and that requires capital. T…

Worker newspapers in the US had circulations as high as 10s of thousands to almost a million during the height of national strikes during the new deal (nearly several every month).

The point is you are letting a system designed by elites to uphold elites set the boundaries. There are many forms of alternative media out there, some more popular than any billionaire owned rag.

Just expand your definition and don't let others tell you what is or isn't appropriate. Especially when it comes to political thought.

Re: As AI eats the web, the internet’s collective memory is disappearing

#902

Post by joe_the_user »

nyanmatt wrote: post #807

> "Search can no longer pretend to be a neutral gateway to a stable body of knowledge." Search hasn't been neutral or stable in a very long time, although I agree it has been pretending to be those things.

Just making search the gateway diminished aspects of the Internet and collective memory - Google actually work to blunt this effect initially by following the structure of DMOZ portal, a human-curated tree of authoritative websites.

It's ancient history by now but it's worth noting things have decay for as long as they have been being built.

Oppositely, ChatGPT is a pretty "better google".

Re: As AI eats the web, the internet’s collective memory is disappearing

#903

Post by bichiliad »

killerstorm wrote: post #706

I don't think it's really an "AI problem", we just got to the "worse" part of the "Worse is better". Back in the day one of competitors of the World Wide Web was Project Xanadu. Project Xanadu was supposed to address the concerns like content persistence and version management within the core design. As such it was much more complex, opinionated and centralized. WWW on the other hand comes with no guarantees - you mi…

Who would have owned the centralization? I always thought that one of the lovely parts of the WWW was that anyone could have a part of it in theory, even if it was easier to let someone else host your website for you.

Re: As AI eats the web, the internet’s collective memory is disappearing

#904

Post by pstuart »

rayiner wrote: post #555
nuclearnicer wrote: post #502

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is an astute point. I agree that we have largely lost a lot of our shared reality. But as with any "beginning" of a long, diffuse process, people might quibble about the specifics. I offer a few other moments you might gesture toward as the beginning of the end of shared reality. First, 1987, with the elimination of the Fairness Doctrine and the subsequent boom in partisan talk radio shows. Second, 1989, when cabl…

That was a temporary blip. Specific technologies facilitated an age of mass, top-down communications in the mid 20th century, just by virtue of how those technologies worked. It enabled a small group of people in charge of the radio/TV stations to have a monopoly on communications and media. The technology both before (printing presses with myriad newspapers) and after (the Internet) were by their nature decentralize…

I've thought about this more than I should but I think that the wonders of internet "channels" comes with a significant cost.

First, let me acknowledge the quasi-monopoly aspect -- it definitely constrained choice and filtered world events through the lens of their corporate overlords, the CIA dripped propaganda into discourse, etc.

But there was so much shared experience that that pretty much unified the US as a tribe. Conspiracies were passed around but were kind of like underground whispers. There was no Red vs Blue.

I'm not arguing to go back to those times, but in many ways the internet and more so, social media, is a deal with the devil.

Re: As AI eats the web, the internet’s collective memory is disappearing

#905

Post by bigbuppo »

JKCalhoun wrote: post #91
comrade1234 wrote: post #7

I spent the last three days (off and on) using Gemini to configure my edge router 4 with my iOS devices on a vpn and it's been awesome. In the past I'd do a google search and read a few sources of documentation, do another google search and read another set of documentation. Now, Gemini aggregates multiple pages together so all of the work of reading source docs from multiple locations is now n a single step. Oh, I s…

Yes. When my kids wonder why I don't hate AI the way they do I tell them it's because I hate Google even more. To be more precise, I hate the SEO shithole the internet has become, that Google serves up, that Google facilitated, indirectly created. (I really don't have any tears to shed if there is a death of the Corporate Internet™.)

LLMs are currently "Search in 1997".

That is to say, it can only get worse from here.

Re: As AI eats the web, the internet’s collective memory is disappearing

#906

Post by hollerith »

KPGv2 wrote: post #772
shimman wrote: post #704

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This discounting how many of the 100s of worker owned newspapers/magazines that were in circulation. Not everything was controlled by a select few. How did you think labor movements in America during the 1800s collectively organized across the country sharing literal war stories?

"Oh those don't count as newspapers. Newspapers are professional . Those are just zines ." It's why I hate people looking down on fanfiction, too. Aliens was Alien fanfiction. The New Testament is OT fanfiction. Hell, nolan's The Odyssey is fanfiction. The establishment uses terms to dismiss outsider art as less-than, and this isn't much different. (They of course get to decide what the "inside" is)

>Aliens was Alien fanfiction

Just because an established Hollywood director was a fan of the first Alien movie does make his script for Alien's sequel "fan fiction".

Cameron had already written and directed The Terminator when the owners of the Alien franchise chose his script for the sequel.

(Fifty Shades of Grey in contrast really did originate as fan fiction.)

Re: As AI eats the web, the internet’s collective memory is disappearing

#907

Post by jmkr »

tru3_power wrote: post #857
jmkr wrote: post #773

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Indeed, I also don't listen to music after 2024. I'm also not interested in anything my friends have made (with claude or others). Or how so much of creativity is now a prompt away. A lot of our culture is disappearing before our eyes and people are defending it.

Wait I’m confused- is this because you believe all music produced post 2024 is ai generated/ai assisted?

No, but I think a lot is, and it makes it (more) difficult to discover new music. There's still in person music, which is what it's about anyway.

Re: As AI eats the web, the internet’s collective memory is disappearing

#908

Post by swat535 »

benfortuna wrote: post #670
chrisjj wrote: post #595

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What even is a “shared reality”? For example my mum and I could watch the exact same movie and showing at the cinema and still come away with a completely different opinion of it. A: It excludes opinion.

Everything is opinion. A shared reality is just where opinions coincide.

> Everything is opinion. A shared reality is just where opinions coincide

I'm not sure I understand.. we have objective realities in the world that are certainly not "opinions".

According this logic, gravity exists because opinions coincide?

Re: As AI eats the web, the internet’s collective memory is disappearing

#909

Post by flir »

shimman wrote: post #901
flir wrote: post #872

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not discounting it by any means. And I know about the pamphlet era that was enabled by the invention of the printing press, and the profound effect it had on Europe. But what's the typical reach of one of those worker-owned newspapers, compared to the reach of a mass circulation newspaper? I think you missed my point: printing at scale needs a support system and a distribution system, and that requires capital. T…

Worker newspapers in the US had circulations as high as 10s of thousands to almost a million during the height of national strikes during the new deal (nearly several every month). The point is you are letting a system designed by elites to uphold elites set the boundaries. There are many forms of alternative media out there, some more popular than any billionaire owned rag. Just expand your definition and don't let…

*bangs head on desk* You're reading a description and hearing endorsement.

Re: As AI eats the web, the internet’s collective memory is disappearing

#910

Post by win311fwg »

hnlmorg wrote: post #898
win311fwg wrote: post #886

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Communication cannot be scientifically measured. Someone's expression being a "blatant lie" can only ever be an opinion, fundamentally.

Broadcasters absolutely have a responsibility to ensure they communicate truthful statements in exactly the same way that any other profession has a responsibility to ensure their output is correct.

Fundamentally impossible. Communication is completely made up. It cannot be measured scientifically. Consider the statement: "Cows live on the moon". It is 100% true, although you may not see it that way if you misinterpret what is said. It's only a lie to the extent that your opinion says it is even though in actuality it is the truth.
Post reply on HN