As AI eats the web, the internet’s collective memory is disappearing • Hacker News Board

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

#951

Post by nagonago » Wed, Aug 12, 2026, 8:26 AM UTC

jdauriemma wrote: post #674

I see symptoms of this all the time. For example, it's a weekly annoyance for folks to pop into /r/strava to showcase their vibe-coded app that uses the Strava API to do $THING. Then someone invariably points out that an existing app (or even Strava itself) already does $THING, and often it's free. I don't mean to be negative, I think it's great that people are building useful niche software and I don't blame them fo…

Same phenomenon for the game Satisfactory, lately I've seen so many vibe-coded tools that just do the exact same thing as already existing tools.

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

#952

Post by robocat » Wed, Aug 12, 2026, 9:03 AM UTC

jasode wrote: post #331

goekjclo wrote: post #263

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"ideas are cheap" was one of the most succesful psyops of all time, so unbelievably wrong

The other half of the one-liner is "Ideas are cheap. Execution is everything." - E.g. an idea is "Everybody should have cheap housing! Or an even better idea, everybody should have free housing." - Ok, how exactly in concrete terms do we actually do that? (The very expensive Execution of the idea.) - "Uh, well, I leave that as an exercise to the reader." Ideas are easy and execution is hard. That's what jaded people…

"Execution is everything" is unfortunately tautological in that it implies you first reach success, then you measure the execution and idea.

It leaves no escape-hatch to judge that an idea is bad. And bad execution can only be spotted if somebody else does good execution.

Similar to saying a startup needs to get product-market-fit to get success. Success defines that you have product-market-fit.

We are all horrifically bad at thinking about cause and effect, or talking about it.

But yes, I've slowly learnt that doing anything often matters more than a grand idea.

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

#953

Post by rightbyte » Wed, Aug 12, 2026, 9:13 AM UTC

hamdingers wrote: post #878

rightbyte wrote: post #836

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the lure with matchmaking was that when it was introduced, it made you really good compared to before by easier access to better practice. In Data 2 the skill level shifted upwards enourmously for pro players and I feel also for normal players. But the scene also got kinda lame and boring with too optimized strategies.

And in the process I think it alienated all the players for whom getting really good wasn't the goal. I never wanted to be the best CS:S player, I wanted to hang out with the regulars on the server I was a regular at. Like a bowling league or a group bike ride.

An analogy would be automatic raid wait rooms in WoW.

Like what is the point of making grinding in games more efficient as you remove the fun and social aspect and the advantage of organizing a party.

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

#954

Post by mike_hearn » Wed, Aug 12, 2026, 9:17 AM UTC

alightsoul wrote: post #931

mike_hearn wrote: post #313

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While we're here exchanging old man stories, I remember the web before blogs existed! I guess we can organize the internet into these eras, each of which was in some sense harder and more expensive to find available info than in the previous: 1. Pre-web. Internet is mostly about messages sent to individuals or groups. USENET organizes group discussion into browseable topic-oriented hierarchies, IRC does the same but…

Social media sites actually want search engines to index them. It's just much more computationally intensive and thus hard to cheaply to index a photo on Instagram or a video on TikTok or a podcast on Spotify than plain text. So search engines decide not to do it. Only google indexes YouTube transcriptions This shift to hard to cheaply index content is maybe why search engines died. People don't use hyperlinks anymor…

Yeah that's the core of it. I've seen people say their finely crafted essays get 1% of the engagement of a video. And in video there is no natural equivalent of the hyperlink, so ranking and discovery are now fully neural and centralized around Youtube.