I started out loving the net because of the feelings of connection and partly because of the honesty and discussions stemming from at least pseudo anonymity, both silly stuff and egghead discussions on history and tech - but i always felt a "human presence" and community out there behind the screens.
Now anonymity is dying and the value of discussions will plummet because you'll be just be arguing, learning or getting inspired from a selection of corporate PR bots, state sponsored psyopping or "idiot with an assistant" that will try to twist your mind or steal your time 24/7.
Christ this is going to be so incredibly boring, paranoid and lonely for everyone in a few years time!
I'm honestly having an existential crisis, the internets is already filled with too much noise and people are already lonely enough.
Back to local community and family i guess, it was amazing while it lasted..
I think anonymity and pseudo-anonymity still have a place and contribute a lot to discussion quality. So do people posting under their real names. We don't know how this is all going to play out yet.
I see that as a positive thing really. I have no desire to be entertained by generated content. Best bet is to start disengaging and learning to have civil interactions with real people again.
Some local communities and families can be pretty dysfunctional or outright hostile. I'm old enough to remember the time before Internet and I think this is why the whole online community thing took off in the first place.
One risk is that bot-generated contributions drown out human-generated content, both due to speed with which they can be crafted as well as “quality”. I put quality in quotes because in human debate there’s a learning process and so while an individual contribution might be “lower quality” than another, the overall discussion quality and learning quality (for both contributor and readers) can be high.
Put differently, just because all the individual contributions are of high quality does not mean the “thread quality” is high.
1: https://twitter.com/levelsio/status/1600232199243984897
2: https://twitter.com/levelsio/status/1600246753348882432
3: https://twitter.com/dannypostmaa/status/1600372062958538752
So if someone from US actually wants to go through the trouble to save $3, well, at least they're unlikely to be a bot.
I wonder if we've reached a singularity point where you cannot be sure you are engaging with a human anymore and it's going to be instrumental in the demise of the net. First, it was the big corporations that created a soulless place, then it was the naive, reckless technologists that killed the little of humanity that remained. Thanks to them, we will soon have to present real IDs to access some websites.
I am in the peak of my career as a software engineer at 35, as many Millenials I've grown during the best years of it, and now I'm considering a life away from what was once a bustling bazaar of human discourse, now it's a void of text, images, rage and little soul.
If the "Dead Internet" is just a conspiracy theory, we're running towards it at breakneck speed.
I wish I didn't have to see 5 posts about chatGPT, or 3, constantly on the front page of HN. If there's any flood, it's probably bots posting stories, and bots upvoting them.
Doctorow in "Walkaway" had some ideas about it that I liked as well.
Sadly, I do think this view of mine of the Internet will die soon, as only the people that grew halfway during the Internet age are able to know: older people lack the finesse and the capacity to empathise with someone through text, younger people lack the knowledge that real life humans are capable of being decent, as most of their socialising is done through a screen now.
It worked largely pretty well to keep out the trolls; as it turns out, a very low amount of people bother trying to troll others when it means that they get hit with an account ban and signing up again means paying the entry fee again.
You could probably also see it as the reason that while SA culture is uh... pretty toxic, it still largely managed to be fairly consistent and polite to each other (towards other communities... less so). Take away the 10$ signup fee and what you get instead is 4chan (whose original culture was a wholesale copy of SA at the time, since it was made for SA users after moot got banned from SA).
You could to some extent make an argument that gatekeeping poorer economies is one way to prevent those bots from signing up. It's not one I necessarily agree with, but it is one way to mitigate the spam.
My solution would probably be to permit users from poorer countries to request a signup from someone else at a discount appropriate to their economy using an invite chain. That way you can still offer a fair way for users from poor economies to engage, whilst allowing for easy banning of spambots simply by treebanning the original inviter if you get the spam issue.
Israel participates in state sponsored propaganda as well. https://www.smh.com.au/technology/israeli-propaganda-war-hit...
The penalty scales with the number of bot accounts, but even Bill Gates can only drive one automobile at a time.
I think the opposite will be true. I hope we will spend more people talking to each other in real life, which actually makes me happy that dead internet is happening.
I dont know if you buy this theory of social media causing loneliness. I intuitively feel that way and the more I talk with friends on chat, or comment here the more lonely I feel. Meanwhile meeting my friends or strangers in real life gives me a memory boost and makes me smile.
The less everyone spends on Twitter arguing with bots, or here on HN arguing in the comments the happier we all are
This is certainly true for the majority of people but will be very bad for people who don't fit in with their surroundings. It will hurt communities like LGBTQ+ quite a lot to not be able to talk to other like-minded/open real people.
There is definitely an amount of amoral interest in amongst all the angry idiots with more specific reasons to be causing trouble.
However - once we do a ton of stuff (other than reliable news though that is a nice side effects) is unlocked. If you can verify who someone is easily - elections and government processes can be a lot more transparent and reach consensus a lot more easily. Medicine can gather a lot of reliable (opt-in) data and become better and more efficient, fraud is easier to detect etc.
I am and have been for about 2-3 years sad for the upcoming loss of privacy and it is truly a tragedy and seems inevitable.
I've read somewhere that openAI is already working on this.
If that doesn't work, I think effective discussions on the internet might plausibly shift gradually to other languages, since AI is currently only focused on English, and I doubt thats going to change any time soon.
first towards European languages like German and French, but since these languages are well supported in tech, and use similar letters and writing style, I suspect they will be conquered quickly.
A real challenge would be Eastern languages, like Arabic, Farsi, Urdu and others.
These languages use a completely different writing style, grammer rules and have a wide field between being understood and being fluent, such that a basic Bot will be caught quickly by a native(this is why Google translate absolutely sucks in these languages, its immediately clear thats its automatically translated).
In the past, it must have been 2003-2008, I was sharing self-drawn comics and ideas how to improve on them with fellow artists, actually meeting them in real life sometimes at conventions. I was also active in a gaming forum plainly for discussing the lore and surrounding theories.
These communities had a real sense of community and weren't social just in name. I knew every day at 5pm a lot of new posts and threads would be starting to appear, from my forum friends and arch enemies alike.
Nowadays, these places are dead as people have moved on to large platforms long ago. This already killed all feeling of community but at least I had some nice comment exchanges and the absolute amount of content increased.
Then it got even worse. I cannot read a single post that isn't surrounded by trolling, astroturfing, psyops, advertisements and affiliate links or bot responses. Good example: as a German, it is very hard to ever discuss the topic of nuclear fission phase-out in a constructive and respectful manner. Especially on reddit, the canned and templated responses are really suspicious.
But it doesn't matter anymore, if it is discussions or content. Communities will be flooded and killed by bots while content is flooded and killed by generated SEO garbage (a lot of threads on HN about this as well). Unless you're explicitly browsing some decent sites like Wikipedia the Internet is already FUBAR compared to pre-2010 or so.
The Bot-trocity is happening and making it worse with every evolution of ChatGPT and so on. We cannot trust images or text anymore. Everything is a dream and nothing is real.
The USPS has a fleet of many (hundreds of thousands?) vehicles, so their capacity to ruin it for everyone is much larger - but their potential liability from fines is too. So they treat it very seriously.
The poster is saying that spam is more like the USPS situation, where single entities control thousands of potential infractions, not the rich individual.
My personal experience here is far tamer than many — as a straight white boy, for example, I didn't need to worry about getting beaten like the gay kids or followed around by the guards like the Mexican kids did when they went to the mall or library[2] — but I grew up in a conservative religious tradition and getting online where I had access to forums like the talk.origins Usenet group was key to realizing that the religion I was raised in was full of people I trusted who were telling me lies[3]. There was very little in the way of a technical community in the parts of California I grew up in but thanks to FidoNet and the early web, I was able to learn how to program well enough to get a hight score on the CS AP test despite going to school in two districts which didn't even offer the class, which mean that I was able to jump on board the web train as that started taking over the world.
1. Disabled, parent of a small child, kid in a suburb where you probably don't have anything within walking distance even there is a safe way to walk without getting run over, someone who lives in a rural or poor community without well-funded libraries or vibrant public spaces, etc.
2. One high school I went to was about 50% migrant farm workers. Seeing the difference in how those kids were treated was eye-opening – both the willingness to police them in ways which even the skater punks didn't get but also the tyranny of low expectations where it was just kind of assumed that they were going to be ground down by the system and should set their sights low.
3. Biology classes in school wasn't enough — the creationists are good at coming up with arguments to discount curriculum – but what really opened my eyes was seeing the full original source materials which were selectively quoted in the religious writing. It's possible to be innocently ignorant but there's really no good faith explanation for slicing-and-dicing a quote carefully to make it sound like some famous scientist meant the opposite of what they actually wrote.
All this discussion and a sibling thread made me realise that only us, the Millennials that have grown halfway before and after the Internet explosion, know better than anyone else what this place was for a few golden years, and what we lost. It's on us and only us to do something about it.
I edited the comment to reflect the possibility of effective internet discussions shifting to other languages.
That being said, I think "back to local communities and family" is a regression because the internet, at least at the beginning, promised genuine interactions between people across the world. There's got to be a way to fulfill that promise without falling into 1984.
[Disclaimer: I am not ChatGPT]
It's not just about acceptance, it's also about the comfort and safety of online communication.
It sounds like you're the one who needs to consider moving.
The vast majority? No, of course not. But a sizeable fraction are, and two things happen because of this: 1) they ruin most spaces when there aren't robust mechanism to keep their people out or their behavior regulated. Nextdoor has shown this, along with most unmoderated internet forums. 2) the fuckwads are frequently able to rile up others and get them to go along with their awful actions; we saw this in Nazi Germany for instance, and many other places throughout history.