5 ms·

It really seems like the internet as we know it is about to break down under an never-ending ocean of ChatGPT spam. Trust and curation should become even more

It really seems like the internet as we know it is about to break down under an never-ending ocean of ChatGPT spam. Trust and curation should become even more valuable than they are today.

bee_rider 4y ago
I wonder if we’ll move back to small static online communities (as were popular 2 or so decades ago). PhpBB boards with tens of regulars all of whom you recognize.
- clintavo 4y ago
  I think this is already happening. HN might be a sort of example, but other communities I’m in are much smaller
  - jacquesm 4y ago
    HN is already way larger than that. There is nobody on HN who knows everybody else either by nickname or IRL or any combination. It's 'mostly anonymous' with 'mostly people I don't know or recognize at all'.
  - pixl97 4y ago
    HN is only this way because of a focus on moderation to keep the place of going off the rails. HN itself has one of the best moderators I've seen that's been able to keep out of petty arguments that tend to infect and ruin forums. It's not something easily scalable at all. Part of the problem with being on a site like HN is we see everyone here bitching and groaning about how much 'big web' sucks and how we should get away with it, while missing that most of us here are also visiting that same big web with a few billion other people every day. I'll believe twitter/FB/etc is dying when I watch them turn off their servers for the last time.
    - epistemer 4y ago
      I don't think the lack of user pictures can be underestimated. No pictures and great moderation is basically the opposite of Instagram and I think exactly why real discussion takes place on here.
- vineyardmike 4y ago
  Considering I’ve already started to see much better discourse on Mastadon vs Twitter - it’s totally plausible and I look forward to it.
  - williamcotton 4y ago
    Everyone will sit under their own vine and under their own fig tree, and no one will make them afraid, for the Lord Almighty has spoken. Micah 4:4
- CuriousCosmic 4y ago
  Agreed. I see internet culture shifting towards the fediverse, small chans, and boards. Frankly it's too difficult to moderate at scale. And either way most users don't want to be part of the same big community as everyone else. They just want to be able to share content between their communities without a tonne of unnecessary friction or many different needless login credentials. Twitter succeeded here because it allowed these communities to seamlessly blend into each other while allowing individual users to prune problematic individuals from their view of the community in a way that just wasn't feasible with other social media or forum platforms. The fediverse (if the projects could fix their UX issues) look like they have the best shot of recreating this "small, discrete communities all intermixed" kind of environment. Hopefully however without a lot of the forced discovery and content rotating that Twitter currently pushes.
  - pixl97 4y ago
    I guess next comes 'how will you maintain low scale'. We've got to see the large scale problems in the last decade, but I think a lot of people either forgot, or were not alive for the small scale problems that existed back in the days of BBS's and early websites. The biggest issue with with most small communities is they tend to die quickly unless they have some unique bonding factor. For example a local RC car racing group. But that isn't generally interesting over a wide range of topics outside a few topics. So now you're looking at building multiple communities and managing them. But you'll find most people won't manage that well and they'll tend to gravitate to a few busier larger communities. But then those larger communities will grow much like the seed of a star via gravity, someone will know someone else that invites them and suddenly you'll have your own little facebook/twatter rife with all the same problems and split views on what is acceptable. There are just a number of problems here that seem intractable when you have hundreds of millions/billions of people that want to be online and in communities of one kind or another, but an unending number of social problems that occur when you get large numbers of people gravitating towards interesting things.
    - CuriousCosmic 4y ago
      I think small communities dying out is acceptable as long as they can be brought back by the members. That was one of the appeals of twitter for example. You could get that tight nit group and maybe it kinda dies out for a year or two but something revitalized the community and it came back. With smaller, centralised communities this falls apart unfortunately since you have to rely on the host to maintain that service and if they shut it down, it's just gone. Federated services on the other hand have the advantage that as long as the participants continue to be part of that community, it can be revived on demand. So in this sense, I think some of the major issues that prevented small communities from persisting and thriving have been solved. Of course like you mentioned the moderation, growth management, and UX aspects have yet to be solved but those have the advantage of being able to be largely independent of the core functionality and can be improved with time without breaking the world. I also think the twitter approach to community formation works really well here. It has it's own issues but a lot of the more niche twitter communities tend to just fracture back into manageable micro-communities once they get bigger than a certain size. It's not as noticeable since what community you see depends on who you follow but it's 100% a thing that happens. I've personally seen it happen more times than I can count at this point. Two solutions for intentionally keeping communities small and preventing low quality content are making joining "referral only" (like https://tildes.net/ https://tildes.net/ for example) or requiring small fee entry (like https://forums.somethingawful.com/index.php https://forums.somethingawful.com/index.php) but each of those has their own problem. The prior has an issue of creating echo chambers as only "like minded individuals" can/will join while the latter can promote the exclusion of less well off individuals or those in regions with limited access to digital finance as well as posing a privacy concern unless some form of privacy preserving money is used. Honestly I'm excited. Social Media from a technical perspective is finally getting interesting again.
- cableshaft 4y ago
  Discord's kinda has that now. I'm in several small communities on there, that I managed to run into. Only a couple dozen active people on each.
- Gigachad 4y ago
  PHPbb forums died half because they couldn’t hold up against the last gen wave of spam. They have no hope against this kind.
- jjtheblunt 4y ago
  Doesn’t Telegram do this now?
- BeFlatXIII 4y ago
  Hopefully so.
deckard1 4y ago
ChatGPT spam created by ChatGPT is when you know we've entered the inner circle of hell
- Spooky23 4y ago
  It’s coming. ChatGPT can write a pitch that is better than most spammers.
  - jacquesm 4y ago
    That's not exactly a very high bar, the problem is that it probably can also outperform your typical start-up founder and/or their corporate finance flunkies.
    - Spooky23 4y ago
      True… but corporate flunkies seem to be able to find people who can write! Spammers to date not so much!
irjustin 4y ago
Break down? No. Change? absolutely. This is a fundamental shift that we're setting coming out of 2021-2022 and it's incredible. I don't know what the next wave of the internet will look like but i'm actually excited because ChatGPT+DallE is making a whole space a commodity. People will need to learn how to adapt and unlike the previous shifts, it's not immediately obvious to me how things will net out.
- abduhl 4y ago
  This comment feels like a copy paste from a cryptocurrency/Web 3.0 comment from 2 years ago. It’s insane how cyclical the hype cycles are, and how they only seem to be happening faster and faster.
  - CatWChainsaw 4y ago
    Like a drug addict who needs more and more to get the same high.
  - irjustin 4y ago
    I mean if we're honest - it reads like a ChatGPT answer that shills itself. haha, but that's what's so crazy we're reaching the point where AI and humans aren't easily distinguishable and eventually impossible. Scary and yet exciting. I'll be the first to pay tribute to our Skynet overlord.
  - pixl97 4y ago
    >and how they only seem to be happening faster and faster. Eh, isn't that what the technological singularity people would say would happen? Way back in the day I'd hear people go "oh the internet won't amount to anything, it's just a fad", and while I didn't know what the internet would become, I believed they were totally wrong. The internet was very useful. Back in the very early days of bitcoin, back when I thought it was potentially useful but that people was highly confused if it was going to escape regulatory issues. When the bitcoin hype cycle started I knew people that knew nothing about blockchain were spouting dumb shit and that it would eventually end in a bust. Now, in my typical fashion I underestimated how dumb people can be on things like this and didn't keep the few bitcoins I had back in the early days and lost access to them missing out on a few hundred thousand dollars at the peak. When looking at the different GPT-like models coming out I actually see useful products that can be made from technologies like this. For example there is one on the front page called 'universal summarizer' that can take a large body of text and turn it into a small and seemingly accurate summary. That is worth something for sure. The ChatGPT is presenting useful information to some of its users too. The biggest question about it's long term success is cost of operation. If that drops over time then GPT and whatever comes after that will be here to stay no matter what you think about hype cycles.
randerson 4y ago
Imagine if ChatGPT becomes so successful that its training set is its own output.
- qup 4y ago
  I think this is why OpenAI is working on gpt-detection.
- CatWChainsaw 4y ago
  6 months tops.
sorry_outta_gas 4y ago
disagree with internet breaking down from chatgpt spam. humans can adapt and find ways to navigate info on the internet, just like whales have evolved in their ocean environment. love, creativity, and regulation will shape the future, not just trust and curation
nicbou 4y ago
This starts to remind me of Snow Crash. Those who can afford it have curators, others get the vilest miasma pipes directly to their headset.

It really seems like the internet as we know it is about to break down under an never-ending ocean of ChatGPT spam. Trust and curation should become even more valuable than they are today.

bee_rider 4y ago

I wonder if we’ll move back to small static online communities (as were popular 2 or so decades ago). PhpBB boards with tens of regulars all of whom you recognize.

clintavo 4y ago
I think this is already happening. HN might be a sort of example, but other communities I’m in are much smaller
- jacquesm 4y ago
  HN is already way larger than that. There is nobody on HN who knows everybody else either by nickname or IRL or any combination. It's 'mostly anonymous' with 'mostly people I don't know or recognize at all'.
- pixl97 4y ago
  HN is only this way because of a focus on moderation to keep the place of going off the rails. HN itself has one of the best moderators I've seen that's been able to keep out of petty arguments that tend to infect and ruin forums. It's not something easily scalable at all. Part of the problem with being on a site like HN is we see everyone here bitching and groaning about how much 'big web' sucks and how we should get away with it, while missing that most of us here are also visiting that same big web with a few billion other people every day. I'll believe twitter/FB/etc is dying when I watch them turn off their servers for the last time.
  - epistemer 4y ago
    I don't think the lack of user pictures can be underestimated. No pictures and great moderation is basically the opposite of Instagram and I think exactly why real discussion takes place on here.
vineyardmike 4y ago
Considering I’ve already started to see much better discourse on Mastadon vs Twitter - it’s totally plausible and I look forward to it.
- williamcotton 4y ago
  Everyone will sit under their own vine and under their own fig tree, and no one will make them afraid, for the Lord Almighty has spoken. Micah 4:4
CuriousCosmic 4y ago
Agreed. I see internet culture shifting towards the fediverse, small chans, and boards. Frankly it's too difficult to moderate at scale. And either way most users don't want to be part of the same big community as everyone else. They just want to be able to share content between their communities without a tonne of unnecessary friction or many different needless login credentials. Twitter succeeded here because it allowed these communities to seamlessly blend into each other while allowing individual users to prune problematic individuals from their view of the community in a way that just wasn't feasible with other social media or forum platforms. The fediverse (if the projects could fix their UX issues) look like they have the best shot of recreating this "small, discrete communities all intermixed" kind of environment. Hopefully however without a lot of the forced discovery and content rotating that Twitter currently pushes.
- pixl97 4y ago
  I guess next comes 'how will you maintain low scale'. We've got to see the large scale problems in the last decade, but I think a lot of people either forgot, or were not alive for the small scale problems that existed back in the days of BBS's and early websites. The biggest issue with with most small communities is they tend to die quickly unless they have some unique bonding factor. For example a local RC car racing group. But that isn't generally interesting over a wide range of topics outside a few topics. So now you're looking at building multiple communities and managing them. But you'll find most people won't manage that well and they'll tend to gravitate to a few busier larger communities. But then those larger communities will grow much like the seed of a star via gravity, someone will know someone else that invites them and suddenly you'll have your own little facebook/twatter rife with all the same problems and split views on what is acceptable. There are just a number of problems here that seem intractable when you have hundreds of millions/billions of people that want to be online and in communities of one kind or another, but an unending number of social problems that occur when you get large numbers of people gravitating towards interesting things.
  - CuriousCosmic 4y ago
    I think small communities dying out is acceptable as long as they can be brought back by the members. That was one of the appeals of twitter for example. You could get that tight nit group and maybe it kinda dies out for a year or two but something revitalized the community and it came back. With smaller, centralised communities this falls apart unfortunately since you have to rely on the host to maintain that service and if they shut it down, it's just gone. Federated services on the other hand have the advantage that as long as the participants continue to be part of that community, it can be revived on demand. So in this sense, I think some of the major issues that prevented small communities from persisting and thriving have been solved. Of course like you mentioned the moderation, growth management, and UX aspects have yet to be solved but those have the advantage of being able to be largely independent of the core functionality and can be improved with time without breaking the world. I also think the twitter approach to community formation works really well here. It has it's own issues but a lot of the more niche twitter communities tend to just fracture back into manageable micro-communities once they get bigger than a certain size. It's not as noticeable since what community you see depends on who you follow but it's 100% a thing that happens. I've personally seen it happen more times than I can count at this point. Two solutions for intentionally keeping communities small and preventing low quality content are making joining "referral only" (like https://tildes.net/ https://tildes.net/ for example) or requiring small fee entry (like https://forums.somethingawful.com/index.php https://forums.somethingawful.com/index.php) but each of those has their own problem. The prior has an issue of creating echo chambers as only "like minded individuals" can/will join while the latter can promote the exclusion of less well off individuals or those in regions with limited access to digital finance as well as posing a privacy concern unless some form of privacy preserving money is used. Honestly I'm excited. Social Media from a technical perspective is finally getting interesting again.
cableshaft 4y ago
Discord's kinda has that now. I'm in several small communities on there, that I managed to run into. Only a couple dozen active people on each.
Gigachad 4y ago
PHPbb forums died half because they couldn’t hold up against the last gen wave of spam. They have no hope against this kind.
jjtheblunt 4y ago
Doesn’t Telegram do this now?
BeFlatXIII 4y ago
Hopefully so.

deckard1 4y ago

ChatGPT spam created by ChatGPT is when you know we've entered the inner circle of hell

Spooky23 4y ago
It’s coming. ChatGPT can write a pitch that is better than most spammers.
- jacquesm 4y ago
  That's not exactly a very high bar, the problem is that it probably can also outperform your typical start-up founder and/or their corporate finance flunkies.
  - Spooky23 4y ago
    True… but corporate flunkies seem to be able to find people who can write! Spammers to date not so much!

irjustin 4y ago

Break down? No. Change? absolutely. This is a fundamental shift that we're setting coming out of 2021-2022 and it's incredible. I don't know what the next wave of the internet will look like but i'm actually excited because ChatGPT+DallE is making a whole space a commodity. People will need to learn how to adapt and unlike the previous shifts, it's not immediately obvious to me how things will net out.

abduhl 4y ago
This comment feels like a copy paste from a cryptocurrency/Web 3.0 comment from 2 years ago. It’s insane how cyclical the hype cycles are, and how they only seem to be happening faster and faster.
- CatWChainsaw 4y ago
  Like a drug addict who needs more and more to get the same high.
- irjustin 4y ago
  I mean if we're honest - it reads like a ChatGPT answer that shills itself. haha, but that's what's so crazy we're reaching the point where AI and humans aren't easily distinguishable and eventually impossible. Scary and yet exciting. I'll be the first to pay tribute to our Skynet overlord.
- pixl97 4y ago
  >and how they only seem to be happening faster and faster. Eh, isn't that what the technological singularity people would say would happen? Way back in the day I'd hear people go "oh the internet won't amount to anything, it's just a fad", and while I didn't know what the internet would become, I believed they were totally wrong. The internet was very useful. Back in the very early days of bitcoin, back when I thought it was potentially useful but that people was highly confused if it was going to escape regulatory issues. When the bitcoin hype cycle started I knew people that knew nothing about blockchain were spouting dumb shit and that it would eventually end in a bust. Now, in my typical fashion I underestimated how dumb people can be on things like this and didn't keep the few bitcoins I had back in the early days and lost access to them missing out on a few hundred thousand dollars at the peak. When looking at the different GPT-like models coming out I actually see useful products that can be made from technologies like this. For example there is one on the front page called 'universal summarizer' that can take a large body of text and turn it into a small and seemingly accurate summary. That is worth something for sure. The ChatGPT is presenting useful information to some of its users too. The biggest question about it's long term success is cost of operation. If that drops over time then GPT and whatever comes after that will be here to stay no matter what you think about hype cycles.

randerson 4y ago

Imagine if ChatGPT becomes so successful that its training set is its own output.

qup 4y ago
I think this is why OpenAI is working on gpt-detection.
CatWChainsaw 4y ago
6 months tops.

sorry_outta_gas 4y ago

disagree with internet breaking down from chatgpt spam. humans can adapt and find ways to navigate info on the internet, just like whales have evolved in their ocean environment. love, creativity, and regulation will shape the future, not just trust and curation

nicbou 4y ago

This starts to remind me of Snow Crash. Those who can afford it have curators, others get the vilest miasma pipes directly to their headset.