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The dark forest claims another victim. > Yancey's Dark Forest theory of the web. The “dark forest” is a place that seems eerily quiet and devoid of life. All t
by nicbou 3y ago
The dark forest claims another victim.
> Yancey's Dark Forest
theory of the web. The “dark forest” is a place that seems eerily quiet and devoid of life. All the living creatures within it are hiding. Because “night is when the predators come out. To survive, the animals stay silent.”
> The predators here are the advertisers, tracking bots, clickbait creators, attention-hungry influencers, reply guys, and trolls. It's unsafe to reveal yourself to them in any authentic way. So we retreat into private spaces. We hide in the cozy web.
https://maggieappleton.com/cozy-web https://maggieappleton.com/cozy-web
- prox 3y agoI believe in this trend. The amount of people that can use powerful tools without any knowledge is increasing. Some might just GPT their way into creating more darkness. Greed is a nefarious beast. Always has been.
- quaintdev 3y agoWith this and all AI generated content I think people will be left with no choice but to go back to real world.
- pixl97 3y agoThen it's a mistake to think the predators will stay in the virtual world and won't migrate to the physical themselves.
- ouid 3y agoWhy? Are you just saying that because it sounds dramatic?
- grugagag 3y agoIm somebody else replying to this thread. I think the predators will follow whichever troden path is to catch more and more victims in their nets. If the ocean of darknes dries up of victims they’ll adapt to land. AI technologies will, in my opinion, become more entangled with the real world. More devices are listening, seeing, labeling and categorizing and that will only explode in ubiquity. I think there will be no escape from it even in the real world.
- pixl97 3y agoOne, because they already exist. Do you not know some person that starts talking about MLM bullshit? Two, large predators rarely go quietly in the night from starvation. They typically expand their hunting grounds and try new types of prey.
- nicbou 3y agoIdeas are contagious, even if they originate from or soread through an AI.
- dist-epoch 3y agoIt won't be long until they put ChatGPT into a walking robot.
- redsaz 3y agoThe idea of this have me a chuckle. Instead of worring about skynet destroying all of humanity, we should be worried about them constantly asking about our car's extended warranty. Seriously though, a real life robot is more expensive to make and run than an online one. Plus, there's nowhere for them to put "permanent" content, they'd have to talk to us one by one, or start graffitotagging ads everywhere. Any robots they did make would be obviously robots, and we can avoid them. It doesn't scale the same way.
- flangola7 3y agoWe will be going back farther than most realize. A person receiving a phone call in 1950, a telegram in 1850, a book in 1750, or a clay tablet in 8650 BCE all had confidence it was the thoughts and words of another flesh and blood human being. "Going back" does not mean pre-internet days, it means pre-distant communication days.
- Abekkus 3y agoLet’s go back further. You can’t just limit your own personal engagements to non-electronic ones. You also need your entire network of connections to not be tainted.
- hakre 3y agoIMHO much speculation for the little explanation provided. Do you have more information? Was it offered to the community to take over for those who may want or similar?
- abhayhegde 3y agoKudos to be able to express what I've been vehemently feeling recently.
- axus 3y agoI'd imagine it's closer to the original Liu Cixin reasons like security. Ideally you could leave your servers up on the Internet auto-updating, doing their work, and ignore all the "predators competing for attention" from Yancey's theory, but it takes attention to stay secure and keep backups. Maybe it was more "Tragedy of the Commons"?
- nicbou 3y agoSecurity is just one aspect. Spam prevention is a much bigger issue. The web is becoming increasingly read-only because of it. Spam is the form of predation that makes the dark forest so silent.
- elbigbad 3y agoI don’t know who Yancy is but they have some complete lack of shame to steal someone else’s idea almost word for word and prepend their name to it. I don’t know what I could muster that absolute “I don’t care at all what people think of me” if I tried, and I have here and there I just don’t have it in me.
- axioms_End 3y agoYou mean Liu Cixin, that Yancy mentions in the first sentence of his essay about Dark Forest of Internet, or someone else?
- elbigbad 3y agoCixin Liu of course. Now let me tell you about “elbigbad’s Theory of Relativity” (hat tip to Einstein who had a hand in its development). More modernly phrased: “‘You miss 100% of the shots you don’t take’ -Wayne Gretzky” - Michael Scott
- beschizza 3y agoThe right analogy would be "elbigbad's Theory of Relativity of the Web", wouldn't it? Not quite so bad.
- axioms_End 3y agoThe problem is that the article was called "The Dark Forest Theory of the Internet", not "Yancy Dark Forest". IMHO it's like "Ultraviolet catastrophe of book collecting" or "Gravity well of Tinder" : general scientific theory /hipothesis used as metaphor of a thing. Of course Dark Forest is not as well known as previously mentioned theories (although it was mentioned by Kurzsgesat, so who knows), but the whole thing is clearly explained in the essay, and the author is clearly stating what Dark Forest is and who created it. Also, the original comment probably mentioned it as Yancy Dark Forest, as "The Dark... Of the Internet" written by Yancy, not as "Yancy totally original idea".
- wffurr 3y agoAnd apply it to The Internet instead of the galaxy, with due credit given.
- raverbashing 3y agoYeah the analogy works much better here than as an answer to the Fermi Paradox
- yreg 3y agoI don't get it. How did advertisers, tracking bots, clickbait creators, attention-hungry influencers or reply guys destroy txti?
- nicbou 3y agoSpam did. The predators in the dark forest are spammers, and the prey are websites that allow user-generated content. Same economy, just different actors.
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- fatneckbeard 3y agoHere is the problem people are having with this Maggie Appleton on this blog literally says "Yancey Strickler's companion idea of the Dark Forest theory of the web". I have a Dark Forest Theory of Hacker News. If I stay out of certain threads i dont get blasted. So i dont post in them. Hacker News is like Liu Cixin's dark forest. i hope someone would say "as Fatneckbeard pointed out, HN is a lot like Liu Cixin's Dark Forest" not "Fat Neck Beards's Dark Forest theory of Hacker News". I did not write 1000+ pages of books about this that became a world wide best seller and responsible for the phrase being a house hold word. I just pointed out they are similar. It is not my idea. It is not even my adaptation of an idea to a novel context. Im just pointing out something relatively obvious, because the original book is widely interpreted as an analogy for China's 996 tech startup culture by the Chinese readership which made it a success in the first place, so I'm basically making a pop culture reference. Even if I wrote a blog about it it would not make it my idea.
- marcellus23 3y ago> Liu Cixin's Dark Forest Liu Cixin did not come up with the Dark Forest theory. It’s been around for decades and many other thinkers and scifi authors had written about it before he did (nothing against him of course).
- musingsole 3y agoBut that's missing the GP's forest for the trees (pun intended). Liu Cixin's work popularized the theory and phrasing by a massive amount both in comparison to the works that came before and as well as after. The core point seems to be the flippant assignment of origination irrespective of the scale of contributions.
- marcellus23 3y agoHow is that not just as flippant an “assignment of origination”? Regardless of how Liu Cixin might have written the most popular treatment of the theory, he did not come up with it, and stood on the shoulders of many others who developed the idea over decades. I have no problem with giving him credit for popularizing the idea but calling it “Liu Cixin’s Dark Forest” is going too far.
- Kiro 3y agoI don't think "bad actors" is referring to any of those in this case.