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Also known as the dead Internet theory. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dead_Internet_theory https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dead_Internet_theory When I first hea

Also known as the dead Internet theory. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dead_Internet_theory https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dead_Internet_theory When I first heard about it on /x/ about 6 years ago I thought it was a bit of a morbid joke around how if all your human interaction is online you can't definitively state that the universe exists outside your front door. But recently it's started to look like more of a true statement that, at least as far as the internet goes, it will soon be impossible to know if anybody you interact with actually exists. FWIW I'm actually looking forward to this happening, for every social activity that is often claimed to have been better before the internet (ie dating, casual debates about politics, etc) has a potential to return to its pre-internet status quo as people come to the conclusion that none of it is real and gradually drop out. Internet will still exist as a valuable tool for transmitting data but the concept of online communities and social networks will suffer and degrade until there's nothing but spam like usenet did.

Uehreka 2y ago
I dunno, I’ve never seen any of these sort of “things will get better by getting worse” theories pan out. I’d wager that if it becomes difficult to tell real from fake on the internet, people may just become more atomized and paranoid, retreating away from social interaction altogether. So for that reason I hope the Dead Internet Theory doesn’t come to pass.
p2detar 2y ago
While I appreciate the claims about GPT and Google search-bots-first designed web, I couldn’t agree less with the „coordinated international effort“ part. I much prefer Maggie Appleton‘s Dark Forest writing and talk on the matter: > The dark forest theory of the web points to the increasingly life-like but life-less state of being online. Most open and publicly available spaces on the web are overrun with bots, advertisers, trolls, data scrapers, clickbait, keyword-stuffing “content creators,” and algorithmically manipulated junk. > It's like a dark forest that seems eerily devoid of human life – all the living creatures are hidden beneath the ground or up in trees. If they reveal themselves, they risk being attacked by automated predators. Links: - https://maggieappleton.com/ai-dark-forest https://maggieappleton.com/ai-dark-forest - Talk: https://youtu.be/QPoM-h1fK8M https://youtu.be/QPoM-h1fK8M edit: formatting

Uehreka 2y ago

I dunno, I’ve never seen any of these sort of “things will get better by getting worse” theories pan out. I’d wager that if it becomes difficult to tell real from fake on the internet, people may just become more atomized and paranoid, retreating away from social interaction altogether. So for that reason I hope the Dead Internet Theory doesn’t come to pass.

p2detar 2y ago

While I appreciate the claims about GPT and Google search-bots-first designed web, I couldn’t agree less with the „coordinated international effort“ part. I much prefer Maggie Appleton‘s Dark Forest writing and talk on the matter: > The dark forest theory of the web points to the increasingly life-like but life-less state of being online. Most open and publicly available spaces on the web are overrun with bots, advertisers, trolls, data scrapers, clickbait, keyword-stuffing “content creators,” and algorithmically manipulated junk. > It's like a dark forest that seems eerily devoid of human life – all the living creatures are hidden beneath the ground or up in trees. If they reveal themselves, they risk being attacked by automated predators. Links: - https://maggieappleton.com/ai-dark-forest https://maggieappleton.com/ai-dark-forest - Talk: https://youtu.be/QPoM-h1fK8M https://youtu.be/QPoM-h1fK8M edit: formatting