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Ask HN: How can we keep (part of) the web human?
Any ideas for how we can keep the web (or at least part of it) human?
It feels like every time I do a web search, more and more of the results are AI generated nonsense.
I'm worried that it's going to become much more difficult to find the human-generated content.
How can we keep a part of the web human? Any ideas? (I'm not keen on Sam Altman’s eyeball-scanning Orb being the "solution.")
- egypturnash 1y agoGet a job at someone pushing AI. Sabotage. You're smart, you can do it subtly enough that it just looks like you're kind of incompetent.
- onemoresoop 1y agoToo bad these jobs pay well and attract people who are quite myopic and drink all the koolaid.
- egypturnash 1y agoYeah, the first challenge is learning how to sound like someone who's drunk the koolaid without letting it actually affect you.
- pajamasam 1y agoI think sometimes it's naivety, unfortunately, in young graduates especially. With a touch of greediness and ambition. I guess the greediness takes precedence once they're not so naive anymore.
- muzani 1y agoGo in from the data angle. They treat people like cattle and it's $15/hour.
- lee-rhapsody 1y agoGoing back to forums locked behind accounts would be a good first step.
- pajamasam 1y agoLike Reddit, you mean? Or with some extra authentication mechanism?
- burnt-resistor 1y agoSounds about right. Prove you're a real human through some sort of identification verification process. Probably would lead to better conversations, especially if each person could have only one account.
- ASalazarMX 1y agoNew AI service idea: this human doesn't exist, complete with plausible fictional ids. uh... for security awareness.
- ranger_danger 1y agoI am quite skeptical it would help. The majority of users on forums already aren't AI, and from my personal experience in the last couple decades on many different forums, there's already an abundance of egotistical, dogmatic god complexes around to make the experience insufferable enough already.
- vincnetas 1y agoAnd there also adversaries who are paid to post. Proper reputation system is needed to fight that.
- sunrunner 1y ago> an abundance of egotistical, dogmatic god complexes around to make the experience insufferable enough already. And you can find a curated list of these people on r/LinkedInLunatics, though I'm not sure the curation is necessary as it seems like pretty much the _entirety_ of LinkedIn posts are the kind that make you question whether the poster is human. There's marketing and building a personal brand, and then there's whatever the heck LinkedIn in 2025 is...
- Animats 1y agoGo back to Facebook's Real Names rule. Require Know Your Customer validation. No fake name postings. Maybe allow explicit anonymous posting, but readers can block.
- onemoresoop 1y agoFacebook or any other corpo is not to be trusted with anything again.
- selfhoster11 1y agoNo, thank you. I'd sooner cancel my Internet contract.
- muzani 1y agoI did social media before and we used verified phone numbers, no email verification. It drastically cut down on fake accounts. Don't make the phone numbers public of course. We expanded it to social media accounts like FB and Google. It went up a bit. But FB caused a lot of issues with little gain. Eventually Apple ID came in, let people make anon accounts and forced us to adopt it. So we cut out social media accounts along with all the people who had accounts. All in all, non-phone made up about 10% of logins, so it was fine.
- codingdave 1y agoStep back a few more steps. Maybe the web has run its course, and we need to engage with each other in other ways. Even aside from the obvious IRL options, maybe voice and real-time interaction should gain traction again. Maybe we need completely new inventions to help us share content and thoughts. Maybe the web can go the way of gopher and become the subject of future story-telling: "Man, remember back when that was how we interacted? Crazy, right?" We should move forward, not sideways.
- onemoresoop 1y agoAll these ways are very harvestable by AI companies. I think the only way is IRL and more people spaces where technology only exists on devices and everything is decentralized.
- mbauman 1y agoA highly relevant must-watch here is Bret Victor's Computational Public Space: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PixPSNRDNMU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PixPSNRDNMU
- selfhoster11 1y agoGiven that the old web was as much of a repository of information as a way to connect, the new thing shouldn't involve unsearchable, temporary comms that work only in real time. Forcing the new thing to be synchronous or near-synchronous would be a terrible waste of subject matter experts' time too.
- pajamasam 1y agoI like your thinking! Thank you for taking the time to give your thoughts :)
- dannyobrien 1y ago"It feels like" -- the first step I would make is to try and better understand what you're seeing. How often does this happen, compared to what you assume is human? Is it increasing? At what rate? Are there papers that confirm your assessment?
- pajamasam 1y agoThis sounds like an AI-generated reply haha
- jay_kyburz 1y agoI'd be interested in building a curated and moderated web. A special browser with an address whitelist. Some kind of democratic curation of content with a small paywall to reduce the noise. Or alternatively, improve pagerank to exclude low quality content and pages that contain ads.
- qznc 1y agoCould be just a browser plugin to show a quality mark (or the opposite)?
- pajamasam 1y agoAgreed. And the paywall would hopefully help keep (some) of the bots out. On the democratic curation though, how do you ensure that bots aren't voting? I guess you can start with a super small group of curators who you know personally and then slowly branch out?
- stego-tech 1y agoVirtual networks (dn42, tor, etc) or Virtual Private Networks (Tailscale, Wireguard) would be my knee-jerk recommendation. Adding a core abstraction at the network layer immediately fouls up all but the most diligently-coded AI bots out there, as does an abstraction at the Transport layer that's different from the traditional internet. In the short-term, I expect more humans to retreat into these sorts of enclaves as scrapers and AI slop make the public internet untenable to use. In the long run...I couldn't tell you. This feels like the sort of schism Cyberpunk stories are made of, when a utopia of data sharing is perverted into a swamp of automated bots and agents, blindly following obsolete programming and untethered from the controls of their creators, harming whatever infrastructure is connected to the public internet without adequate security. I'd like to think smarter people than myself (shoutout to Xe Iaso for Anubis) will create tools to protect humans and our online presence from the bots, but I'm not super hopeful of their success in the face of present profit-motives for AI Companies to defeat them. Perhaps the answer is to simply devalue the internet as an entity, and thereby destroy incentive to scrape or pollute it at such a scale. Maybe it's yanking services offline and putting them back in the real world, or privacy laws and insurance companies making data hoarding untenable and unaffordable for companies to engage in. Maybe it's identity validation at the point of connectivity, verifying smart cards or identification before you're allowed online (incredibly dystopian and the stuff of Pal*ntir's wet dreams). I honestly couldn't tell you right now what the long game looks like. Only to find your humans, build your digital fortresses, and help each other as best you can.
- pajamasam 1y agoGreat answer, thank you.
- abnercoimbre 1y agoI'm touched by it, and I'll start taking action immediately.
- dogleash 1y agoEven before AI the human element was being drown out. The neat internet thing was neat for a while because power hadn't worked out how to exploit it for their own ends. They have now, the genie doesn't go back in the bottle.
- pajamasam 1y agoDoes that mean we need to invent some new thing or rather go back to IRL? And what about news, media, etc. Do we create physical copies again?
- anxoo 1y agoif you can't think of a way to reliably distinguish AIs from humans, that observation alone should raise great concerns which eclipse "spam comments on forums" or "bad results on google"
- mbauman 1y agoOP (and I) can definitely distinguish the two. The trouble is that I can no longer find the humans who are actually posting valuable information.
- JohnMakin 1y agohttps://cyberpunk.fandom.com/wiki/Blackwall https://cyberpunk.fandom.com/wiki/Blackwall
- BaudouinVH 1y agoall the Gemini-verse feels more human than the web to me nowadays. My two cents. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gemini_(protocol) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gemini_(protocol)
- beej71 1y agoYup, very much so. And Usenet even is coming back to life now that Google dropped it. Always be on the lookout for the next small thing! :)
- sim04ful 1y agoWhat if we shifted our focus entirely from the source of information to how useful and accurate it is? I can't see how the prevalent value system could avoid being "sapio-supremacist" ? is "future proof" to include intelligences that are artificial but whose "sentience" is otherwise human equivalent or "greater"
- pajamasam 1y agoI don't just want useful and accurate information. I want fun, creative, funny content that I can relate to.
- pajamasam 1y agoAlso, multiple perspectives.
- spacemadness 1y agoThat’s not the problem. The way you’re modeling it as an accuracy issue is partly solved by peer reviewed journals but that’s not what people are asking for. People are asking for authenticity and not the output of automated information generators for hire.
- b112 1y agoSetup web forums, include ToS which indicates service is denied using automated tools. People have been charged with telecommunication related crimes for hscking, and the tos csn indicate access denial. This gated access won't stop AI, but will make account usage illegal. People have been convicted for far less. May as well use such laws to our advantage for once. That's the best path I can see.
- zeroCalories 1y agoIs this an argument for AI? First, AI slop sucks. Second, even if it stopped sucking, it would need good input data, which it will need for a top 5 dish soap recommendation until it can do my dishes for me. Third, I want more than just useful information.
- Apreche 1y agoA lot of the web is human. You just can’t discover it. It doesn’t rank highly in search results. It doesn’t go viral on social networks. It doesn’t get wildly upvoted on aggregator sites like this one. That’s the fundamental dilemma of not just the web, but the Internet, as a pull medium opposed to a push medium like television or radio. A human can not remember every URL. From your blank web browser you can only go to URLs you know. Then the only web pages you will ever see are ones that are linked, directly or indirectly, from the ones you know. Most people only know Google, Facebook, etc. Anything that isn’t linked to from those sites effectively does not exist. But it does exist. It’s a whole forest full of trees falling and not making a sound. It’s up to you to do what you can to find it.
- mathgeek 1y agoPerhaps some examples would help? The human-centric web I remember was centered on sharing things you found.
- ge96 1y agoI wonder if registrars provide lists of bought domain names vs. trying to map IPV4 which has multiple domains pointing to same ip would be interesting to do mapping yourself though probably pointless with how much effort/time it would take does remind me of this fun video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JcJSW7Rprio https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JcJSW7Rprio
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- tolerance 1y agoMake friends in real life and only use the internet as a commerce/information exchange platform.
- petemilly 1y agohttps://blogroll.org https://blogroll.org is a neat project that curates personal blogs. One of the curators (Manu) also has a weekly blogger interview series that I enjoy: https://peopleandblogs.com https://peopleandblogs.com
- pajamasam 1y agoLooks nice, thank you!
- o-o- 1y agoWe're missing a piece of middleware technology. Imagine a network like Reddit or IMDB that: a) offers posting under anonymity, b) allows users to associate with exactly one physical passport, c) has no knowledge of who an account belongs to, d) allows for filtering on content by passport-authenticated users.
- seuraughty 1y agoI love the middleware idea as a one-stop shop for verification that could then be used by other platforms. Passports would be a hard sell, but a phone number and one time payment would work well I think.
- muzani 1y agoIt's the search engine (i.e. Google) not catching up. There seems to be a conflict of interest here in a search engine and a pro-AI company. New technologies are going to break old ones. We'll probably see more discovery tech emerge again with AI in mind.
- whytaka 1y agoI've been building https://www.webring.gg https://www.webring.gg . It's a webring creation and management tool that lets members vote new websites (and website owners) to join the ring. I'm hoping that good webrings can hold the integrity of human networks on the web.
- zevon 1y agoThere is a lot of humanity in the web. Small blogs, niche forums, personal websites, art and so on - all those things still exist. They may have become harder to find among a lot of trash but using, for example, a mix of different search engines and, more recently, treating LLM output like a first-semester-student's literature review, they can be found. Personally, I also just don't use Instagram, Facebook, Discord or whatever the closed platform du jour currently is. When I learned how to use the web, google and Facebook were not around. I remember switching search engines as well as adopting and adapting search strategies multiple times. Then, there was a relatively long era of google (as in: It was simply the best and fastest way to find what you were looking for) - but as giants get too big, they inevitably fall, so keeping ready to continue adopting and adapting is - IMO - always a good idea.
- spacemadness 1y agoIt does suck that everyone’s solution to the web being absolutely trashed by profit seekers was to go to Discord. They are also just profit seekers and do sketchy things that all these companies end up doing in the end. You can’t turn off their scanning if programs you’re running on the Desktop app for instance. There still just data mining like everyone else.