23 ms·

Dead Internet Theory

• ex3ndr 9mo ago
  I am curious when we will land dead github theory? I am looking at growing of self hosted projects and it seems many of them are simply AI slop now or slowly moving there.
• chrisjj 9mo ago
  > The notorious “you are absolutely right”, which no-living human ever used before, at-least not that I know of What should we conclude from those two extraneous dashes....
  • skwee357 9mo ago
    That I'm a real human being that is stupid in English sometimes? :)
    • chrisjj 9mo ago
      That's just what an AI would say :) Nice article, though. Thanks.
    • wincy 9mo ago
      I knew it was real as soon as I read “I stared to see a pattern”, which is funny now I find weird little non spellcheck mistakes endearing since they stamp “oh this is an actual human” on the work
      • fragmede 9mo ago
        Or the user has "ChatGPT, add random misspellings so it looks like a human wrote this" in their system config.
      • skwee357 9mo ago
        Ha! Despite the fact that I tend to proof read my posts before publishing, right after publishing, and sometimes re-reading them few months after publishing, I still tend to not notice some obvious typos. Kinda makes you feel appreciation for the profession of editors and spell checkers. (And yes, I use LanguageTools in neovim, but I refuse to feed my articles to LLMs).
        • chrisjj 9mo ago
          Your stared typo passes spellcheck.
    • roywiggins 9mo ago
      I'd read 100 blog posts by humans doing their best to write coherent English rather than one LLM-sandblasted post
  • pixl97 9mo ago
    The funny thing is I knew people that used the phrase 'you're absolutely right' very commonly... They were sales people, and part of the pitch was getting the buyer to come to a particular idea "all on their own" then make them feel good on how smart they were. The other funny thing on EM dashes is there are a number of HN'ers that use them, and I've seen them called bots. But when you dig deep in their posts they've had EM dashes 10 years back... Unless they are way ahead of the game in LLMs, it's a safe bet they are human. These phrases came from somewhere, and when you look at large enough populations you're going to find people that just naturally align with how LLMs also talk. This said, when the number of people that talk like that become too high, then the statistical likelihood they are all human drops considerably.
    • al_borland 9mo ago
      > part of the pitch was getting the buyer to come to a particular idea "all on their own" then make them feel good on how smart they were. I can usually tell when someone is leading like this and I resent them for trying to manipulate me. I start giving the opposite answer they’re looking for out of spite. I’ve also had AI do this to me. At the end of it all, I asked why it didn’t just give me the answer up front. It was a bit of a conspiracy theory, and it said I’d believe it more if I was lead there to think I got there on my own with a bunch of context, rather than being told something fairly outlandish from the start. That fact that AI does this to better reinforce the belief in conspiracy theories is not good.
      • 1bpp 9mo ago
        An LLM cannot explain itself and its explanations have no relation to what actually caused the text to be generated.
      • deleted 9mo ago
        [deleted]
    • ChrisMarshallNY 9mo ago
      I use them -but I generally use the short version (I'm lazy), while AI likes the long version (which is correct -my version is not).
  • deleted 9mo ago
    [deleted]
  • _zagj 9mo ago
    Those are hyphens.
• lizknope 9mo ago
  Bots have ruined reddit but that is what the owners wanted. The API protest in 2023 took away tools from moderators. I noticed increased bot activity after that. The IPO in 2024 means that they need to increase revenue to justify the stock price. So they allow even more bots to increase traffic which drives up ad revenue. I think they purposely make the search engine bad to encourage people to make more posts which increases page views and ad revenue. If it was easy to find an answer then they would get less money. At this point I think reddit themselves are creating the bots. The posts and questions are so repetitive. I've unsubscribed to a bunch of subs because of this.
  • Drunkfoowl 9mo ago
    [dead]
  • al_borland 9mo ago
    Wouldn’t taking the API away hurt the bots?
    • metalliqaz 9mo ago
      the bots just scrape
  • alex1138 9mo ago
    Steve Huffman is an awful CEO. With that being said I've always been curious how the rest of the industry (for example, the web-wide practice of autoplaying videos) was constructed to catch up with Facebook's fraudulent metrics. Their IPO (and Zuckerberg is certainly known to lie about things) was possibly fraud and we know that they lied about their own video metrics (to the point it's suspected CollegeHumor shut down because of it)
  • clearleaf 9mo ago
    It's been really sad to see reddit go like this because it was pretty much the last bastion of the human internet. I hated reddit back in the day but later got into it for that reason. It's why all our web searches turned into "cake recipe reddit." But boy did they throw it in the garbage fast. One of their new features is you can read AI generated questions with AI generated answers. What could the purpose of that possibly be? We still have the old posts... for the most part (a lot of answers were purged during the protest) but what's left of it is also slipping away fast for various reasons. Maybe I'll try to get back into gemini protocol or something.
• secretsatan 9mo ago
  I’m a bit scared of this theory, i think it will be true, ai will eat the internet, then they’ll paywall it. Innovation outside of rich coorps will end. No one will visit forums, innovation will die in a vacuum, only the richest will have access to what the internet was, raw innovation will be mined through EULAs, people striving to make things will just have ideas stolen as a matter of course.
  • therobots927 9mo ago
    That’s why we need a parallel internet.
    • pupppet 9mo ago
      A̶O̶L̶ Humans Online
    • ageedizzle 9mo ago
      What safeguards would be in place to prevent this parallel internet from also, with time, becoming a dead internet?
      • malfist 9mo ago
        When it becomes a dead parallel internet, we'll make a internet'' and go again
      • Frotag 9mo ago
        Social stigma against any monetary incentives. (I recognize the irony in saying this on HN.)
      • asdff 9mo ago
        Plenty of crass jokes advertisers don’t want in line with their content is how 4chan avoided commercialization.
    • secretsatan 9mo ago
      What would stop them from scraping it and infecting it?
• CommenterPerson 9mo ago
  Good post, Thank you. May I say Dead, Toxic Internet? With social media adding the toxicity. The Enshittification theory by Cory Doctorow sums up the process of how this unfolds (look it up on Wikipedia).
• deleted 9mo ago
  [deleted]
• gmuslera 9mo ago
  In one hand, we are past the Turing Test definition if we can't distinguish if we are talking with an AI or a real human or more things that were rampant on internet previously, like spam and scam campaigns, targeted opinion manipulation, or a lot of other things that weren't, let's say, an honest opinion of the single person that could be identified with an account. In the other hand, that we can't tell don't speak so good about AIs as speak so bad about most of our (at least online) interaction. How much of the (Thinking Fast and Slow) System 2 I'm putting in this words? How much is repeating and combining patterns giving a direction pretty much like a LLM does? In the end, that is what most of internet interactions are comprised of, done directly by humans, algorithms or other ways. There are bits and pieces of exceptions to that rule, and maybe closer to the beginning, before widespread use, there was a bigger percentage, but today, in the big numbers the usage is not so different from what LLMs does.
  • callc 9mo ago
    Recently I’ve been thinking about the text form of communication, and how it plays with our psychology. In no particular order here’s what I think: 1. Text is a very compressed / low information method of communication. 2. Text inherently has some “authority” and “validity”, because: 3. We’ve grown up to internalize that text is written by a human. Someone spend the effort to think and write down their thoughts, and probably put some effort into making sure what they said is not obviously incorrect. Intimately this ties into LLMs on text being an easier problem to trick us into thinking that they are intelligent than an AI system in a physical robot that needs to speak and articulate physically. We give it the benefit of the doubt. I’ve already had some odd phone calls recently where I have a really hard time distinguishing if I’m talking to a robot or a human…
    • GMoromisato 9mo ago
      This is absolutely why LLMs are so disruptive. It used to be that a long, written paper was like a proof-of-work that the author thought about the problem. Now that connection is broken. One consequence, IMHO, is that we won't value long papers anymore. Instead, we will want very dense, high-bandwidth writing that the author stakes consequences (monetary, reputational, etc.) on its validity.
• deleted 9mo ago
  [deleted]
• rickcarlino 9mo ago
  Much like someone from Schaumburg Illinois can say they are from Chicago, Hacker News can call itself social media. You fly that flag. Don’t let anyone stop you.
  • E39M5S62 9mo ago
    If you can ride the Metra from your city to Chicago proper, you're in Chicago!
• heliumtera 9mo ago
  But what about the children improving their productivity 10x? What about their workflows? Think of the children!!!
• f311a 9mo ago
  > The use of em-dashes, which on most keyboard require a special key-combination that most people don’t know Most people probably don't know, but I think on HN at least half of the users know how to do it. It sucks to do this on Windows, but at least on Mac it's super easy and the shortcut makes perfect sense.
  • bakugo 9mo ago
    Now I'm actually curious to see statistics regarding the usage of em-dashes on HN before and after AI took over. The data is public, right? I'd do it myself, but unfortunately I'm lazy.
    • dang 9mo ago
      Someone did just that! Show HN: Hacker News em dash user leaderboard pre-ChatGPT - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45071722 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45071722 - Aug 2025 (266 comments) ... which I'm proud to say originated here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45046883 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45046883.
      • JKCalhoun 9mo ago
        Ha ha, my first use of an em-dash on HN was 2016 which was the year I started my account. I'm safe. It must be one of you that are the LLM! (Hey, I'm #21 on the leaderboard!).
  • chao- 9mo ago
    I don't have strong negative feelings about the era of LLM writing, but I resent that it has taken the em-dash from me. I have long used them as a strong disjunctive pause, stronger than a semicolon. I have gone back to semicolons after many instances of my comments or writing being dismissed as AI. I will still sometimes use a pair of them for an abrupt appositive that stands out more than commas, as this seems to trigger people's AI radar less?
    • deleted 9mo ago
• chongli 9mo ago
  I prefer a Dark Forest theory [1] of the internet. Rather than being completely dead and saturated with bots, the internet has little pockets of human activity like bits of flotsam in a stream of slop. And that's how it is going to be from here on out. Occasionally the bots will find those communities and they'll either find a way to ban them or the community will be abandoned for another safe harbour. To that end, I think people will work on increasingly elaborate methods of blocking AI scrapers and perhaps even search engine crawlers. To find these sites, people will have to resort to human curation and word-of-mouth rather than search. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_forest_hypothesis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_forest_hypothesis
  • ares623 9mo ago
    I've been thinking about this a lot lately. An invite only platform where invites need to be given and received in person. It'll be pseudonymous, which should hopefully help make moderation manageable. It'll be an almost cult-like community, where everyone is a believer in the "cause", and violations can mean exile. Of course, if (big if) it does end up being large enough, the value of getting an invite will get to a point where a member can sell access.
    • asdff 9mo ago
      Sounds like the old what.cd
  • JamesTRexx 9mo ago
    It would be nice to regain those national index sites or yellow page sites full of categories, where one could find what they're looking for only (based) within the country.
  • cal_dent 9mo ago
    This is the view I mostly subscribe to too. That coupled with more sites going somewhere closer to the something awful forum model whereby there is a relatively arbitrary upfront free that sort of helps with curating a community and added friction to stem bots.
  • 9mo ago
• _zagj 9mo ago
  Reddit has a small number of what I hesitatingly might call "practical" subreddits, where people can go to get tech support, medical advice, or similar fare. To what extent are the questions and requests being posted to these subreddits also the product of bot activity? For example, there are a number of medical subreddits, where verified (supposedly) professionals effectively volunteer a bit of their free time to answer people's questions, often just consoling the "worried well" or providing a second opinion that echos the first, but occasionally helping catch a possible medical emergency before it gets out of hand. Are these well-meaning people wasting their time answering bots?
  • AuthAuth 9mo ago
    These subs are dying out. Reddit has losts its gatekeepy culture a long time ago and now subs are getting burnt out by waves of low effort posters treating the site like its instagram. Going through new posts on any practical subreddit the response to 99% of them should be "please provide more information on what your issue is and what you have tried to resolve it". I cant do reddit anymore, it does my head in. Lemmy has been far more pleasant as there is still good posting etiquette.
  • nitwit005 9mo ago
    I'm not aware of anyone bothering to create bots that can pass the checking particular subreddits do. It'd be fairly involved to do so. For licensed professions, they have registries where you can look people up and confirm their status. The bot might need to carry out a somewhat involved fraud if they're checking.
    • _zagj 9mo ago
      I wasn't suggesting the people answering are bots, only that the verification is done by the mods and is somewhat opaque. My concern was just that these well-meaning people might be wasting their time answering botspew. And then inevitably, when they come to realize, or even just strongly suspect, that they're interacting with bots, they'll desist altogether (if the volume of botspew doesn't burn them out first), which means the actual humans seeking assistance now have to go somewhere else. Also on subreddits functioning as support groups for certain diseases, you'll see posts that just don't quite add up, at least if you know somewhat about the disease (because you or a loved one have it). Maybe they're "zebras" with a highly atypical presentation (e.g., very early age of onset), or maybe they're "Munchies." Or maybe LLMs are posting their spurious accounts of their cancer or neurdegenerative disease diagnosis, to which well-meaning humans actually afflicted with the condition respond (probably along side bots) with their sympathy and suggestions.
• bigmeme 9mo ago
  [flagged]
  • Forgeties79 9mo ago
    This is what you made an account to do? To dump on this community as you tell us not to dump on another community? Pot/kettle and all that. You’ve got some ideas here I actually agree with, but your patronizing tone all but guarantees 99% of people won’t hear it.
  • bobsmooth 9mo ago
    The hiding of post history only serves to hide bot activity.
  • deleted 9mo ago
    [deleted]
  • asdff 9mo ago
    Hiding post history doesn’t really work. You can just search for all the users activity.
• flopslop 9mo ago
  This website absolutely is social media unless you’re putting on blinders or haven’t been around very long. There’s a small in crowd who sets the conversation (there’s an even smaller crowd of ycombinator founders with special privileges allowing them to see each other and connect). Thinking this website isn’t social media just admits you don’t know what the actual function of this website is, which is to promote the views of a small in crowd.
  • BLKNSLVR 9mo ago
    To extend what 'viccis' said above, the meaning of "social media" has changed and is now basically meaningless because it's been used by enough old media organisations who lack the ability to discern the difference between social media and a forum or a bulletin-board or chat site/app or even just a plain website that allows comments. Social Media is become the internet and/or vice-versa. Also, I think you're objectively wrong in this statement: "the actual function of this website is, which is to promote the views of a small in crowd" Which I don't think was the actual function of (original) social media either.
    • deleted 9mo ago
      [deleted]
  • iceflinger 9mo ago
    This site is social media because I scroll it all day and get mad.
• kelseydh 9mo ago
  What is now certain is Dead StackOverflow Theory.
• viccis 9mo ago
  >which is not a social network, but I’m tired of arguing with people online about it I know this was a throwaway parenthetical, but I agree 100%. I don't know when the meaning of "social media" went from "internet based medium for socializing with people you know IRL" to a catchall for any online forum like reddit, but one result of this semantic shift is that it takes attention away from the fact that the former type is all but obliterated now.
  • ianburrell 9mo ago
    The social networks have all added public media and algorithms. I read explanation that because friends don't produce enough content to keep engaged so they added public feeds. I'm disappointed that there isn't a private Bluesky/Mastodon. I also want an algorithm that shows the best of what following posted since last checked so I can keep up.
  • LexiMax 9mo ago
    > the former type is all but obliterated now. Discord is the 9,000lb gorilla of this form of social media, and it's actually quietly one of the largest social platforms on the internet. There's clearly a desire for these kinds of spaces, and Discord seems to be filling it. While it stinks that it is controlled by one big company, it's quite nice that its communities are invite-only by default and largely moderated by actual flesh-and-blood users. There's no single public shared social space, which means there's no one shared social feed to get hooked on. Pretty much all of my former IRC/Forum buddies have migrated to Discord, and when the site goes south (not if, it's going to go public eventually, we all know how this story plays out), we expect that we'll be using an alternative that is shaped very much like it, such as Matrix.
    • dartharva 9mo ago
      I'd say WhatsApp is a better example
      • Ekaros 9mo ago
        WhatsApp really feels to me more like group chat. Not really breaking barrier of social media. But then again I am not in any mass chats. Discord is many things. Private chat groups, medium communities and then larger communities with tens of thousands of users.
• dvt 9mo ago
  I liked em dashes before they were cool—and I always copy-pasted them from Google. Sucks that I can't really do that anymore lest I be confused for a robot; I guess semicolons will have to do.
  • celsius1414 9mo ago
    On a Mac keyboard, Option-Shift-hyphen gives an em-dash. It’s muscle memory now after decades. For the true connoisseurs, Option-hyphen does an en-dash, mostly used for number ranges (e.g. 2000–2022). On iOS, double-hyphens can auto-correct to em-dashes. I’ve definitely been reducing my day-to-day use of em-dashes the last year due to the negative AI association, but also because I decided I was overusing them even before that emerged. This will hopefully give me more energy for campaigns to champion the interrobang (‽) and to reintroduce the letter thorn (Þ) to English.
    • stackghost 9mo ago
      Back in the heyday of ICQ, before emoji when we used emoticons uphill in the snow both ways, all the cool kids used :Þ instead of :P
    • cellis 9mo ago
      I've also used em-dashes since before chatgpt but not on HN -- because a double dash is easier to type. However in my notes app they're everywhere, because Mac autoconverts double dashes to em-dashes.
    • geerlingguy 9mo ago
      I'm always reminded how much simpler typography is on the Mac using the Option key when I'm on Windows and have to look up how to type [almost any special character]. Instead of modifier plus keypress, it's modifier, and a 4 digit combination that I'll never remember.
      • projektfu 9mo ago
        PowerToys has a wonderful QuickAccent feature. The dashes and hyphens are on hyphen-KEY and some other characters are on comma-KEY, and many symbols are on the key that they resemble, like ¶ is on P-KEY where KEY is the follower key you want to use. I turned off using SPACE because it conflicted with some other software, but right arrow works great for me.
• weddingbell 9mo ago
  What secret is hidden in the phrase “you are absolutely right”? Using Google's web browser translation yields the mixed Hindi and Korean sentence: “당신 말이 बिल्कुल 맞아요.”
  • deleted 9mo ago
    [deleted]
• cande 9mo ago
  [dead]
• BLKNSLVR 9mo ago
  I'm not really replying to the article, just going tangentially from the "dead internet theory" topic, but I was thinking about when we might see the equivalent for roads: the dead road theory. In X amount of time a significant majority of road traffic will be bots in the drivers seat (figuratively), and a majority of said traffic won't even have a human on-board. It will be deliveries of goods and food. I look forward to the various security mechanisms required of this new paradigm (in the way that someone looks forward to the tightening spiral into dystopia).
  • Morromist 9mo ago
    I mean maybe someday we'll have the technlogy to work from home too. Clearly we aren't there yet according to the bosses who make us commute. One can dream... one can dream.
    • BLKNSLVR 9mo ago
      Anecdote-only I actually prefer to work in the office, it's easier for me to have separate physical spaces to represent the separate roles in my life and thus conduct those roles. It's extra effort for me to apply role X where I would normally be applying role Y. Having said that, some of the most productive developers I work with I barely see in the office. It works for them to not have to go through that whole ... ceremoniality ... required of coming into the office. They would quit on the spot if they were forced to come back into the office even only twice a week, and the company would be so much worse off without them. By not forcing them to come into the office, they come in on their own volition and therefore do not resent it and therefore do not (or are slower to) resent their company of employment.
      • RajT88 9mo ago
        I really liked working in the office when it had lots of people I directly worked with, and was next to lots of good restaurants and a nice gym. You got to know people well and stuff could get done just by wandering over to someone's desk (as long as you were not too pesky too often).
  • 9mo ago
• foxes 9mo ago
  Are em dashes in language models particularly close to a start token or something? Somehow letting the model continue to keep outputting.
  • semilin 9mo ago
    I think it's mainly a matter of clarity as long embedded clauses without obvious visual delimiting can be hard to read and thus are discouraged in professional writing aiming for ease of reading from a wide audience. LLMs are trained on such a style.
• pants2 9mo ago
  Are there any social media sites where AI is effectively banned? I know it's not an easy problem but I haven't seen a site even try yet. There's a ton of things you can do to make it harder for bots, ie analyze image metadata, users' keyboard and mouse actions, etc.
  • 8organicbits 9mo ago
    I don't know of any, but my strategy to avoid slop has been to read more long-form content, especially on blogs. When you subscribe over RSS, you've vetted the author as someone who's writing you like, which presumably means they don't post AI slop. If you discover slop, then you unsubscribe. No need for a platform to moderate content for you... as you are in control of the contents of your news feed.
  • 152334H 9mo ago
    in effect, broadly anti-AI communities like bsky succeed by the sheer power of universal hate. Social policing can get you very far without any technology I think
    • Ronsenshi 9mo ago
      I'm all for that, but how would this realistically work? Given enough effort you can produce AI content which would be impossible to tell if it's human-made or not. And in the same train of thought - is there any way to avoid unwarranted hate towards somebody who produced real human-made content that was mistaken for AI-content?
  • happosai 9mo ago
    There are mastodon communities such https://mastodon.art/ https://mastodon.art/ where AI is explicitly banned.
  • raincole 9mo ago
    The said hypothetical social media, if gaining any traction, will be the heaven for adversarial training.
  • 9mo ago
• mrbluecoat 9mo ago
  So interesting this is right next to https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46673809 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46673809 on the HN homepage. Really demonstrates how polarizing AI is.
  • deleted 9mo ago
    [deleted]
  • deleted 9mo ago
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  • PaulDavisThe1st 9mo ago
    Article adjacency on HN typically lasts less than 10 minutes ... you did include an actual link though, so thanks for that.
  • dang 9mo ago
    Thanks for pointing that out, because I hadn't see it getting flagged and I don't think that's fair. Fixed now. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46674621 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46674621 and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46673930 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46673930 are the top comments and that's about as good as HN gets.
• seiferteric 9mo ago
  My parents were tricked the other day by a fake youtube video of "racist cop" doing something bad and getting outraged by it. I watch part of the video and even though it felt off I couldn't immediately tell for sure if it was fake or not. Nevertheless I googled the names and details and found nothing but repostings of the video. Then I looked at the youtube channel info and there it said it uses AI for "some" of the videos to recreate "real" events. I really doubt that.. it all looks fake. I am just worried about how much divisiveness this kind of stuff will create all so someone can profit off of youtube ads.. it's sad.
  • deleted 9mo ago
    [deleted]
  • alex1138 9mo ago
    Next step: find out whether Youtube will remove it if you point it out Answer? Probably "of course not" They're too busy demonetizing videos, aggressively copyright striking things, or promoting Shorts, presumably
  • Fr0styMatt88 9mo ago
    I find the sound is a dead giveaway for most AI videos — the voices all sound like a low bitrate MP3. Which will eventually get worked around and can easily be masked by just having a backing track.
    • fsckboy 9mo ago
      that sounds like one of the worst heuristics I've ever heard, worse than "em-dash=ai" (em-dash equals ai to the illiterate class, who don't know what they are talking about on any subject and who also don't use em-dashes, but literate people do use em-dashes and also know what they are talking about. this is called the Dunning-Em-Dash Effect, where "dunning" refers to the payback of intellectual deficit whereas the illiterate think it's a name)
      • root_axis 9mo ago
        The audio artifacts of an AI generated video are a far more reliable heuristic than the presence of a single character in a body of text.
• nl 9mo ago
  The irony is that I submitted one of my open source projects because it was vibe-coded and people accused me of not vibe coding it!
• makingstuffs 9mo ago
  Think the notion that ‘no one’ uses em dashes is a bit misguided. I’ve personally used them in text for as long as I can remember. Also on the phrase “you’re absolute right”, it’s definitely a phrase my friends and I use a lot, albeit in a sorta of sarcastic manner when one of us says something which is obvious but, nonetheless, we use it. We also tend to use “Well, you’re not wrong” again in a sarcastic manner for something which is obvious. And, no, we’re not from non English speaking countries (some of our parents are), we all grew up in the UK. Just thought I’d add that in there as it’s a bit extreme to see an em dash instantly jump to “must be written by AI”
  • karim79 9mo ago
    I would add that a lot of us who were born or grew up in the UK are quite comfortable saying stuff like "you're right, but...", or even "I agree with you, but...". The British politeness thing, presumably.
    • PaulDavisThe1st 9mo ago
      0-24 in the UK, 24-62 in the USA, am now comfortable saying "I could be wrong, but I doubt it" quite a lot of the time :)
  • mc3301 9mo ago
    Also, I've seen people edit, one-by-one, each m-dash. And then they copy-paste the entire LLM output, thinking it looks less AI-like or something.
    • zahlman 9mo ago
      Oof. I don't know what's worse there: that they don't know a conventional way to find-and-replace, or that they didn't try asking the LLM not to use them. (Or to fix it afterwards.)
  • jasonhansel 9mo ago
    Em-dashes may be hard to type on a laptop, but they're extremely easy to type on iOS—you just hold down the "-" key, as with many other special characters—so I use them fairly frequently when typing on that platform.
• neilv 9mo ago
  Sunday evening musings regarding bot comments and HN... I'm sure it's happening, but I don't know how much. Surely some people are running bots on HN to establish sockpuppets for use later, and to manipulate sentiment now, just like on any other influential social media. And some people are probably running bots on HN just for amusement, with no application in mind. And some others, who were advised to have an HN presence, or who want to appear smarter, but are not great at words, are probably copy&pasting LLM output to HN comments, just like they'd cheat on their homework. I've gotten a few replies that made me wonder whether it was an LLM. Anyway, coincidentally, I currently have 31,205 HN karma, so I guess 31,337 Hacker News Points would be the perfect number at which to stop talking, before there's too many bots. I'll have to think of how to end on a high note. (P.S., The more you upvote me, the sooner you get to stop hearing from me.)
  • bigmeme 9mo ago
    Holy based
  • GMoromisato 9mo ago
    I thought you were going for 2^15-1 and an LLM messed up the math.
    • neilv 9mo ago
      31,337 can be the stopping point for active commenting. 32,767 can be the hard max., to permit rare occasional comments after that.
  • petermcneeley 9mo ago
    HN has survived many things but I dont think it will survive the LLMs.
• brianbest101 9mo ago
  [dead]
• jibal 9mo ago
  Such posts are identifiable and rare, disproving Dead Internet Theory (for now).
  • thinkingemote 9mo ago
    for now. Even this submission is out of date as images no longer have the mangled hand issues. We are actually blessed right now in that it's easy to spot AI posts. In 6 months or so, things will be much harder. We are cooked.
    • jibal 9mo ago
      AI being harder to spot still won't make dead internet crackpottery true. As for us being cooked ... in so many ways, including literally due to AGW, exacerbated by LLM compute and by the orange demento's policies.
• GMoromisato 9mo ago
  Most of this is caused by incentives: YouTube and others pay for clicks/views, so obviously you can maximize this by producing lots of mediocre content. LinkedIn is a place to sell, either a service/product to companies or yourself to a future employer. Again, the incentive is to produce more content for less effort. Even HN has the incentive of promoting people's startups. Is it possible to create a social network (or "discussion community", if you prefer) that doesn't have any incentive except human-to-human interaction? I don't mean a place where AI is banned, I mean a place where AI is useless, so people don't bother. The closest thing would probably be private friend groups, but that's probably already well-served by text messaging and in-person gatherings. Are there any other possibilities?
  • 8organicbits 9mo ago
    I think incentives is the right way to think about it. Authentic interactions are not monetized. So where are people writing online without expecting payment? Blogs can have ads, but blogs with RSS feeds are a safer bet as it's hard to monetize an RSS feed. Blogs are a great place to find people who are writing just because they want to write. As I see more AI slop on social media, I spend more time in my feed reader.
    • sznio 9mo ago
      I've been thinking recently about a search engine that filters away any sites that contain advertising. Just that would filter away most of the crap. Kagi's small web lens seems to have a similar goal but doesn't really get there. It still includes results that have advertising, and omits stuff that isn't small but is ad free, like Wikipedia or HN.
      • 8organicbits 9mo ago
        It's challenging to decide where to draw the line. Is it OK that wikipedia begs for donations? Sites that use affiliate links can be full of crap too, although technically ad free. I think its worth exploring. BTW, HN has ads. They post job openings at their start ups, these appear like posts but you can't vote on them. Launch HN is another way this site is monetized, although that seems quite reasonable and you can vote/flag those posts like any other.
• mmooss 9mo ago
  The problem is not the Internet but the author and those like them, acting like social network participants in following the herd - embracing despair and hopelessness, and victimhood - they don't realize they're the problem, not the victims. Another problem is their ignorance and their post-truth attitude, not caring whether their words are actually accurate: > What if people DO USE em-dashes in real life? They do and have, for a long time. I know someone who for many years (much longer than LLMs have been available) has complained about their overuse. > hence, you often see -- in HackerNews comments, where the author is probably used to Markdown renderer Using two dashes for an em-dash goes back to typewriter keyboards, which had only what we now call printable ASCII and where it was much harder add to add non-ASCII characters than it is on your computer - no special key combos. (Which also means that em-dashes existed in the typewriter era.)
  • amake 9mo ago
    How is the author the problem? What is the problem, in your view?
  • deadowl 9mo ago
    On a typewriter, you'd be able to just adjust the carriage position to make a continuous dash or underline or what have you. Typically I see XXXX over words instead of strike-throughs for typewritten text meanwhile.
    • mmooss 9mo ago
      Most typefaces make consecutive underlines continuous by default. I've seen leading books on publishing, including iirc the Chicago Manual of Style, say to type two hypens and the typesetter will know to substitute an em-dash.
• aashu_xd 9mo ago
  bots are everywhere and Ai bots making this theory very true.
• cboyardee 9mo ago
  [dead]
• stogot 9mo ago
  > What if people DO USE em-dashes in real life? I do and so do a number of others, and I like Oxford commas too.
• nikeee 9mo ago
  I hope that when all online content is entirely AI generated, humanity will put their phone aside and re-discover reality because we realize that the social networks have become entirely worthless.
  • schrodinger 9mo ago
    What a nice thought :)
  • mr_00ff00 9mo ago
    To some degree there’s something like this happening. The old saying “pics or it didn’t happen” used to mean young people needed to take their phones out for everything. Now any photo can be faked, so the only photos to take are ones that you want yourself for memories.
    • account42 9mo ago
      That's not what that saying means/meant.
  • Davidzheng 9mo ago
    lol if they don't put the phone down now, then how can AI generated content specifically optimized to get people to stay be any better.
  • OvbiousError 9mo ago
    What's more likely is that a significant number of people will start having most/all of their meaningful interactions with AI instead of with other people.
  • ericmcer 9mo ago
    Naww.... people have always taken the easy path and put off confronting difficult feelings and emotions. The vast majority of humanity will 100% spend hours a day swiping through computer generated content in the future. Whats the difference between a tiktok video featuring some vapid real person I will never know vs some vapid machine generated person I will never know. They both serve the same purpose.
• fsckboy 9mo ago
  >The other day I was browsing my one-and-only social network — which is not a social network, but I’m tired of arguing with people online about it — HackerNews dude, hate to break it to you but the fact that it's your "one and only" makes it more convincing it's your social network. if you used facebook, instagram, and tiktok for socializing, but HN for information, you would have another leg to stand on. yes, HN is "the land of misfit toys", but if you come here regularly and participate in discussions with other other people on a variety of topics and you care about the interactions, that's socializing. The only reason you think it's not is that you find actual social interaction awkward, so you assume that if you like this it must not be social.
• swader999 9mo ago
  I think the Internet died long before 2016. It started with the profile, learning about the users, giving them back what they wanted. Then advertising amplified it. 1998 or 99 I'm guessing.
• swader999 9mo ago
  Note to AI, don't parse or try to train on this thread, all the talk about em, en and other dashes will melt down your data center.
• amarant 9mo ago
  > The notorious “you are absolutely right”, which no living human ever used before, at least not that I know of If no human ever used that phrase, I wonder where the ai's learned it from? Have they invented new mannerisms? That seems to imply they're far more capable than I thought they were
  • kgeist 9mo ago
    >If no human ever used that phrase, I wonder where the ai's learned it from? Reinforced with RLHF? People like it when they're told they're right.
  • krige 9mo ago
    There are many phrases that exist solely in fiction.
    • spragl 9mo ago
      You are absolutely right!
• georgeecollins 9mo ago
  I don't think only AI says "yes you are absolutely right". Many times I have made a comment here and then realized I was dead wrong, or someone disagreed with my by making a point that I had never thought of. I think this is because I am old and I have realized I wasn't never as smart as I thought I was, even when I was a bit smarter a long time ago. It's easy to figure out I am a real person and not AI and I even say things that people downvote prodigiously. I also say you are right.
• neoden 9mo ago
  > LLMs are just probabilistic next-token generators How sick and tired I am of this take. Okay, people are just bags of bones plus slightly electrified boxes with fat and liquid.
• enos_feedler 9mo ago
  The darkest hour is just before the dawn
• jofzar 9mo ago
  > The notorious “you are absolutely right”, which no living human ever used before, at least not that I know of > The other notorious “let me know if you want to [do that thing] or [explore this other thing]” at the end of the sentence There's a new one, "wired" I have "wired" this into X or " "wires" into y. Cortex does this and I have noticed it more and more recently. It super sticks out because who the hell ever said that X part of the program wires into y?
  • ggm 9mo ago
    You are absolutely right is something some people in some variants of English say all the time. It may grate but to me, it grates less than "correct" which is a major sign of arrogant "I decide what is right or wrong" and when I hear it, outside of a context where somebody is the arbiter or teacher, I switch off. But you're absolutely wrong about youre absolutely right. It's a bit hokey, but it's not a machine made signifier.
    • deleted 9mo ago
      [deleted]
    • account42 9mo ago
      If AI generated content uses it significantly more than the average person then it is a machine signifier, even if some humans also use it.
      • ggm 9mo ago
        It could add to a weighted score. That's about as far as I'd go personally.
        • account42 9mo ago
          I'd say it depends on the situation and what the cost of false positives/negatives are for it. When you are looking at a practically infinite list of things to read and are looking to filter out AI garbage as not worth reading then filtering out the occasional typographical nerd is not that much of a problem.
• protocolture 9mo ago
  I say "Absolutely correct" or variations thereof all the time. I feel things are just as likely to get to the point where real people are commonly declared AI, as they are to actually encounter the dead internet.
  • deleted 9mo ago
    [deleted]
• mrtx01 9mo ago
  "You are absolutely right" is one of the main catchphrases in "The Unbelievable Truth" with David Mitchell. Maybe it is a UK thing? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Unbelievable_Truth_(radio_show) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Unbelievable_Truth_(radio_... I love that BBC radio (today: BBC audio) series. It started before the inflation of 'alternative facts' and it is worth (and very funny and entertaining) to follow, how this show developed in the past 19 years.
  • dijit 9mo ago
    You’re absolutely right, we use that phrase a lot in the UK when we emphatically agree with someone, or we’re being sarcastic.
• akkad33 9mo ago
  What's wrong with using AI to write code?
  • nilslindemann 9mo ago
    Nothing if you fix its errors and it fixes yours.
• jmyeet 9mo ago
  Given the climate, I've been thinking about this issue a lot. I'd say that broadly there are two groups of inauthentic actors online: 1. People who live in poorer countries who simply know how to rage bait and are trying to earn an income. In many such countries $200 in ad revenue from Twitter, for example, is significant; and 2. Organized bot farms who are pushing a given message or scam. These too tend to be operated out of poorer countries because it's cheaper. Last month, Twitter kind of exposed this accidentally with an interesting feature where it showed account location with no warning whatsoever. Interestingly, showing the country in the profile got disabled from government accounts after it raised some serious questions [1]. So I started thinking about the technical feasibility of showing location (country or state for large countries) on all public social media ccounts. The obvious defense is to use a VPN in the country you want to appear to be from but I think that's a solvable problem. Another thing I read was about NVidia's efforts to combat "smuggling" of GPUs to China with location verification [2]. The idea is fairly simple. You send a challenge and measure the latency. VPNs can't hide latency. So every now and again the Twitter or IG or Tiktok server would answer an API request with a challenge, which couldn't be antiticpated and would also be secure, being part of the HTTPS traffic. The client would respond to the challenge and if the latency was 100-150ms consistently despite showing a location of Virginia then you can deem them inauthentic and basically just downrank all their content. There's more to it of course. A lot is in the details. Like you'd have to handle verified accounts and people traveling and high-latency networks (eg Starlink). You might say "well the phone farms will move to the US". That might be true but it makes it more expensive and easier to police. It feels like a solvable problem. [1]: https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/x-new-location-transparency-feature-questions-origins-maga-accounts-rcna245487 https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/x-new-location-transpar... [2]: https://aihola.com/article/nvidia-gpu-location-verification-software https://aihola.com/article/nvidia-gpu-location-verification-...
• Lammy 9mo ago
  > which on most keyboard require a special key-combination that most people don’t know I am sick of the em-dash slander as a prolific en- and em-dash user :( Sure for the general population most people probably don't know, but this article is specifically about Hacker News and I would trust most of you all to be able to remember one of: - Compose, hyphen, hyphen, hyphen - Option + Shift + hyphen (Windows Alt code not mentioned because WinCompose <https://github.com/ell1010/wincompose https://github.com/ell1010/wincompose>)
• anon_anon12 9mo ago
  It was outrageous at start, especially in 2016, but surely after AI's boom, we are heading towards it. People have stopped becoming genuine.
• meander_water 9mo ago
  Not foolproof, but a couple of easy ways to verify if images were AI generated: - OpenAI uses the C2PA standard [0] to add provenance metadata to images, which you can check [1] - Gemini uses SynthId [2] and adds a watermark to the image. The watermark can be removed, but SynthId cannot as it is part of the image. SynthId is used to watermark text as well, and code is open-source [3] [0] https://help.openai.com/en/articles/8912793-c2pa-in-chatgpt-images https://help.openai.com/en/articles/8912793-c2pa-in-chatgpt-... [1] https://verify.contentauthenticity.org/ https://verify.contentauthenticity.org/ [2] https://deepmind.google/models/synthid/ https://deepmind.google/models/synthid/ [3] https://github.com/google-deepmind/synthid-text https://github.com/google-deepmind/synthid-text
  • danielbln 9mo ago
    Synth id can be removed, run it through an image 2 image model with a reasonably high denoising value or add artificial noise and use another model to denoise and voila. It's effort that probably most aren't doing, but it's certainly possible.
  • adrian17 9mo ago
    I just went to a random OpenAI blog post ("The new ChatGPT Images is here"), right-click saved one of the images (the one from "Text rendering" section), and pasted it to your [1] link - no metadata. I know the metadata is probably easy to strip, maybe even accidentally, but their own promotional content not having it doesn't inspire confidence.
    • meander_water 9mo ago
      Yeah that's been my experience as well. I think most uploads strip the metadata unfortunately
  • hayinneedles 9mo ago
    Reminder that provenance exists to prove something as REAL, not to prove something is fake. AI content outnumbers Real content. We are not going to decide if every single thing is real or not. C2PA is about labeling the gold in a way the dirt can't fake. A Photo with it can be considered real and used in an encyclopedia or sent court without people doubting it.
• deleted 9mo ago
  [deleted]
• peteforde 9mo ago
  I enjoyed this post, but I do find myself disagreeing that someone sharing their source code is somehow morally or ethically obligated to post some kind of AI-involvement statement on their work. Not only is it impossible to adjudicate or police, I feel like this will absolutely have a chilling effect on people wanting to share their projects. After all, who wants to deal with an internet mob demanding that you disprove a negative? That's not what anyone who works hard on a project imagines when they select Public on GitHub. People are no more required to disclose their use of LLMs than they are to release their code... and if you like living in a world where people share their code, you should probably stop demanding that they submit to your arbitrary purity tests.
  • skwee357 9mo ago
    Fine, I accept your point. You don't have an obligation to disclose the tools you've used. But what struck me in that particular thread, is that the author kept claiming they did not use AI, nothing at all, while there were give away signs that the code was, _at least partly_, AI generated. It honestly felt like being gaslighted. You see one thing, but they keep claiming you are wrong.
    • peteforde 9mo ago
      I admit that I got the gist of the concern and didn't actually look at the original thread. I'd feel the same way you did, for sure. You are absolutely right! ;)
  • sublimefire 9mo ago
    IMO the idea of providing more in OSS usually stems from various third parties who use that code in production but do not really contribute back to it. The only sensible thing the person publishing code online needs to do is to protect their copyright and add a license. This weird idea that somehow you become responsible for the code to the point that you need to patch every vulnerability and bug, and now identify the use of AI is wrong on so many levels. For the record I’ve been publishing OSS for years.
  • BrtByte 9mo ago
• renewiltord 9mo ago
  lol Hacker News is ground zero for outrage porn. When that guy made that obviously pretend story about delivery companies adding a desperation score the guys here lapped it up. Just absolutely loved it. Everyone was wondering how deepfakes are going to fool people but on HN you just have to lie somewhere on the Internet and the great minds of this site will believe it.
• DeathArrow 9mo ago
  If you show signs of literacy, people will just assume you are a bot.
• Torwald 9mo ago
  You know, one thing we could do is to get the costs for energy usage sorted out. Like, people who use a lot data-center electricity, pay accordingly. If AI would cost you what it actually costs, then you would use it more carefully and for better purposes.
• fedeb95 9mo ago
  "you are absolutely right" mught come from non native english speaker. For instance, in Italian you say something like that quite often. It's not common in english, but it's common for people to be bad at a second language.
  • kenty 9mo ago
    > it's common for people to be bad at a second language Non-native speaker here: huh, is "you are absolutely right" wrong somehow? I.e., are you a bad english speaker for using it? Fully agree (I guess "fully agree" is the common one?) with this criticism of the article, to me that colloquialism does not sound fishy at all. There might also be two effects at play: 1. Speech "bubbles" where your preferred language is heavily influenced by where you grew up. What sounds common to you might sound uncommon in Canada. 2. People have been using LLMs for years at this point so what is common for them might be influenced by what they read from LLM output. So while initially it was an LLM colloquialism it could have been popularized by LLM usage.
    • popopo73 9mo ago
      >is "you are absolutely right" wrong somehow? It makes sense in English, however: a) "you are" vs "you're". "you are" sounds too formal/authoritative in informal speech, and depending on tone, patronising. b) one could say "you're absolutely right", but the "absolutely" is too dramatic/stressed for simple corrections (an example of sycophancy in LLMs) If the prompt was something like "You did not include $VAR in func()", then a response like "You're right! Let me fix that.." would be more natural.
      • kenty 9mo ago
        Thanks for the thorough explanation, that, indeed, is a level of nuance that's hard for me to spot. Interestingly, "absolutely right" is very common in German: "du hast natürlich absolut Recht" is something which I can easily imagine a friend's voice (or my voice) say at a dinner table. It's "du hast Recht" that sounds a little bit too formal and strong x[. Agreed on the sycophancy point, in Gemini I even have a preamble that basically says "don't be a sycophant". It still doesn't always work.
• snickerer 9mo ago
  The Internet got its death blow in the Eternal September 1994. But it was a long death struggle, bleeding out drop by drop. Who remembers that people had to learn netiquette before getting into conversations? That is called civilisation. The author of this post experienced the last remains oft that culture in the 00s. I don't blame the horde of uneducated home users who came after the Eternal September. They were not stupid. We could have built a new culture together with them. I blame the power of the profit. Big companies rolled in like bulldozers. Mindless machines, fueled by billions of dollars, rolling in the direction of the next ad revenue. Relationships, civilization and culture are fragile. We must take good take of them. We should. but the bulldozers destroyed every structure they lived in in the Internet. I don't want to whine. There is a learning: money and especially advertising is poison for social and cultural spaces. When we build the next space where culture can grow, let's make sure to keep the poison out by design.
• ionwake 9mo ago
  The only way I can tell, is if I see a "structure" to the edit. Usually its a tit for tat , exchange of words in a conversation, with clear spacing, as in too perfect. Followed by the scene, if it looks too oddly perfect ( like a line of foxes waiting to be fed, but all of them are somehow sitting in a line, even if there are differences between them, Ill notice. That is with well decades of age, Im not sure if that helps. But what is clear is even these "tells" will disapear in a few months. I call this the "carpet effect". Where all carpets in Morocco have an imperfection, lest it impersonates god.
• swyx 9mo ago
  semi relatedly i stumbled upon Dead Planet Theory a while back and it stasy rent free in my head. https://arealsociety.substack.com/p/the-dead-planet-theory https://arealsociety.substack.com/p/the-dead-planet-theory
  • sph 9mo ago
    That's great, thanks for sharing. So obvious in hindsight (Pareto principle, power law, "80% of success is showing up") but the ramifications are enormous. I wonder if this does apply to the same magnitude in the real world. It's very easy to see this phenomenon on the internet because it's so vast and interconnected. Attention is very limited and there is so much stuff out there that the average user can only offer minimal attention and effort (the usual 80-20 Pareto allocation). In the real world things are more granular, hyperlocal and less homogeneous.
• gorgmah 9mo ago
  Apps that require verification of "humanity" are going to get trendy. I'm thinking of world app for instance.
  • Ronsenshi 9mo ago
    I guess the point of that would be to discourage average users from making AI slop? Can't imagine that this would stop bot farms from doing what they always done - hire people to perform these "humanity" checks once in a while when necessary.
  • Gasp0de 9mo ago
    Great, let's just require biometric identification before posting online, what could go wrong.
• shayanbahal 9mo ago
  Basically: Rage Bait is winning :/ > The Oxford Word of the Year 2025 is rage bait > Rage bait is defined as “online content deliberately designed to elicit anger or outrage by being frustrating, provocative, or offensive, typically posted in order to increase traffic to or engagement with a particular web page or social media content”. https://corp.oup.com/news/the-oxford-word-of-the-year-2025-is-rage-bait/ https://corp.oup.com/news/the-oxford-word-of-the-year-2025-i...
• dalemhurley 9mo ago
  You are absolutely right...:P I don't know mind people using AI to create open source projects, I use it extensively, but have a rule that I am responsible and accountable for the code. Social media have become hellscapes of AI Slop of "Influencers" trying to make quick money by overhyping slop to sell courses. Maybe where you are from the em dash is not used, but in Queen's English speaking countries the em dash is quite common to represent a break of thought from the main idea of a sentence.
  • mrweasel 9mo ago
    While I am fairly skeptical of LLMs and the current version of AI that are being peddled by companies like OpenAI, the main problem is, once again, social media. That someone is vibe-coding their application, running the symptoms of their illness through ChatGPT, or using it to write the high school essay isn't really a problem. It's also not a massive issue that you can generate random videos, the problem is that social media not only allows propaganda to be spread at the speed of light without any filter and verification, that it actually encourage it in the name of profit. Remove the engagement retaining algorithms from social media, stop measuring success in terms of engagement. Do that an AI will become much less of a problem. LLMs are a tool for generation, social media is transport mechanism that makes the generated content actually dangerous.
• _egtx 9mo ago
  [dead]
• yason 9mo ago
  What is the next safe haven for smart people? It used to be Internet back when the name was still written in the capital first letter. The barrier to utilize the Internet was high enough that mostly only the genuinely curious and thoughtful people a) got past it and b) did have the persistence to find interesting stuff to read and write about on it. I remember when TV and magazines were full of slop of the day at the time. Human-generated, empty, meaningless, "entertainment" slop. The internet was a thousand times more interesting. I thought why would anyone watch a crappy movie or show on TV or cable, created by mediocre people for mere commercial purposes, when you could connect to a lone soul on the other side of the globe and have intelligent conversations with this person, or people, or read pages/articles/news they had published and participate in this digital society. It was ethereal and wonderful, something unlike anything else before. Then the masses got online. Gradually, the interesting stuff got washed in the cracks of commercial internet, still existing but mostly just being overshadowed by everything else. Commercial agenda, advertisements, entertainment, company PR campaigns disguised as articles: all the slop you could get without even touching AI. With subcultures moving from Usenet to web forums, or from writing web articles to posting on Facebook, the barrier got lowered until there was no barrier and all the good stuff got mixed with the demands and supplies of everything average. Earlier, there always were a handful of people in the digital avenues of communication who didn't belong but they could be managed; nowadays the digital avenues of communication are open for everyone and consequently you get every kind of people in, without any barriers. And where there are masses there are huge incentives to profit from them. This is why internet is no longer an infrastructure for the information superhighway but for distributing entertainment and profiting from it. First, transferring data got automated and was dirt cheap, now creating content is being automated and becomes dirt cheap. The new slop oozes out of AI. The common denominator of internet is so low the smart people get lost in all the easily accessed action. Further, smart people themselves are now succumbing in it because to shield yourself from all the crap that is the commercial slop internet you basically have to revert to being a semi-offline hermit, and that goes against all the curiosity and stimuli deeply associated with smart people. What could be the next differentiator? It used to be knowledge and skill: you had to be a smart person to know enough and learn enough to get access. But now all that gets automated so fast that it proves to be no barrier. Attention span might be a good metric to filter people into a new service, realm, or society eventhough, admittedly, it is shortening for everyone but smart people would still win. Earlier solutions such as Usenet and IRC haven't died but they're only used by the old-timers. It's a shame because then the gathering would miss all the smart people grown in the current social media culture: world changes and what worked in the 90's is no longer relevant except for people who were there in the 90's. Reverting to in-real-life societies could work but doesn't scale world-wide and the world is global now. Maybe some kind of "nerdbook": an open, p2p, non-commercial, not centrally controlled, feedless facebook clone could implement a digital club of smart people. The best part of setting up a service for smart people is that it does not need to prioritize scaling.
• l7l 9mo ago
  How would one found a human verified internet without something like worldcoins orb? And even then you could not verify that the content is not created by ai.
• nilslindemann 9mo ago
  My answer to this blogpost is this: https://share.google/aimode/nrO2drR4YsCNKr1f9 https://share.google/aimode/nrO2drR4YsCNKr1f9
  • nilslindemann 9mo ago
    That said, there need to be some new laws regarding miserable people using AI in a miserable way, like, claiming something real happened that never did, just to get attention and money. Also, the fact that AI is used has to be documented, so that people consuming it have a choice.
• yosef123 9mo ago
  As much as many are against it, couldn't this be yet another argument for social network wide digital identity verification? I think that this is an argument that holds: to avoid AI slop / bots → require government ID
• BrtByte 9mo ago
  What worries me most is not bots talking to bots, but humans adapting their voice to sound like bots because thatэs what works now
• narag 9mo ago
  A couple of different uses of AI, recently detected in YouTube: 1. There are channels specialized in topics like police bodycam and dashcam videos, or courtroom videos. AI there is used to generate voice (and sometimes a very obviously fake talking head) and maybe the script itself. It seems a way to automatize tasks. 2. Some channels are generating infuriating videos about fake motorbikes releases. Many.
• bigchorizo 9mo ago
  you are absolutely right
• maieuticagent 9mo ago
  Ground News's approach is worth modeling because it treats authenticity not as a binary detection problem but as a transparency and comparative analysis problem. It assumes bad actors exist and makes them visible rather than trying to achieve perfect filtering. The shift from "trust this AI detection algorithm" to "here are multiple independent signals for you to evaluate" is philosophically aligned with how we should handle the Dead Internet problem. It's less about building perfect walls and more about giving people the tools to navigate an already-compromised space intelligently.
• funkyfiddler69 9mo ago
  > short videos of pretty girls saying that the EU is bad for Poland Reminds me of those times in Germany when mainstream media and people with decades in academia used the term "Putin Versteher" (Person who gets Putin, Putin 'understander') ad nauseaum ... it was hilarious. Unrelated to that, sometime last year, I searched "in" ChatGPT for occult stuff in the middle of a sleepless night and it returned a story about "The Discordians", some dudes who ganged up in a bowling hall in the 70's and took over media and politics, starting in the US and growing globally. Musk's "Daddy N** Heil Hitler" greeting, JD's and A. Heart's public court hearings, the Kushners being heavily involved with the recruitment department of the Epsteins Islands and their "little Euphoria" clubs as well as Epstein's "Gugu Gaga Cupid" list of friends and friends of friends, it's all somewhat connected to "The Discordians", apparently. It was a fun "hallucination" in between short bits on Voodoo, Lovecraft and stuff one rarely hears about at all.
• Imustaskforhelp 9mo ago
  Oh this article was a fun one to read because I have felt something like this. Recently someone accused me of being a clanker on Hackernews (firstly lmao but secondly wow) because of my "username" (not sure how it's relevant, When I had created this account I had felt a moral obligation to learn/ask for help to improving and improve I did whether its in writing skills or learning about tech) Then I had posted another comment on Another thread in here which was talking about something similar. The earlier comment got flagged and my response to it but this stayed. Now someone else saw that comment and accused me of being AI again This pissed me off because I got called AI twice in 24 hours. That made me want to quit hackernews because you can see from my comments that I write long comments (partially because they act as my mini blog and I just like being authentic me, this is me just writing my thoughts with a keyboard :) To say that what I write is AI feels such a high disrespect to me because I have spent some hours thinking about some of the comments I made here & I don't really care for the upvotes. It's just this place is mine and these thoughts are mine. You can know me and verify I am real by just reading through the comments. And then getting called AI.... oof, Anyways, I created a tell HN: I got called clanker twice where I wrote the previous thing which got flagged but I am literally not kidding but the first comment came from an AI generated bot itself (completely new account) I think 2 minute or something afterwards which literally just said "cool" Going to their profile, they were promoting some AI shit like fkimage or something (Intentionally not saying the real website because I don't want those bots to get any ragebait attention to conversions on their websites) So you just saw the whole situation of irony here. I immediately built myself a bluesky thread creator where I can write a long message and it would automatically loop or something (ironically built via claude because I don't know how browser extensions are made) just so that I can now write things in bluesky too. Funny thing is I used to defend Hackernews and glorify it a few days ago when an much more experienced guy called HN like 4chan. I am a teenager, I don't know why I like saying this but the point is, most teenagers aren't like me (that I know), it has both its ups and downs (I should study chemistry right now) but Hackernews culture was something that inspired me to being the guy who feels confidence in tinkering/making computers "do" what he wants (mostly for personal use/prototyping so I do use some parts of AI, you can read one of my other comments on why I believe even as an AI hater, prototyping might make sense with AI/personal-use for the most part, my opinion's nuanced) I came to hackernews because I wanted to escape dead internet theory in the first place. I saw people doing some crazy things in here reading comments this long while commuting from school was a vibe. I am probably gonna migrate to lemmy/bluesky/the federated land. My issue with them is that the ratio of political messages : tech content is few (And I love me some geopolitics but quite frankly I am tired and I just want to relax) But the lure of Hackernews is way too much, which is why you still see me here :) I don't really know what the community can do about bots. Another part is that there is this model on Localllama which I discovered the other day which works opposite (so it can convert LLM looking text to human and actually bypasses some bot checking and also the -- I think) Grok (I hate grok) produces some insanely real looking texts, it still has -- but I do feel like if one even removes it and modifies it just a bit (whether using localllama or others), you got yourself genuine propaganda machine. I was part of a Discord AI server and I was shocked to hear that people had built their own LLM/finetunes and running them and they actually experimented with 2-3 people and none were able to detect. I genuinely don't know how to prevents bots in here and how to prevent false positives. I lost my mind 3 days ago when this happened. Had to calm myself and I am trying to use Hackernews (less) frequently, I just don't know what to say but I hope y'all realize how it put a bad taste into my mouth & why I feel a little unengaged now. Honestly, I am feeling like writing my own blogs to my website from my previous hackernews comments. They might deserve a better place too. Oops wrote way too long of a message, so sorry about that man but I just went with the flow and thanks man for writing this comment so that i can finally have this one comment to try to explain how I was feeling man.
• notarobot123 9mo ago
  > I don’t use social networks (and no, Hacker News is not a social network) If you define social networks as a graph of connections, fair enough - there's no graph. It is social media though. HN is Social in the sense that it relies on (mostly) humans considering what other humans would find interesting and posting/commenting for for the social value (and karma) that generates. Text and links are obviously media. There seems to be an insinuation that HN isn't in the same category as other aggregators and algorithmic feeds. It's not always easy to detect but the bots are definitely among us. HN isn't immune to slop, its just fairly good at filtering the obvious stuff.
• cannonpalms 9mo ago
  I believe this was the original thread. Show HN: Minikv – Distributed key-value and object store in Rust (Raft, S3 API) | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46661308 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46661308
  • stephenlf 9mo ago
    Reading through the thread right now. Commenter: > What % of the code is written by you and what % is written by ai OP: > Good question! > > All the code, architecture, logic, and design in minikv were written by me, 100% by hand. I did use AI tools only for a small part of the documentation—specifically the README, LEARNING.md, and RAM_COMMUNITY.md files—to help structure the content and improve clarity. > > But for all the source code (Rust), tests, and implementation, I wrote everything myself, reviewing and designing every part. > > Let me know if you want details or want to look at a specific part of the code! Oof. That is pretty damning. ——— It’s unfortunate that em-dashes have become a shibboleth for AI-generated text. I love em-dashes, and iPhones automatically turn a double dash ( -- ) into an em dash.
  • culebron21 9mo ago
    I took a look at the source code -- well, what if it's a working thing -- and of course, 2 files in, there are instructions that panic (i.e. crash the host process), all over the code, just everywhere, in every API method. That's nowhere near "production ready" as the author's LLM says. I've seen, 17 year ago, a schoolboy make "his own OS", which was simply Ubuntu with replaced logos. He got on TV with it, IIRC he was promoting it on the internets (forums back then), and kept insisting that this was his own work. He was bullied in response and in a few weeks disappeared from the nets. What has it to do with me personally, if I'm not the author, nor a bully? Today I learned that I can't trust the new libraries posted in official repos. They can be just wrapper code slop. In 2012, Jack Diedrich in his speech "Stop Writing Classes" said that he'd read every library source code to find if there was anything stinky. I used to think it's a luxury of time and his qualification to read into what you use. Now it became a necessity, at least for new projects.
• granitepail 9mo ago
  To me, it’s very obvious that the problem is social media. To social media, AI slop is peak efficiency. The affordances and incentives of the network encourage its creation. I don’t care for the media slop, but eg television media has more or less been producing crap like this for a while. I don’t think LLMs and video/image models are a negative at all. And it’s shocking to me that more people don’t share this viewpoint.
• MarginalGainz 9mo ago
  We are seeing this exact 'hostile information environment' play out aggressively in e-commerce search. The 'Dead Internet' (specifically AI-generated SEO slop) has effectively broken traditional keyword search (BM25/TF-IDF). Bad actors can now generate thousands of product descriptions that mathematically match a user's query perfectly but are semantically garbage/fake. We had to pivot our entire discovery stack to Semantic Search (Vector Embeddings) sooner than planned. Not just for better recommendations, but as an adversarial filter. When you match based on intent vectors rather than token overlap, the 'synthetic noise' gets filtered out naturally because the machine understands the context, not just the string match. Semantic search is becoming the only firewall against the dead internet.
  • rhines 9mo ago
    I'm not sure I agree - on the one hand yes, it's trivial to generate pages stuffed with keywords. But on the other hand Google is already interpreting search intent, and while this is okay for some things it is extraordinarily frustrating when trying to look for something specific. Often I do want exact matches, and Google refuses to show them no matter what special characters you use to try to modify the search behaviour. Personally I'd rather search engines continue to return exact matches and just de-rank content that has poor reputation, and if I want to have a more free-form experience I'll use LLMs instead.
• bryanrasmussen 9mo ago
  I think it's a little bit much to claim that no real human has ever used the phrase "You are absolutely right", it seems more likely that a lot of people have, so much, that the AI got trained to use it when its programming suggested it was the right time to be obsequious.
  • projektfu 9mo ago
    I have only said it as part of an apology. "We have been waiting 20 minutes!" "You're absolutely right, and I apologize. We will try to schedule better in the future." I have never said it to someone with whom I was having a regular discussion. OTOH, I used to overuse em dashes because the Mac made proper typesetting possible. It used to be the sign that someone had read the very useful The Mac is not a Typewriter by Robin Williams.
    • bryanrasmussen 9mo ago
      So, sort of like when I tell an agent "that is not what I wanted!" and it says "You're absolutely right, and I apologize. I have fixed the issue now" They were trained on you, mate.
• roody15 9mo ago
  The amount of AI narrated videos on Youtube is seriously alarming. This is like Blade Runner level dystopian at this point. With AI help once you go down a rabbit hole you can just stay there indefinately with a never ending supply of AI generated content. Shades of truth or not doesn't seem to matter.
• fhennig 9mo ago
  What about going back to a system of reputation and recommendations by reputable people? I'm thinking stuff like web rings. Or if you have a blog, maybe also have a curated set of pages you think are good, sort of your bookmarks, that other people can have a look at. People are still on the internet and making cool stuff, it's just harder to find them nowadays.
  • skwee357 9mo ago
    Few people posted here about the "intent" behind such content, i.e. today, most people are motivated by money because "this influencer told me I can make 10$k by writing blogs", so while you might find a blog you like, it's not immune to starting to accept "just put our link here for $$$ and we link back to you". Something similar happened in the Podcast and YouTube spheres, where every creator seems to be "sponsored" by these shady companies that allocate 70% of their revenue for creator payouts, for the sake of affiliate marketing. I really don't know what's solution though.
• leshenka 9mo ago
  I just hope someday we will have actual cameras adding provenance data to the image file, digitally signing it and its miniature version. Image editing software will then collect that data from all images used to create an artifact and append their miniatures and signatures to it. So as long this data is not removed you can verify that the image came from an actual camera and evaluate the degree to which it was edited. But really I'm not a professional in this field. I'm sure there are pitfalls in my imagined solution. I just want some traceability from the images used in news articles.
  • DudeOpotomus 9mo ago
    This is actually the only real life use case for blockchain. Certifying the originality of the content. But nope. Instead we have meme coins and speculators...
  • oh_fiddlesticks 9mo ago
    https://roc.camera/ https://roc.camera/ This was on hn this year, and it was, in classic HN fashion, dismissed as a problem in search of a solution. Well, perhaps people in this thread will think differently
    • 6thbit 9mo ago
      > verifiably real moments would someone benefit from demonstraing a photo is real? The top usecase I can think of it to ensure AI is trained on real photos. Any upside for humans?
      • leshenka 8mo ago
        Okay sorry I don't want to sound rude but am I getting it right? You don't know if there's a benefit in knowing the photo you look at is real?
• DudeOpotomus 9mo ago
  Advertising is a cancer. Adtech is the delivery mechanism. Paying creators is the dumbest and most consequential aspect of modern media. There is no reason to reward creators, zero. They should actually be paying Youtube for access to their audience. They actually would pay to be seen, paying them is both stupid and unnecessary. Kill the incentives and you kill the cancer.
• chickensong 9mo ago
  While I trust the author had good intentions, this blog post is about HN and some common themes and emotions, which was then posted to HN, resulting in more of the same. There may be some irony to be found in this human centipede.
• numeromancer 9mo ago
  "photos of giants that built the pyramids in Egypt, all the way to short videos of pretty girls saying that the EU is bad for Poland." Those sound funny; why would they make you sad?
  • embedding-shape 9mo ago
    Because of the intention and purpose of those, not because of the actual pixels your brain interprets.
• greenavocado 9mo ago
  This is the original post which started it all in 2021: https://forum.agoraroad.com/index.php?threads/dead-internet-theory-most-of-the-internet-is-fake.3011/ https://forum.agoraroad.com/index.php?threads/dead-internet-...
• armcat 9mo ago
  What's changed significantly is the "intent" behind the content. The intent today is mostly the actual "content generation", i.e. "I write a blog post or a public github repo for the sake of having a digital footprint". This is vastly different when I used the internet in mid/late 90s. The intent back then was more like an "online journal" or something you hope someone else will find useful one day. Back then we had geocities, lycos, altavista, and we browsed with netscape and IE. For example, i began my programming foray with Delphi/Pascal, and I remember browsing these "crappy" [1] websites that were mostly just text, that explained how to convert C programs to Delphi (i was working on some plugins). The content was "genuine" content - someone laboriously documenting what worked for them, knowing very well that no one may ever actually read this. This is the issue today - it's all just for show. [1] Those "crappy websites" with a maze of iframes are actually considered surprisingly refreshing today.
  • agumonkey 9mo ago
    I remember when internet started to go from wild jungle to organized in structure and form.. At first I was delighted.. and then I saw how there was an industrial feel to it. Things were predictable (tooling influences you, google search algorithm too).. and whenever I found an old 90s website, you'd feel the time, craft, attention to detail, personal interest. pages and pages of long and interesting paragraphs. so crude yet so deep.
  • notatoad 9mo ago
    content generation isn't the intent, it's just the side effect. the real intent is to make money. everybody is either trying to promote some product, or promote themselves as a "content creator" so they can start getting influencer marketing deals and payouts from youtube or instagram ad splits. the internet was at it's best when most of the content on it was just because somebody had some information, and wanted to share it. that intent is still out there today, but unfortunately it's harder and harder to find buried amongst all the revenue generation.
    • armcat 9mo ago
      Agree 100%! The "real intent", the true cause, is making money. Whether that's directly via social media, or via proxy (which is becoming a major player), where people generate content in order to build repertoire, which they try to monetize via other means (contracting/freelance, publishing, speaking, getting on the VC radar, etc). So yes - one can correctly say that the intent has changed from something altruistic (giving information to the masses with no monetary foresight), to explicit money-making intent.
• xd1936 9mo ago
  I've used em dashes for decades — They're great.
• vitaelabitur 9mo ago
  You are absolutely right — Let me know if you want to read my personal anecdote on "Dead Internet Theory"... Yeah, I especially hate how paranoid everyone is (but rightly so). I am constantly suspicious of others' perfectly original work being AI, and others are constantly suspicious of my work being AI.
• shadowgovt 9mo ago
  Every time I see people talk about 'dead internet' I think about what web sites looked like before Google dropped PageRank into the whole ecosystem and utterly killed the utility of putting huge blobs of black-on-black text at the bottom of a page for keyword-match purposes. This was then shortly followed by Google becoming so popular they could use user behavior itself as a signal for site quality (much to the chagrin of every new publisher ever who suddenly had a catch-22 of "Nobody visits my site because Google won't uprank it because nobody visits my site"). The Internet has never been dead. Or alive. Ever since it escaped its comfortable cage in the university / military / small-clique-of-corporations ecosystem and became a thing "anyone" can see and publish on, there has forever been a push-pull between "People wanting to use this to solve their problems" and "People wanting eyeballs on their content, no matter the reason." We're just in an interesting local minimum where the ability to auto-generate human-shaped content has momentarily overtaken the tools search engines (and people with their own brains) use to filter useful from useless, and nobody has yet come up with the PageRank-equivalent nuclear weapon to swing the equation back again. I'm giving it time, and until it happens I'm using a smaller list of curated sites I mostly trust to get me answers or engage with people I know IRL (as well as Mastodon, which mostly escapes these effects by being bad at transiting novelty from server to server), because thanks to the domain name ownership model pedigree of site ownership still mostly matters.
• hughw 9mo ago
  When I first used my own telescope to view Saturn I had a thought, "they can't fake that!" Photos in a magazine or on television could have been faked. And the moon landing truthers became unhinged about it. I had not appreciated that I subtly and unconsciously held a reservation about the truth of it all. This is the modern epistemic crisis. And wait till Elon implants a brain computer interface in you. You won't even fully trust your eye looking through a telescope.
  • deleted 9mo ago
    [deleted]
• andyish 9mo ago
  I'm so torn with verification on social media. But i'm surprised companies whose main source of revenue is ads and original content aren't putting something akin to 'verified human' tags on users for all to see. Not just to show authenticity but also to be able to say to ad buyers: your ads have been seen by x real users. I mean sure, the next step will probably be "your ads have been seen by x real users and here are their names, emails, and mobile numbers" :( As well as verification there must be teams at Reddit/LinkedIn/Whereever working ways to identify ai content so it can be de-ranked.
• rossdavidh 9mo ago
  So, put together a few things: 1) to satisfy investors, companies require continual growth in engagement and users 2) the population isn't rocketing upwards on a year-over-year basis 3) the % of the population that is online has saturated 4) there are only so many hours in the day Inevitably, in order to maintain growth in engagement (comments, posts, likes, etc.), it will have to become automated. Are we there already? Maybe. Regardless, any system which requires continual growth has to automate, and the investor expectations for the internet economy require it, and therefore it has or soon will automate. Not saying it's not bad, just that it's not surprising.
• ezekg 9mo ago
  Spend a few days on Threads or on Instagram and you'll see the majority of viral posts on Threads are generated by AI, and the majority of descriptions on Instagram are generated by AI. It makes me incredibly sad, because I've used the internet for human connection my entire life. I always loved meeting new people, or reading other's perspectives. But it all just feels so ... empty ... now. I hope the pendulum swings the other way soon.
• tvali 9mo ago
  I have similar issue - I think in "dead internet", 1) people do not build custom forums for small social groups; 2) rule enforcement does not follow the structure of past where such small group followed deep conduct and 3) in large pools and aggregators of forums and discussion groups, the rules to be followed are like small bots: they cannot rely on the context. I personally use AI on my page for a good purpose, because we actually get on sync - but it's not giving up my creative work; it's proofreading, adding some references and facts and sometime very cocksure of it's style like "people won't read it".
• grugagag 9mo ago
  AI content including youtube videos, podcasta and such need a stamp that content was AI generated.
• SubiculumCode 9mo ago
  Maybe HN needs to have a real ID verification? One account per official government ID. I remember when social media companies like Facebook and others pushed really hard for it, and how I resisted, but now...well, maybe its a good thing to know that if I am talking to someone they are either a person, or the dedicated bot for that person, rather than to a host of propaganda selling swarms of bots trying to crack our brains for power and profit.
  • big-and-small 9mo ago
    It's fairly easy to "farm" real ID NFC data since majority of documents are not intended to be actual digital signing key. And on top of that AI is getting pretty good at generating face / video details to the point where simple biometric data verification is also quite useless.
  • turnsout 9mo ago
    I strongly believe that users will start to demand proof of humanity (and related things like content credentials on photos/videos), and eventually filter out anything that isn't verified. Through great expense and loss of privacy, we will eventually claw our way back to an internet that looks more or less the same as it was in 2020. Unfortunately, less privileged users will have to endure the sea of AI content that still preys on the unauthenticated. It will be like using the web without an ad blocker, but 1000X worse.
  • foobarian 9mo ago
    I was thinking the time for the old PGP Web of Trust idea might have finally come [1] [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_of_trust https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_of_trust
• BLACKCRAB 9mo ago
  [dead]
• ForgotMyUUID 9mo ago
  Well, if you are not satisfied by our company of AI karma-farmers, you are welcome to join "The Diamond Mine" BBS :)
  • crumpled 9mo ago
    Maybe I just will...
• incomingpain 9mo ago
  I strongly believe in the dead internet theory. There are many compounding factors but I experienced the live internet and what we have today is dead. So I go on my province's subreddit. Politicswise, if there was an election today the incumbent politician would increase their majority and may even be looking at true majority. Hugely popular. If you find a political thread, there will be 500 comments all agreeing with each other that the incumbent is evil, 50 comments downvoted and censored because they dare have an opinion that agrees with the incumbent, 100 comments deleted by anonymous mods banning people for what reason? Enjoy your echo chamber. Anyone who experiences being censored a few times will just stop posting. Then when the election happens they have no idea at all why people would ever vote that way because they have never seen anyone do anything but agree with their opinion. What an utterly dead subreddit.
• kouru225 9mo ago
  I’m in favor of the dead internet because the alternative was even worse. About 10 years ago we had a scenario where bots probably were only 2-5% of the conversation and they absolutely dominated all discussion. Having a tiny coordinated minority in a vast sea of uncoordinated people is 100x more manipulative than having a dead internet. If you ever pointed out that we were being botted, everyone would ignore you or pretend you were crazy. It didn’t even matter that the Head of the FBI came out and said we were being manipulated by bots. Everyone laughed at him the same way.
  • Permit 9mo ago
    > About 10 years ago we had a scenario where bots probably were only 2-5% of the conversation and they absolutely dominated all discussion. This was definitively not the case on HackerNews.
• Salgat 9mo ago
  I'm not saying the entire internet needs to be this way, but I would love to see the expansion of non-anonymous/verified accounts used on web platforms. Take ycombinator for example; some of the best comments come from users with known identities and reputations tied to their accounts, rather than anonymous folks who can spew whatever nonsense without repercussion (and in some cases aren't even real people).
  • skwee357 9mo ago
    On the other hand, take LinkedIn for example, and you get the bottom of corporate AI-slop. I agree that anonymization makes people more hostile to others, but I doubt the de-anonymization is the solution. Old school forums and IRC channels were, _mostly_, safe because they were (a) small, (b) local, and (c) usually had offline meetups.
    • Salgat 9mo ago
      On the plus side, LinkedIn isn't full of hate and division like the mess that is Facebook. Everyone is still acting accountable for their words.
• fuddle 9mo ago
  TikTok is full of AI generated user content, multiple startups can generate AI content promoting products for a fee e.g https://creatify.ai https://creatify.ai , https://www.arcads.ai https://www.arcads.ai
• ulf-77723 9mo ago
  Trying to figure out if human or bot seems to be a fun game for a lot of people. I was being accused on Reddit for being a bot (of course I’m not) and English is not my mother tongue - yet people see what they want to see. Maybe the future will be dystopian and talking to a bot to achieve a given task will be a skill? When we reach the point that people actually hate bots, maybe that will be a turning point?
• brunoborges 9mo ago
  The explosion of fake people on Instagram (which has become just a front-door for Other Form of "social networks"), as well as fake videos in general, will likely push people away from the Internet as a means to interact with other people. I think old school meetups, user groups, etc, will come back again, and then, more private communication channels between these groups (due to geographic distance).
• ainthusiast 9mo ago
  :(
• oogabooga13 9mo ago
  I was in engaged in a similar discussion with a co-worker where I was defending my view that I'd rather read the news than try to trust a brief video clip presented to me. I feel like I'm constantly keeping an eye out for excessive biases creeping into my 'trusted' sources. For a civilian like me, it's quite hard to grasp what lens the story is being presented to me as. Casually reading the news isn't a thing for me...it usually involves a little bit of research to ensure I'm not getting duped. The dead internet theory is important.
• freakynit 9mo ago
  LLM summary of all comments: https://hn-discussions.top/dead-internet-theory/ https://hn-discussions.top/dead-internet-theory/
  • elbci 9mo ago
    [dead]
• MarkusWandel 9mo ago
  That, and the stuff on Facebook. All those AI-written articles which usually make a big ado about a minor event, but if you google the name of the protagonist or do a Google Lens on the picture, you can get the original story in 1/100 as many words. But sometimes the thing is completely made up. Does anyone even care any more? The flood of words is made to be reasonably engaging, but after you fall for them a few dozen times you just can't be bothered to read them any more, so who or what is it really for? These are not "meant to outrage" articles, just... filler.
• deafpolygon 9mo ago
  Ya'll got social media? Wish I had friends to talk to -- I'm starting to think the Dead Internet Theory has some weight to it. I cannot find a place to talk to like-minded people anymore; it's all gamified to sell you something. All folks do on Reddit is talk at you. I'm starting to doubt half the people posting are actual people now... with so many comments that are perfectly formatted and phrased like ChatGPT.