7 ms·

You can't trust the internet anymore

236 points by panic 8mo ago

ninjagoo 8mo ago
The internet has gone from a high-trust society to a low-trust society, all in the span of a couple of decades. Enshittification strikes again. And it doesn't have appear to have any means to rid itself of the bad apples. A sad situation all around.
- PessimalDecimal 8mo ago
  It might be more accurate to say that a lot of low-trust societies have become connected to the Internet which weren't nearly as online a couple of decades ago. For example, a huge fraction of the world's spam originates from Russia, India and Bangladesh. And we know that a lot of the romance scams are perpetrated by Chinese gangs operating out of quasi-lawless parts of Myanmar. Not so much from, say, Switzerland.
  - kgeist 8mo ago
    Russia has been among the top sources of spam since the early 2000s, it's not like anything changed lately. Mail-order bride scams and similar peaked in like 2005. It doesn't take a lot of people to send spam, I don't think it's correlated with the general population's online presence. I'd actually say it's quite the opposite: in 2026, Russia has never been more disconnected from the Western parts of the Internet than it is now (the Russian Internet watchdog blocks like 30% of foreign resources since a few years ago, while Russian IPs are routinely banned on Western sites after 2022, I can barely open anything without a VPN). For that reason, and because of limited English proficiency, Russian netizens rarely visit foreign resources these days, except for a few platforms without a good Russian replacement like Instagram and YouTube (both banned btw, only via a VPN), where they usually stay mostly within their Russian-speaking communities. I'm not sure why any of them would be the reason the Internet as a whole has supposedly become low-trust. The OP in question is some SEO company using an LLM to churn out sites with "unique content." We already had this stuff 20 years ago, except the "unique content" was generated by scripts that replaced words with synonyms. Nothing really new here.
    - marginalia_nu 8mo ago
      Prigozhin falling out of the metaphorical window also seems to have tempered the amount of political stuff coming directly from Russia.
    - expedition32 8mo ago
      Yeah blaming Russians and Chinese for the internet turning to shit is ludicrous. Chinese have their own internet anyway- it was a shock to me at first just how little the average Chinese citizen really cares about Western culture or society. They have their own problems ofcourse but it has nothing to do with us No it's the tens of billions of mostly American capital going into AI data centers and large bullshit models.
      - marginalia_nu 8mo ago
        It's not completely unfounded. A lot of cyber crime adjacent stuff targeting the west is coming from China and Russia. This is a consequence of these countries not having functioning law enforcement cooperation with the west, as well as chilly bordering on hostile diplomatic relations. It's not (always) sanctioned by the governments of these countries, but it's not entirely unwelcome either. Though all that stuff is a very different thing from what's being discussed in this thread.
        sunaookami 8mo ago
        >A lot of cyber crime adjacent stuff targeting the west is coming from China and Russia. If you trust your government's propaganda that is used to jusitfy "hackbacks" and buying 0-days on the darkweb that fucks us all.
        marginalia_nu 8mo ago
        Eh, you don't really need to trust any propaganda to see this. Set up an nginx on a public IP and tail its logs. Vulnerability scans will hit you literally non stop so long as it's a western IP. Block China and Russia IPs and it drops by like 90%. Don't get me wrong the west isn't doing much to enforce Russian or Chinese complaints either. It's really just a messy diplomatic situation all around.
  - blell 8mo ago
    70% of the GDP of Laos comes from scamming people in the first world. "A report by the Global Initiative on Transnational Organised Crime (based on United States Institute of Peace findings) estimated that revenues from “pig-butchering” cyber scams in Laos were around US $10.9 billion, which would be *equivalent to more than two-thirds (≈67–70 %) of formal Lao GDP in a recent year." https://globalinitiative.net/wp-content/uploads/2025/05/GI-TOC-Compound-crime-Cyber-scam-operations-in-Southeast-Asia-May-2025.pdf https://globalinitiative.net/wp-content/uploads/2025/05/GI-T...
- digiown 8mo ago
  The WWW has never been a high-trust place. Some smaller communities, sure, but anyone has always been able to write basically what they want on the internet, true or false, as long as it is not illegal in the country hosting it, which is close to nothing in the US. The difference is that there historically weren't much to be gained by annoying or misleading people on the internet, so trolling is mainly motivated by personal satisfaction. Two things changed since then: (1) most people now use the internet as the primary information source, and (2) the cost of creating bullshit has fallen precipitously.
  - allenu 8mo ago
    I agree. It's not that the web was high-trust. It was more that if you landed on a niche web page, you knew whoever put it together probably had at least a little expertise (and care) since it wouldn't be worth writing about something that very few people would find and read anyway. Now that it's super cheap to produce niche content, even if very few people find a page, it's "worth it" to produce said garbage as it gives you some easy SEO for very little time investment. The motivation for content online has changed over the last 20 years from people wanting to share things they're interested in to one where the primary goal is to collect eyeballs to make a profit in some way.
- PaulDavisThe1st 8mo ago
  to be boring, the term "enshittification" was invented by one individual, recently, and has a specific meaning. it does not refer to "things just get worse" but describes a specific strategy adopted by corporations using the internet for commercial purposes.
  - LPisGood 8mo ago
    Words change meaning as they are used. Especially negative words that may start rather specific tend to get used more generally until the specificity is lost.
    - PaulDavisThe1st 8mo ago
      "enshittification" was invented within the last couple of years and its inventor is still alive. I'd normally be the first to agree with and push your point about language evolving, but it's not time to apply that to a neologism this young.
      - LPisGood 8mo ago
        I think the fact that it’s primarily an Internet related term that gets used a lot on the Internet, has something to do with the acceleration in the broadening of its meaning
    - anigbrowl 8mo ago
      how about we put some effort into actually picking the correct words and not just handwaving everything? Especially since the whole topic of discussion here is 'internet research is increasingly less reliable because people just wrote/publish any old BS for clicks.'
      - LPisGood 8mo ago
        I don’t think it’s necessarily handwaving. I don’t think anyone has a monopoly on the way language is used and broadening terms is a very natural thing that happens as language evolves
- fatherwavelet 8mo ago
  The good old days when you could trust everything posted on usenet to be true. We must live on different planets.
eterm 8mo ago
It is the failure mode of incorrect trust that has changed. Previously you might get burned with some bad information or incorrect data or get taken in by a clever hoax once in a while. Now you get overwhelmed by regurgitation, which itself gets fed back into the machine. The ratio of people to bots reading is crashed to near zero. We have burned the web.
- lazystar 8mo ago
  I've been miserable over the last few weeks after coming to that same conclusion. Its so bad that i doubt the people that were pulling the strings can even tell whats going on anymore.
  - archagon 8mo ago
    If the web is burned, something new will arise in its place (with new constraints) as long as there's a need. It's not like we only get one shot at this.
    - lazide 8mo ago
      Depends on if someone ends up launching nukes over this, which there isn’t a non-zero chance is going to occur. This same type of info war tends to muddy, confuse, and get everyone on edge.
    - joseda-hg 8mo ago
      The constraints being different already make the replacement tangibly different Maybe it will kill the veil of (perceived) anonimity which tangibly changes how people behave, or maybe the filter will be monetary and the filter will just affect the underclass shifting whatever discourse will be had We can't act like whatever replaces the current web won't be different, because then there's no reason to change at all
- pixl97 8mo ago
  Hence dead internet theory has turned into dead internet reality.
marginalia_nu 8mo ago
Tangentially related, I have a hunch, but cannot prove, that prediction markets are the driving force behind a lot of the bad information online, since they essentially monetarily incentivize making people misjudge the state of the world. There's been a huge uptick in this sort of brigade like behavior around current events. First noted it around LK99, that failed room temperature semiconductor in 2023, but it just keeps happening. Used to be we only saw it around elections and crypto pump and dumps, now it's cropping up in the weirdest places.
- digiown 8mo ago
  Interesting theory. I'm inclined to disagree, however. Prediction markets essentially allows people to trade information for money, even the types historically more difficult to trade. There aren't enough people betting on things for deliberate misinformation to become worthwhile, IMO, and most people would stop betting after being in the wrong too often, unlike casinos which always let you win sometimes. I believe the misinformation is largely by self-interested parties. Politicians as well as influencers trying to push agendas, and the engagement/attention farming for advertising revenue, which are largely indifferent to truth.
  - marginalia_nu 8mo ago
    It's the same as with crypto rug pulls, nobody is going to fall for that several times. Was still money to make in that before everyone and their grandma wisened up.
    - digiown 8mo ago
      I don't think prediction markets work well for that. It is a market and you can't really prevent anyone else from benefitting from the same victims, which dilutes your earnings.
      - forgetfreeman 8mo ago
        You don't need a perfect oracle to win on prediction markets. All it takes is enough influence to tip % in your favor. Card counting is very effective.
throwaway2027 8mo ago
"You really think someone would do that? Just go on the Internet and tell lies?" https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/just-go-on-the-internet-and-tell-lies https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/just-go-on-the-internet-and-t...
- nicole_express 8mo ago
  A big part of my annoyance is that in the past, something like Phantasy Star Fukkokuban would not really be worth lying about; people need a reason to lie.
  - yellowapple 8mo ago
    There was no reason to lie about knowing the Scots language well enough to be the primary contributor by volume to Scots Wikipedia, and yet that's something that happened.
    - pdonis 8mo ago
      > There was no reason to lie about knowing the Scots language well enough to be the primary contributor by volume to Scots Wikipedia Yes, there was: becoming the primary contributor by volume to Scots Wikipedia (which probably doesn't have many contributors to begin with, but there you are). Some people just have to have attention, no matter how.
  - anigbrowl 8mo ago
    I'm gonna guess that it's just popular enough that being in the top 5 results on search engines yields a small net gain in ad revenue. It's possible the decision to generate the fake article was itself made by a machine. Great piece btw
    - hcs 8mo ago
      Seems much more likely it's just going through a list of all games, collated from databases that humans have painstakingly curated.
mnau 8mo ago
Signal to noise ratio is getting *lower (EDIT: was higher) than ever. I don't see a way out of this other than "human certified" digitally signed authorship (e.g. by using eIDAS in EU). There could be a proxy to at least retain pseudo-anonymity, but trackable to a human. Tragedy of commons strikes again.
- varjag 8mo ago
  I suppose you meant SNR is getting lower.
- pino999 8mo ago
  And that human can use A.I. again. It won't help.
  - mnau 8mo ago
    I would argue that it can be circumvented, not that it won't help. If a human uses his/her signature for content farm, it can be flagged as such.
- PaulDavisThe1st 8mo ago
  "Tragedy of commons" is a false concept that obscures greed and selfishness and often lawlessness. Even its originator (Hardin) accepts that it does not describe actual history. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46623359 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46623359
  - armchairhacker 8mo ago
    There’s a lot of debate under your linked comment. My understanding is that people tend to cooperate in smaller numbers or when reputation is persistent (the larger the group, the more reliable reputation has to be), otherwise the (uncommon) low-trust actors ruin everything. Most humans are altruistic and trusting by default, but a large enough group will have a few sociopaths and misunderstood interactions; which creates distrust across the entire group, because people hate being taken advantage of.
gustavus 8mo ago
When I first started using the Internet there were 3 rules that were pounded into my head repeatedly. 1. Don't believe everything or anything you read or see on the Internet. 2. Never share personal information about yourself online. 3. Every man was a man, every woman was a man and every teenager is an FBI agent. I have yet to find a problem with the Internet thats isn't because of breaking one of the above rules. My point being you couldn't ever trust the Internet before anyways.
- PaulDavisThe1st 8mo ago
  You forgot Fido's Corollary: 3a. ... and nobody knows if you're a dog.
- WD-42 8mo ago
  You've always needed skepticism, of course. But it used to be if you came across an article about a super obscure video game from the early 90s (referencing the blog post here) you could be reasonably sure that it wasn't completely made up. There just wasn't the incentive to publish nonsense about super niche things because it took time and effort to do so. Now you can collate a list of thousands of titles and simply instruct an LLM to produce garbage for each one and publish it on the internet. This is a real change, IMO.
- anigbrowl 8mo ago
  Yeah when I was 10 someone told me not to believe everything I read too. But guess what, that's kinda useless advice because consulting reference material is a necessity and there are wide variations in the quality of reference material. This sort of 'don't trust anyone' heuristic can just as easily lead to conclusions that the earth is flat, the moon landing never happened, vaccinations are the leading cause of disease etc.
WD-42 8mo ago
This is why my friends and I are setting up a mesh network in our town. The open internet has been going downhill for a while, but LLMs are absolutely accelerating it's demise. I was in denial for the last few years but at this point I've accepted that the internet I grew up on as a kid in the late 90s to mid 2000s is dead. I am grateful for having experienced it but the time has come to move on. The future for people that valued what the early internet provided is local, trusted networks in my opinion. It's sad that we need to retreat into exclusionary circles but there are too many people interested in making a buck on the race to the bottom.
- xantronix 8mo ago
  I've been looking into building some sort of Wireguard mesh service since many of my friends are distributed all across the world. I wish you the very best in your endeavours!
  - purpleKiwi 8mo ago
    How would that look like in practice? I've just heard about the term and I like the description of it, especially the possibilities it gives
    - xantronix 8mo ago
      That's a great question; it's something I still need to explore, but it would involve some sort of distributed public key database and IP address directory, then a routing table on top of that as people add more resources to the mesh. Wireguard is particularly good at transparent roaming, so it's trivial to use on portable devices or if you need to migrate your server from one provider to another.
      - Avicebron 8mo ago
        Isn't this just Tailscale? Or Netmaker maybe if you want your own control plane?
rvz 8mo ago
It always has been like that on the internet. Now made worse for obvious reasons. On the internet no one knows if you're a dog, human or a moltbot.
3eb7988a1663 8mo ago
I was recently running into this while playing the latest Hollow Knight game. Several sloppified sites which obviously were trying to tailor mechanics/items of the original game into the new one. The new release is only ~six months old, so there is just not that much hard content available to reference. My question is -why? Is it really worth the ad revenue to trick a few people looking into a few niche topics? Say you pick the top 5000 trending movies/music/games and generate fake content covering the gamut. What is the payback period?
- pixl97 8mo ago
  >Is it really worth the ad revenue to trick a few people looking into a few niche topics? Maybe it's problem space exploration via pollution? Said creators of pollution (bullshit asymmetry theory in practice) have very little cost in creating said pollution and there is the possibility of a payback larger than that cost.
- bombcar 8mo ago
  If you live in a VLCOL country, and have access to free tooling (via various means) you only need a very small return to make it entirely worth your while.
underlipton 8mo ago
It comes down to Google's failure. Rather than outright defeating the SEO eldridge abomination by adopting a zero-tolerance policy to those tactics, Google made a mutually advantageous bargain with them of - course, leaving out a third party: us. They could do this because they had no competition. Now, the culture of enabling bad actors is, unfortunately, set. Google did all the innovation it needed to and ever is going to. It needed to be broken up a decade ago. We can still do it now. Though I don't know how much it will save, especially if we don't also go after Apple, and Meta, and Microsoft.
- avidiax 8mo ago
  It would be in Google's ultimate interest to label AI-generated websites and potentially rank them lower in search results. AI needs to be kept up to date with training data. But that same training data is now poisoned with AI hallucination. Labelling AI generated media helps reduce the amount of AI poison in the training set, and keeps the AI more useful. It also simply undermines the quality of search, both for human users and for AI tool use.
- dehrmann 8mo ago
  > Rather than outright defeating the SEO... SEO is a slippery slope on both sides because a little bit is good for everyone. Google wanted pages it could easily extract meaning from, publishers wanted traffic, and users wanted relevant search results. Now there's a prisoners dilemma where once someone starts abusing SEO, it's a race to the bottom.
  - underlipton 8mo ago
    >SEO is a slippery slope on both sides because a little bit is good for everyone I reject this emphatically. Google should never have been in the business of shaping internet content. Perhaps they should have even gone out of their way to avoid doing so. Without Google (or a better-performing competitor) acquiescing to the game, there is no SEO market.
neom 8mo ago
I thought a lot last night about how we could protect HN, I didn't come up with a good answer except maybe you'll need to have someone with a higher reputation vouch aka invites. My internet community journey has mostly just been irc -> dA -> twitter -> HN. Too frequently these days I feel I might be putting emotional energy into something that isn't human on this site, hard to express how that makes me feel, but it's not pleasant at all. 힝
- krapp 8mo ago
  We can't. This forum is run by the company that used to be run by Sam Altman and it's already full of people who work in the industry that's driving AI adoption and who use and aggressively believe in AI to the point of religion. There are already bot accounts posting, and humans posting comments filtered by AI. Most Show HNs are vibe coded. There's nothing anyone can do about it. No matter how many guidelines dang deploys, no matter how much negative social pressure we apply (and we could apply much more but doing so would just run afoul of the tone policing of the guidelines) people will use AI because they want to, and because it's a part of their identity politics, specifically to spite people who don't want to see it. They currently bother to mention when they use ChatGPT for a comment. It's just a matter of time until people don't even bother, because it's so normalized. The Fediverse is currently good, the culture there is rabidly anti-capitalist and anti-AI. I like Mastodon. But that will eventually, inevitably get ruined as well, and we'll just have to move on to the next thing.
  - neom 8mo ago
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saudade https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saudade
- benhurmarcel 8mo ago
  HN with invites is basically https://lobste.rs/ https://lobste.rs/
stavros 8mo ago
You never could trust the internet. The difference is that now the problem is so widespread that it's finally spurring us into action, and hopefully a good "web of trust" or similar solution will emerge.
arjie 8mo ago
It is true that as the cost to construct fake content has gone to zero, we need some kind of scalable trust mechanism to access all this information. I don't yet know what this is but a Web of Trust structure always seems appealing. A lot of people are going to be excluded, but such is life, I suppose. If I were to be honest, going to where the fish aren't is also going to help. Almost certainly there are very few LLM generated websites on the Gemini protocol. I'm setting up a secondary archiver myself that will record simply the parts of the web that consent to it via robots.txt. Let's see how far I get.
- armchairhacker 8mo ago
  I think if a Web of Trust becomes common, it will create a culture shift and most people won’t be excluded (compared to invite-only spaces today). If you have a public presence, are patient enough, or a friend or colleague of someone trusted, you can become trusted. With solid provenance, trust doesn’t have to be carefully guarded, because it can be revoked and the offender’s reputation can be damaged such that it’s hard to regain. Also, small sites could form webs of trust with each other, trusting and revoking other sites within the larger network in the same manner that people are vouched or revoked within each site (similar to the town -> state -> government -> world hierarchy); then you only need to gain the trust of an easy group (e.g. physically local or of a niche hobby you’re an expert in) to gain trust in far away groups who trust that entire group.
Devasta 8mo ago
The future of the internet is going to be invite-only enclaves. I sometimes wonder is anyone working on the next generation of discussion forums, or if it'll be a return to PHPBB.
- marginalia_nu 8mo ago
  lobste.rs is already kinda that I think, makes an interesting contrast to HN, which has a similar crowd but is open to anyone.
  - FranklinJabar 8mo ago
    Interesting. Seems like it's largely converged to the same site.
- FranklinJabar 8mo ago
  They'll instantly become infiltrated with bots and include people based on arbitrary politics. Either the content is such that it makes zero sense to game or spam or it is lost already.
  - Devasta 8mo ago
    But if approval of a new user in the enclave requires vouching by an existing member, then they will be anyone who joins lest they are banned themselves right? I'm talking about like 100-200 members max social clubs, not subthing like subreddits with tens of thousands of users.
- nicbou 8mo ago
  This will create an interesting problem for newcomers to an area or hobby, since they will have few introduction points. It will work for some people, but exclude others. I wonder if there is another way.
shevy-java 8mo ago
AI is kind of like Skynet in the first Terminator movie. It now destroys our digital life. New autogenerated websites appear, handled by AI. Real websites become increasingly less likely to show up on people's daily info-feed. It is very strange compared to the 1990s; I feel we lost something here. > The commons of the internet are probably already lost That depends. If people don't push back against AI then yes. Skynet would have won without the rebel forces. And the rebels are there - just lurking. It needs a critical threshold of anger before they will push back against the AI-Skynet 3.0 slop.
expedition32 8mo ago
People talk about AI slop but I predict that in a couple of years you won't be able to tell... And at that point does it even matter? Zuckerberg wins.
nwhnwh 8mo ago
The trust collapse: Infinite AI content is awful https://arnon.dk/the-trust-collapse-infinite-ai-content-is-awful https://arnon.dk/the-trust-collapse-infinite-ai-content-is-a...
CrzyLngPwd 8mo ago
There was a very brief window, of maybe hours or days, where the Internet could be trusted, and that was a long time ago.
47thpresident 8mo ago
I had a similar experience when I was looking for YouTube videos on the Intel i7-4790T, it's a relatively obscure CPU that was only found on small-form factor pre-builds during the Haswell era. The only recent videos I found were slop videos [1] narrating a script clearly generated by an LLM, with a link to their Amazon affiliate in the description. The CPU has never been put on retail sale! These channels upload a dozen times a day on random products just to get an affiliate commission. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YpHUBC681iU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YpHUBC681iU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0w5a33Jeen0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0w5a33Jeen0
ptrl600 8mo ago
Websites with poor SEO practice are often more trustworthy.
LorenPechtel 8mo ago
The Singularity is coming. But it's the date at which it is no longer possible to discern reality you can't actually observe.
AnimalMuppet 8mo ago
There's a lot of people unhappy about this here. Presuming that the sentiment extends beyond HN, then it might be a problem that you could make some money by solving. (In the same way that Google figured out how to let the net tell it which pages were best, and made an insane amount of money from doing so.) People want something real, not AI slop or shills or astroturf or corpo-speak or any of a thousand other flavors of fake. People want it rather desperately. In fact, the current situation is bad for peoples' mental health. Can someone figure out how to give people a much higher percentage of real?
mojomark 8mo ago
When you make a photocopy of a photocopy... of a photocopy, you get a VERY blurry photocopy.
nunez 8mo ago
I've been hitting this a lot lately in Kagi. I'll search for instructions on how to do a thing and some random website will have nothing but _hard_ AI slop going off about the thing I was looking up. It must be easier than ever to build content mills these days.
xtiansimon 8mo ago
And why not? We humans do things like this all the time. We act with powerful false beliefs. Misunderstand a situation or simply just the meaning of a word, and then build our world-view and lives around those false beliefs. Train your model on this, and replicate in those false beliefs.
incomingpain 8mo ago
Ive been on the internet for over 30 years. I have never experienced a time when you could trust the internet.

236 points by panic 8mo ago

The internet has gone from a high-trust society to a low-trust society, all in the span of a couple of decades. Enshittification strikes again. And it doesn't have appear to have any means to rid itself of the bad apples. A sad situation all around.

PessimalDecimal 8mo ago
It might be more accurate to say that a lot of low-trust societies have become connected to the Internet which weren't nearly as online a couple of decades ago. For example, a huge fraction of the world's spam originates from Russia, India and Bangladesh. And we know that a lot of the romance scams are perpetrated by Chinese gangs operating out of quasi-lawless parts of Myanmar. Not so much from, say, Switzerland.
- kgeist 8mo ago
  Russia has been among the top sources of spam since the early 2000s, it's not like anything changed lately. Mail-order bride scams and similar peaked in like 2005. It doesn't take a lot of people to send spam, I don't think it's correlated with the general population's online presence. I'd actually say it's quite the opposite: in 2026, Russia has never been more disconnected from the Western parts of the Internet than it is now (the Russian Internet watchdog blocks like 30% of foreign resources since a few years ago, while Russian IPs are routinely banned on Western sites after 2022, I can barely open anything without a VPN). For that reason, and because of limited English proficiency, Russian netizens rarely visit foreign resources these days, except for a few platforms without a good Russian replacement like Instagram and YouTube (both banned btw, only via a VPN), where they usually stay mostly within their Russian-speaking communities. I'm not sure why any of them would be the reason the Internet as a whole has supposedly become low-trust. The OP in question is some SEO company using an LLM to churn out sites with "unique content." We already had this stuff 20 years ago, except the "unique content" was generated by scripts that replaced words with synonyms. Nothing really new here.
  - marginalia_nu 8mo ago
    Prigozhin falling out of the metaphorical window also seems to have tempered the amount of political stuff coming directly from Russia.
  - expedition32 8mo ago
    Yeah blaming Russians and Chinese for the internet turning to shit is ludicrous. Chinese have their own internet anyway- it was a shock to me at first just how little the average Chinese citizen really cares about Western culture or society. They have their own problems ofcourse but it has nothing to do with us No it's the tens of billions of mostly American capital going into AI data centers and large bullshit models.
    - marginalia_nu 8mo ago
      It's not completely unfounded. A lot of cyber crime adjacent stuff targeting the west is coming from China and Russia. This is a consequence of these countries not having functioning law enforcement cooperation with the west, as well as chilly bordering on hostile diplomatic relations. It's not (always) sanctioned by the governments of these countries, but it's not entirely unwelcome either. Though all that stuff is a very different thing from what's being discussed in this thread.
      - sunaookami 8mo ago
        >A lot of cyber crime adjacent stuff targeting the west is coming from China and Russia. If you trust your government's propaganda that is used to jusitfy "hackbacks" and buying 0-days on the darkweb that fucks us all.
        marginalia_nu 8mo ago
        Eh, you don't really need to trust any propaganda to see this. Set up an nginx on a public IP and tail its logs. Vulnerability scans will hit you literally non stop so long as it's a western IP. Block China and Russia IPs and it drops by like 90%. Don't get me wrong the west isn't doing much to enforce Russian or Chinese complaints either. It's really just a messy diplomatic situation all around.
- blell 8mo ago
  70% of the GDP of Laos comes from scamming people in the first world. "A report by the Global Initiative on Transnational Organised Crime (based on United States Institute of Peace findings) estimated that revenues from “pig-butchering” cyber scams in Laos were around US $10.9 billion, which would be *equivalent to more than two-thirds (≈67–70 %) of formal Lao GDP in a recent year." https://globalinitiative.net/wp-content/uploads/2025/05/GI-TOC-Compound-crime-Cyber-scam-operations-in-Southeast-Asia-May-2025.pdf https://globalinitiative.net/wp-content/uploads/2025/05/GI-T...
digiown 8mo ago
The WWW has never been a high-trust place. Some smaller communities, sure, but anyone has always been able to write basically what they want on the internet, true or false, as long as it is not illegal in the country hosting it, which is close to nothing in the US. The difference is that there historically weren't much to be gained by annoying or misleading people on the internet, so trolling is mainly motivated by personal satisfaction. Two things changed since then: (1) most people now use the internet as the primary information source, and (2) the cost of creating bullshit has fallen precipitously.
- allenu 8mo ago
  I agree. It's not that the web was high-trust. It was more that if you landed on a niche web page, you knew whoever put it together probably had at least a little expertise (and care) since it wouldn't be worth writing about something that very few people would find and read anyway. Now that it's super cheap to produce niche content, even if very few people find a page, it's "worth it" to produce said garbage as it gives you some easy SEO for very little time investment. The motivation for content online has changed over the last 20 years from people wanting to share things they're interested in to one where the primary goal is to collect eyeballs to make a profit in some way.
PaulDavisThe1st 8mo ago
to be boring, the term "enshittification" was invented by one individual, recently, and has a specific meaning. it does not refer to "things just get worse" but describes a specific strategy adopted by corporations using the internet for commercial purposes.
- LPisGood 8mo ago
  Words change meaning as they are used. Especially negative words that may start rather specific tend to get used more generally until the specificity is lost.
  - PaulDavisThe1st 8mo ago
    "enshittification" was invented within the last couple of years and its inventor is still alive. I'd normally be the first to agree with and push your point about language evolving, but it's not time to apply that to a neologism this young.
    - LPisGood 8mo ago
      I think the fact that it’s primarily an Internet related term that gets used a lot on the Internet, has something to do with the acceleration in the broadening of its meaning
  - anigbrowl 8mo ago
    how about we put some effort into actually picking the correct words and not just handwaving everything? Especially since the whole topic of discussion here is 'internet research is increasingly less reliable because people just wrote/publish any old BS for clicks.'
    - LPisGood 8mo ago
      I don’t think it’s necessarily handwaving. I don’t think anyone has a monopoly on the way language is used and broadening terms is a very natural thing that happens as language evolves
fatherwavelet 8mo ago
The good old days when you could trust everything posted on usenet to be true. We must live on different planets.

eterm 8mo ago

It is the failure mode of incorrect trust that has changed. Previously you might get burned with some bad information or incorrect data or get taken in by a clever hoax once in a while. Now you get overwhelmed by regurgitation, which itself gets fed back into the machine. The ratio of people to bots reading is crashed to near zero. We have burned the web.

lazystar 8mo ago
I've been miserable over the last few weeks after coming to that same conclusion. Its so bad that i doubt the people that were pulling the strings can even tell whats going on anymore.
- archagon 8mo ago
  If the web is burned, something new will arise in its place (with new constraints) as long as there's a need. It's not like we only get one shot at this.
  - lazide 8mo ago
    Depends on if someone ends up launching nukes over this, which there isn’t a non-zero chance is going to occur. This same type of info war tends to muddy, confuse, and get everyone on edge.
  - joseda-hg 8mo ago
    The constraints being different already make the replacement tangibly different Maybe it will kill the veil of (perceived) anonimity which tangibly changes how people behave, or maybe the filter will be monetary and the filter will just affect the underclass shifting whatever discourse will be had We can't act like whatever replaces the current web won't be different, because then there's no reason to change at all
pixl97 8mo ago
Hence dead internet theory has turned into dead internet reality.

marginalia_nu 8mo ago

Tangentially related, I have a hunch, but cannot prove, that prediction markets are the driving force behind a lot of the bad information online, since they essentially monetarily incentivize making people misjudge the state of the world. There's been a huge uptick in this sort of brigade like behavior around current events. First noted it around LK99, that failed room temperature semiconductor in 2023, but it just keeps happening. Used to be we only saw it around elections and crypto pump and dumps, now it's cropping up in the weirdest places.

digiown 8mo ago
Interesting theory. I'm inclined to disagree, however. Prediction markets essentially allows people to trade information for money, even the types historically more difficult to trade. There aren't enough people betting on things for deliberate misinformation to become worthwhile, IMO, and most people would stop betting after being in the wrong too often, unlike casinos which always let you win sometimes. I believe the misinformation is largely by self-interested parties. Politicians as well as influencers trying to push agendas, and the engagement/attention farming for advertising revenue, which are largely indifferent to truth.
- marginalia_nu 8mo ago
  It's the same as with crypto rug pulls, nobody is going to fall for that several times. Was still money to make in that before everyone and their grandma wisened up.
  - digiown 8mo ago
    I don't think prediction markets work well for that. It is a market and you can't really prevent anyone else from benefitting from the same victims, which dilutes your earnings.
    - forgetfreeman 8mo ago
      You don't need a perfect oracle to win on prediction markets. All it takes is enough influence to tip % in your favor. Card counting is very effective.

throwaway2027 8mo ago

"You really think someone would do that? Just go on the Internet and tell lies?" https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/just-go-on-the-internet-and-tell-lies https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/just-go-on-the-internet-and-t...

nicole_express 8mo ago
A big part of my annoyance is that in the past, something like Phantasy Star Fukkokuban would not really be worth lying about; people need a reason to lie.
- yellowapple 8mo ago
  There was no reason to lie about knowing the Scots language well enough to be the primary contributor by volume to Scots Wikipedia, and yet that's something that happened.
  - pdonis 8mo ago
    > There was no reason to lie about knowing the Scots language well enough to be the primary contributor by volume to Scots Wikipedia Yes, there was: becoming the primary contributor by volume to Scots Wikipedia (which probably doesn't have many contributors to begin with, but there you are). Some people just have to have attention, no matter how.
- anigbrowl 8mo ago
  I'm gonna guess that it's just popular enough that being in the top 5 results on search engines yields a small net gain in ad revenue. It's possible the decision to generate the fake article was itself made by a machine. Great piece btw
  - hcs 8mo ago
    Seems much more likely it's just going through a list of all games, collated from databases that humans have painstakingly curated.

mnau 8mo ago

Signal to noise ratio is getting *lower (EDIT: was higher) than ever. I don't see a way out of this other than "human certified" digitally signed authorship (e.g. by using eIDAS in EU). There could be a proxy to at least retain pseudo-anonymity, but trackable to a human. Tragedy of commons strikes again.

varjag 8mo ago
I suppose you meant SNR is getting lower.
pino999 8mo ago
And that human can use A.I. again. It won't help.
- mnau 8mo ago
  I would argue that it can be circumvented, not that it won't help. If a human uses his/her signature for content farm, it can be flagged as such.
PaulDavisThe1st 8mo ago
"Tragedy of commons" is a false concept that obscures greed and selfishness and often lawlessness. Even its originator (Hardin) accepts that it does not describe actual history. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46623359 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46623359
- armchairhacker 8mo ago
  There’s a lot of debate under your linked comment. My understanding is that people tend to cooperate in smaller numbers or when reputation is persistent (the larger the group, the more reliable reputation has to be), otherwise the (uncommon) low-trust actors ruin everything. Most humans are altruistic and trusting by default, but a large enough group will have a few sociopaths and misunderstood interactions; which creates distrust across the entire group, because people hate being taken advantage of.

gustavus 8mo ago

When I first started using the Internet there were 3 rules that were pounded into my head repeatedly. 1. Don't believe everything or anything you read or see on the Internet. 2. Never share personal information about yourself online. 3. Every man was a man, every woman was a man and every teenager is an FBI agent. I have yet to find a problem with the Internet thats isn't because of breaking one of the above rules. My point being you couldn't ever trust the Internet before anyways.

PaulDavisThe1st 8mo ago
You forgot Fido's Corollary: 3a. ... and nobody knows if you're a dog.
WD-42 8mo ago
You've always needed skepticism, of course. But it used to be if you came across an article about a super obscure video game from the early 90s (referencing the blog post here) you could be reasonably sure that it wasn't completely made up. There just wasn't the incentive to publish nonsense about super niche things because it took time and effort to do so. Now you can collate a list of thousands of titles and simply instruct an LLM to produce garbage for each one and publish it on the internet. This is a real change, IMO.
anigbrowl 8mo ago
Yeah when I was 10 someone told me not to believe everything I read too. But guess what, that's kinda useless advice because consulting reference material is a necessity and there are wide variations in the quality of reference material. This sort of 'don't trust anyone' heuristic can just as easily lead to conclusions that the earth is flat, the moon landing never happened, vaccinations are the leading cause of disease etc.

WD-42 8mo ago

This is why my friends and I are setting up a mesh network in our town. The open internet has been going downhill for a while, but LLMs are absolutely accelerating it's demise. I was in denial for the last few years but at this point I've accepted that the internet I grew up on as a kid in the late 90s to mid 2000s is dead. I am grateful for having experienced it but the time has come to move on. The future for people that valued what the early internet provided is local, trusted networks in my opinion. It's sad that we need to retreat into exclusionary circles but there are too many people interested in making a buck on the race to the bottom.

xantronix 8mo ago
I've been looking into building some sort of Wireguard mesh service since many of my friends are distributed all across the world. I wish you the very best in your endeavours!
- purpleKiwi 8mo ago
  How would that look like in practice? I've just heard about the term and I like the description of it, especially the possibilities it gives
  - xantronix 8mo ago
    That's a great question; it's something I still need to explore, but it would involve some sort of distributed public key database and IP address directory, then a routing table on top of that as people add more resources to the mesh. Wireguard is particularly good at transparent roaming, so it's trivial to use on portable devices or if you need to migrate your server from one provider to another.
    - Avicebron 8mo ago
      Isn't this just Tailscale? Or Netmaker maybe if you want your own control plane?

rvz 8mo ago

It always has been like that on the internet. Now made worse for obvious reasons. On the internet no one knows if you're a dog, human or a moltbot.

3eb7988a1663 8mo ago

I was recently running into this while playing the latest Hollow Knight game. Several sloppified sites which obviously were trying to tailor mechanics/items of the original game into the new one. The new release is only ~six months old, so there is just not that much hard content available to reference. My question is -why? Is it really worth the ad revenue to trick a few people looking into a few niche topics? Say you pick the top 5000 trending movies/music/games and generate fake content covering the gamut. What is the payback period?

pixl97 8mo ago
>Is it really worth the ad revenue to trick a few people looking into a few niche topics? Maybe it's problem space exploration via pollution? Said creators of pollution (bullshit asymmetry theory in practice) have very little cost in creating said pollution and there is the possibility of a payback larger than that cost.
bombcar 8mo ago
If you live in a VLCOL country, and have access to free tooling (via various means) you only need a very small return to make it entirely worth your while.

underlipton 8mo ago

It comes down to Google's failure. Rather than outright defeating the SEO eldridge abomination by adopting a zero-tolerance policy to those tactics, Google made a mutually advantageous bargain with them of - course, leaving out a third party: us. They could do this because they had no competition. Now, the culture of enabling bad actors is, unfortunately, set. Google did all the innovation it needed to and ever is going to. It needed to be broken up a decade ago. We can still do it now. Though I don't know how much it will save, especially if we don't also go after Apple, and Meta, and Microsoft.

avidiax 8mo ago
It would be in Google's ultimate interest to label AI-generated websites and potentially rank them lower in search results. AI needs to be kept up to date with training data. But that same training data is now poisoned with AI hallucination. Labelling AI generated media helps reduce the amount of AI poison in the training set, and keeps the AI more useful. It also simply undermines the quality of search, both for human users and for AI tool use.
dehrmann 8mo ago
> Rather than outright defeating the SEO... SEO is a slippery slope on both sides because a little bit is good for everyone. Google wanted pages it could easily extract meaning from, publishers wanted traffic, and users wanted relevant search results. Now there's a prisoners dilemma where once someone starts abusing SEO, it's a race to the bottom.
- underlipton 8mo ago
  >SEO is a slippery slope on both sides because a little bit is good for everyone I reject this emphatically. Google should never have been in the business of shaping internet content. Perhaps they should have even gone out of their way to avoid doing so. Without Google (or a better-performing competitor) acquiescing to the game, there is no SEO market.

neom 8mo ago

I thought a lot last night about how we could protect HN, I didn't come up with a good answer except maybe you'll need to have someone with a higher reputation vouch aka invites. My internet community journey has mostly just been irc -> dA -> twitter -> HN. Too frequently these days I feel I might be putting emotional energy into something that isn't human on this site, hard to express how that makes me feel, but it's not pleasant at all. 힝

krapp 8mo ago
We can't. This forum is run by the company that used to be run by Sam Altman and it's already full of people who work in the industry that's driving AI adoption and who use and aggressively believe in AI to the point of religion. There are already bot accounts posting, and humans posting comments filtered by AI. Most Show HNs are vibe coded. There's nothing anyone can do about it. No matter how many guidelines dang deploys, no matter how much negative social pressure we apply (and we could apply much more but doing so would just run afoul of the tone policing of the guidelines) people will use AI because they want to, and because it's a part of their identity politics, specifically to spite people who don't want to see it. They currently bother to mention when they use ChatGPT for a comment. It's just a matter of time until people don't even bother, because it's so normalized. The Fediverse is currently good, the culture there is rabidly anti-capitalist and anti-AI. I like Mastodon. But that will eventually, inevitably get ruined as well, and we'll just have to move on to the next thing.
- neom 8mo ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saudade https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saudade
benhurmarcel 8mo ago
HN with invites is basically https://lobste.rs/ https://lobste.rs/

stavros 8mo ago

You never could trust the internet. The difference is that now the problem is so widespread that it's finally spurring us into action, and hopefully a good "web of trust" or similar solution will emerge.

arjie 8mo ago

It is true that as the cost to construct fake content has gone to zero, we need some kind of scalable trust mechanism to access all this information. I don't yet know what this is but a Web of Trust structure always seems appealing. A lot of people are going to be excluded, but such is life, I suppose. If I were to be honest, going to where the fish aren't is also going to help. Almost certainly there are very few LLM generated websites on the Gemini protocol. I'm setting up a secondary archiver myself that will record simply the parts of the web that consent to it via robots.txt. Let's see how far I get.

armchairhacker 8mo ago
I think if a Web of Trust becomes common, it will create a culture shift and most people won’t be excluded (compared to invite-only spaces today). If you have a public presence, are patient enough, or a friend or colleague of someone trusted, you can become trusted. With solid provenance, trust doesn’t have to be carefully guarded, because it can be revoked and the offender’s reputation can be damaged such that it’s hard to regain. Also, small sites could form webs of trust with each other, trusting and revoking other sites within the larger network in the same manner that people are vouched or revoked within each site (similar to the town -> state -> government -> world hierarchy); then you only need to gain the trust of an easy group (e.g. physically local or of a niche hobby you’re an expert in) to gain trust in far away groups who trust that entire group.

Devasta 8mo ago

The future of the internet is going to be invite-only enclaves. I sometimes wonder is anyone working on the next generation of discussion forums, or if it'll be a return to PHPBB.

marginalia_nu 8mo ago
lobste.rs is already kinda that I think, makes an interesting contrast to HN, which has a similar crowd but is open to anyone.
- FranklinJabar 8mo ago
  Interesting. Seems like it's largely converged to the same site.
FranklinJabar 8mo ago
They'll instantly become infiltrated with bots and include people based on arbitrary politics. Either the content is such that it makes zero sense to game or spam or it is lost already.
- Devasta 8mo ago
  But if approval of a new user in the enclave requires vouching by an existing member, then they will be anyone who joins lest they are banned themselves right? I'm talking about like 100-200 members max social clubs, not subthing like subreddits with tens of thousands of users.
nicbou 8mo ago
This will create an interesting problem for newcomers to an area or hobby, since they will have few introduction points. It will work for some people, but exclude others. I wonder if there is another way.

shevy-java 8mo ago

AI is kind of like Skynet in the first Terminator movie. It now destroys our digital life. New autogenerated websites appear, handled by AI. Real websites become increasingly less likely to show up on people's daily info-feed. It is very strange compared to the 1990s; I feel we lost something here. > The commons of the internet are probably already lost That depends. If people don't push back against AI then yes. Skynet would have won without the rebel forces. And the rebels are there - just lurking. It needs a critical threshold of anger before they will push back against the AI-Skynet 3.0 slop.

expedition32 8mo ago

People talk about AI slop but I predict that in a couple of years you won't be able to tell... And at that point does it even matter? Zuckerberg wins.

nwhnwh 8mo ago

The trust collapse: Infinite AI content is awful https://arnon.dk/the-trust-collapse-infinite-ai-content-is-awful https://arnon.dk/the-trust-collapse-infinite-ai-content-is-a...

CrzyLngPwd 8mo ago

There was a very brief window, of maybe hours or days, where the Internet could be trusted, and that was a long time ago.

47thpresident 8mo ago

I had a similar experience when I was looking for YouTube videos on the Intel i7-4790T, it's a relatively obscure CPU that was only found on small-form factor pre-builds during the Haswell era. The only recent videos I found were slop videos [1] narrating a script clearly generated by an LLM, with a link to their Amazon affiliate in the description. The CPU has never been put on retail sale! These channels upload a dozen times a day on random products just to get an affiliate commission. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YpHUBC681iU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YpHUBC681iU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0w5a33Jeen0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0w5a33Jeen0

ptrl600 8mo ago

Websites with poor SEO practice are often more trustworthy.

LorenPechtel 8mo ago

The Singularity is coming. But it's the date at which it is no longer possible to discern reality you can't actually observe.

AnimalMuppet 8mo ago

There's a lot of people unhappy about this here. Presuming that the sentiment extends beyond HN, then it might be a problem that you could make some money by solving. (In the same way that Google figured out how to let the net tell it which pages were best, and made an insane amount of money from doing so.) People want something real, not AI slop or shills or astroturf or corpo-speak or any of a thousand other flavors of fake. People want it rather desperately. In fact, the current situation is bad for peoples' mental health. Can someone figure out how to give people a much higher percentage of real?

mojomark 8mo ago

When you make a photocopy of a photocopy... of a photocopy, you get a VERY blurry photocopy.

nunez 8mo ago

I've been hitting this a lot lately in Kagi. I'll search for instructions on how to do a thing and some random website will have nothing but _hard_ AI slop going off about the thing I was looking up. It must be easier than ever to build content mills these days.

xtiansimon 8mo ago

And why not? We humans do things like this all the time. We act with powerful false beliefs. Misunderstand a situation or simply just the meaning of a word, and then build our world-view and lives around those false beliefs. Train your model on this, and replicate in those false beliefs.

incomingpain 8mo ago

Ive been on the internet for over 30 years. I have never experienced a time when you could trust the internet.