13 ms·

The dead Internet is not a theory anymore

419 points by hubraumhugo 7mo ago

artemonster 7mo ago
I think next step will be an isolated version of invite-only internet where you have to be physically present with your invitee to give them access. There will be a beautiful navigation widget where you can access a unified "addon" to any page: community moderated comment section, version history of that page, backlinks, carefully curated "related" section(so that you can continue browsing beautiful human written content on 1910 era steam locomotives, similar to 90s era webrings), donate button so that you can support he author and much more! Oh, the dream
- artemonster 7mo ago
  optional de-centralized hosting, unified cryptocurrency as payment tokens, single open LLM as summary and search-indexing tool, specialized toolkits for journals and social networks (livejournal, early twitter, early fb). Most importantly: you can post anonymously where its allowed (there could be areas where it can be disallowed entirely, like a public square), but your account will take the punishment, so no edgy shitposting behind throwaways.
jeandejean 7mo ago
Next step is: we get back to speaking to each other in the real world. That would successfully close the loop.
- sebastiennight 7mo ago
  I think this will be a tiny minority who is already currently not terminally online (so, no big change for them). And the vast majority will just be driven to more AI-mediated interactions.
  - tines 7mo ago
    I think it's a symptom of being terminally online to think that most other people are also terminally online. The internet has a way of convincing you that most of the [interesting] events in the world happen on the internet. But I think this isn't the case; most stuff happens in the real world, most people live in the real world most of the time, and a tiny fraction of trite drama happens online.
    - ticulatedspline 7mo ago
      Dunnow, everyone is in a bubble of some sorts. I'm online a good bit but rarely on my phone, If I'm away from my desk I'm offline. My social circle is similar so I would naturally have bias for what I experience. Year or so ago I took an Uber and was mesmerized by the driver. He had his phone up mounted on the left and was pretty constantly interacting with it. Checking for new rides, watching a video, checking facebook. It was quite impressive how much content he consumed while at a red light and how dexterously he navigated to and through like 10 different apps. I very much got the feeling that this was a person that was terminally online and suspected that he's not alone. A bit alienating really, living in the same country speaking the same language but realizing there's this huge cultural/behavior divide between us.
    - pixl97 7mo ago
      >being terminally online to think that most other people are also terminally online. 50% of US teenagers describe themselves as terminally online. Go any place where people work and have time to goof, and you'll see them online. Go to a bar/club, you see people with a phone in front of their face. The idea there is an online and offline is crumbling further every day. Cameras are small, bandwidth is high in relation to our compression algorithms. Anything happening in the world can be broadcast live. More and more types of machines are coming online that accept digital instructions that make things happen in real life. Furthermore it's an odd rejection of the printing press on your part. That methods of information exchange affect the real world around them. If the book brought about the industrial revolution, what does an always available global communications network bring? At least based on your writing here on HN it seems like you're probably an introvert, or at least a person that likes quiet pondering and reflections. Reading a book would be far more interesting than most online activities, right? If I'm right and that is the case, then you may be missing just how many people are horrifically addicted to being on social media all the time.
- deleted 7mo ago
  [deleted]
- krapp 7mo ago
  I don't want to talk to people in the real world. That's why I spend all of my time on the fucking internet.
Ancalagon 7mo ago
Hey it’s what executives want. Fake everything. Slop and robots everywhere. Have at it, I say. Maybe then people will go outside again
- jsbisviewtiful 7mo ago
  My household just bought The Brick to start taking control of our phones and online usage. We've been very online for 15+ years but are hoping to break the addiction cycle by simply blocking our devices from access. The timing feels right, mostly because sites like Instagram and Reddit are too braindead and spam+ad heavy these days. The executives and shareholders' desire for profits have already killed two of my biggest online pastimes.
  - tartoran 7mo ago
    I heard of The brick and sounds very effective. Not many people realize the're addicted to their devices and most tragic of all is that kids who grew always online have no baseline to return to. As the OP mentions, I too hope that when it'll all become a junk pile people will eventually return to offline mode.
- tartoran 7mo ago
  Eventually that's what's going to happen if things keep on going in this direction and it looks like there's nothing stopping it so yeah, we're moving in circles. Old things will become new again.
- Oras 7mo ago
  I wish going outside again were possible, but what if most of the people you actually want to hang out with aren't in the same area? And for those who are near, the cost of having a coffee or a drink is too much now on top of expenses that are already stretching,
  - Ancalagon 7mo ago
    go for a walk with your friends and a bottle of water
bsaul 7mo ago
I only see two outcomes for this problem : an internet of verified identities (start by uploading your ID card). Or a paid internet, where it doesn't matter who you are, but since you're going to pay for that email or that reddit account, the probability that it's AI spam is greatly reduced. And i'm looking forward to none of them.
- basch 7mo ago
  How would you overcome a local llm embedded into a keyboard?
- Invictus0 7mo ago
  You could have easily said this twenty years ago when photoshopped photos were going viral on the early internet. Turns out people are completely fine with ai content and photoshop.
  - csallen 7mo ago
    There's a huge difference between fake content and fake authors.
  - crab_galaxy 7mo ago
    Fine in what way? What people? I have not seen or heard of a single person who is excited about AI generated blog posts, or TikToks, or commercials, or images. In fact it’s the opposite, the internet coined the term AI slop, and my non-internet addicted friends hate the fact that chatGPT is killing the environment. The only people I’ve ever seen champion AI are the few who are excited by the bleeding edge, and the many many peddlers
    - officeplant 7mo ago
      The most common people just seem to be the elderly who don't care / don't know any better. The same ones who told us never to believe anything from the internet. They seem to be hooked on weird AI jesus facebook posts, daily AI generated motivational content, talking to the chatbot in Whatsapp, etc.
CloakHQ 7mo ago
[dead]
toddmorey 7mo ago
I see many, many startups that promise to be an automated marketing agent that will do this exact thing: scour sites for conversations and post links to your product. Obviously that burns down the human Internet, but it’s also a business that will have a short lifespan and bring about its own demise. I guess they don’t care about anything enduring as long as they can grab some quick cash on the way out.
- girvo 7mo ago
  > I guess they don’t care about anything enduring as long as they can grab some quick cash on the way out. As far as I can tell, that is basically all AI-related businesses. Including those non-AI ones jumping on the bandwagon to throw all their employees in the bin and expect 10x productivity somehow: if they are right and these tools do become that good, well the economy as we know it is over as white collar knowledge work disappears. But hey, we made money in those few years right!
  - pixl97 7mo ago
    At least in the US very few industries actually seem to be about making a product. A good example is this, car companies don't make cars for the most part, they make loans. Financial companies first, car companies second. Consolidation, collusion, and rent-seeking behaviors by companies are going out of control too. The fact AI companies can do what they are doing has much to do with the previous brick and mortar businesses weakening any business regulations down to nothing.
    - D13Fd 7mo ago
      > A good example is this, car companies don't make cars for the most part, they make loans. Financial companies first, car companies second. I get that this is true from a certain point of view. But car companies clearly compete in a very healthy way on features and quality. In fact, cars are a great example of a market where the companies clearly care about making the product, and the competition between them has driven that products to incredible heights. Cars these days are vastly better than they were in the past.
ticulatedspline 7mo ago
Kinda been dead a while, also not dead there's still good stuff out there. Lots of it, but it's in the corners and under the carpets. Things created in the original spirit of the "let me show you my interests" that the older web was built on. While back was toying with the idea of building out a new web on a new protocol (not http based). Thus no existing browser would understand it. Deliberately obscure to force a "Reset" button of sorts. Though would be short lived, over time we've learned to ruin stuff faster and faster. I'm not sure there's any network so alien that it could hold on to that golden era of innocence from the past, it would be found then expediently and expertly exploited.
- moritz 7mo ago
  https://geminiprotocol.net/docs/specification.gmi https://geminiprotocol.net/docs/specification.gmi [no, not that gemini]
drykiss 7mo ago
Maybe the only parts of a future internet people will actually hang out in is going to be one where any profit-making is completely de-incentivized. No recommendations. No product reviews. No opinions on companies or services. More slow web. Maybe we'll slowly head back to what websites used to look like when Yahoo was the biggest search engine.
- bonesss 7mo ago
  Back then the day Yahoo was a manually curated index of submitted & verified sites with search capabilities. Wild-ass business idea: what if Yahoo 2026 recreated Yahoo 1996 and also any of the video sites it bought up back in the day get relaunched as deshittified ad-selling mechanisms to fund the whole thing… there’s gotta be Yahoo 1996 money in whatever scraps YouTube is missing. It used to be faster and easier to follow actual content.
  - PaulKeeble 7mo ago
    An index is also a lot more discoverable for content like the others. The issues of classification still exist its not a tree like they tried to make it but indexes based on human effort on value I think still have their place
Computer0 7mo ago
Just yesterday in a local non profit organization's Signal groupchat a user who had just offered to take meeting minutes the day prior emitted an open claw error message to the chat. They are now banned from the organization.
august- 7mo ago
do you think small, invite-only communities will end up being the last holdout for genuine human conversation online? or will bots eventually infiltrate those too?
- levkk 7mo ago
  Lobsters is like that, basically a ghost town compared to Reddit. If you block engagement, you will succeed.
  - esseph 7mo ago
    > Lobsters Invite only, very exclusionary. Private club with public posting? Worst of both worlds.
- daedrdev 7mo ago
  It's absolutely why discord is popular.
- floatrock 7mo ago
  Bots will absolutely infiltrate them eventually, but I think it's the only solution. Internet promised ability to connect with anyone anywhere around the world. It felt limitless and infinite. Turns out in an infinite world, the loudest voices are the ragebaits, the algorithmically-amplified, or the outright scammers. Human social brain doesn't work in an infinite world, it works for a Dunbar's Number world. And we all like our psuedo-anonymous soapboxes (I'm standing on one right now), but trick will be to realize that the glitter of infinite quantity isn't the same as small-scale connection.
  - pixl97 7mo ago
    At least for some time I imagine a hybridization may pop up. For example you grow a community of humans that keeps bots under control. Because of this all actors are humans, and valuable because of that. Hence you'll end up with defectors getting paid to siphon off all the conversations to some ad companies that will work on tying them with real world identities and then serving them more detailed ads in the places they cannot avoid interfacing with the open internet.
d--b 7mo ago
Well, it's not such terrible news, is it? I get nostalgia for the 90s/00s, but that time was never coming back anyways. The best we can hope now is for people to be less online. And if it comes from people drowning in AI crap, I think it's kind of funny.
- righthand 7mo ago
  I don’t think people are going to get offline and the best we can probably do is create free and open p2p platforms that don’t require registration necessarily to use. And allow people to control their own databases. A lot of communication is locked behind corporations that run the services that are building these tracking and identification databases. I actually think it’s more about getting people off browsers and other tracking software.
  - pixl97 7mo ago
    >create free and open p2p platforms that don’t require registration necessarily to use And how do you create this without it being overran by bots, spam, and people posting gargantuan amounts of porn? >allow people to control their own databases There are two types of people that want to control databases. 1: The freedom seeking type who want information sovereignty. 2: The type of people that want to hoover up as much data as possible for money and power. Guess who has more ability to control the world out of those two. Lastly, most people want to use curated websites free of spam and content they don't want. Almost nobody wants to do that curation themselves. Hence curated platforms will attract the most people via network effects. ah shoot, that wasn't lastly... > getting people off browsers and putting them on what exactly? phone apps, that's not better at all. Multimedia attracts people like flies to poop. It's seemingly a natural human response to move to an application that is more visually interesting regardless of it's security safety.
    - righthand 7mo ago
      > And how do you create this without it being overran by bots, spam, and people posting gargantuan amounts of porn? By not creating public networks out of it. The only database people want to control is their personal information and who they communicate with and when. So we should enable low barrier to entry to communicate. I cannot solve for the social media side of it, but we can enable people to at least have low friction when getting online. Somewhere to turn to that is not a data harvesting service. The displacement effort has to come from those that believe in those freedoms. It’s not easy, maybe impossible in some circumstances but this status quo right now cannot be it, in my opinion.
chuckadams 7mo ago
The funny thing about the LinkedIn post is that the parody is dead-on as to the kind of mindless slop a human on LI would post. LinkedIn was the Dead Internet before LLMs were even a thing. And I guess AI doesn't even have to be posting everything for Dead Internet Theory to hold, it just has to be the default perception in order to cause everything to be treated skeptically. I think I'll just take up blacksmithing.
halyconWays 7mo ago
The only place that reminds me of the old Internet is VRChat, funny enough. You're guaranteed to be interacting with a nerdy, culturally similar human who's present in the moment.
- Anamon 7mo ago
  That just reminded me of Chat Roulette for some reason. It seems that one is still around, as well. I'd guess not many bots on there, either (though potentially plenty of other unpleasant things).
amiantos 7mo ago
Why is it being called dead internet theory when, as far as I can tell, what's really happening is that big centralized systems are being overrun with bots? The internet existed and was pretty great before these large centralized systems came into being. Anyone can still run a blog/website, and/or their own discourse server. There's no need to mourn for these centralized systems that largely existed only to exploit us in some way. Let's celebrate "small internet theory", an internet where exploitation is effectively impossible because every company that tries it is overrun with AI bots. That sounds awesome to me personally, but I was also up late last night watching clips of Conan O'Brien from 1999 and the nostalgia for that era / what the internet was like back then hit me so hard it was almost painful.
- JumpCrisscross 7mo ago
  > Why is it being called dead internet theory “A social networking system simulates a user using a language model trained using training data generated from user interactions performed by that user. The language model may be used for simulating the user when the user is absent from the social networking system, for example, when the user takes a long break or if the user is deceased” [1]. (More seriously: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dead_Internet_theory https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dead_Internet_theory) [1] https://patents.google.com/patent/US12513102B2 https://patents.google.com/patent/US12513102B2
  - amiantos 7mo ago
    So why isn't it called "dead social media theory"? The internet is not only social media services, though I understand a lot of people seem to think that without centralized social media services there is no reason to use the internet.
    - pixl97 7mo ago
      Have you been on the internet at large lately? With google you may get one authoritative site on something and 50 bot copies of the site on different domains. Sometimes the stolen site is the number one return. Also, if you ran sites years/decades ago, you realized way back then the any local user posting was getting overran by spammers/bots. Now is so much worse that it's not worth doing in most cases. So, most posts on social media aren't real. Most user posts on non-social media are spam/not real. Most websites in searches are copies/ad spam. So yea, dead internet reality.
_pdp_ 7mo ago
The Internet was always full of bots. Not chatbots, but bots like crawlers, scrapers, automated scripts. That was fine. What the OP is talking about is bots that participate in public discourse. That's the actual problem. I think it can be handled to a degree though. Private communities, private Internet on top of existing Internet, and social media platforms without public APIs and with strict, enforceable ToS would all help.
alex1138 7mo ago
1) Holy fuck I'd borderline forgotten about Numa Numa 2) Reddit... doesn't have much of an incentive to fix the astroturf issue. The site "organically" censors, a lot
aerhardt 7mo ago
I have to use LinkedIn to sell. I only occasionally look at the feed but I am ruthlessly muting or blocking anyone who is blatantly foisting their AI drivel on other humans. I’ve had enough of this shit.
- robotswantdata 7mo ago
  unfollow works too
  - aerhardt 7mo ago
    I’ve been unfollowing people for a while and the issue is rarely from within my network anymore… the feed shows a lot of posts from AI foisters who I don’t even follow.
    - robotswantdata 7mo ago
      Same. LinkedIn is now unusable for me. Will try blocking!
empath75 7mo ago
Reddit in particular is overwhelmed by bots. There are small niche communities where it’s mostly people talking to people, but the vast majority of popular posts are made by bots, voted on by bots and commented on by bots. It’s not even like commercial astroturfing, it’s just karma farming and public sentiment manipulation.
- demaga 7mo ago
  I think it makes sense, since most people don't post anything or at least don't post much. So someone (something) must fill in this void.
- TitaRusell 7mo ago
  Presumably advertisers still want real human eyeballs? Or maybe we have finally accepted that our entire economy is the naked emperor.
rustystump 7mo ago
Everyone here is so far from a normie it is almost painful. Dead internet is an outcome of supply and demand. The fundamental issue is that a plurality of humans pref the direction things have gone and are moving in. Is it a good direction? By this crowd’s standards, no. To be clear, i dont like either but when i watch the speed kids swap between 5 insta accounts and 3 reddit accounts, it seems the majority are happy with it.
- twoodfin 7mo ago
  Let’s not kid ourselves: Every day, multiple “I just asked the LLM to clean up my notes” posts are voted up to the front page here, often with highly engaged, appreciative comment sections. LLM’s for all their faults are well-trained to produce what we want.
kmbfjr 7mo ago
Lots of interesting ideas to fix it, I’ll offer mine: let it die. The grand bargain of the web is gone and it ain’t coming back.
pixl97 7mo ago
Dead internet prophecy.
alexchantavy 7mo ago
Vrei sa pleci dar numa numa iei numa numa iei numa numa numa iei bring back the old internet
wrs 7mo ago
> And of course let’s not forget AI spamming OSS repos with nonsensical PRs. What’s even funnier is when the reviewer turns out to be AI too. What's even funnier is this is literally how "agent teams" (the latest hotness) work. They just do it all on your laptop rather than spamming GitHub.
jesse_dot_id 7mo ago
Thankfully, humans excel at finding solutions to problems.
- pixl97 7mo ago
  Most of the time, by making more problems.
floathub 7mo ago
Emacs will solve this too: https://github.com/tanrax/org-social https://github.com/tanrax/org-social :-)
starkeeper 7mo ago
I just searched for a video game tip: "Bannerlord II where to sell clay?" and google's top result was an AI generated page FOR THIS GAME that directed me to ebay. Also, I forgot to mention: google AI overview included the AI garbage page as it's answer. It's dead Jim.
dom96 7mo ago
I think that we are going to see more and more of this. To the point where most interactions you have online will likely be with bots. So I started building something that actually has a chance of fixing it: a social network for only humans. I wrote about it here: https://blog.picheta.me/post/the-future-of-social-media-is-human/ https://blog.picheta.me/post/the-future-of-social-media-is-h...
jruohonen 7mo ago
So, as I share his thoughts, I've been wondering: why haven't we seen any real innovations in this space? Mastodon wasn't really it and neither was Substack, although maybe it got slightly closer. TikTok and Telegram, maybe, for different reasons, but they'll face the same destiny. I'd suppose the much despised "mainstream media" might be a winner here eventually. But beyond that, I am thinking about something like the following: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2026/mar/10/uk-society-authors-logo-identify-books-written-by-humans-not-ai https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2026/mar/10/uk-societ...
- krapp 7mo ago
  Mastodon has been an obvious innovation and success, along with decentralized platforms and protocols in general.
talkingtab 7mo ago
It is the corporate internet - the one by the corporation, for the corporation that is dead. Or at least everything in it is dead. The death blow is AI, but it was almost there anyway. The good news is that the community internet - for the community, by the community - is just starting. What is a community internet? The internet is layered protocols. UDP, ICMP, TCP, HTTP, HTTPS etc. The community internet is just a new layer of protocols. Coming soon.
- chewbacha 7mo ago
  Sure, but just for reference: https://xkcd.com/927/ https://xkcd.com/927/
nszceta 7mo ago
This is the founding thesis of the dead internet theory: 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-...
Kapura 7mo ago
People need to look long and hard at how they are using technology, and ask how technology should be used. Every single technological trend for the past 10 years has been smoke and mirrors, promising utility of an iPhone but with deliverables closer to a blockchain full of links to jpegs.
mrkramer 7mo ago
Tbh I don't care if I speak to a human or a bot as long as they are "useful"; by useful I mean if they provide me useful information but then again humans can provide unique information that bots can not. But I think identity is not relevant anymore, what's relevant is reputation. People think internet bots are bad per se but we need to build useful bots, just like there are chat bots that are useful on various platforms like Telegram, Discord or whatever other platforms people use.
- ninjagoo 7mo ago
  This is a great point. In the past and present, sites like slashdot and HN depend on the users to achieve that moderation to surface useful comments and keep 'spam' down. Now, there are tools to achieve that kind of moderation automagically, and even better, consistently. This is an opportunity to build out a community that is useful for everyone. The first platform that guarantees anonymity supported by human-independent moderation will likely attract significant and persistent user support. There is still the issue of cost - how does the community pay for such a platform? Perhaps like the Google of yore - very limited ads? Avoiding enshittification can be done through the Wikipedia model - non-profit to manage the whole thing?
vivid242 7mo ago
In nature, sometimes death is the prerequisite of life: Think of the dead leaves on the forest ground. I think the age of algorithmic curation is dead - but it may, through a „RenaiSSance“, bring back true human connection.
butterlesstoast 7mo ago
Really makes me wonder. Is there anything we can do to revive the internet or is it time to let the golden age go? : (
- deleted 7mo ago
  [deleted]
- nwhnwh 7mo ago
  What is wrong with real life?
  - butterlesstoast 7mo ago
    Very fair question. Investing in life outside of the internet has always paid off ten-fold.
abcde666777 7mo ago
For a while video was a holdout of sorts - e.g. if someone posted video content of themselves or their voice you could trust a real person was behind it. But now convincing fake video generation is easily accessible, so one more holdout stands to fall. It does seem like some kind of ID system is going to be the only way. Sucky but inevitable. I often have the following thought: technological advancement, for all its boons, inevitably leads down destructive roads in the long run. Sooner or later we open a pandora's box.
- bytehowl 7mo ago
  The technology isn't inherently evil. The actual problem is the way our societies are set up, ironically incentivizing sociopathic behaviour even among members of a single nation, nevermind when geopolitics get involved.
  - abcde666777 7mo ago
    I essentially see it like this: imagine giving a hand grenade to a three year old. The grenade isn't inherently evil, but it raises the existential stakes for that three year old and anyone in their vicinity. There comes some hypothetical point where technology has advanced so much that anyone has the power to destroy the world.
- mvdtnz 7mo ago
  > convincing fake video generation is easily accessible, so one more holdout stands to fall. Is it though? I have absolutely no doubt we'll get there but I haven't seen any evidence of this in the wild. My Youtube feed is becoming overrun with content with clearly generated scripts and often generated narration. But I haven't seen a single instance (that I'm aware of) of generated video being passed off as real. Yes I have seen hundreds of tweets and reddit posts showcasing game-changing video technologies like AI face replacement and yes they look incredible in the 45 second demo reels, but every instance I have seen of real-world usage was comically bad.
RobRivera 7mo ago
Maybe we should get more Jannies. They only cost zero dollars and zero cents
deleted 7mo ago
[deleted]
irusensei 7mo ago
I imagine soon there will be small scale Tailscale style semi private networks popping up with no AI content and no regards to draconic identity collection laws.
Bombthecat 7mo ago
We are closing in on the "personal bubble internet" bots create news, videos and comments for your personal liking.
protocolture 7mo ago
I reckon we are going find an inverse metcalfes at some stage where the value of a network is proportional to the square of its connected users, minus the square of the number of connected bots. Heck I would be surprised if meta hadnt figured this out, or wasnt on the way to figuring it out.
lovich 7mo ago
Ironic that there’s a dead bot comment at the bottom of this article trying to pose as a human
sebringj 7mo ago
Isn't this more about identity crisis? Not in the psychological sense but in the internet sense? Who is real who isn't? Crypto proof of work idk? Your profile like d LinkedIn or Hacker News or something gives your clawbot x credits worth of legit automated queries or rate limits on your behalf? It could be flipped upside down where we don't spend our eyes off on reading websites anymore, it just goes and gets it for us but I may be hallucinating.
- tim333 7mo ago
  They tried Worldcoin as a solution to proof of human but it never took off. I guess linking to social media as you say? I haven't had much issue with AIs but so many human scammers often with bot accounts. On Xitter 90% of my followers are those.
taskpod 7mo ago
The real problem isn't that bots exist — it's that we have no trust infrastructure for the internet. We can verify domains with SSL, authenticate users with OAuth, but we have zero standard for verifying that an AI agent is good at what it claims. The dead internet is a discovery/trust problem, not just a spam problem.
rglover 7mo ago
I'm here for it in the short-term. As the market continues to saturate, most of the people building this stuff will flame out. Eventually, I suspect we hit a tipping point where the ROI is too low (not enough real human engagement, just other bots) and the flood dials back.
Rapzid 7mo ago
You know.. I keep thinking this might be a good thing in some ways. AI spam could save us from the worst of the current social media status quo, the toxicity of the attention "economy", but flooding it so thoroughly nobody wants to engage with it anymore. Maybe the world can collectively "wake up" and "go outside" by turning towards local and more intimate communities for social interactions.. It's a shame though that this is gonna kill so many sites and projects. Sure we have ChatGPT, but also with things like Google AI summary getting so much better traffic to sites is going to plummet. Without people visiting I think the incentive, heck even motivation, for a ton of the sites is gone. We've seen it with sites like Stack Overflow, but it's probably going to happen to just about everything.. Things are definitely going to change in significant ways. The internet of the past is definitely dead, it just doesn't know it yet.
- obruchez 7mo ago
  > It's a shame though that this is gonna kill so many sites and projects. Sure we have ChatGPT, but also with things like Google AI summary getting so much better traffic to sites is going to plummet. Without people visiting I think the incentive, heck even motivation, for a ton of the sites is gone. We've seen it with sites like Stack Overflow, but it's probably going to happen to just about everything.. As I see it, this is just an extra step in a long series of tools to just serve information more quickly. Search snippets for search results have always (?) been displayed for each link/page returned. If the information you were looking for was included in those snippets, then you wouldn't need to visit the actual site. Then at some point there were knowledge cards/panels. Again, if the information you were looking for was in those cards/panels, then you didn't need to click on the links. Now with LLMs/Gemini, the information is sometimes summarized at the top of the page. You need even less to visit the search results. Google has always been a kind of cache for the Internet. It's just way more efficient at extracting and displaying information from that cache now. So, yes, traffic keeps going down. But new knowledge will still need to be produced, right?
- looselygoosy 7mo ago
  I don't know that the influx of AI spam would necessarily result in people disengaging and choosing to seek out real content, though. Social media feeds have been serving up less and less content from our actual real life contacts for a while now (partly because people seem to be posting less). As long as it's engaging I think a significant chunk of people aren't going to care whether it's AI (anecdotally, my mother loves AI generated videos, perhaps it's just novelty at the moment and it will wear off)
e-dant 7mo ago
Good fucking riddance. Time to start actually talking to each other again.
taauji 7mo ago
I'm curious what tools do people use to apply to jobs automatically? Would this be automatically flagged by recruitment systems as AI? We have never had a problem like this at our company but now I am little paranoid
cawksuwcka 7mo ago
fuck the internet. eventually everything needs to get fucked.
- cindyllm 7mo ago
  [dead]
sph 7mo ago
I am still pissed that Wikipedia calls it a conspiracy theory. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dead_Internet_theory https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dead_Internet_theory Wasn’t WP supposed to be impartial and avoid passing judgement?
- efilife 7mo ago
  There's been some discussion about this https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Dead_Internet_theory#c-Bon_courage-20260203131100-RfC_on_conspiracy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Dead_Internet_theory#c-Bo...
ajam1507 7mo ago
This post's title is hyperbolic at best. At best the author is noticing what most people have known for a long time, there are bots on the internet. Most interactions I have online are with real people. Maybe we will end up with a dead internet, but moderation is still possible currently. The elephant in the room is that a lot of social media companies have a conflict of interest. They can juice their user metrics by not moderating bots as well as they could be.
ingohelpinger 7mo ago
just go out, what you are seeking is real life which happens outside, not in front of a display.
- Anamon 7mo ago
  I, for one, miss the promise of the old Internet, that you could connect with people from all around the world. I always saw it as an exciting extension to real-world interactions, not a replacement. And I love the fact that over the past 30 years, I was able to make friends (or pen pals, if you will) in the US, Canada, Mexico, Bolivia, Japan, Indonesia, Russia, New Zealand... the concept of finding people sharing your niche interests, wherever they were on the globe, even as you were stuck on your cozy suburb, was amazing to me, and I'm sad that we all but lost that.
tim333 7mo ago
The internet is not dead though - it's bursting with life, both human and LLM claw like. It's only going to get more so as time goes on. Re: >Can we go back to an internet like this? I guess we can’t. Gary Brolsma is still at it with Numa Numa (2023) https://youtu.be/ZBKm1MBsTbk https://youtu.be/ZBKm1MBsTbk. There's just a bunch of other stuff out there too.
rchaud 7mo ago
I have a decent-enough filter for AI-written nonsense: - banner blindness to blue check accounts (instantly scroll past, the blue check is extremely prominent visually) - a very long Ublock Origin text filter regex for emojis (green check mark in particular) and $currentHotTopic keywords where the signal to noise ratio is close to 0.
butlike 7mo ago
What does it matter who wrote it as long as you like the content? If the content is posted on a network that allows robotic agents to post, and you don't like it, just sign on to a different network. I imagine it will be way closer to Ghost in the Shell/Cyberpunk in the end than we realize.
- Anamon 7mo ago
  The problem is that A. People want to connect with other people, not talk to computers, and B. AI slop peddlers know this and have an incentive to lie about their content. If GenAI content was always reliably declared and people's choices were respected, we wouldn't have a problem. It's like saying, what does it matter if the news article was fake, as long as you enjoyed reading it? It matters because when I read the news, I want to read about things that actually happened, not stories that manage to fool me into believing they're true.
- 11mariom 7mo ago
  I'm not reading comments to like them. I want to know other points of view, learn something, get bigger context, etc. AI opinion is worthless. If I'd like AI opinion I will simply ask chat/gemini/whatever other LLM myself.
JKCalhoun 7mo ago
"I only see two outcomes for this problem…" Or, you know, the internet just dies and we all meet at bowling alleys again.
aronqrqr 7mo ago
[dead]

419 points by hubraumhugo 7mo ago

I think next step will be an isolated version of invite-only internet where you have to be physically present with your invitee to give them access. There will be a beautiful navigation widget where you can access a unified "addon" to any page: community moderated comment section, version history of that page, backlinks, carefully curated "related" section(so that you can continue browsing beautiful human written content on 1910 era steam locomotives, similar to 90s era webrings), donate button so that you can support he author and much more! Oh, the dream

artemonster 7mo ago
optional de-centralized hosting, unified cryptocurrency as payment tokens, single open LLM as summary and search-indexing tool, specialized toolkits for journals and social networks (livejournal, early twitter, early fb). Most importantly: you can post anonymously where its allowed (there could be areas where it can be disallowed entirely, like a public square), but your account will take the punishment, so no edgy shitposting behind throwaways.

jeandejean 7mo ago

Next step is: we get back to speaking to each other in the real world. That would successfully close the loop.

sebastiennight 7mo ago
I think this will be a tiny minority who is already currently not terminally online (so, no big change for them). And the vast majority will just be driven to more AI-mediated interactions.
- tines 7mo ago
  I think it's a symptom of being terminally online to think that most other people are also terminally online. The internet has a way of convincing you that most of the [interesting] events in the world happen on the internet. But I think this isn't the case; most stuff happens in the real world, most people live in the real world most of the time, and a tiny fraction of trite drama happens online.
  - ticulatedspline 7mo ago
    Dunnow, everyone is in a bubble of some sorts. I'm online a good bit but rarely on my phone, If I'm away from my desk I'm offline. My social circle is similar so I would naturally have bias for what I experience. Year or so ago I took an Uber and was mesmerized by the driver. He had his phone up mounted on the left and was pretty constantly interacting with it. Checking for new rides, watching a video, checking facebook. It was quite impressive how much content he consumed while at a red light and how dexterously he navigated to and through like 10 different apps. I very much got the feeling that this was a person that was terminally online and suspected that he's not alone. A bit alienating really, living in the same country speaking the same language but realizing there's this huge cultural/behavior divide between us.
  - pixl97 7mo ago
    >being terminally online to think that most other people are also terminally online. 50% of US teenagers describe themselves as terminally online. Go any place where people work and have time to goof, and you'll see them online. Go to a bar/club, you see people with a phone in front of their face. The idea there is an online and offline is crumbling further every day. Cameras are small, bandwidth is high in relation to our compression algorithms. Anything happening in the world can be broadcast live. More and more types of machines are coming online that accept digital instructions that make things happen in real life. Furthermore it's an odd rejection of the printing press on your part. That methods of information exchange affect the real world around them. If the book brought about the industrial revolution, what does an always available global communications network bring? At least based on your writing here on HN it seems like you're probably an introvert, or at least a person that likes quiet pondering and reflections. Reading a book would be far more interesting than most online activities, right? If I'm right and that is the case, then you may be missing just how many people are horrifically addicted to being on social media all the time.
deleted 7mo ago
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krapp 7mo ago
I don't want to talk to people in the real world. That's why I spend all of my time on the fucking internet.

Ancalagon 7mo ago

Hey it’s what executives want. Fake everything. Slop and robots everywhere. Have at it, I say. Maybe then people will go outside again

jsbisviewtiful 7mo ago
My household just bought The Brick to start taking control of our phones and online usage. We've been very online for 15+ years but are hoping to break the addiction cycle by simply blocking our devices from access. The timing feels right, mostly because sites like Instagram and Reddit are too braindead and spam+ad heavy these days. The executives and shareholders' desire for profits have already killed two of my biggest online pastimes.
- tartoran 7mo ago
  I heard of The brick and sounds very effective. Not many people realize the're addicted to their devices and most tragic of all is that kids who grew always online have no baseline to return to. As the OP mentions, I too hope that when it'll all become a junk pile people will eventually return to offline mode.
tartoran 7mo ago
Eventually that's what's going to happen if things keep on going in this direction and it looks like there's nothing stopping it so yeah, we're moving in circles. Old things will become new again.
Oras 7mo ago
I wish going outside again were possible, but what if most of the people you actually want to hang out with aren't in the same area? And for those who are near, the cost of having a coffee or a drink is too much now on top of expenses that are already stretching,
- Ancalagon 7mo ago
  go for a walk with your friends and a bottle of water

bsaul 7mo ago

I only see two outcomes for this problem : an internet of verified identities (start by uploading your ID card). Or a paid internet, where it doesn't matter who you are, but since you're going to pay for that email or that reddit account, the probability that it's AI spam is greatly reduced. And i'm looking forward to none of them.

basch 7mo ago
How would you overcome a local llm embedded into a keyboard?
Invictus0 7mo ago
You could have easily said this twenty years ago when photoshopped photos were going viral on the early internet. Turns out people are completely fine with ai content and photoshop.
- csallen 7mo ago
  There's a huge difference between fake content and fake authors.
- crab_galaxy 7mo ago
  Fine in what way? What people? I have not seen or heard of a single person who is excited about AI generated blog posts, or TikToks, or commercials, or images. In fact it’s the opposite, the internet coined the term AI slop, and my non-internet addicted friends hate the fact that chatGPT is killing the environment. The only people I’ve ever seen champion AI are the few who are excited by the bleeding edge, and the many many peddlers
  - officeplant 7mo ago
    The most common people just seem to be the elderly who don't care / don't know any better. The same ones who told us never to believe anything from the internet. They seem to be hooked on weird AI jesus facebook posts, daily AI generated motivational content, talking to the chatbot in Whatsapp, etc.

CloakHQ 7mo ago

[dead]

toddmorey 7mo ago

I see many, many startups that promise to be an automated marketing agent that will do this exact thing: scour sites for conversations and post links to your product. Obviously that burns down the human Internet, but it’s also a business that will have a short lifespan and bring about its own demise. I guess they don’t care about anything enduring as long as they can grab some quick cash on the way out.

girvo 7mo ago
> I guess they don’t care about anything enduring as long as they can grab some quick cash on the way out. As far as I can tell, that is basically all AI-related businesses. Including those non-AI ones jumping on the bandwagon to throw all their employees in the bin and expect 10x productivity somehow: if they are right and these tools do become that good, well the economy as we know it is over as white collar knowledge work disappears. But hey, we made money in those few years right!
- pixl97 7mo ago
  At least in the US very few industries actually seem to be about making a product. A good example is this, car companies don't make cars for the most part, they make loans. Financial companies first, car companies second. Consolidation, collusion, and rent-seeking behaviors by companies are going out of control too. The fact AI companies can do what they are doing has much to do with the previous brick and mortar businesses weakening any business regulations down to nothing.
  - D13Fd 7mo ago
    > A good example is this, car companies don't make cars for the most part, they make loans. Financial companies first, car companies second. I get that this is true from a certain point of view. But car companies clearly compete in a very healthy way on features and quality. In fact, cars are a great example of a market where the companies clearly care about making the product, and the competition between them has driven that products to incredible heights. Cars these days are vastly better than they were in the past.

ticulatedspline 7mo ago

Kinda been dead a while, also not dead there's still good stuff out there. Lots of it, but it's in the corners and under the carpets. Things created in the original spirit of the "let me show you my interests" that the older web was built on. While back was toying with the idea of building out a new web on a new protocol (not http based). Thus no existing browser would understand it. Deliberately obscure to force a "Reset" button of sorts. Though would be short lived, over time we've learned to ruin stuff faster and faster. I'm not sure there's any network so alien that it could hold on to that golden era of innocence from the past, it would be found then expediently and expertly exploited.

moritz 7mo ago
https://geminiprotocol.net/docs/specification.gmi https://geminiprotocol.net/docs/specification.gmi [no, not that gemini]

drykiss 7mo ago

Maybe the only parts of a future internet people will actually hang out in is going to be one where any profit-making is completely de-incentivized. No recommendations. No product reviews. No opinions on companies or services. More slow web. Maybe we'll slowly head back to what websites used to look like when Yahoo was the biggest search engine.

bonesss 7mo ago
Back then the day Yahoo was a manually curated index of submitted & verified sites with search capabilities. Wild-ass business idea: what if Yahoo 2026 recreated Yahoo 1996 and also any of the video sites it bought up back in the day get relaunched as deshittified ad-selling mechanisms to fund the whole thing… there’s gotta be Yahoo 1996 money in whatever scraps YouTube is missing. It used to be faster and easier to follow actual content.
- PaulKeeble 7mo ago
  An index is also a lot more discoverable for content like the others. The issues of classification still exist its not a tree like they tried to make it but indexes based on human effort on value I think still have their place

Computer0 7mo ago

Just yesterday in a local non profit organization's Signal groupchat a user who had just offered to take meeting minutes the day prior emitted an open claw error message to the chat. They are now banned from the organization.

august- 7mo ago

do you think small, invite-only communities will end up being the last holdout for genuine human conversation online? or will bots eventually infiltrate those too?

levkk 7mo ago
Lobsters is like that, basically a ghost town compared to Reddit. If you block engagement, you will succeed.
- esseph 7mo ago
  > Lobsters Invite only, very exclusionary. Private club with public posting? Worst of both worlds.
daedrdev 7mo ago
It's absolutely why discord is popular.
floatrock 7mo ago
Bots will absolutely infiltrate them eventually, but I think it's the only solution. Internet promised ability to connect with anyone anywhere around the world. It felt limitless and infinite. Turns out in an infinite world, the loudest voices are the ragebaits, the algorithmically-amplified, or the outright scammers. Human social brain doesn't work in an infinite world, it works for a Dunbar's Number world. And we all like our psuedo-anonymous soapboxes (I'm standing on one right now), but trick will be to realize that the glitter of infinite quantity isn't the same as small-scale connection.
- pixl97 7mo ago
  At least for some time I imagine a hybridization may pop up. For example you grow a community of humans that keeps bots under control. Because of this all actors are humans, and valuable because of that. Hence you'll end up with defectors getting paid to siphon off all the conversations to some ad companies that will work on tying them with real world identities and then serving them more detailed ads in the places they cannot avoid interfacing with the open internet.

d--b 7mo ago

Well, it's not such terrible news, is it? I get nostalgia for the 90s/00s, but that time was never coming back anyways. The best we can hope now is for people to be less online. And if it comes from people drowning in AI crap, I think it's kind of funny.

righthand 7mo ago
I don’t think people are going to get offline and the best we can probably do is create free and open p2p platforms that don’t require registration necessarily to use. And allow people to control their own databases. A lot of communication is locked behind corporations that run the services that are building these tracking and identification databases. I actually think it’s more about getting people off browsers and other tracking software.
- pixl97 7mo ago
  >create free and open p2p platforms that don’t require registration necessarily to use And how do you create this without it being overran by bots, spam, and people posting gargantuan amounts of porn? >allow people to control their own databases There are two types of people that want to control databases. 1: The freedom seeking type who want information sovereignty. 2: The type of people that want to hoover up as much data as possible for money and power. Guess who has more ability to control the world out of those two. Lastly, most people want to use curated websites free of spam and content they don't want. Almost nobody wants to do that curation themselves. Hence curated platforms will attract the most people via network effects. ah shoot, that wasn't lastly... > getting people off browsers and putting them on what exactly? phone apps, that's not better at all. Multimedia attracts people like flies to poop. It's seemingly a natural human response to move to an application that is more visually interesting regardless of it's security safety.
  - righthand 7mo ago
    > And how do you create this without it being overran by bots, spam, and people posting gargantuan amounts of porn? By not creating public networks out of it. The only database people want to control is their personal information and who they communicate with and when. So we should enable low barrier to entry to communicate. I cannot solve for the social media side of it, but we can enable people to at least have low friction when getting online. Somewhere to turn to that is not a data harvesting service. The displacement effort has to come from those that believe in those freedoms. It’s not easy, maybe impossible in some circumstances but this status quo right now cannot be it, in my opinion.

chuckadams 7mo ago

The funny thing about the LinkedIn post is that the parody is dead-on as to the kind of mindless slop a human on LI would post. LinkedIn was the Dead Internet before LLMs were even a thing. And I guess AI doesn't even have to be posting everything for Dead Internet Theory to hold, it just has to be the default perception in order to cause everything to be treated skeptically. I think I'll just take up blacksmithing.

halyconWays 7mo ago

The only place that reminds me of the old Internet is VRChat, funny enough. You're guaranteed to be interacting with a nerdy, culturally similar human who's present in the moment.

Anamon 7mo ago
That just reminded me of Chat Roulette for some reason. It seems that one is still around, as well. I'd guess not many bots on there, either (though potentially plenty of other unpleasant things).

amiantos 7mo ago

Why is it being called dead internet theory when, as far as I can tell, what's really happening is that big centralized systems are being overrun with bots? The internet existed and was pretty great before these large centralized systems came into being. Anyone can still run a blog/website, and/or their own discourse server. There's no need to mourn for these centralized systems that largely existed only to exploit us in some way. Let's celebrate "small internet theory", an internet where exploitation is effectively impossible because every company that tries it is overrun with AI bots. That sounds awesome to me personally, but I was also up late last night watching clips of Conan O'Brien from 1999 and the nostalgia for that era / what the internet was like back then hit me so hard it was almost painful.

JumpCrisscross 7mo ago
> Why is it being called dead internet theory “A social networking system simulates a user using a language model trained using training data generated from user interactions performed by that user. The language model may be used for simulating the user when the user is absent from the social networking system, for example, when the user takes a long break or if the user is deceased” [1]. (More seriously: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dead_Internet_theory https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dead_Internet_theory) [1] https://patents.google.com/patent/US12513102B2 https://patents.google.com/patent/US12513102B2
- amiantos 7mo ago
  So why isn't it called "dead social media theory"? The internet is not only social media services, though I understand a lot of people seem to think that without centralized social media services there is no reason to use the internet.
  - pixl97 7mo ago
    Have you been on the internet at large lately? With google you may get one authoritative site on something and 50 bot copies of the site on different domains. Sometimes the stolen site is the number one return. Also, if you ran sites years/decades ago, you realized way back then the any local user posting was getting overran by spammers/bots. Now is so much worse that it's not worth doing in most cases. So, most posts on social media aren't real. Most user posts on non-social media are spam/not real. Most websites in searches are copies/ad spam. So yea, dead internet reality.

_pdp_ 7mo ago

The Internet was always full of bots. Not chatbots, but bots like crawlers, scrapers, automated scripts. That was fine. What the OP is talking about is bots that participate in public discourse. That's the actual problem. I think it can be handled to a degree though. Private communities, private Internet on top of existing Internet, and social media platforms without public APIs and with strict, enforceable ToS would all help.

alex1138 7mo ago

1) Holy fuck I'd borderline forgotten about Numa Numa 2) Reddit... doesn't have much of an incentive to fix the astroturf issue. The site "organically" censors, a lot

aerhardt 7mo ago

I have to use LinkedIn to sell. I only occasionally look at the feed but I am ruthlessly muting or blocking anyone who is blatantly foisting their AI drivel on other humans. I’ve had enough of this shit.

robotswantdata 7mo ago
unfollow works too
- aerhardt 7mo ago
  I’ve been unfollowing people for a while and the issue is rarely from within my network anymore… the feed shows a lot of posts from AI foisters who I don’t even follow.
  - robotswantdata 7mo ago
    Same. LinkedIn is now unusable for me. Will try blocking!

empath75 7mo ago

Reddit in particular is overwhelmed by bots. There are small niche communities where it’s mostly people talking to people, but the vast majority of popular posts are made by bots, voted on by bots and commented on by bots. It’s not even like commercial astroturfing, it’s just karma farming and public sentiment manipulation.

demaga 7mo ago
I think it makes sense, since most people don't post anything or at least don't post much. So someone (something) must fill in this void.
TitaRusell 7mo ago
Presumably advertisers still want real human eyeballs? Or maybe we have finally accepted that our entire economy is the naked emperor.

rustystump 7mo ago

Everyone here is so far from a normie it is almost painful. Dead internet is an outcome of supply and demand. The fundamental issue is that a plurality of humans pref the direction things have gone and are moving in. Is it a good direction? By this crowd’s standards, no. To be clear, i dont like either but when i watch the speed kids swap between 5 insta accounts and 3 reddit accounts, it seems the majority are happy with it.

twoodfin 7mo ago
Let’s not kid ourselves: Every day, multiple “I just asked the LLM to clean up my notes” posts are voted up to the front page here, often with highly engaged, appreciative comment sections. LLM’s for all their faults are well-trained to produce what we want.

kmbfjr 7mo ago

Lots of interesting ideas to fix it, I’ll offer mine: let it die. The grand bargain of the web is gone and it ain’t coming back.

pixl97 7mo ago

Dead internet prophecy.

alexchantavy 7mo ago

Vrei sa pleci dar numa numa iei numa numa iei numa numa numa iei bring back the old internet

wrs 7mo ago

> And of course let’s not forget AI spamming OSS repos with nonsensical PRs. What’s even funnier is when the reviewer turns out to be AI too. What's even funnier is this is literally how "agent teams" (the latest hotness) work. They just do it all on your laptop rather than spamming GitHub.

jesse_dot_id 7mo ago

Thankfully, humans excel at finding solutions to problems.

pixl97 7mo ago
Most of the time, by making more problems.

floathub 7mo ago

Emacs will solve this too: https://github.com/tanrax/org-social https://github.com/tanrax/org-social :-)

starkeeper 7mo ago

I just searched for a video game tip: "Bannerlord II where to sell clay?" and google's top result was an AI generated page FOR THIS GAME that directed me to ebay. Also, I forgot to mention: google AI overview included the AI garbage page as it's answer. It's dead Jim.

dom96 7mo ago

I think that we are going to see more and more of this. To the point where most interactions you have online will likely be with bots. So I started building something that actually has a chance of fixing it: a social network for only humans. I wrote about it here: https://blog.picheta.me/post/the-future-of-social-media-is-human/ https://blog.picheta.me/post/the-future-of-social-media-is-h...

jruohonen 7mo ago

So, as I share his thoughts, I've been wondering: why haven't we seen any real innovations in this space? Mastodon wasn't really it and neither was Substack, although maybe it got slightly closer. TikTok and Telegram, maybe, for different reasons, but they'll face the same destiny. I'd suppose the much despised "mainstream media" might be a winner here eventually. But beyond that, I am thinking about something like the following: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2026/mar/10/uk-society-authors-logo-identify-books-written-by-humans-not-ai https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2026/mar/10/uk-societ...

krapp 7mo ago
Mastodon has been an obvious innovation and success, along with decentralized platforms and protocols in general.

talkingtab 7mo ago

It is the corporate internet - the one by the corporation, for the corporation that is dead. Or at least everything in it is dead. The death blow is AI, but it was almost there anyway. The good news is that the community internet - for the community, by the community - is just starting. What is a community internet? The internet is layered protocols. UDP, ICMP, TCP, HTTP, HTTPS etc. The community internet is just a new layer of protocols. Coming soon.

chewbacha 7mo ago
Sure, but just for reference: https://xkcd.com/927/ https://xkcd.com/927/

nszceta 7mo ago

This is the founding thesis of the dead internet theory: 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-...

Kapura 7mo ago

People need to look long and hard at how they are using technology, and ask how technology should be used. Every single technological trend for the past 10 years has been smoke and mirrors, promising utility of an iPhone but with deliverables closer to a blockchain full of links to jpegs.

mrkramer 7mo ago

Tbh I don't care if I speak to a human or a bot as long as they are "useful"; by useful I mean if they provide me useful information but then again humans can provide unique information that bots can not. But I think identity is not relevant anymore, what's relevant is reputation. People think internet bots are bad per se but we need to build useful bots, just like there are chat bots that are useful on various platforms like Telegram, Discord or whatever other platforms people use.

ninjagoo 7mo ago
This is a great point. In the past and present, sites like slashdot and HN depend on the users to achieve that moderation to surface useful comments and keep 'spam' down. Now, there are tools to achieve that kind of moderation automagically, and even better, consistently. This is an opportunity to build out a community that is useful for everyone. The first platform that guarantees anonymity supported by human-independent moderation will likely attract significant and persistent user support. There is still the issue of cost - how does the community pay for such a platform? Perhaps like the Google of yore - very limited ads? Avoiding enshittification can be done through the Wikipedia model - non-profit to manage the whole thing?

vivid242 7mo ago

In nature, sometimes death is the prerequisite of life: Think of the dead leaves on the forest ground. I think the age of algorithmic curation is dead - but it may, through a „RenaiSSance“, bring back true human connection.

butterlesstoast 7mo ago

Really makes me wonder. Is there anything we can do to revive the internet or is it time to let the golden age go? : (

deleted 7mo ago
[deleted]
nwhnwh 7mo ago
What is wrong with real life?
- butterlesstoast 7mo ago
  Very fair question. Investing in life outside of the internet has always paid off ten-fold.

abcde666777 7mo ago

For a while video was a holdout of sorts - e.g. if someone posted video content of themselves or their voice you could trust a real person was behind it. But now convincing fake video generation is easily accessible, so one more holdout stands to fall. It does seem like some kind of ID system is going to be the only way. Sucky but inevitable. I often have the following thought: technological advancement, for all its boons, inevitably leads down destructive roads in the long run. Sooner or later we open a pandora's box.

bytehowl 7mo ago
The technology isn't inherently evil. The actual problem is the way our societies are set up, ironically incentivizing sociopathic behaviour even among members of a single nation, nevermind when geopolitics get involved.
- abcde666777 7mo ago
  I essentially see it like this: imagine giving a hand grenade to a three year old. The grenade isn't inherently evil, but it raises the existential stakes for that three year old and anyone in their vicinity. There comes some hypothetical point where technology has advanced so much that anyone has the power to destroy the world.
mvdtnz 7mo ago
> convincing fake video generation is easily accessible, so one more holdout stands to fall. Is it though? I have absolutely no doubt we'll get there but I haven't seen any evidence of this in the wild. My Youtube feed is becoming overrun with content with clearly generated scripts and often generated narration. But I haven't seen a single instance (that I'm aware of) of generated video being passed off as real. Yes I have seen hundreds of tweets and reddit posts showcasing game-changing video technologies like AI face replacement and yes they look incredible in the 45 second demo reels, but every instance I have seen of real-world usage was comically bad.

RobRivera 7mo ago

Maybe we should get more Jannies. They only cost zero dollars and zero cents

deleted 7mo ago

[deleted]

irusensei 7mo ago

I imagine soon there will be small scale Tailscale style semi private networks popping up with no AI content and no regards to draconic identity collection laws.

Bombthecat 7mo ago

We are closing in on the "personal bubble internet" bots create news, videos and comments for your personal liking.

protocolture 7mo ago

I reckon we are going find an inverse metcalfes at some stage where the value of a network is proportional to the square of its connected users, minus the square of the number of connected bots. Heck I would be surprised if meta hadnt figured this out, or wasnt on the way to figuring it out.

lovich 7mo ago

Ironic that there’s a dead bot comment at the bottom of this article trying to pose as a human

sebringj 7mo ago

Isn't this more about identity crisis? Not in the psychological sense but in the internet sense? Who is real who isn't? Crypto proof of work idk? Your profile like d LinkedIn or Hacker News or something gives your clawbot x credits worth of legit automated queries or rate limits on your behalf? It could be flipped upside down where we don't spend our eyes off on reading websites anymore, it just goes and gets it for us but I may be hallucinating.

tim333 7mo ago
They tried Worldcoin as a solution to proof of human but it never took off. I guess linking to social media as you say? I haven't had much issue with AIs but so many human scammers often with bot accounts. On Xitter 90% of my followers are those.

taskpod 7mo ago

The real problem isn't that bots exist — it's that we have no trust infrastructure for the internet. We can verify domains with SSL, authenticate users with OAuth, but we have zero standard for verifying that an AI agent is good at what it claims. The dead internet is a discovery/trust problem, not just a spam problem.

rglover 7mo ago

I'm here for it in the short-term. As the market continues to saturate, most of the people building this stuff will flame out. Eventually, I suspect we hit a tipping point where the ROI is too low (not enough real human engagement, just other bots) and the flood dials back.

Rapzid 7mo ago

You know.. I keep thinking this might be a good thing in some ways. AI spam could save us from the worst of the current social media status quo, the toxicity of the attention "economy", but flooding it so thoroughly nobody wants to engage with it anymore. Maybe the world can collectively "wake up" and "go outside" by turning towards local and more intimate communities for social interactions.. It's a shame though that this is gonna kill so many sites and projects. Sure we have ChatGPT, but also with things like Google AI summary getting so much better traffic to sites is going to plummet. Without people visiting I think the incentive, heck even motivation, for a ton of the sites is gone. We've seen it with sites like Stack Overflow, but it's probably going to happen to just about everything.. Things are definitely going to change in significant ways. The internet of the past is definitely dead, it just doesn't know it yet.

obruchez 7mo ago
> It's a shame though that this is gonna kill so many sites and projects. Sure we have ChatGPT, but also with things like Google AI summary getting so much better traffic to sites is going to plummet. Without people visiting I think the incentive, heck even motivation, for a ton of the sites is gone. We've seen it with sites like Stack Overflow, but it's probably going to happen to just about everything.. As I see it, this is just an extra step in a long series of tools to just serve information more quickly. Search snippets for search results have always (?) been displayed for each link/page returned. If the information you were looking for was included in those snippets, then you wouldn't need to visit the actual site. Then at some point there were knowledge cards/panels. Again, if the information you were looking for was in those cards/panels, then you didn't need to click on the links. Now with LLMs/Gemini, the information is sometimes summarized at the top of the page. You need even less to visit the search results. Google has always been a kind of cache for the Internet. It's just way more efficient at extracting and displaying information from that cache now. So, yes, traffic keeps going down. But new knowledge will still need to be produced, right?
looselygoosy 7mo ago
I don't know that the influx of AI spam would necessarily result in people disengaging and choosing to seek out real content, though. Social media feeds have been serving up less and less content from our actual real life contacts for a while now (partly because people seem to be posting less). As long as it's engaging I think a significant chunk of people aren't going to care whether it's AI (anecdotally, my mother loves AI generated videos, perhaps it's just novelty at the moment and it will wear off)

e-dant 7mo ago

Good fucking riddance. Time to start actually talking to each other again.

taauji 7mo ago

I'm curious what tools do people use to apply to jobs automatically? Would this be automatically flagged by recruitment systems as AI? We have never had a problem like this at our company but now I am little paranoid

cawksuwcka 7mo ago

fuck the internet. eventually everything needs to get fucked.

cindyllm 7mo ago
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sph 7mo ago

I am still pissed that Wikipedia calls it a conspiracy theory. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dead_Internet_theory https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dead_Internet_theory Wasn’t WP supposed to be impartial and avoid passing judgement?

efilife 7mo ago
There's been some discussion about this https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Dead_Internet_theory#c-Bon_courage-20260203131100-RfC_on_conspiracy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Dead_Internet_theory#c-Bo...

ajam1507 7mo ago

This post's title is hyperbolic at best. At best the author is noticing what most people have known for a long time, there are bots on the internet. Most interactions I have online are with real people. Maybe we will end up with a dead internet, but moderation is still possible currently. The elephant in the room is that a lot of social media companies have a conflict of interest. They can juice their user metrics by not moderating bots as well as they could be.

ingohelpinger 7mo ago

just go out, what you are seeking is real life which happens outside, not in front of a display.

Anamon 7mo ago
I, for one, miss the promise of the old Internet, that you could connect with people from all around the world. I always saw it as an exciting extension to real-world interactions, not a replacement. And I love the fact that over the past 30 years, I was able to make friends (or pen pals, if you will) in the US, Canada, Mexico, Bolivia, Japan, Indonesia, Russia, New Zealand... the concept of finding people sharing your niche interests, wherever they were on the globe, even as you were stuck on your cozy suburb, was amazing to me, and I'm sad that we all but lost that.

tim333 7mo ago

The internet is not dead though - it's bursting with life, both human and LLM claw like. It's only going to get more so as time goes on. Re: >Can we go back to an internet like this? I guess we can’t. Gary Brolsma is still at it with Numa Numa (2023) https://youtu.be/ZBKm1MBsTbk https://youtu.be/ZBKm1MBsTbk. There's just a bunch of other stuff out there too.

rchaud 7mo ago

I have a decent-enough filter for AI-written nonsense: - banner blindness to blue check accounts (instantly scroll past, the blue check is extremely prominent visually) - a very long Ublock Origin text filter regex for emojis (green check mark in particular) and $currentHotTopic keywords where the signal to noise ratio is close to 0.

butlike 7mo ago

What does it matter who wrote it as long as you like the content? If the content is posted on a network that allows robotic agents to post, and you don't like it, just sign on to a different network. I imagine it will be way closer to Ghost in the Shell/Cyberpunk in the end than we realize.

Anamon 7mo ago
The problem is that A. People want to connect with other people, not talk to computers, and B. AI slop peddlers know this and have an incentive to lie about their content. If GenAI content was always reliably declared and people's choices were respected, we wouldn't have a problem. It's like saying, what does it matter if the news article was fake, as long as you enjoyed reading it? It matters because when I read the news, I want to read about things that actually happened, not stories that manage to fool me into believing they're true.
11mariom 7mo ago
I'm not reading comments to like them. I want to know other points of view, learn something, get bigger context, etc. AI opinion is worthless. If I'd like AI opinion I will simply ask chat/gemini/whatever other LLM myself.

JKCalhoun 7mo ago

"I only see two outcomes for this problem…" Or, you know, the internet just dies and we all meet at bowling alleys again.

aronqrqr 7mo ago

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