6 ms·

Kinda seems like we’re rapidly headed for the complete collapse of the internet as we know it. Every site that is driven by user posting seems to be headed tow

Kinda seems like we’re rapidly headed for the complete collapse of the internet as we know it. Every site that is driven by user posting seems to be headed towards being overrun by AI bots chatting with each other, either for sake of promoting something or farming karma. And there’s really not much point in publishing good content anymore, since AI is just going slurp it up and regurgitate it without driving you any traffic. Though it’ll be interesting to see what happens to ChatGPT and the like once the amount of quality content for them to consume slows to a trickle. Will people still use ChatGPT to get product recommendations without Reddit posts and Wirecutter providing good content for those recommendations?

dana321 7mo ago
That and most of the news being behind a paywall, which they can scrape anyway. The internet archive is my safe haven these days, i can go back and remember the old internet.
- mikeocool 7mo ago
  Ha yeah, I quite like the 2003 vintage.
bobsmooth 7mo ago
Unless you're allowed to say slurs without being banned, your forum will be overrun with bots. The sanitation of the internet is the perfect breeding ground for brand-safe AI promotion bots.
- georgeburdell 7mo ago
  4chan has bots too.
- seattle_spring 7mo ago
  Curious how you came to that conclusion. Anecdotally, places where you can slur to your heart's content like /r/conservative seem far more inundated with bots than other areas of Reddit. I feel like that's really saying something too, because Reddit has a really bad bot problem overall.
  - direwolf20 7mo ago
    [dead]
diacritical 7mo ago
> And there’s really not much point in publishing good content anymore, since AI is just going slurp it up and regurgitate it without driving you any traffic. You just published good content knowing AI will slurp it up and not give you any traffic in return. I'm now replying to you with more content with the same expectations about AI and traffic. Why care about AI or traffic or recognition? Isn't the content the thing that matters? It's like answering technical questions in an anonymous/pseudonymous chat or forum, which I'm sure you've done, too. We do it to help others. If an AI can take my answer and spread it around without paying me or mentioning one of my random usernames I change every month or so, I would be happy. And if the AI gives me credit like "coffeecup543 originally posted that on IRC channel X 5 years ago", I couldn't care less. It would be noise to the reader. Even if the AI uses my real name, so what? The people who cared about traffic and money from their posts rarely made good content, anyway. Listicles and affiliate marketing BS and SEO optimizations and making a video that could be 1 minute into 10 minutes, or text that could've been 5 articles into a long book - all existed from before AI. With AI I actually get less of this crap - either skip it or condense it.
- wibbily 7mo ago
  It's two different problems. People who run review sites and blogs and such care about traffic, and not getting attribution will kill their desire to participate. People who post here and on Reddit etc. care about talking with other human beings, and feeling ignored in a sea of botspam will kill *their* desire to participate.
  - NitpickLawyer 7mo ago
    > feeling ignored in a sea of botspam will kill their desire to participate. The bots are not really that bad, they're (still) pretty easy to spot and not engage with. I'm more perplexed about the negativity filled comments sections, and I'm pretty sure most posters are real grass-fed certified humans. I don't get why negative posts get so upvoted, get so popular on the front page, and people still debate with outdated arguments in them. People come in and fight other deamons, make straw-man arguments and in general promote negative stuff like there's no tomorrow. I think you can get so much more signal from posititve examples, from "hey I did a thing" type posts, and so on. Even overhyped stuff like the claw-mania can still be useful. Yet the "I did a thing" get so overwhelmed by negativity, nitpicking and "haha not perfect means doa" type of messages. That makes me want to participate less...
kdheiwns 7mo ago
With AI running rampant, it seems security through obscurity is basically the best thing we have. Everyone knows reddit, facebook, xitter, etc so any clown can and does have bots running loose. HN is "obscure" in that most normies don't know about this place, and so it's relatively safe from the floods of spam. But I think it's just a matter of time until non-tech people start looking for those few bastions of human comments online, come across this place, and a great flood begins and it'll never be undone. After that, I guess it'll be a rise of invite-only forums like we had in the early 2000s all over again.
- ultratalk 7mo ago
  Eternal AI september.
  - JetSetIlly 7mo ago
    Eternal LLMber
- Mountain_Skies 7mo ago
  I've asked ChatGPT a question about something I read in a thread here and it responded with a comment from that thread, even though the thread was less than an hour old. HN is well known in the tech community and there are certain subjects, especially anything involving Israel or India, that nearly instantly result in a flood of comments from bad actors. HN isn't Reddit but it's also a shadow of what it once was, which is driving away more of the productive participation in favor of agenda-based posting.
  - WesolyKubeczek 7mo ago
    Note that these topics often involve comments which you can predict very easily. Internet users are like that, agenda or no. Wasn’t it in the heyday of forums that you could recognize the most prolific/annoying members by their style and vocabulary? A model should have no problem pulling such things off.
    - 7mo ago
deanc 7mo ago
The bot problem cannot be solved. Even if you strongly authenticate, people are letting bots act on their behalf (moltbook is a great example of this) and what's to stop people doing that in the future. Build your identity and reputation autonomously with the benefits that come with that. This happens now on Onlyfans too. Content creators hire agencies which in the best case outsource chatting to "customers" to armies of cheap labour in Asia, and the worst case use bots. The dead internet theory [1] is probably not just a theory anymore. HN recently made a policy to not allow AI posting and posters, but do you honestly think that's going to work? I would place a bet that a top HN poster within the next year is outed as using AI for posting on their behalf. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dead_Internet_theory https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dead_Internet_theory
- JimDabell 7mo ago
  > people are letting bots act on their behalf (moltbook is a great example of this) and what's to stop people doing that in the future. Verifiable credentials; services can get persistent pseudonymous identifiers that are linked to a real-world identity. Ban them once and they stay banned. It doesn’t matter if a person lets a bot post inauthentic content using their identity if, when they are caught, that person cannot simply register a new account. This solves a bunch of problems – online abuse, spam, bots, etc. – without telling websites who you are or governments what you do.
  - Terr_ 7mo ago
    I'd rather have a system where there's a small investment cost to making an account, but you could always make another. Imagine A system where there's a vending machine outside City Hall, you spend $X on a charity for choice, and you get a one-time, anonymous token. You can "spend" it with a forum to indicate "this is probably a person or close enough to it." Misuse of the system could be curbed by making it so that the status of a token cannot be tested non-destructively.
    - JimDabell 7mo ago
      Do you think there is a price point that locks out spammers without locking out poor people?
october8140 7mo ago
The future is human curated content. Provide the same experience people get today but without the noise. Give them just the good stuff and don't let just anyone make a post. A book has an author, a movie has a director, maybe websites can have webmasters again who filter through the garbage for you.
- kolinko 7mo ago
  human curated -> human moderated. I, for one, don't care if it's ai, or human-written. I care if it's interesting/useful.
  - kaizenb 7mo ago
    results are important, not the tools or process. (on this matter)
    - jacamera 7mo ago
      Results over time are important. Or at least they should be.
- b112 7mo ago
  Yes, precisely. This means that only sites which verify identity will have any value in the future. And by verified, that means against government ID and verified as real. No amount of sign up fee works as an alternative. Note that a site can verify identity, prevent sock puppets, ban bad actors and prevent re-registration, all while keeping that ID private. You still get a handle and publicly facing nick if you want it. The company which handles this correctly will have a big B after it. Digg actually has a chance at this. It has no users, so the outrage won't exist in the same capacity. Existing platforms will be pummeled in the market if they try to convert to this type of site, as their DAU will likely drop a thousandfold, just due to the eliminated bots. But Digg could relaunch this way. And as exhibited, this is now the only way. The age of the anonymous internet is over, it's done. People not realizing this are living in the past. Note, I don't like this, but acknowledging reality is vital. Issues with leaked databases, users, hacking of Pii are all technical and legislative issues, and not relevant to whether or not this happens. Because it will happen, and is happening. It should be noted that falsifying ID is a crime. Fake ID coupled with computer fraud laws will eventually result in hefty jail time. This is sensible, if people want a world where ecommerce, and discourse is online... and the general public does. And has exhibited a complete lack of care about privacy regardless.
shellfishgene 7mo ago
This could be positive. So far things were gamed and manipulated to some extent, with some fake content, but it was never too obvious, and a bit of a cat and mouse game with filters and whatnot. Now, it's so easy to fake content that robust systems will have to evolve, or most social media sites will become worthless, and advertisers will catch up eventually when they are paying for bot-only sites. The downside of course is that these robust systems are hard to imagine without complete loss of anonymity of the users.
- armchairhacker 7mo ago
  Web of trust weakens anonymity, but doesn’t eliminate it. - You know who your online invitees are, but not your invitees-of-invitees-of-… - You can create an account, get it invited, then create an alt account and invite it. Now the alt account is still linked to you, but others don’t know whether it’s your friend or yourself. (Importantly, you can’t evade bans with alts; if your invited users keep getting banned, you’ll be prevented from inviting more if not banned yourself)
nicbou 7mo ago
Every website that was driven by traffic is also dying. I have put nearly a decade of work into mine, and AI overviews and ChatGPT have reduced traffic by over 60%. At some point I will need to give up and find a job, and that corner of the internet will get no new original information, just rehashed slop.
nativeit 7mo ago
As someone who came of age before “the internet as you know it”, I am looking forward to all of the cancerous Web 2.0 OG slop and narcissism factories succumbing to their own fates. Let me tell you, the internet as we know it sucks, and the internet it ate 25-years ago is a marked improvement. We should be so lucky. Now go write a personal blog in plain text, and rejoice.
visarga 7mo ago
> Though it’ll be interesting to see what happens to ChatGPT and the like once the amount of quality content for them to consume slows to a trickle. Creative loop moves inside the agentic chat room, where we do learning, work, art, research, leisure, planning, and other activities. Already OpenAI is close to 1B users and puts multiple trillion tokens per day into our heads, while we put our own tokens into their logs. An experience flywheel or extended cognition wheel of planetary size. LLMs can reflect and detect which of their responses compound better in downstream activities and derive RLHF-RLVR signalling from all our interactions. One good thing is that a chat room is less about posing than a forum, but LLMs have taken to sycophancy so they are not immune, just easier to deal with than forums. And you can more easily find another LLM than a replacement speciality forum.
dartharva 7mo ago
You mean a complete collapse of social media, not the whole internet. The internet is a telecom ecosystem and has a lot more to it than just forums and link aggregators. I honestly believe it might not even be such a bad thing. People were arguably better without social networks and media, and it's perhaps better to let the cancerous thing just die and keep the internet just as a utility powering boring things like banking and academia.
- gzread 7mo ago
  What would you say are the major applications of the internet? It's used for business and academia in ways that aren't going away, yes. M2M communication will stay. Social media is the largest user-facing segment and it might not. I don't have a sense of how big these sectors are relative to each other. If the largest sectors of the internet disappear, the internet shrinks a lot.
phtrivier 7mo ago
Asking money to people in order to read stuff, and promoting the one people are actually ready to part with real money to read, is a first interesting step. (See: substack, Patreon,etc...) I know this is going to sound horrible, but : how about asking money to contribute, period ? Maybe have a free tier of a couple comments, etc... But if you want to build a troll factory, sure... Show us the cash ?
- rglullis 7mo ago
  I do believe that charging for it is one way to create some friction, but it's not enough. Twitter is full of blue checks that are just bots and automated reply guys. I'm treating now all these bots as a stressor on our defense systems, and we will end up having to learn how to build a real Web of Trust, and really up our game on the PKI side. We also need some good Zero Knowledge proof of humanity that people can tie to their Keyoxide profile, so that we can just filter out any message that is not provably associated with a human.
  - solus_factor 7mo ago
    Instead of building a Web of Trust, a better solution might be to find efficient ways of clustering people. Look how civil and insightful this discussion is. Why? Because people have different "quality", even if it's not politically correct to talk about it, we all know it intuitively. Imagine a forum, where all the HN-level people are gradually clustered together, all the rednecks with conspiracy theories, all the leftists dreaming of communism, all form their own independent echo-chambers. Yes, echo-chambers are bad, but let's face it, you won't be able to change most people's opinions anyway. Don't agree with me? Go on reddit, try saying something "controversial", like "men can't get pregnant", see how many people you would be able to convince :)
    - rglullis 7mo ago
      > magine a forum, where all (...) form their own independent echo-chambers. That would be a horrible nightmare. You are falling for the same identity politics trap of the ones you are implicitly criticizing. You being on HN makes you no better than the "others". > you won't be able to change most people's opinions anyway. Who cares about "changing most people's opinions"?
AlexandrB 7mo ago
> Will people still use ChatGPT to get product recommendations without Reddit posts and Wirecutter providing good content for those recommendations? They will try and OpenAI will sell favorable placement to manufacturers.
elphinstone 7mo ago
Perhaps they migrate into Discord and Instagram once they acquire better visual and voice capabilities.
dbmikus 7mo ago
Every website needs to add the "friend or foe" system[0] so that I can mark bots to avoid their content and mark good posters so I can filter just to theirs. [0]: https://hackersmacker.org/ https://hackersmacker.org/
- troosevelt 7mo ago
  This should be seperate from marking bots because what this really wil do is embed people into hearing only what they want, making discussion worse.
  - well_ackshually 7mo ago
    no, I truly do not want to read IHeartHitler88's opinion on jews, or donttreadonme09's bright opinions about how the economy would be better if we listened to Ayn Rand. I'll be very happy when they're out of my sight. If I want to have a miserable day, sure, I'll turn it off. Fact of the matter is, most posts on the internet are already dogshit. Now they're also populated by AI, but the point stands. Most of what you will say online is at best useless.
    - NetMageSCW 7mo ago
      >Most of what you will say online is at best useless. If that is true, you are saying far too much.
      - well_ackshually 7mo ago
        I know, it hurts. Most of what I say in this website doesn't matter. Even if it did, it's about the same thing as screaming into the void. And it applies to you too. The vast majority of what we post is vapid, useless bullshit.
- kevin_thibedeau 7mo ago
  On /. I would only mark obnoxious people as friends so I could see the friend-of-a-friend indicator and be cautious of anyone aligned with them.
rib3ye 7mo ago
Collapse of the Internet or collapse of the visual world wide web? tbh, I am a little curious to see what comes after clicking a button on a web page.
adam12 7mo ago
Yeah, we need human verification more than age verification.

dana321 7mo ago

That and most of the news being behind a paywall, which they can scrape anyway. The internet archive is my safe haven these days, i can go back and remember the old internet.

mikeocool 7mo ago
Ha yeah, I quite like the 2003 vintage.

bobsmooth 7mo ago

Unless you're allowed to say slurs without being banned, your forum will be overrun with bots. The sanitation of the internet is the perfect breeding ground for brand-safe AI promotion bots.

georgeburdell 7mo ago
4chan has bots too.
seattle_spring 7mo ago
Curious how you came to that conclusion. Anecdotally, places where you can slur to your heart's content like /r/conservative seem far more inundated with bots than other areas of Reddit. I feel like that's really saying something too, because Reddit has a really bad bot problem overall.
- direwolf20 7mo ago
  [dead]

diacritical 7mo ago

> And there’s really not much point in publishing good content anymore, since AI is just going slurp it up and regurgitate it without driving you any traffic. You just published good content knowing AI will slurp it up and not give you any traffic in return. I'm now replying to you with more content with the same expectations about AI and traffic. Why care about AI or traffic or recognition? Isn't the content the thing that matters? It's like answering technical questions in an anonymous/pseudonymous chat or forum, which I'm sure you've done, too. We do it to help others. If an AI can take my answer and spread it around without paying me or mentioning one of my random usernames I change every month or so, I would be happy. And if the AI gives me credit like "coffeecup543 originally posted that on IRC channel X 5 years ago", I couldn't care less. It would be noise to the reader. Even if the AI uses my real name, so what? The people who cared about traffic and money from their posts rarely made good content, anyway. Listicles and affiliate marketing BS and SEO optimizations and making a video that could be 1 minute into 10 minutes, or text that could've been 5 articles into a long book - all existed from before AI. With AI I actually get less of this crap - either skip it or condense it.

wibbily 7mo ago
It's two different problems. People who run review sites and blogs and such care about traffic, and not getting attribution will kill their desire to participate. People who post here and on Reddit etc. care about talking with other human beings, and feeling ignored in a sea of botspam will kill *their* desire to participate.
- NitpickLawyer 7mo ago
  > feeling ignored in a sea of botspam will kill their desire to participate. The bots are not really that bad, they're (still) pretty easy to spot and not engage with. I'm more perplexed about the negativity filled comments sections, and I'm pretty sure most posters are real grass-fed certified humans. I don't get why negative posts get so upvoted, get so popular on the front page, and people still debate with outdated arguments in them. People come in and fight other deamons, make straw-man arguments and in general promote negative stuff like there's no tomorrow. I think you can get so much more signal from posititve examples, from "hey I did a thing" type posts, and so on. Even overhyped stuff like the claw-mania can still be useful. Yet the "I did a thing" get so overwhelmed by negativity, nitpicking and "haha not perfect means doa" type of messages. That makes me want to participate less...

kdheiwns 7mo ago

With AI running rampant, it seems security through obscurity is basically the best thing we have. Everyone knows reddit, facebook, xitter, etc so any clown can and does have bots running loose. HN is "obscure" in that most normies don't know about this place, and so it's relatively safe from the floods of spam. But I think it's just a matter of time until non-tech people start looking for those few bastions of human comments online, come across this place, and a great flood begins and it'll never be undone. After that, I guess it'll be a rise of invite-only forums like we had in the early 2000s all over again.

ultratalk 7mo ago
Eternal AI september.
- JetSetIlly 7mo ago
  Eternal LLMber
Mountain_Skies 7mo ago
I've asked ChatGPT a question about something I read in a thread here and it responded with a comment from that thread, even though the thread was less than an hour old. HN is well known in the tech community and there are certain subjects, especially anything involving Israel or India, that nearly instantly result in a flood of comments from bad actors. HN isn't Reddit but it's also a shadow of what it once was, which is driving away more of the productive participation in favor of agenda-based posting.
- WesolyKubeczek 7mo ago
  Note that these topics often involve comments which you can predict very easily. Internet users are like that, agenda or no. Wasn’t it in the heyday of forums that you could recognize the most prolific/annoying members by their style and vocabulary? A model should have no problem pulling such things off.
  - 7mo ago

deanc 7mo ago

The bot problem cannot be solved. Even if you strongly authenticate, people are letting bots act on their behalf (moltbook is a great example of this) and what's to stop people doing that in the future. Build your identity and reputation autonomously with the benefits that come with that. This happens now on Onlyfans too. Content creators hire agencies which in the best case outsource chatting to "customers" to armies of cheap labour in Asia, and the worst case use bots. The dead internet theory [1] is probably not just a theory anymore. HN recently made a policy to not allow AI posting and posters, but do you honestly think that's going to work? I would place a bet that a top HN poster within the next year is outed as using AI for posting on their behalf. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dead_Internet_theory https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dead_Internet_theory

JimDabell 7mo ago
> people are letting bots act on their behalf (moltbook is a great example of this) and what's to stop people doing that in the future. Verifiable credentials; services can get persistent pseudonymous identifiers that are linked to a real-world identity. Ban them once and they stay banned. It doesn’t matter if a person lets a bot post inauthentic content using their identity if, when they are caught, that person cannot simply register a new account. This solves a bunch of problems – online abuse, spam, bots, etc. – without telling websites who you are or governments what you do.
- Terr_ 7mo ago
  I'd rather have a system where there's a small investment cost to making an account, but you could always make another. Imagine A system where there's a vending machine outside City Hall, you spend $X on a charity for choice, and you get a one-time, anonymous token. You can "spend" it with a forum to indicate "this is probably a person or close enough to it." Misuse of the system could be curbed by making it so that the status of a token cannot be tested non-destructively.
  - JimDabell 7mo ago
    Do you think there is a price point that locks out spammers without locking out poor people?

october8140 7mo ago

The future is human curated content. Provide the same experience people get today but without the noise. Give them just the good stuff and don't let just anyone make a post. A book has an author, a movie has a director, maybe websites can have webmasters again who filter through the garbage for you.

kolinko 7mo ago
human curated -> human moderated. I, for one, don't care if it's ai, or human-written. I care if it's interesting/useful.
- kaizenb 7mo ago
  results are important, not the tools or process. (on this matter)
  - jacamera 7mo ago
    Results over time are important. Or at least they should be.
b112 7mo ago
Yes, precisely. This means that only sites which verify identity will have any value in the future. And by verified, that means against government ID and verified as real. No amount of sign up fee works as an alternative. Note that a site can verify identity, prevent sock puppets, ban bad actors and prevent re-registration, all while keeping that ID private. You still get a handle and publicly facing nick if you want it. The company which handles this correctly will have a big B after it. Digg actually has a chance at this. It has no users, so the outrage won't exist in the same capacity. Existing platforms will be pummeled in the market if they try to convert to this type of site, as their DAU will likely drop a thousandfold, just due to the eliminated bots. But Digg could relaunch this way. And as exhibited, this is now the only way. The age of the anonymous internet is over, it's done. People not realizing this are living in the past. Note, I don't like this, but acknowledging reality is vital. Issues with leaked databases, users, hacking of Pii are all technical and legislative issues, and not relevant to whether or not this happens. Because it will happen, and is happening. It should be noted that falsifying ID is a crime. Fake ID coupled with computer fraud laws will eventually result in hefty jail time. This is sensible, if people want a world where ecommerce, and discourse is online... and the general public does. And has exhibited a complete lack of care about privacy regardless.

shellfishgene 7mo ago

This could be positive. So far things were gamed and manipulated to some extent, with some fake content, but it was never too obvious, and a bit of a cat and mouse game with filters and whatnot. Now, it's so easy to fake content that robust systems will have to evolve, or most social media sites will become worthless, and advertisers will catch up eventually when they are paying for bot-only sites. The downside of course is that these robust systems are hard to imagine without complete loss of anonymity of the users.

armchairhacker 7mo ago
Web of trust weakens anonymity, but doesn’t eliminate it. - You know who your online invitees are, but not your invitees-of-invitees-of-… - You can create an account, get it invited, then create an alt account and invite it. Now the alt account is still linked to you, but others don’t know whether it’s your friend or yourself. (Importantly, you can’t evade bans with alts; if your invited users keep getting banned, you’ll be prevented from inviting more if not banned yourself)

nicbou 7mo ago

Every website that was driven by traffic is also dying. I have put nearly a decade of work into mine, and AI overviews and ChatGPT have reduced traffic by over 60%. At some point I will need to give up and find a job, and that corner of the internet will get no new original information, just rehashed slop.

nativeit 7mo ago

As someone who came of age before “the internet as you know it”, I am looking forward to all of the cancerous Web 2.0 OG slop and narcissism factories succumbing to their own fates. Let me tell you, the internet as we know it sucks, and the internet it ate 25-years ago is a marked improvement. We should be so lucky. Now go write a personal blog in plain text, and rejoice.

visarga 7mo ago

> Though it’ll be interesting to see what happens to ChatGPT and the like once the amount of quality content for them to consume slows to a trickle. Creative loop moves inside the agentic chat room, where we do learning, work, art, research, leisure, planning, and other activities. Already OpenAI is close to 1B users and puts multiple trillion tokens per day into our heads, while we put our own tokens into their logs. An experience flywheel or extended cognition wheel of planetary size. LLMs can reflect and detect which of their responses compound better in downstream activities and derive RLHF-RLVR signalling from all our interactions. One good thing is that a chat room is less about posing than a forum, but LLMs have taken to sycophancy so they are not immune, just easier to deal with than forums. And you can more easily find another LLM than a replacement speciality forum.

dartharva 7mo ago

You mean a complete collapse of social media, not the whole internet. The internet is a telecom ecosystem and has a lot more to it than just forums and link aggregators. I honestly believe it might not even be such a bad thing. People were arguably better without social networks and media, and it's perhaps better to let the cancerous thing just die and keep the internet just as a utility powering boring things like banking and academia.

gzread 7mo ago
What would you say are the major applications of the internet? It's used for business and academia in ways that aren't going away, yes. M2M communication will stay. Social media is the largest user-facing segment and it might not. I don't have a sense of how big these sectors are relative to each other. If the largest sectors of the internet disappear, the internet shrinks a lot.

phtrivier 7mo ago

Asking money to people in order to read stuff, and promoting the one people are actually ready to part with real money to read, is a first interesting step. (See: substack, Patreon,etc...) I know this is going to sound horrible, but : how about asking money to contribute, period ? Maybe have a free tier of a couple comments, etc... But if you want to build a troll factory, sure... Show us the cash ?

rglullis 7mo ago
I do believe that charging for it is one way to create some friction, but it's not enough. Twitter is full of blue checks that are just bots and automated reply guys. I'm treating now all these bots as a stressor on our defense systems, and we will end up having to learn how to build a real Web of Trust, and really up our game on the PKI side. We also need some good Zero Knowledge proof of humanity that people can tie to their Keyoxide profile, so that we can just filter out any message that is not provably associated with a human.
- solus_factor 7mo ago
  Instead of building a Web of Trust, a better solution might be to find efficient ways of clustering people. Look how civil and insightful this discussion is. Why? Because people have different "quality", even if it's not politically correct to talk about it, we all know it intuitively. Imagine a forum, where all the HN-level people are gradually clustered together, all the rednecks with conspiracy theories, all the leftists dreaming of communism, all form their own independent echo-chambers. Yes, echo-chambers are bad, but let's face it, you won't be able to change most people's opinions anyway. Don't agree with me? Go on reddit, try saying something "controversial", like "men can't get pregnant", see how many people you would be able to convince :)
  - rglullis 7mo ago
    > magine a forum, where all (...) form their own independent echo-chambers. That would be a horrible nightmare. You are falling for the same identity politics trap of the ones you are implicitly criticizing. You being on HN makes you no better than the "others". > you won't be able to change most people's opinions anyway. Who cares about "changing most people's opinions"?

AlexandrB 7mo ago

> Will people still use ChatGPT to get product recommendations without Reddit posts and Wirecutter providing good content for those recommendations? They will try and OpenAI will sell favorable placement to manufacturers.

elphinstone 7mo ago

Perhaps they migrate into Discord and Instagram once they acquire better visual and voice capabilities.

dbmikus 7mo ago

Every website needs to add the "friend or foe" system[0] so that I can mark bots to avoid their content and mark good posters so I can filter just to theirs. [0]: https://hackersmacker.org/ https://hackersmacker.org/

troosevelt 7mo ago
This should be seperate from marking bots because what this really wil do is embed people into hearing only what they want, making discussion worse.
- well_ackshually 7mo ago
  no, I truly do not want to read IHeartHitler88's opinion on jews, or donttreadonme09's bright opinions about how the economy would be better if we listened to Ayn Rand. I'll be very happy when they're out of my sight. If I want to have a miserable day, sure, I'll turn it off. Fact of the matter is, most posts on the internet are already dogshit. Now they're also populated by AI, but the point stands. Most of what you will say online is at best useless.
  - NetMageSCW 7mo ago
    >Most of what you will say online is at best useless. If that is true, you are saying far too much.
    - well_ackshually 7mo ago
      I know, it hurts. Most of what I say in this website doesn't matter. Even if it did, it's about the same thing as screaming into the void. And it applies to you too. The vast majority of what we post is vapid, useless bullshit.
kevin_thibedeau 7mo ago
On /. I would only mark obnoxious people as friends so I could see the friend-of-a-friend indicator and be cautious of anyone aligned with them.

rib3ye 7mo ago

Collapse of the Internet or collapse of the visual world wide web? tbh, I am a little curious to see what comes after clicking a button on a web page.

adam12 7mo ago

Yeah, we need human verification more than age verification.