It used to be Internet back when the name was still written in the capital first letter. The barrier to utilize the Internet was high enough that mostly only the genuinely curious and thoughtful people a) got past it and b) did have the persistence to find interesting stuff to read and write about on it.

I remember when TV and magazines were full of slop of the day at the time. Human-generated, empty, meaningless, "entertainment" slop. The internet was a thousand times more interesting. I thought why would anyone watch a crappy movie or show on TV or cable, created by mediocre people for mere commercial purposes, when you could connect to a lone soul on the other side of the globe and have intelligent conversations with this person, or people, or read pages/articles/news they had published and participate in this digital society. It was ethereal and wonderful, something unlike anything else before.

Then the masses got online. Gradually, the interesting stuff got washed in the cracks of commercial internet, still existing but mostly just being overshadowed by everything else. Commercial agenda, advertisements, entertainment, company PR campaigns disguised as articles: all the slop you could get without even touching AI. With subcultures moving from Usenet to web forums, or from writing web articles to posting on Facebook, the barrier got lowered until there was no barrier and all the good stuff got mixed with the demands and supplies of everything average. Earlier, there always were a handful of people in the digital avenues of communication who didn't belong but they could be managed; nowadays the digital avenues of communication are open for everyone and consequently you get every kind of people in, without any barriers.

And where there are masses there are huge incentives to profit from them. This is why internet is no longer an infrastructure for the information superhighway but for distributing entertainment and profiting from it. First, transferring data got automated and was dirt cheap, now creating content is being automated and becomes dirt cheap. The new slop oozes out of AI. The common denominator of internet is so low the smart people get lost in all the easily accessed action. Further, smart people themselves are now succumbing in it because to shield yourself from all the crap that is the commercial slop internet you basically have to revert to being a semi-offline hermit, and that goes against all the curiosity and stimuli deeply associated with smart people.

What could be the next differentiator? It used to be knowledge and skill: you had to be a smart person to know enough and learn enough to get access. But now all that gets automated so fast that it proves to be no barrier.

Attention span might be a good metric to filter people into a new service, realm, or society eventhough, admittedly, it is shortening for everyone but smart people would still win.

Earlier solutions such as Usenet and IRC haven't died but they're only used by the old-timers. It's a shame because then the gathering would miss all the smart people grown in the current social media culture: world changes and what worked in the 90's is no longer relevant except for people who were there in the 90's.

Reverting to in-real-life societies could work but doesn't scale world-wide and the world is global now. Maybe some kind of "nerdbook": an open, p2p, non-commercial, not centrally controlled, feedless facebook clone could implement a digital club of smart people.

The best part of setting up a service for smart people is that it does not need to prioritize scaling.

Reminds me of those times in Germany when mainstream media and people with decades in academia used the term "Putin Versteher" (Person who gets Putin, Putin 'understander') ad nauseaum ... it was hilarious.

Unrelated to that, sometime last year, I searched "in" ChatGPT for occult stuff in the middle of a sleepless night and it returned a story about "The Discordians", some dudes who ganged up in a bowling hall in the 70's and took over media and politics, starting in the US and growing globally.

Musk's "Daddy N** Heil Hitler" greeting, JD's and A. Heart's public court hearings, the Kushners being heavily involved with the recruitment department of the Epsteins Islands and their "little Euphoria" clubs as well as Epstein's "Gugu Gaga Cupid" list of friends and friends of friends, it's all somewhat connected to "The Discordians", apparently.

It was a fun "hallucination" in between short bits on Voodoo, Lovecraft and stuff one rarely hears about at all.

Recently someone accused me of being a clanker on Hackernews (firstly lmao but secondly wow) because of my "username" (not sure how it's relevant, When I had created this account I had felt a moral obligation to learn/ask for help to improving and improve I did whether its in writing skills or learning about tech)

Then I had posted another comment on Another thread in here which was talking about something similar. The earlier comment got flagged and my response to it but this stayed. Now someone else saw that comment and accused me of being AI again

This pissed me off because I got called AI twice in 24 hours. That made me want to quit hackernews because you can see from my comments that I write long comments (partially because they act as my mini blog and I just like being authentic me, this is me just writing my thoughts with a keyboard :)

To say that what I write is AI feels such a high disrespect to me because I have spent some hours thinking about some of the comments I made here & I don't really care for the upvotes. It's just this place is mine and these thoughts are mine. You can know me and verify I am real by just reading through the comments.

And then getting called AI.... oof, Anyways, I created a tell HN: I got called clanker twice where I wrote the previous thing which got flagged but I am literally not kidding but the first comment came from an AI generated bot itself (completely new account) I think 2 minute or something afterwards which literally just said "cool"

Going to their profile, they were promoting some AI shit like fkimage or something (Intentionally not saying the real website because I don't want those bots to get any ragebait attention to conversions on their websites)

So you just saw the whole situation of irony here.

I immediately built myself a bluesky thread creator where I can write a long message and it would automatically loop or something (ironically built via claude because I don't know how browser extensions are made) just so that I can now write things in bluesky too.

Funny thing is I used to defend Hackernews and glorify it a few days ago when an much more experienced guy called HN like 4chan.

I am a teenager, I don't know why I like saying this but the point is, most teenagers aren't like me (that I know), it has both its ups and downs (I should study chemistry right now) but Hackernews culture was something that inspired me to being the guy who feels confidence in tinkering/making computers "do" what he wants (mostly for personal use/prototyping so I do use some parts of AI, you can read one of my other comments on why I believe even as an AI hater, prototyping might make sense with AI/personal-use for the most part, my opinion's nuanced)

I came to hackernews because I wanted to escape dead internet theory in the first place. I saw people doing some crazy things in here reading comments this long while commuting from school was a vibe.

I am probably gonna migrate to lemmy/bluesky/the federated land. My issue with them is that the ratio of political messages : tech content is few (And I love me some geopolitics but quite frankly I am tired and I just want to relax)

But the lure of Hackernews is way too much, which is why you still see me here :)

I don't really know what the community can do about bots.

Another part is that there is this model on Localllama which I discovered the other day which works opposite (so it can convert LLM looking text to human and actually bypasses some bot checking and also the -- I think)

Grok (I hate grok) produces some insanely real looking texts, it still has -- but I do feel like if one even removes it and modifies it just a bit (whether using localllama or others), you got yourself genuine propaganda machine.

I was part of a Discord AI server and I was shocked to hear that people had built their own LLM/finetunes and running them and they actually experimented with 2-3 people and none were able to detect.

I genuinely don't know how to prevents bots in here and how to prevent false positives.

I lost my mind 3 days ago when this happened. Had to calm myself and I am trying to use Hackernews (less) frequently, I just don't know what to say but I hope y'all realize how it put a bad taste into my mouth & why I feel a little unengaged now.

Honestly, I am feeling like writing my own blogs to my website from my previous hackernews comments. They might deserve a better place too.

Oops wrote way too long of a message, so sorry about that man but I just went with the flow and thanks man for writing this comment so that i can finally have this one comment to try to explain how I was feeling man.

The 'Dead Internet' (specifically AI-generated SEO slop) has effectively broken traditional keyword search (BM25/TF-IDF). Bad actors can now generate thousands of product descriptions that mathematically match a user's query perfectly but are semantically garbage/fake.

We had to pivot our entire discovery stack to Semantic Search (Vector Embeddings) sooner than planned. Not just for better recommendations, but as an adversarial filter.

When you match based on intent vectors rather than token overlap, the 'synthetic noise' gets filtered out naturally because the machine understands the context, not just the string match. Semantic search is becoming the only firewall against the dead internet.