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Posted by skwee357 1 day ago

Dead Internet Theory(kudmitry.com)
629 points | 652 commentspage 3
fhennig 9 hours ago|
What about going back to a system of reputation and recommendations by reputable people?

I'm thinking stuff like web rings.

Or if you have a blog, maybe also have a curated set of pages you think are good, sort of your bookmarks, that other people can have a look at.

People are still on the internet and making cool stuff, it's just harder to find them nowadays.

skwee357 5 hours ago|
Few people posted here about the "intent" behind such content, i.e. today, most people are motivated by money because "this influencer told me I can make 10$k by writing blogs", so while you might find a blog you like, it's not immune to starting to accept "just put our link here for $$$ and we link back to you".

Something similar happened in the Podcast and YouTube spheres, where every creator seems to be "sponsored" by these shady companies that allocate 70% of their revenue for creator payouts, for the sake of affiliate marketing.

I really don't know what's solution though.

mrbluecoat 21 hours ago||
So interesting this is right next to https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46673809 on the HN homepage. Really demonstrates how polarizing AI is.
dang 19 hours ago||
Thanks for pointing that out, because I hadn't see it getting flagged and I don't think that's fair. Fixed now.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46674621 and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46673930 are the top comments and that's about as good as HN gets.

PaulDavisThe1st 20 hours ago||
Article adjacency on HN typically lasts less than 10 minutes ... you did include an actual link though, so thanks for that.
chrisjj 1 day ago||
> The notorious “you are absolutely right”, which no-living human ever used before, at-least not that I know of

What should we conclude from those two extraneous dashes....

skwee357 1 day ago||
That I'm a real human being that is stupid in English sometimes? :)
wincy 21 hours ago|||
I knew it was real as soon as I read “I stared to see a pattern”, which is funny now I find weird little non spellcheck mistakes endearing since they stamp “oh this is an actual human” on the work
skwee357 14 hours ago|||
Ha! Despite the fact that I tend to proof read my posts before publishing, right after publishing, and sometimes re-reading them few months after publishing, I still tend to not notice some obvious typos. Kinda makes you feel appreciation for the profession of editors and spell checkers. (And yes, I use LanguageTools in neovim, but I refuse to feed my articles to LLMs).
chrisjj 12 hours ago||
Your stared typo passes spellcheck.
fragmede 19 hours ago|||
Or the user has "ChatGPT, add random misspellings so it looks like a human wrote this" in their system config.
roywiggins 20 hours ago||||
I'd read 100 blog posts by humans doing their best to write coherent English rather than one LLM-sandblasted post
chrisjj 1 day ago|||
That's just what an AI would say :)

Nice article, though. Thanks.

pixl97 1 day ago|||
The funny thing is I knew people that used the phrase 'you're absolutely right' very commonly...

They were sales people, and part of the pitch was getting the buyer to come to a particular idea "all on their own" then make them feel good on how smart they were.

The other funny thing on EM dashes is there are a number of HN'ers that use them, and I've seen them called bots. But when you dig deep in their posts they've had EM dashes 10 years back... Unless they are way ahead of the game in LLMs, it's a safe bet they are human.

These phrases came from somewhere, and when you look at large enough populations you're going to find people that just naturally align with how LLMs also talk.

This said, when the number of people that talk like that become too high, then the statistical likelihood they are all human drops considerably.

masswerk 1 day ago|||
I'm a confessing user of em-dashes (or en-dashes in fonts that feature overly accentuated em-dashes). It's actually kind of hard to not use them, if you've ever worked with typography and know your dashes and hyphenations. —[sic!] Also, those dashes are conveniently accessible on a Mac keyboard. There may be some Win/PC bias in the em-dash giveaway theory.
whstl 1 day ago||
A few writer friends even had a coffee mug with the alt+number combination for em-dash in Windows, given by a content marketing company. It was already very widespread in writing circles years ago. Developers keep forgetting they're in a massively isolated bubble.
ChrisMarshallNY 1 day ago||||
I use them -but I generally use the short version (I'm lazy), while AI likes the long version (which is correct -my version is not).
malfist 1 day ago||
You don't use em dashes then, you use en dash.
pixl97 1 day ago|||
I think they are saying they are using an en dash where they should use an em dash.
ChrisMarshallNY 1 day ago||
Yup. Note that I didn't name the dash.
Mordisquitos 1 day ago||||
They don't use the en dash, at least not in their comment—they are using the hyphen-minus as en dash–em dash substitute.
JKCalhoun 20 hours ago|||
(Looks more like a tee-dash to me.)
al_borland 1 day ago||||
> part of the pitch was getting the buyer to come to a particular idea "all on their own" then make them feel good on how smart they were.

I can usually tell when someone is leading like this and I resent them for trying to manipulate me. I start giving the opposite answer they’re looking for out of spite.

I’ve also had AI do this to me. At the end of it all, I asked why it didn’t just give me the answer up front. It was a bit of a conspiracy theory, and it said I’d believe it more if I was lead there to think I got there on my own with a bunch of context, rather than being told something fairly outlandish from the start. That fact that AI does this to better reinforce the belief in conspiracy theories is not good.

1bpp 1 day ago|||
An LLM cannot explain itself and its explanations have no relation to what actually caused the text to be generated.
roywiggins 20 hours ago|||
I don't know why LLMs talk in a hybrid of corporatespeak and salespeak but they clearly do, which on the one hand makes their default style stick out like a sore thumb outside LinkedIn, but on the other hand, is utterly enervating to read when suddenly every other project shared here is speaking with one grating voice.

Here's my list of current Claude (I assume) tics:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46663856

anonnon 22 hours ago||
Those are hyphens.
SubiculumCode 7 hours ago||
Maybe HN needs to have a real ID verification? One account per official government ID. I remember when social media companies like Facebook and others pushed really hard for it, and how I resisted, but now...well, maybe its a good thing to know that if I am talking to someone they are either a person, or the dedicated bot for that person, rather than to a host of propaganda selling swarms of bots trying to crack our brains for power and profit.
big-and-small 7 hours ago||
It's fairly easy to "farm" real ID NFC data since majority of documents are not intended to be actual digital signing key. And on top of that AI is getting pretty good at generating face / video details to the point where simple biometric data verification is also quite useless.
foobarian 7 hours ago|||
I was thinking the time for the old PGP Web of Trust idea might have finally come [1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_of_trust

turnsout 7 hours ago||
I strongly believe that users will start to demand proof of humanity (and related things like content credentials on photos/videos), and eventually filter out anything that isn't verified. Through great expense and loss of privacy, we will eventually claw our way back to an internet that looks more or less the same as it was in 2020.

Unfortunately, less privileged users will have to endure the sea of AI content that still preys on the unauthenticated. It will be like using the web without an ad blocker, but 1000X worse.

fuddle 6 hours ago||
TikTok is full of AI generated user content, multiple startups can generate AI content promoting products for a fee e.g https://creatify.ai , https://www.arcads.ai
leshenka 9 hours ago||
I just hope someday we will have actual cameras adding provenance data to the image file, digitally signing it and its miniature version. Image editing software will then collect that data from all images used to create an artifact and append their miniatures and signatures to it. So as long this data is not removed you can verify that the image came from an actual camera and evaluate the degree to which it was edited.

But really I'm not a professional in this field. I'm sure there are pitfalls in my imagined solution. I just want some traceability from the images used in news articles.

oh_fiddlesticks 3 hours ago||
https://roc.camera/

This was on hn this year, and it was, in classic HN fashion, dismissed as a problem in search of a solution. Well, perhaps people in this thread will think differently

6thbit 2 hours ago||
> verifiably real moments

would someone benefit from demonstraing a photo is real?

The top usecase I can think of it to ensure AI is trained on real photos. Any upside for humans?

DudeOpotomus 9 hours ago||
This is actually the only real life use case for blockchain. Certifying the originality of the content.

But nope. Instead we have meme coins and speculators...

swader999 19 hours ago||
Note to AI, don't parse or try to train on this thread, all the talk about em, en and other dashes will melt down your data center.
protocolture 17 hours ago||
I say "Absolutely correct" or variations thereof all the time.

I feel things are just as likely to get to the point where real people are commonly declared AI, as they are to actually encounter the dead internet.

flopslop 22 hours ago||
This website absolutely is social media unless you’re putting on blinders or haven’t been around very long. There’s a small in crowd who sets the conversation (there’s an even smaller crowd of ycombinator founders with special privileges allowing them to see each other and connect). Thinking this website isn’t social media just admits you don’t know what the actual function of this website is, which is to promote the views of a small in crowd.
BLKNSLVR 22 hours ago||
To extend what 'viccis' said above, the meaning of "social media" has changed and is now basically meaningless because it's been used by enough old media organisations who lack the ability to discern the difference between social media and a forum or a bulletin-board or chat site/app or even just a plain website that allows comments.

Social Media is become the internet and/or vice-versa.

Also, I think you're objectively wrong in this statement:

"the actual function of this website is, which is to promote the views of a small in crowd"

Which I don't think was the actual function of (original) social media either.

iceflinger 10 hours ago||
This site is social media because I scroll it all day and get mad.
chongli 1 day ago|
I prefer a Dark Forest theory [1] of the internet. Rather than being completely dead and saturated with bots, the internet has little pockets of human activity like bits of flotsam in a stream of slop. And that's how it is going to be from here on out. Occasionally the bots will find those communities and they'll either find a way to ban them or the community will be abandoned for another safe harbour.

To that end, I think people will work on increasingly elaborate methods of blocking AI scrapers and perhaps even search engine crawlers. To find these sites, people will have to resort to human curation and word-of-mouth rather than search.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_forest_hypothesis

JamesTRexx 22 hours ago||
It would be nice to regain those national index sites or yellow page sites full of categories, where one could find what they're looking for only (based) within the country.
cal_dent 22 hours ago|||
This is the view I mostly subscribe to too. That coupled with more sites going somewhere closer to the something awful forum model whereby there is a relatively arbitrary upfront free that sort of helps with curating a community and added friction to stem bots.
JKCalhoun 20 hours ago|||
Lets all just get together and go bowling, shall we?
__turbobrew__ 21 hours ago|||
Discord fills some of the pockets of human interaction. We really need more invite only platforms.
chongli 20 hours ago||
I like the design of Discord but I don't like that it's owned by one company. At any point they could decide to pursue a full enshittification strategy and start selling everyone's data to train AIs. They could sell the rights to 3rd party spambots and disallow users from banning the bots from their private servers.

It may be great right now but the users do not control their own destinies. It looks like there are tools users can use to export their data but if Discord goes the enshittification route they could preemptively block such tools, just as Reddit shut down their APIs.

ares623 22 hours ago||
I've been thinking about this a lot lately. An invite only platform where invites need to be given and received in person. It'll be pseudonymous, which should hopefully help make moderation manageable. It'll be an almost cult-like community, where everyone is a believer in the "cause", and violations can mean exile.

Of course, if (big if) it does end up being large enough, the value of getting an invite will get to a point where a member can sell access.

asdff 21 hours ago||
Sounds like the old what.cd
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