So interesting this is right next to https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46673809 on the HN homepage. Really demonstrates how polarizing AI is.

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

I have similar issue - I think in "dead internet", 1) people do not build custom forums for small social groups; 2) rule enforcement does not follow the structure of past where such small group followed deep conduct and 3) in large pools and aggregators of forums and discussion groups, the rules to be followed are like small bots: they cannot rely on the context. I personally use AI on my page for a good purpose, because we actually get on sync - but it's not giving up my creative work; it's proofreading, adding some references and facts and sometime very cocksure of it's style like "people won't read it".

"you are absolutely right" mught come from non native english speaker. For instance, in Italian you say something like that quite often. It's not common in english, but it's common for people to be bad at a second language.

  1. Speech "bubbles" where your preferred language is heavily influenced by where you grew up. What sounds common to you might sound uncommon in Canada.
  2. People have been using LLMs for years at this point so what is common for them might be influenced by what they read from LLM output. So while initially it was an LLM colloquialism it could have been popularized by LLM usage.

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.

So, put together a few things:

1) to satisfy investors, companies require continual growth in engagement and users

2) the population isn't rocketing upwards on a year-over-year basis

3) the % of the population that is online has saturated

4) there are only so many hours in the day

Inevitably, in order to maintain growth in engagement (comments, posts, likes, etc.), it will have to become automated. Are we there already? Maybe. Regardless, any system which requires continual growth has to automate, and the investor expectations for the internet economy require it, and therefore it has or soon will automate.

Not saying it's not bad, just that it's not surprising.

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.

I’m a bit scared of this theory, i think it will be true, ai will eat the internet, then they’ll paywall it.

Innovation outside of rich coorps will end. No one will visit forums, innovation will die in a vacuum, only the richest will have access to what the internet was, raw innovation will be mined through EULAs, people striving to make things will just have ideas stolen as a matter of course.

The explosion of fake people on Instagram (which has become just a front-door for Other Form of "social networks"), as well as fake videos in general, will likely push people away from the Internet as a means to interact with other people.

I think old school meetups, user groups, etc, will come back again, and then, more private communication channels between these groups (due to geographic distance).

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.