Top
Best
New

Posted by skwee357 1 day ago

Dead Internet Theory(kudmitry.com)
651 points | 668 commentspage 7
rickcarlino 1 day ago|
Much like someone from Schaumburg Illinois can say they are from Chicago, Hacker News can call itself social media. You fly that flag. Don’t let anyone stop you.
E39M5S62 1 day ago|
If you can ride the Metra from your city to Chicago proper, you're in Chicago!
vitaelabitur 16 hours ago||
You are absolutely right — Let me know if you want to read my personal anecdote on "Dead Internet Theory"...

Yeah, I especially hate how paranoid everyone is (but rightly so). I am constantly suspicious of others' perfectly original work being AI, and others are constantly suspicious of my work being AI.

anonnon 1 day ago||
Reddit has a small number of what I hesitatingly might call "practical" subreddits, where people can go to get tech support, medical advice, or similar fare. To what extent are the questions and requests being posted to these subreddits also the product of bot activity? For example, there are a number of medical subreddits, where verified (supposedly) professionals effectively volunteer a bit of their free time to answer people's questions, often just consoling the "worried well" or providing a second opinion that echos the first, but occasionally helping catch a possible medical emergency before it gets out of hand. Are these well-meaning people wasting their time answering bots?
AuthAuth 1 day ago||
These subs are dying out. Reddit has losts its gatekeepy culture a long time ago and now subs are getting burnt out by waves of low effort posters treating the site like its instagram. Going through new posts on any practical subreddit the response to 99% of them should be "please provide more information on what your issue is and what you have tried to resolve it".

I cant do reddit anymore, it does my head in. Lemmy has been far more pleasant as there is still good posting etiquette.

nitwit005 1 day ago||
I'm not aware of anyone bothering to create bots that can pass the checking particular subreddits do. It'd be fairly involved to do so.

For licensed professions, they have registries where you can look people up and confirm their status. The bot might need to carry out a somewhat involved fraud if they're checking.

anonnon 1 day ago||
I wasn't suggesting the people answering are bots, only that the verification is done by the mods and is somewhat opaque. My concern was just that these well-meaning people might be wasting their time answering botspew. And then inevitably, when they come to realize, or even just strongly suspect, that they're interacting with bots, they'll desist altogether (if the volume of botspew doesn't burn them out first), which means the actual humans seeking assistance now have to go somewhere else.

Also on subreddits functioning as support groups for certain diseases, you'll see posts that just don't quite add up, at least if you know somewhat about the disease (because you or a loved one have it). Maybe they're "zebras" with a highly atypical presentation (e.g., very early age of onset), or maybe they're "Munchies." Or maybe LLMs are posting their spurious accounts of their cancer or neurdegenerative disease diagnosis, to which well-meaning humans actually afflicted with the condition respond (probably along side bots) with their sympathy and suggestions.

nitwit005 22 hours ago||
Ah, apologies, misread your post.
DeathArrow 23 hours ago||
If you show signs of literacy, people will just assume you are a bot.
andyish 15 hours ago||
I'm so torn with verification on social media. But i'm surprised companies whose main source of revenue is ads and original content aren't putting something akin to 'verified human' tags on users for all to see. Not just to show authenticity but also to be able to say to ad buyers: your ads have been seen by x real users.

I mean sure, the next step will probably be "your ads have been seen by x real users and here are their names, emails, and mobile numbers" :(

As well as verification there must be teams at Reddit/LinkedIn/Whereever working ways to identify ai content so it can be de-ranked.

Salgat 13 hours ago||
I'm not saying the entire internet needs to be this way, but I would love to see the expansion of non-anonymous/verified accounts used on web platforms. Take ycombinator for example; some of the best comments come from users with known identities and reputations tied to their accounts, rather than anonymous folks who can spew whatever nonsense without repercussion (and in some cases aren't even real people).
skwee357 12 hours ago|
On the other hand, take LinkedIn for example, and you get the bottom of corporate AI-slop.

I agree that anonymization makes people more hostile to others, but I doubt the de-anonymization is the solution. Old school forums and IRC channels were, _mostly_, safe because they were (a) small, (b) local, and (c) usually had offline meetups.

Salgat 3 hours ago||
On the plus side, LinkedIn isn't full of hate and division like the mess that is Facebook. Everyone is still acting accountable for their words.
neoden 1 day ago||
> LLMs are just probabilistic next-token generators

How sick and tired I am of this take. Okay, people are just bags of bones plus slightly electrified boxes with fat and liquid.

ulf-77723 13 hours ago||
Trying to figure out if human or bot seems to be a fun game for a lot of people. I was being accused on Reddit for being a bot (of course I’m not) and English is not my mother tongue - yet people see what they want to see.

Maybe the future will be dystopian and talking to a bot to achieve a given task will be a skill? When we reach the point that people actually hate bots, maybe that will be a turning point?

notarobot123 18 hours ago||
> I don’t use social networks (and no, Hacker News is not a social network)

If you define social networks as a graph of connections, fair enough - there's no graph. It is social media though.

HN is Social in the sense that it relies on (mostly) humans considering what other humans would find interesting and posting/commenting for for the social value (and karma) that generates. Text and links are obviously media.

There seems to be an insinuation that HN isn't in the same category as other aggregators and algorithmic feeds. It's not always easy to detect but the bots are definitely among us. HN isn't immune to slop, its just fairly good at filtering the obvious stuff.

akkad33 1 day ago|
What's wrong with using AI to write code?
nilslindemann 20 hours ago|
Nothing if you fix its errors and it fixes yours.
More comments...