Top
Best
New

Posted by skwee357 1 day ago

Dead Internet Theory(kudmitry.com)
657 points | 678 commentspage 9
ainthusiast 15 hours ago|
:(
stogot 1 day ago||
> What if people DO USE em-dashes in real life?

I do and so do a number of others, and I like Oxford commas too.

secretsatan 1 day ago||
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.

therobots927 1 day ago|
That’s why we need a parallel internet.
femto 1 day ago|||
The "old" Internet is still there in parallel with the "new" Internet. It's just been swamped by the large volume of "new" stuff. In the 90s the Internet was small and before crawler based search engines you had to find things manually and maintain your own list of URLs to get back to things.

Ignore the search engines, ignore all the large companies and you're left with the "Old Internet". It's inconvenient and it's hard work to find things, but that's how it was (and is).

therobots927 1 day ago||
Well then in that case, maybe we need a “vetted internet”. Like the opposite of the dark web, this would only index vetted websites, scanned for AI slop, and with optional parental controls, equipped with customized filters that leverage LLMs to classify content into unwanted categories. It would require a monthly subscription fee to maintain but would be a nonprofit model.
femto 1 day ago||
That's the original "Yahoo Directory", which was a manually curated page.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yahoo#Founding

The original Yahoo doesn't exist (outside archive.org), but I'm guessing would be a keen person or two out there maintaining a replacement. It would probably be disappointing, as manually curated lists work best when the curator's interests are similar to your own.

What you want might be Kagi Search with the AI filtering on? I've never used Kagi, so I could be off with that suggestion.

efreak 10 hours ago||
The original dmoz/open directory project/Yahoo directory database is being hosted (but not maintained; I don't think it's being updated) at odp.org, which also includes links to other directory projects at http://odp.org/Computers/Internet/Searching/Directories
ageedizzle 1 day ago||||
What safeguards would be in place to prevent this parallel internet from also, with time, becoming a dead internet?
Frotag 1 day ago|||
Social stigma against any monetary incentives. (I recognize the irony in saying this on HN.)
malfist 1 day ago||||
When it becomes a dead parallel internet, we'll make a internet'' and go again
asdff 1 day ago|||
Plenty of crass jokes advertisers don’t want in line with their content is how 4chan avoided commercialization.
pupppet 1 day ago||||
A̶O̶L̶ Humans Online
JKCalhoun 1 day ago||||
Internot.
secretsatan 1 day ago|||
What would stop them from scraping it and infecting it?
hackable_sand 1 day ago|||
It's bimodal

Like wearing a mask on one's head to ward tigers.

aashu_xd 1 day ago||
bots are everywhere and Ai bots making this theory very true.
yosef123 23 hours ago||
As much as many are against it, couldn't this be yet another argument for social network wide digital identity verification? I think that this is an argument that holds: to avoid AI slop / bots → require government ID
greenavocado 19 hours ago||
This is the original post which started it all in 2021: https://forum.agoraroad.com/index.php?threads/dead-internet-...
Torwald 1 day ago||
You know, one thing we could do is to get the costs for energy usage sorted out. Like, people who use a lot data-center electricity, pay accordingly.

If AI would cost you what it actually costs, then you would use it more carefully and for better purposes.

jmyeet 1 day ago||
Given the climate, I've been thinking about this issue a lot. I'd say that broadly there are two groups of inauthentic actors online:

1. People who live in poorer countries who simply know how to rage bait and are trying to earn an income. In many such countries $200 in ad revenue from Twitter, for example, is significant; and

2. Organized bot farms who are pushing a given message or scam. These too tend to be operated out of poorer countries because it's cheaper.

Last month, Twitter kind of exposed this accidentally with an interesting feature where it showed account location with no warning whatsoever. Interestingly, showing the country in the profile got disabled from government accounts after it raised some serious questions [1].

So I started thinking about the technical feasibility of showing location (country or state for large countries) on all public social media ccounts. The obvious defense is to use a VPN in the country you want to appear to be from but I think that's a solvable problem.

Another thing I read was about NVidia's efforts to combat "smuggling" of GPUs to China with location verification [2]. The idea is fairly simple. You send a challenge and measure the latency. VPNs can't hide latency.

So every now and again the Twitter or IG or Tiktok server would answer an API request with a challenge, which couldn't be antiticpated and would also be secure, being part of the HTTPS traffic. The client would respond to the challenge and if the latency was 100-150ms consistently despite showing a location of Virginia then you can deem them inauthentic and basically just downrank all their content.

There's more to it of course. A lot is in the details. Like you'd have to handle verified accounts and people traveling and high-latency networks (eg Starlink).

You might say "well the phone farms will move to the US". That might be true but it makes it more expensive and easier to police.

It feels like a solvable problem.

[1]: https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/x-new-location-transpar...

[2]: https://aihola.com/article/nvidia-gpu-location-verification-...

jibal 1 day ago||
Such posts are identifiable and rare, disproving Dead Internet Theory (for now).
thinkingemote 1 day ago|
for now.

Even this submission is out of date as images no longer have the mangled hand issues.

We are actually blessed right now in that it's easy to spot AI posts. In 6 months or so, things will be much harder. We are cooked.

jibal 13 hours ago||
AI being harder to spot still won't make dead internet crackpottery true. As for us being cooked ... in so many ways, including literally due to AGW, exacerbated by LLM compute and by the orange demento's policies.
foxes 1 day ago|
Are em dashes in language models particularly close to a start token or something? Somehow letting the model continue to keep outputting.
semilin 1 day ago|
I think it's mainly a matter of clarity as long embedded clauses without obvious visual delimiting can be hard to read and thus are discouraged in professional writing aiming for ease of reading from a wide audience. LLMs are trained on such a style.
More comments...