Posted by panic 5 hours ago
> The commons of the internet are probably already lost
That depends. If people don't push back against AI then yes. Skynet would have won without the rebel forces. And the rebels are there - just lurking. It needs a critical threshold of anger before they will push back against the AI-Skynet 3.0 slop.
Enshittification strikes again.
And it doesn't have appear to have any means to rid itself of the bad apples. A sad situation all around.
For example, a huge fraction of the world's spam originates from Russia, India and Bangladesh. And we know that a lot of the romance scams are perpetrated by Chinese gangs operating out of quasi-lawless parts of Myanmar. Not so much from, say, Switzerland.
"A report by the Global Initiative on Transnational Organised Crime (based on United States Institute of Peace findings) estimated that revenues from “pig-butchering” cyber scams in Laos were around US $10.9 billion, which would be *equivalent to more than two-thirds (≈67–70 %) of formal Lao GDP in a recent year."
https://globalinitiative.net/wp-content/uploads/2025/05/GI-T...
For that reason, and because of limited English proficiency, Russian netizens rarely visit foreign resources these days, except for a few platforms without a good Russian replacement like Instagram and YouTube (both banned btw, only via a VPN), where they usually stay mostly within their Russian-speaking communities. I'm not sure why any of them would be the reason the Internet as a whole has supposedly become low-trust. The OP in question is some SEO company using an LLM to churn out sites with "unique content." We already had this stuff 20 years ago, except the "unique content" was generated by scripts that replaced words with synonyms. Nothing really new here.
Chinese have their own internet anyway- it was a shock to me at first just how little the average Chinese citizen really cares about Western culture or society. They have their own problems ofcourse but it has nothing to do with us
No it's the tens of billions of mostly American capital going into AI data centers and large bullshit models.
Though all that stuff is a very different thing from what's being discussed in this thread.
If you trust your government's propaganda that is used to jusitfy "hackbacks" and buying 0-days on the darkweb that fucks us all.
Don't get me wrong the west isn't doing much to enforce Russian or Chinese complaints either. It's really just a messy diplomatic situation all around.
The difference is that there historically weren't much to be gained by annoying or misleading people on the internet, so trolling is mainly motivated by personal satisfaction. Two things changed since then: (1) most people now use the internet as the primary information source, and (2) the cost of creating bullshit has fallen precipitously.
The motivation for content online has changed over the last 20 years from people wanting to share things they're interested in to one where the primary goal is to collect eyeballs to make a profit in some way.
Isn't that what's driving the pollution of the Internet by LLMs?
> Enshittification, also known as crapification and platform decay, is a process in which two-sided online products and services decline in quality over time. Initially, vendors create high-quality offerings to attract users, then they degrade those offerings to better serve business customers, and finally degrade their services to both users and business customers to maximize short-term profits for shareholders.
Also see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enshittification#Impact which talks of the broadening of the usage of that term.
asserted without evidence and likely false.
The consumer internet has become platformized, and the dominant platforms are going through enshittification: early user subsidy, then advertiser/seller favoritism, now rent extraction that is degrading outcomes for everyone.
I'd normally be the first to agree with and push your point about language evolving, but it's not time to apply that to a neologism this young.
It literally started meaning that hours after it was first posted to HN and being used. Sorry, that's just how language works. Enshittification got enshittified. Deal with it and move on.
Maybe it wasn't literally hours, but it was really fast. I remember noting how quickly people began to complain about it being used "improperly." The earliest instance I could find was this thread[0] from 2023 where user Gunax complained about it. I couldn't find an earlier reference in Algolia, it probably exists but I honestly don't care enough to put in the effort.
[0]https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36297336
>and also in that "things become shittier" was and is still a perfectly common expression
...perfectly encapsulated and described by the term "enshittification." Which is why people use it for that now. It's more descriptive in the general sense than it is as a specific term of art. You're complaining that a word that means "the process of turning to shit" is being used to describe "the process of turning to shit." What did people expect to happen? If you want to keep it as a precise and technical term of art, keep calling it "platform decay." A shit joke is not a technical, precise term of art.
You can be as much of a prescriptivist crank about this as you want, it doesn't matter. "Enshittification" now refers to any process by which things "turn to shit."
But here's what you're basically implying:
A writer was thinking about the ways things get shittier, decided that there was an actual pattern (at least when it came to online services) that came up again and again, such that "shittified" or "shittier" didn't really describe the most insidious part of it, and coined "enshittification" as a neologism that captured both the "shittier/shittified" aspects and also the academic overtones of "enXXXXication" ...
... and within less than 3 years, sloppy use of the neologism rendered it undifferentiatable from its roots, and the language without a simple term to describe the specific, capitalistic, corporatist process that the writer had noticed.
I can be anti-prescriptivist in general without losing my opposition to that specific process.
The process of language drift is accelerated exponentially by the internet. 5-10 years and upwards is an obsolete timescale, these changes can happen in months now, sometimes faster depending on the community.
1. Don't believe everything or anything you read or see on the Internet.
2. Never share personal information about yourself online.
3. Every man was a man, every woman was a man and every teenager is an FBI agent.
I have yet to find a problem with the Internet thats isn't because of breaking one of the above rules.
My point being you couldn't ever trust the Internet before anyways.
Now you can collate a list of thousands of titles and simply instruct an LLM to produce garbage for each one and publish it on the internet. This is a real change, IMO.
3a. ... and nobody knows if you're a dog.
Google did all the innovation it needed to and ever is going to. It needed to be broken up a decade ago. We can still do it now. Though I don't know how much it will save, especially if we don't also go after Apple, and Meta, and Microsoft.
AI needs to be kept up to date with training data. But that same training data is now poisoned with AI hallucination. Labelling AI generated media helps reduce the amount of AI poison in the training set, and keeps the AI more useful.
It also simply undermines the quality of search, both for human users and for AI tool use.
SEO is a slippery slope on both sides because a little bit is good for everyone. Google wanted pages it could easily extract meaning from, publishers wanted traffic, and users wanted relevant search results. Now there's a prisoners dilemma where once someone starts abusing SEO, it's a race to the bottom.
I reject this emphatically. Google should never have been in the business of shaping internet content. Perhaps they should have even gone out of their way to avoid doing so. Without Google (or a better-performing competitor) acquiescing to the game, there is no SEO market.
On the internet no one knows if you're a dog, human or a moltbot.
And at that point does it even matter? Zuckerberg wins.
Great piece btw
Yes, there was: becoming the primary contributor by volume to Scots Wikipedia (which probably doesn't have many contributors to begin with, but there you are). Some people just have to have attention, no matter how.
What we have here is worse; LLMs give you bullshit. A bullshitter does not care if something is true or false, it just uses rhetoric to convince you of something.
I am far from being someone nostalgic about the old internet, or the world in general back then. Things in many ways sucked back then, we just tend to forget how exactly they sucked. But honestly, a LLM-driven internet is mostly pointless. If what I am to read online is AI generated crap, why bother reading it on websites and not just reading it straight from a chatbot already?