Dead Internet Theory

https://kudmitry.com/articles/dead-internet-theory/

by skwee357 • 6 months ago

697 674 6 months ago

kudmitry.com

chrisjj3• 6 months 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....

skwee3577• 6 months ago

That I'm a real human being that is stupid in English sometimes? :)

chrisjj3• 6 months ago

That's just what an AI would say :)

Nice article, though. Thanks.

wincy2• 6 months 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

roywiggins3• 6 months ago

I'd read 100 blog posts by humans doing their best to write coherent English rather than one LLM-sandblasted post

pixl972• 6 months 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.

al_borland2• 6 months 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.

ChrisMarshallNY2• 6 months 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).

masswerk• 6 months 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.

roywiggins3• 6 months 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

_zagj3• 6 months ago

Those are hyphens.

lizknope3• 6 months ago

Bots have ruined reddit but that is what the owners wanted.

The API protest in 2023 took away tools from moderators. I noticed increased bot activity after that.

The IPO in 2024 means that they need to increase revenue to justify the stock price. So they allow even more bots to increase traffic which drives up ad revenue. I think they purposely make the search engine bad to encourage people to make more posts which increases page views and ad revenue. If it was easy to find an answer then they would get less money.

At this point I think reddit themselves are creating the bots. The posts and questions are so repetitive. I've unsubscribed to a bunch of subs because of this.

al_borland2• 6 months ago

Wouldn’t taking the API away hurt the bots?

metalliqaz• 6 months ago

the bots just scrape

alex11387• 6 months ago

Steve Huffman is an awful CEO. With that being said I've always been curious how the rest of the industry (for example, the web-wide practice of autoplaying videos) was constructed to catch up with Facebook's fraudulent metrics. Their IPO (and Zuckerberg is certainly known to lie about things) was possibly fraud and we know that they lied about their own video metrics (to the point it's suspected CollegeHumor shut down because of it)

clearleaf2• 6 months ago

It's been really sad to see reddit go like this because it was pretty much the last bastion of the human internet. I hated reddit back in the day but later got into it for that reason. It's why all our web searches turned into "cake recipe reddit." But boy did they throw it in the garbage fast. One of their new features is you can read AI generated questions with AI generated answers. What could the purpose of that possibly be? We still have the old posts... for the most part (a lot of answers were purged during the protest) but what's left of it is also slipping away fast for various reasons. Maybe I'll try to get back into gemini protocol or something.

georgeburdell• 6 months ago

I see a retreat to the boutique internet. I recently went back to a gaming-focused website, founded in the late 90s, after a decade. No bots there, as most people have a reputation of some kind

alex11387• 6 months ago

I really want to see people who ruin functional services made into pariahs

I don't care how aggressive this sounds; name and shame.

Huffman should never be allowed to work in the industry again after what he and others did to Reddit (as you say, last bastion of the internet)

Zuckerberg should never be allowed after trapping people in his service and then selectively hiding posts (just for starters. He's never been a particularly nice guy)

Youtube and also Google - because I suspect they might share a censorship architecture... oh, boy. (But we have to remove + from searches! Our social network is called Google+! What do you mean "ruining the internet"?)

lifetimerubyist2• 6 months ago

Isn't showing ads to bots...pointless?

lizknope3• 6 months ago

If the advertisers don't know the difference between a human and a bot then they will still pay money to display the ad.

SchemaLoad• 6 months ago

The biggest change reddit made was ignoring subscriptions and just showing anything the algorithm thinks you will like. Resulting in complete no name subreddits showing on your front page. Meaning moderators no longer control content for quality, which is both a good and bad thing, but it means more garbage makes it to your front page.

bananapub• 6 months ago

why would you look at the "front page" if you only wanted to see things you subscribed to? that's what the "latest" and whatever the other one is for.

they have definitely made reddit far worse in lots of ways, but not this one.

chongli3• 6 months ago

I can't remember the last time I was on the Reddit front page and I use the site pretty much daily. I only look at specific subreddit pages (barely a fraction of what I'm subscribed to).

These are some pretty niche communities with only a few dozen comments per day at most. If Reddit becomes inhospitable to them then I'll abandon the site entirely.

imglorp• 6 months ago

allow even more bots to increase traffic which drives up ad revenue

Isn't that just fraud?

OGEnthusiast• 6 months ago

It is. Reddit is probably 99% fraud/bots at this point.

clearleaf2• 6 months ago

Yes registering fake views is fraud against ad networks. Ad networks love it though because they need those fake clicks to defraud advertisers in turn. Paying to have ads viewed by bots is just paying to have electricity and compute resources burned for no reason. Eventually the wrong person will find out about this and I think that's why Google's been acting like there's no tomorrow.

nitwit0054• 6 months ago

I doubt it's true though. Everyone has something they can track besides total ad views. A reddit bot had no reason to click ads and do things on the destination website. It's there to make posts.

Spooky23• 6 months ago

I’m think you are overestimating humanity.

At the moment I am on a personal finance kick. Once in awhile I find myself in the bogleheads Reddit. If you don’t know bogleheads have a cult-like worship of the founder of vanguard, whose advice, shockingly, is to buy index funds and never sell.

Most of it is people arguing about VOO vs VTI vs VT. (lol) But people come in with their crazy scenarios, which are all varied too much to be a bot, although the answer could easily be given by one!

swed4202• 6 months ago

Bots have ruined reddit but that is what the owners wanted.

Adding the option to hide profile comments/posts was also a terrible move for several reasons.

b65e8bee43c2ed0• 6 months ago

given the timing, it has definitely been done to obscure bot activity, but the side effect of denying the usual suspects the opportunity to comb through ten years of your comments to find a wrongthink they can use to dismiss everything you've just said, regardless of how irrelevant it is, is unironically a good thing. I've seen many instances of their impotent rage about it since it's been implemented, and each time it brings a smile to my face.

asdff3• 6 months ago

You can still see them in search. The bots don’t seem to bother hiding posts though.

vinyl7• 6 months ago

So they allow even more bots to increase traffic which drives up ad revenue

When are people who buy ads going to realize that the majority of their online ad spend is going towards bots rather than human eye balls who will actually buy their product? I'm very surprised there hasn't been a massive lawsuite against Google, Facebook, Reddit, etc. for misleading and essentially scamming ad buyers

Underphil• 6 months ago

Is this really true though? Don't they have ways of tracking the returns on advertising investment? I would have thought that after a certain amount of time these ad buys would show themselves as worthless if they actually were.

secretsatan2• 6 months 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.

therobots9272• 6 months ago

That’s why we need a parallel internet.

pupppet• 6 months ago

A̶O̶L̶ Humans Online

ageedizzle• 6 months ago

What safeguards would be in place to prevent this parallel internet from also, with time, becoming a dead internet?

secretsatan2• 6 months ago

What would stop them from scraping it and infecting it?

femto2• 6 months 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).

JKCalhoun6• 6 months ago

Internot.

CommenterPerson• 6 months ago

Good post, Thank you. May I say Dead, Toxic Internet? With social media adding the toxicity. The Enshittification theory by Cory Doctorow sums up the process of how this unfolds (look it up on Wikipedia).

gmuslera• 6 months ago

In one hand, we are past the Turing Test definition if we can't distinguish if we are talking with an AI or a real human or more things that were rampant on internet previously, like spam and scam campaigns, targeted opinion manipulation, or a lot of other things that weren't, let's say, an honest opinion of the single person that could be identified with an account.

In the other hand, that we can't tell don't speak so good about AIs as speak so bad about most of our (at least online) interaction. How much of the (Thinking Fast and Slow) System 2 I'm putting in this words? How much is repeating and combining patterns giving a direction pretty much like a LLM does? In the end, that is what most of internet interactions are comprised of, done directly by humans, algorithms or other ways.

There are bits and pieces of exceptions to that rule, and maybe closer to the beginning, before widespread use, there was a bigger percentage, but today, in the big numbers the usage is not so different from what LLMs does.

callc• 6 months ago

Recently I’ve been thinking about the text form of communication, and how it plays with our psychology. In no particular order here’s what I think:

1. Text is a very compressed / low information method of communication.

2. Text inherently has some “authority” and “validity”, because:

3. We’ve grown up to internalize that text is written by a human. Someone spend the effort to think and write down their thoughts, and probably put some effort into making sure what they said is not obviously incorrect.

Intimately this ties into LLMs on text being an easier problem to trick us into thinking that they are intelligent than an AI system in a physical robot that needs to speak and articulate physically. We give it the benefit of the doubt.

I’ve already had some odd phone calls recently where I have a really hard time distinguishing if I’m talking to a robot or a human…

GMoromisato4• 6 months ago

This is absolutely why LLMs are so disruptive. It used to be that a long, written paper was like a proof-of-work that the author thought about the problem. Now that connection is broken.

One consequence, IMHO, is that we won't value long papers anymore. Instead, we will want very dense, high-bandwidth writing that the author stakes consequences (monetary, reputational, etc.) on its validity.

optimalsolver• 6 months ago

on one hand

on the other hand

Kelteseth• 6 months ago

Are you implying that this was an AI bot comment?

jaccola• 6 months ago

But that’s not the Turing Test. The human who can be fooled in the Turing test was explicitly called the “interrogator”.

To pass the Turing test the AI would have to be indistinguishable from a human to the person interrogating it in a back and forth conversation. Simply being fooled by some generated content does not count (if it did, this was passed decades ago).

No LLM/AI system today can pass the Turing test.

zahlman11• 6 months ago

I've encountered people who seem to understand properly how the test works, and still think that current LLM passes it easily.

Most of them come across to me like they would think ELIZA passes it, if they weren't told up front that they were testing ELIZA.

rickcarlino• 6 months 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• 6 months ago

If you can ride the Metra from your city to Chicago proper, you're in Chicago!

ex3ndr• 6 months ago

I am curious when we will land dead github theory? I am looking at growing of self hosted projects and it seems many of them are simply AI slop now or slowly moving there.

heliumtera• 6 months ago

But what about the children improving their productivity 10x? What about their workflows?

Think of the children!!!

f311a• 6 months ago

The use of em-dashes, which on most keyboard require a special key-combination that most people don’t know

Most people probably don't know, but I think on HN at least half of the users know how to do it.

It sucks to do this on Windows, but at least on Mac it's super easy and the shortcut makes perfect sense.

bakugo• 6 months ago

Now I'm actually curious to see statistics regarding the usage of em-dashes on HN before and after AI took over. The data is public, right? I'd do it myself, but unfortunately I'm lazy.

dang3• 6 months ago

Someone did just that!

Show HN: Hacker News em dash user leaderboard pre-ChatGPT - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45071722 - Aug 2025 (266 comments)

... which I'm proud to say originated here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45046883.

chao-2• 6 months ago

I don't have strong negative feelings about the era of LLM writing, but I resent that it has taken the em-dash from me. I have long used them as a strong disjunctive pause, stronger than a semicolon. I have gone back to semicolons after many instances of my comments or writing being dismissed as AI.

I will still sometimes use a pair of them for an abrupt appositive that stands out more than commas, as this seems to trigger people's AI radar less?

kelseydh3• 6 months ago

One way to use em-dash and look human is to write it incorrectly with two hyphens: --

myself248• 6 months ago

At this point I almost look forward to some idiot calling me AI because they don't like what I said. I should start keeping score.

JKCalhoun6• 6 months ago

I still use 'em. Fuck what everybody else thinks.

d4rkp4ttern3• 6 months ago

First time I’m hearing about a shortcut for this. I always use 2 hyphens. Is that not considered an em-dash ?

FridayoLeary2• 6 months ago

You are absolutely right — most internet users don't know the specific keyboard combination to make an em dash and substitute it with two hyphens. On some websites it is automatically converted into an em dash. If you would like to know more about this important punctuation symbol and it's significance in identitifying ai writing, please let me know.

keyle• 6 months ago

No it's not the same. Note there are medium and long as well.

That said I always use -- myself. I don't think about pressing some keyboard combo to emphasise a point.

rsch• 6 months ago

I can’t be the only one who has ever read https://practicaltypography.com/hyphens-and-dashes.html

kelseydh3• 6 months ago

This would have been very helpful three years ago, before I permanently stopped using em-dashes to not have my writing confused with LLM's.

numpad0• 6 months ago

I've been left wondering when is the world going to find out about Input Method Editor.

It lets users type all sorts of ‡s, (*´ڡ`●)s, 2026/01/19s, by name, on Windows, Mac, Linux, through pc101, standard dvorak, your custom qmk config, anywhere without much prior knowledge. All it takes is to have a little proto-AI that can range from floppy sizes to at most few hundred MBs in size, rewriting your input somewhere between the physical keyboard and text input API.

If I wanted em–dashes, I can do just that instantly – I'm on Windows and I don't know what are the key combinations. Doesn't matter. I say "emdash" and here be an em-dash. There should be the equivalent to this thing for everybody.

chongli3• 6 months 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

ares623• 6 months 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.

asdff3• 6 months ago

Sounds like the old what.cd

JamesTRexx• 6 months 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_dent2• 6 months 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.

__turbobrew__• 6 months ago

Discord fills some of the pockets of human interaction. We really need more invite only platforms.

chongli3• 6 months 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.

JKCalhoun6• 6 months ago

Lets all just get together and go bowling, shall we?

_zagj3• 6 months 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• 6 months 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.

nitwit0054• 6 months 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.

_zagj3• 6 months 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.

flopslop• 6 months 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.

BLKNSLVR4• 6 months 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.

iceflinger2• 6 months ago

This site is social media because I scroll it all day and get mad.

kelseydh3• 6 months ago

What is now certain is Dead StackOverflow Theory.

viccis• 6 months ago

which is not a social network, but I’m tired of arguing with people online about it

I know this was a throwaway parenthetical, but I agree 100%. I don't know when the meaning of "social media" went from "internet based medium for socializing with people you know IRL" to a catchall for any online forum like reddit, but one result of this semantic shift is that it takes attention away from the fact that the former type is all but obliterated now.

ianburrell• 6 months ago

The social networks have all added public media and algorithms. I read explanation that because friends don't produce enough content to keep engaged so they added public feeds. I'm disappointed that there isn't a private Bluesky/Mastodon. I also want an algorithm that shows the best of what following posted since last checked so I can keep up.

LexiMax2• 6 months ago

the former type is all but obliterated now.

Discord is the 9,000lb gorilla of this form of social media, and it's actually quietly one of the largest social platforms on the internet. There's clearly a desire for these kinds of spaces, and Discord seems to be filling it.

While it stinks that it is controlled by one big company, it's quite nice that its communities are invite-only by default and largely moderated by actual flesh-and-blood users. There's no single public shared social space, which means there's no one shared social feed to get hooked on.

Pretty much all of my former IRC/Forum buddies have migrated to Discord, and when the site goes south (not if, it's going to go public eventually, we all know how this story plays out), we expect that we'll be using an alternative that is shaped very much like it, such as Matrix.

dartharva• 6 months ago

I'd say WhatsApp is a better example

PaulDavisThe1st4• 6 months ago

Discord is the 9,000lb gorilla of this form of social media, and it's actually quietly one of the largest social platforms on the internet. There's clearly a desire for these kinds of spaces, and Discord seems to be filling it.

The "former type" had to do with online socializing with people you know IRL.

I have never seen anything on Discord that matches this description.

alex11387• 6 months ago

900 lb. Gorillas don't weigh 9000 lbs

roywiggins3• 6 months ago

It's even worse than that, TikTok & Instagram are labeled "social media" despite, I'd wager, most users never actually posting anything anymore. Nobody really socializes on short form video platforms any more than they do YouTube. It's just media. At least forums are social, sort of.

munificent3• 6 months ago

"internet based medium for socializing with people you know IRL"

"Social media" never meant that. We've forgotten already, but the original term was "social network" and the way sites worked back then is that everyone was contributing more or less original content. It would then be shared automatically to your network of friends. It was like texting but automatically broadcast to your contact list.

Then Facebook and others pivoted towards "resharing" content and it became less "what are my friends doing" and more "I want to watch random media" and your friends sharing it just became an input into the popularity algorithm. At that point, it became "social media".

HN is neither since there's no way to friend people or broadcast comments. It's just a forum where most threads are links, like Reddit.

hnbad• 6 months ago

I think most people only recall becoming aware of Facebook when it was already so widespread that people talked about it as "the site you go to to find out what extended family members and people you haven't spoken to in years are up to".

Let's remember that the original idea was to connect with people in your college/university. I faintly recall this time period because I tried to sign up for it only to find out that while there had been an announcement that it was opened up internationally, it still only let you sign up with a dot EDU email address, which none of the universities in my country had.

In the early years "social media" was a lot more about having a place to express yourself or share your ideas and opinions so other people you know could check up on them. Many remember the GIF anarchy and crimes against HTML of Geocities but that aesthetic also carried over to MySpace while sites like Live Journal or Tumblr more heavily emphasized prose. This was all also in the context of a more open "blogosphere" where (mostly) tech nerds would run their own blogs and connect intentionally much like "webrings" did in the earlier days for private homepages and such before search engine indexing mostly obliterated their main use.

Facebook pretty much created modern "social media" by creating the global "timeline", forcing users to compete with each other (and corporate brands) for each other's attention while also focusing the experience more on consumption and "reaction" than creation and self-expression. This in turn resulted in more "engagement" which eventually led to algorithmic timelines trying to optimize for engagement and ad placement / "suggested content".

HN actually follows the "link aggregator" or "news aggregator" lineage of sites like Reddit, Digg, Fark, etc (there were also "bookmark aggregators" like stumbleupon but most of those died out to). In terms of social interactions it's more like e.g. the Slashdot comment section even though the "feed" is somewhat "engagement driven" like on social media sites. But as you said, it lacks all the features that would normally be expected like the ability to "curate" your timeline (or in fact, having a personalized view of the timeline at all) or being able to "follow" specific people. You can't even block people.

flomo• 6 months ago

You know Meta, the "social media company" came out and said their users spend less than 10% of the time interacting with people they actually know?

"Social Media" had become a euphemism for 'scrolling entertainment, ragebait and cats' and has nothing to do 'being social'. There is NO difference between modern reddit and facebook in that sense. (Less than 5% of users are on old.reddit, the majority is subject to the algorithm.)

alex11387• 6 months ago

It would be nice if the social media company actually showed their posts in the feed

theshrike795• 6 months ago

I don't go to Meta properties to interact with anyone anymore.

Our extended family has a WhatsApp group, but that's about it. I'm not convincing a bunch of 60+ year olds to switch to a new platform they're not used to.

Instagram has been read-only for me for half a decade, I still poke my head on FB now and then to spy on people I used to know.

bandrami3• 6 months ago

I'll come clean and say I've still never tried Discord and I feel like I must not be understanding the concept. It really looks like it's IRC but hosted by some commercial company and requiring their client to use and with extremely tenuous privacy guarantees. I figure I must be missing something because I can't understand why that's so popular when IRC is still there.

krawcu• 6 months ago

it's very easy to make a friend server that has all you basically need: sending messages, images/files and being able to talk with voice channels.

you can also invite a music bot or host your own that will join the voice channel with a song that you requested

lmm2• 6 months ago

IRC has many many usability problems which I'm sure you're about to give a "quite trivial curlftpfs" explaination for why they're unimportant - missing messages if you're offline, inconsistent standards for user accounts/authentication, no consensus on how even basic rich text should work much less sending images, inconsistent standards for voice calls that tend to break in the presence of NAT, same thing for file transfers...

Ekaros3• 6 months ago

It is IRC, but with modern features and no channel splits. It also adds voice chats and video sharing. Trade off is that privacy and commercial platform. On other hand it is very much simpler to use. IRC is a mess of usability really. Discord has much better user experience for new users.

qludes• 6 months ago

Because it's the equivalent to running a private irc server plus logging with forum features, voice comms, image hosting, authentication and bouncers for all your users. With a working client on multiple platforms (unlike IRC and jabber that never really took off on mobile).

iceflinger2• 6 months ago

I was a heavy IRC user in 2015 before Discord and even though I personally prefer using IRC, it was obvious it would take over the communities I was for a few reasons:

1. People don't understand or want to setup a client that isn't just loading some page in their browser 2. People want to post images and see the images they posted without clicking through a link, in some communities images might be shared more than text. 3. People want a persistent chat history they can easily access from multiple devices/notifications etc 4. Voice chat, many IRC communities would run a tandem mumble server too.

All of these are solvable for a tech-savvy enough IRC user, but Discord gets you all of this out of the box with barely more than an email account.

There are probably more, but these are the biggest reasons why it felt like within a year I was idling in channels by myself. You might not want discord but the friction vs irc was so low that the network effect pretty much killed most of IRC.

theshrike795• 6 months ago

Discord has a better client and doesn't require an always-on connection to stay connected.

Yes IRCv3 exists and can do the backlog filling thing. Nobody uses that.

If "privacy" was an issue for you, you do know that IRC server admins could and still can see every single message on their servers unless everyone is using an encryption plugin on the channel?

The thing that Discord replicates with IRC is limited audience. Unless the server is public, I know I can be more open because I trust the people in there not to be assholes and share private stuff with others.

PurpleRamen• 6 months ago

I don't know when the meaning of "social media" went from "internet based medium for socializing with people you know IRL" to a catchall

5 minutes after the first social network became famous. It never really has been just about knowing people IRL, that was only in the beginning, until people started connecting with everyone and their mother.

Now it's about people and them connecting and socializing. If there are persons, then it's social. HN has profiles where you can "follow" people, thus, it's social on a minimal level. Though, we could dispute whether it's just media or a mature network. Because there obviously are notable differences in terms of social-related features between HN or Facebook.

dvt• 6 months ago

I liked em dashes before they were cool—and I always copy-pasted them from Google. Sucks that I can't really do that anymore lest I be confused for a robot; I guess semicolons will have to do.

celsius1414• 6 months ago

On a Mac keyboard, Option-Shift-hyphen gives an em-dash. It’s muscle memory now after decades. For the true connoisseurs, Option-hyphen does an en-dash, mostly used for number ranges (e.g. 2000–2022). On iOS, double-hyphens can auto-correct to em-dashes.

I’ve definitely been reducing my day-to-day use of em-dashes the last year due to the negative AI association, but also because I decided I was overusing them even before that emerged.

This will hopefully give me more energy for campaigns to champion the interrobang (‽) and to reintroduce the letter thorn (Þ) to English.

stackghost• 6 months ago

Back in the heyday of ICQ, before emoji when we used emoticons uphill in the snow both ways, all the cool kids used :Þ instead of :P

cellis• 6 months ago

I've also used em-dashes since before chatgpt but not on HN -- because a double dash is easier to type. However in my notes app they're everywhere, because Mac autoconverts double dashes to em-dashes.

geerlingguy• 6 months ago

I'm always reminded how much simpler typography is on the Mac using the Option key when I'm on Windows and have to look up how to type [almost any special character].

Instead of modifier plus keypress, it's modifier, and a 4 digit combination that I'll never remember.

derf_• 6 months ago

And on X, an em-dash (—) is Compose, hyphen, hyphen, hyphen. An en-dash (–) is Compose, hyphen, hyphen, period. I never even needed to look these up. They're literally the first things I tried given a basic knowledge of the Compose idiom (which you can pretty much guess from the name "Compose").

npn• 6 months ago

you can absolutely still use `--`, but you need to add spaces around them.

parpfish• 6 months ago

I’m an em-dash lover but always (and still do) type the double hyphen because that’s what I was taught for APA style years ago

weddingbell• 6 months ago

What secret is hidden in the phrase “you are absolutely right”? Using Google's web browser translation yields the mixed Hindi and Korean sentence: “당신 말이 बिल्कुल 맞아요.”

BLKNSLVR4• 6 months ago

I'm not really replying to the article, just going tangentially from the "dead internet theory" topic, but I was thinking about when we might see the equivalent for roads: the dead road theory.

In X amount of time a significant majority of road traffic will be bots in the drivers seat (figuratively), and a majority of said traffic won't even have a human on-board. It will be deliveries of goods and food.

I look forward to the various security mechanisms required of this new paradigm (in the way that someone looks forward to the tightening spiral into dystopia).

Morromist• 6 months ago

I mean maybe someday we'll have the technlogy to work from home too. Clearly we aren't there yet according to the bosses who make us commute. One can dream... one can dream.

BLKNSLVR4• 6 months ago

Anecdote-only

I actually prefer to work in the office, it's easier for me to have separate physical spaces to represent the separate roles in my life and thus conduct those roles. It's extra effort for me to apply role X where I would normally be applying role Y.

Having said that, some of the most productive developers I work with I barely see in the office. It works for them to not have to go through that whole ... ceremoniality ... required of coming into the office. They would quit on the spot if they were forced to come back into the office even only twice a week, and the company would be so much worse off without them. By not forcing them to come into the office, they come in on their own volition and therefore do not resent it and therefore do not (or are slower to) resent their company of employment.

BobBagwill• 6 months ago

The Last of the Winnebagos by Connie Willis

TacticalCoder• 6 months ago

In x amount of time a significant majority of road traffic will be bots in the drivers seat (figuratively), and a majority of said traffic won't even have a human on-board. It will be deliveries of goods and food.

Nah. That's assuming most cars today, with literal, not figurative, humans are delivering goods and food. But they're not: most cars during traffic hours and by very very very far are just delivering groceries-less people from point A to point B. In the morning: delivering human (usually by said human) to work. Delivering human to school. Delivering human back to home. Delivering human back from school.

disqard• 6 months ago

You might like David Mason's short story "Road Stop":

https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/61309

WD-42• 6 months ago

Not a dystopia for me. I’m a cyclist that’s been hit by 3 cars. I believe we will look back at the time when we allowed emotional and easily distracted meat bags behind the wheels of fast moving multiple ton kinetic weapons for what it is: barbarism.

bigstrat20032• 6 months ago

That is not really a defensible position. Most drivers don't ever hit someone with their car. There is nothing "barbaric" about the system we have with cars. Imperfect, sure. But not barbaric.

throwaway132448• 6 months ago

You should spend some more time driving in the environments you cycle in. This will make you better at anticipating the situations that lead to you getting hit.

nottorp4• 6 months ago

Maybe take a look at how the Netherlands solved this problem. Hint: not with "AI" drivers.

By the way, I don't bike but I walk about everywhere lately. So to hyperbolize as it's the custom on the internets, i live in constant fear not of cars, but of super holier than you eco cyclists running me over. (Yea, I'm not in NL.)

foxes• 6 months ago

Are em dashes in language models particularly close to a start token or something? Somehow letting the model continue to keep outputting.

semilin2• 6 months 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.

pants22• 6 months ago

Are there any social media sites where AI is effectively banned? I know it's not an easy problem but I haven't seen a site even try yet. There's a ton of things you can do to make it harder for bots, ie analyze image metadata, users' keyboard and mouse actions, etc.

8organicbits4• 6 months ago

I don't know of any, but my strategy to avoid slop has been to read more long-form content, especially on blogs. When you subscribe over RSS, you've vetted the author as someone who's writing you like, which presumably means they don't post AI slop. If you discover slop, then you unsubscribe. No need for a platform to moderate content for you... as you are in control of the contents of your news feed.

152334H• 6 months ago

in effect, broadly anti-AI communities like bsky succeed by the sheer power of universal hate. Social policing can get you very far without any technology I think

Ronsenshi2• 6 months ago

I'm all for that, but how would this realistically work? Given enough effort you can produce AI content which would be impossible to tell if it's human-made or not. And in the same train of thought - is there any way to avoid unwarranted hate towards somebody who produced real human-made content that was mistaken for AI-content?

happosai• 6 months ago

There are mastodon communities such https://mastodon.art/ where AI is explicitly banned.

raincole2• 6 months ago

The said hypothetical social media, if gaining any traction, will be the heaven for adversarial training.

voidUpdate• 6 months ago

Apparently the vine restart will explicitly ban ai content. Thus providing an excellent source of untainted training data, but that's beside the point

rsynnott• 6 months ago

Not actually banned on Bluesky, but the community at large is so hostile to it that, generally, there's very little AI stuff.

dpkirchner2• 6 months ago

It's impossible, so I figure we may as well accept it when browsing rando's content (or just don't read any of it) and reject it when interacting with friends and family. What else can you really do?

pants22• 6 months ago

Sure, it's impossible to block everything, but you can at least make it difficult enough to post AI slop that the spammers go elsewhere. Most social media sites haven't even tried and are in fact actively encouraging AI slop.

mrbluecoat• 6 months 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.

PaulDavisThe1st4• 6 months ago

Article adjacency on HN typically lasts less than 10 minutes ... you did include an actual link though, so thanks for that.

dang3• 6 months 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.

seiferteric• 6 months ago

My parents were tricked the other day by a fake youtube video of "racist cop" doing something bad and getting outraged by it. I watch part of the video and even though it felt off I couldn't immediately tell for sure if it was fake or not. Nevertheless I googled the names and details and found nothing but repostings of the video. Then I looked at the youtube channel info and there it said it uses AI for "some" of the videos to recreate "real" events. I really doubt that.. it all looks fake. I am just worried about how much divisiveness this kind of stuff will create all so someone can profit off of youtube ads.. it's sad.

alex11387• 6 months ago

Next step: find out whether Youtube will remove it if you point it out

Answer? Probably "of course not"

They're too busy demonetizing videos, aggressively copyright striking things, or promoting Shorts, presumably

Fr0styMatt88• 6 months ago

I find the sound is a dead giveaway for most AI videos — the voices all sound like a low bitrate MP3.

Which will eventually get worked around and can easily be masked by just having a backing track.

fsckboy2• 6 months ago

that sounds like one of the worst heuristics I've ever heard, worse than "em-dash=ai" (em-dash equals ai to the illiterate class, who don't know what they are talking about on any subject and who also don't use em-dashes, but literate people do use em-dashes and also know what they are talking about. this is called the Dunning-Em-Dash Effect, where "dunning" refers to the payback of intellectual deficit whereas the illiterate think it's a name)

sheept2• 6 months ago

a reliable giveaway for AI generated videos is just a quick glance at the account's post history—the videos will look frequent, repetitive, and lack a consistent subject/background—and that's not something that'll go away when AI videos get better

cortesoft• 6 months ago

Or they are reposting other people's content

eru2• 6 months ago

[...] and lack a consistent subject/background—and that's not something that'll go away when AI videos get better

Why not? Surely you can ask your friendly neighbourhood AI to run a consistent channel for you?

fallinditch• 6 months ago

A giveaway for detecting AI-generated text is the use of em-dashes, as noted in op - you are caught bang to rights!

phire• 6 months ago

I actually avoid most YouTube channels that upload too frequently. Especially with consistent schedules.

Even if I'm 100% certain it's not AI slop, it's still a very strong indicator that the videos are some kind of slop.

zahlman11• 6 months ago

How can they look repetitive while being inconsistent? Do you mean in terms of presentation / "editing" style?

vitaflo3• 6 months ago

Sort by oldest. If the videos go back more than 3 years watch an old one. So many times the person narrating the old vids is nothing like the new vids and a dead ringer for AI. If the account is less than a year old, 100% AI.

SilverSlash• 6 months ago

I really wish Google will flag videos with any AI content, that they detect.

munificent3• 6 months ago

Would be nice, but unlikely given that they are going in the opposite direction and having YouTube silently add AI to videos without the author even requesting it: https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20250822-youtube-is-using...

zdc1• 6 months ago

It's a band-aid solution, given that eventually AI content will be indistinguishable from real-world content. Maybe we'll even see a net of fake videos citing fake news articles, etc.

Of course there are still "trusted" mainstream sources, expect they can inadvertently (or for other reasons) misstate facts as well. I believe it will get harder and harder to reason about what's real.

hshdhdhj4444• 6 months ago

The problem’s gonna be when Google as well is plastered with fake news articles about the same thing. There’s very little to no way you will know whether something is real or not.

ekianjo2• 6 months ago

That was already the case for anything printed or written. You have no way of telling if this is true or not.

quantummagic2• 6 months ago

As they say, the demand for racism far outstrips the supply. It's hard to spend all day outraged if you rely on reality to supply enough fodder.

neilv3• 6 months ago

I hadn't heard that saying.

Many people seek being outraged. Many people seek to have awareness of truth. Many people seek getting help for problems. These are not mutually exclusive.

Just because someone fakes an incident of racism doesn't mean racism isn't still commonplace.

In various forms, with various levels of harm, and with various levels of evidence available.

(Example of low evidence: a paper trail isn't left when a black person doesn't get a job for "culture fit" gut feel reasons.)

Also, faked evidence can be done for a variety of reasons, including by someone who intends for the faking to be discovered, with the goal of discrediting the position that the fake initially seemed to support.

(Famous alleged example, in second paragraph: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Killian_documents_controversy#... )

silisili• 6 months ago

Rage sells. Not long after EBT changes, there were a rash of videos of people playing the person people against welfare imagine in their head. Women, usually black, speaking improperly about how the taxpayers need to take care of their kids.

Not sure how I feel about that, to be honest. On one hand I admire the hustle for clicks. On the other, too many people fell for it and probably never knew it was a grift, making all recipients look bad. I only happened upon them researching a bit after my own mom called me raging about it and sent me the link.

hn_throwaway_99• 6 months ago

I like that saying. You can see it all the time on Reddit where, not even counting AI generated content, you see rage bait that is (re)posted literally years after the fact. It's like "yeah, OK this guy sucks, but why are you reposting this 5 years after it went viral?"

actionfromafar2• 6 months ago

That's why this administration is working hard to fill the demand.

blks• 6 months ago

You sure about that? I think actions of the US administration together with ICE and police work provide quite enough

watwut• 6 months ago

Wut? If you listen to what real people say, racism is quite common has all the power right now.

InsideOutSanta8• 6 months ago

This is not the right thing to take away from this. This isn't about one group of people wanting to be angry. It's about creating engagement (for corporations) and creating division in general (for entities intent on harming liberal societies).

In fact, your comment is part of the problem. You are one of the people who want to be outraged. In your case, outraged at people who think racism is a problem. So you attack one group of people, not realizing that you are making the issue worse by further escalating and blaming actual people, rather than realizing that the problem is systemic.

We have social networks like Facebook that require people to be angry, because anger generates engagement, and engagement generates views, and views generate ad impressions. We have outside actors who benefit from division, so they also fuel that fire by creating bot accounts that post inciting content. This has nothing to do with racism or people on one side. One second, these outside actors post a fake incident of a racist cop to fire up one side, and the next, they post a fake incident about schools with litter boxes for kids who identify as pets to fire up the other side.

Until you realize that this is the root of the problem, that the whole system is built to make people angry at each other, you are only contributing to the anger and division.

pjc50• 6 months ago

Wrong takeaway. There are plenty of real incidents. The reason for posting fake incidents is to discredit the real ones.

whattheheckheck• 6 months ago

Right... when you overhear the elderly in the gym locker rooms talk about "the Mexicans that keep moving in" yeah racism is so short in supply....

TiredOfLife• 6 months ago

You don't need AI for that.

https://youtu.be/xiYZ__Ww02c

ryanjshaw3• 6 months ago

I’m spending way too much time on the RealOrAI subreddits these days. I think it scares me because I get so many wrong, so I keep watching more, hoping to improve my detection skills. I may have to accept that this is just the new reality - never quite knowing the truth.

raincole2• 6 months ago

Those subreddits label content wrong all the time. Some of top commentors are trolling (I've seen one cooking video where the most voted comment is "AI, the sauce stops when it hits the plate"... as thick sauce should do.)

You're training yourself with a very unreliable source of truth.

bradgessler• 6 months ago

What if AI is running RealOrAI to trick us into never quite knowing the truth?

lukan2• 6 months ago

"I may have to accept that this is just the new reality - never quite knowing the truth."

Some people, quite some time ago, also came to that conclusion. (And they did not even had AI to blame)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_know_that_I_know_nothing

lesam• 6 months ago

Before photography, we knew something was truthful because someone trustworthy vouched for it.

Now that photos and videos can be faked, we'll have to go back to the older system.

djeastm• 6 months ago

My favorite theory about those subreddits is that it's the AI companies getting free labeling from (supposed) authentic humans so they can figure out how to best tweak their models to fool more and more people.

josfredo• 6 months ago

I fail to understand your worry. This will change nothing regarding some people’s tendency to foster and exploit negative emotions for traction and money. “AI makes it easier”, was it hard to stumble across out-of-context clips and photoshops that worked well enough to create divisiveness? You worry about what could happen but everything already has happened.

haxiomic• 6 months ago

The current situation is not as bad as it can get; this is accelerant on the fire and it can get a lot worse

Nevermark5• 6 months ago

It really isn’t that slop didn’t exist before.

It is that it is increasingly becoming indistinguishable from not-slop.

There is a different bar of believability for each of us. None of us are always right when we make a judgement. But the cues to making good calls without digging are drying up.

And it won’t be long before every fake event has fake support for diggers to find. That will increase the time investment for anyone trying to figure things out.

It isn’t the same staying the same. Nothing has ever stayed the same. “Staying the same” isn’t a thing in nature and hasn’t been the trend in human history.

acatton• 6 months ago

“AI makes it easier”, was it hard to stumble across out-of-context clips and photoshops that worked well enough to create divisiveness?

Yes. And I think this is what most tech-literate people fail to understand. The issue is scale.

It takes a lot of effort to find the right clip, cut it to remove its context, and even more effort to doctor a clip. Yes, you're still facing Brandolini's law[1], you can see that with the amount of effort Captain Disillusion[2] put in his videos to debunk crap.

But AI makes it 100× times worse. First, generating a convincing entirely video only takes a little bit of prompting, and waiting, no skill is required. Second, you can do that on a massive scale. You can easily make 2 AI videos a day. If you want to doctor videos "the old way", you'll need a team of VFX artists to do it at this scale.

I genuinely think that tech-literate folks, like myself and other hackernews posters, don't understand that significantly lowering the barrier to entry to X doesn't make X equivalent to what it was before. Scale changes everything.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brandolini%27s_law

[2] https://www.youtube.com/CaptainDisillusion

jplusequalt• 6 months ago

AI makes it easier

How many people were getting quote tweeted on Twitter with deep fake porn of them before Grok could remove the clothes off your person with a simple prompt?

phatfish• 6 months ago

Google is complicit in this sort of content by hosting it no questions asked. They will happily see society tear itself apart if they are getting some as revenue. Same as the other social media companies.

And yes I know the argument about Youtube being a platform it can be used for good and bad. But Google control and create the algorithm and what is pushed to people. Make it a dumb video hosting site like it used to be and I'll buy the "bad and good" angle.

BrtByte5• 6 months ago

It's sad, yeah. And exhausting. The fact that you felt something was off and took the time to verify already puts you ahead of the curve, but it's depressing that this level of vigilance is becoming the baseline just to consume media safely

lrvick2• 6 months ago

If there are ad incentives, assume all content is fake by default.

On the actual open decentralized internet, which still exists, mastodon, IRC, matrix... bots are rare.

direwolf20• 6 months ago

Of course - because everyone is banned upon first suspicion.

tomaskafka• 6 months ago

That’s not because it’s decentralized or open, it’s because it doesn’t matter. If it was larger or more important, it would get run over by bots in weeks.

Any platform that wants to resist bots need to - tie personas to real or expensive identities - force people to add AI flag to AI content - let readers filter content not marked as AI - and be absolutely ruthless in permabanning anyone who posts AI content unmarked, one strike and you are dead forever

The issue then becomes that marking someone as “posts unmarked AI content” becomes a weapon. No idea about how to handle it.

iso1631• 6 months ago

Usenet died partly due to the ads, and the inability for adblocking software at the time to keep up.

People left and never came back.

But those bots were certainly around in the 90s

mlrtime• 6 months ago

There are top posts daily of either 100% false images or very doctored images to portray a narrative (usually political or social) on reddit.

Then the comments are all usually not critical of the image but to portray the people supporting the [fake] image as being in a cult. It's wild!

b3lvedere• 6 months ago

Just twenty minutes ago i got a panic call that someone was getting dozens of messages that their virusscanner is not working and they have hundreds of viruses. By removing Google Chrome from sending messages to the Windows notification bar everything went back to normal on the computer.

Customer asked if reporting these kinds of illegal ads would be the best course. Nope, not by a long shot. As long as Google gets its money, they will not care. Ads have become a cancer of the internet.

Maybe i should setup a Pi-Hole business...

bryanrasmussen3• 6 months ago

If there was a GDPR type law for any company above a certain size (so as to only catch the big Ad networks) that allowed the propagation of "false" ads claiming security issues, monetary benefits or governmental services, then it could stop transmission of most of the really problematic ads, because any company the size of Google is also in the risk minimization business and they will set up a workflow to filter out "illegal" ads to at least a defensible level so they don't get fines that cost more than the ads pay.

Also can you set Windows not to allow Ads notifications through to the notification bar? If not that should also be a point of the law.

Now I bet somebody is going to come along and scold me for trying to solve social problems by suggesting laws be made.

ericmcer2• 6 months ago

People just need to have like a barebones understanding of: computer hardware level, OS level, browser level and how permissions work between the three.

If you have that you will never get scared by a popup in Chrome.

spicyusername2• 6 months ago

    divisiveness this kind of stuff will create

I'm pretty sure we're already decades in to the world of "has created".

Everyone I know has strong opinions on every little thing, based exclusively their emotional reactions and feed consumption. Basically no one has the requisite expertise commensurate with their conviction, but being informed is not required to be opinionated or exasperated.

And who can blame them (us). It is almost impossible to escape the constant barrage of takes and news headlines these days without being a total luddite. And each little snippet worms its way into your brain (and well being) one way or the other.

It's just been too much for too long and you can tell.

gooob• 6 months ago

it's malware in the mind. it was happening before deep fakes was possible. news outlets and journalists have always had incentive to present extreme takes to get people angry, cause that sells. now we have tools that pretty much just accelerate and automate that process. it's interesting. it would be helpful to figure out how to prevent people (especially upcoming generations) from getting swept away by all this.

_heimdall3• 6 months ago

It is almost impossible to escape the constant barrage of takes and news headlines these days without being a total luddite

Its odd to me to still use "luddite" disparagingly while implying that avoiding certain tech would actually have some high impact benefits. At that point I can't help but think the only real issue with being a luddite is not following the crowd and fitting in.

Ntrails2• 6 months ago

It is almost impossible to escape the constant barrage of takes and news headlines these days without being a total luddite

It really isn't that hard, if I'm looking at my experience. Maybe a little stuff on here counts. I get my news from the FT, it's relatively benign by all accounts. I'm not sure that opting out of classical social media is particularly luddite-y, I suspect it's closer to becoming vogue than not?

Being led around by the nose is a choice still, for now at least.

bigmeme2• 6 months ago

Everyone I know has strong opinions on every little thing, based exclusively their emotional reactions and feed consumption. Basically no one has the requisite expertise commensurate with their conviction, but being informed is not required to be opinionated or exasperated.

Case in point: if you ask for expertise verification on HN you get downvoted. People would rather argue their point, regardless of validity. This site’s culture is part of the problem and it predates AI.

vitaflo3• 6 months ago

Nothing wrong with being a Luddite these days. It’s the only way to not have your mind assaulted.

bombcar2• 6 months ago

I honestly think it might be downstream of individualized mass-market democracy; each person is tasked with fully understanding the world as it is so they can make the correct decisions at all level of voting, but ain't nobody got time for that.

So we emotionally convince ourselves that we have solved the problem so we can act appropriately and continue doing things that are important to us.

The founders recognized this problem and attempted to setup a Republic as an answer to it; so that each voter didn't have to ask "do I know everything about everything so I can select the best person" and instead were asked "of this finite, smaller group, who do I think is best to represent me at the next level"? We've basically bypassed that; every voter knows who ran for President last election, hardly anyone can identify their party's local representative in the party itself (which is where candidates are selected, after all).

sdoering• 6 months ago

It is almost impossible to escape the constant barrage of takes and news headlines these days without being a total luddite.

Then I am very proudly one. I don't do TikTok, FB, IG, LinkedIn or any of this crap. I do a bit of NH here and there. I follow a curated list of RSS feeds. And I twice a day look at a curated/grouped list of headlines from around the world, built from a multitude of sources.

Whenever I see a yellow press headline from the German bullshit print medium "BILD" when paying for gas or out shopping, I can't help but smile. That people pay money for that shit is - nowadays - beyond me.

To be fair. This was a long process. And I still regress sometimes. I started my working life at an editorial team for an email portal. Our job was to generate headlines that would stop people from logging in to read their mail and read our crap instead - because ads embedded within content were way better paid than around emails.

So I actually learned the trade. And learned that outrage (or sex) sells. This was some 18 or so years ago - the world changed since then. It became even more flammable. And more people seem to be playing with their matches. I changed - and changed jobs and industries a few times.

So over time I reduced my news intake. And during the pandemic learned to definitely reduce my social media usage - it is just not healthy for my state of mind. Because I am way to easily dopamine addicted and trigger-able. I am a classic xkcd.com/386 case.

b00ty4breakfast• 6 months ago

I'm pretty sure we're already decades in to the world of "has created".

Simulacra and Simulation came out in '81, for an example of how long this has been a recognized phenomenon

baubino2• 6 months ago

It is almost impossible to escape the constant barrage of takes and news headlines these days without being a total luddite.

It’s quite easy actually. Like the OP, I have no social media accounts other than HN (which he rightfully asserts isn’t social media but is the inheritor of the old school internet forum). I don’t see the mess everyone complains about because I choose to remove myself from it. At the same time, I still write code every day, I spend way too much time in front of a screen, and I manage to stay abreast of what’s new in tech and in the world in general.

Too many people conflate social media with technology more broadly and thus make the mistake of thinking that turning away from social media means becoming a luddite. You can escape the barrage of trolls and hottakes by turning off social media while still participating in the much smaller but saner tech landscape that remains.

eudamoniac2• 6 months ago

I think people will eventually learn to not trust any videos or stories they see online. I think the much bigger issue will be what happens when the LLM providers encode "alignment" into the models to insist on certain worldviews, opinions, or even falsehoods. Trust in LLMs and usage of them is increasing.

"Great question! No, we have always been at war with Eurasia. Can I help with anything else?"

NoMoreNicksLeft2• 6 months ago

"Eventually" does alot of heavy lifting in your prediction. This is like saying that if you feed poison to panda bears, they will eventually become immune to poison. On what timescale though? 8 million years from now, if the species survived, and if I've been feeding that poison to each and every generation... sure.

If I just feed it to 10 pandas, today, they're all dead.

And I suspect that humanity's position in this analogy is far closer to the latter than the former.

charles_f• 6 months ago

In reciprocity, my parents call "AI" anything they don't like or want to believe.

We truly live in wonderful times!

theptip• 6 months ago

Will create

As others have noted, it’s a long-term trend - agree that as you note it’ll get worse. The Russian psy-ops campaigns from the Internet Research Agency during Trump #1 campaign being a notable entry, where for example they set up both fake far-left and far-right protest events on FB and used these as engagement bait on the right/left. (I’m sure the US is doing the same/worse to their adversaries too.)

Whatever fraction bots play overall, it has to be way higher for political content given the power dynamics.

novok• 6 months ago

Eventually it will make everyone say that videos are fake because nobody trusts videos anymore. We will ironically be back to something like the 40s where security cameras didn't exist and photography was rare and relatively expensive. A strange kind of privacy.

atomtamadas• 6 months ago

Humans have strong self preservation instincts so at some point they'll start to ignore the free internet content or treat it as no more than fiction. There might come the time when people will demand personal meetings for everything, kind of a return to nature because they won't trust anything that can be machine generated. In way that's positive as current trends of weakening deeper human connections will be reversed thanks to AI :)

nl• 6 months ago

The irony is that I submitted one of my open source projects because it was vibe-coded and people accused me of not vibe coding it!

makingstuffs• 6 months ago

Think the notion that ‘no one’ uses em dashes is a bit misguided. I’ve personally used them in text for as long as I can remember.

Also on the phrase “you’re absolute right”, it’s definitely a phrase my friends and I use a lot, albeit in a sorta of sarcastic manner when one of us says something which is obvious but, nonetheless, we use it. We also tend to use “Well, you’re not wrong” again in a sarcastic manner for something which is obvious.

And, no, we’re not from non English speaking countries (some of our parents are), we all grew up in the UK.

Just thought I’d add that in there as it’s a bit extreme to see an em dash instantly jump to “must be written by AI”

karim79• 6 months ago

I would add that a lot of us who were born or grew up in the UK are quite comfortable saying stuff like "you're right, but...", or even "I agree with you, but...". The British politeness thing, presumably.

PaulDavisThe1st4• 6 months ago

0-24 in the UK, 24-62 in the USA, am now comfortable saying "I could be wrong, but I doubt it" quite a lot of the time :)

mc3301• 6 months ago

Also, I've seen people edit, one-by-one, each m-dash. And then they copy-paste the entire LLM output, thinking it looks less AI-like or something.

zahlman11• 6 months ago

Oof. I don't know what's worse there: that they don't know a conventional way to find-and-replace, or that they didn't try asking the LLM not to use them. (Or to fix it afterwards.)

jasonhansel• 6 months ago

Em-dashes may be hard to type on a laptop, but they're extremely easy to type on iOS—you just hold down the "-" key, as with many other special characters—so I use them fairly frequently when typing on that platform.

wk_end• 6 months ago

But why when the “-“ works just as well and doesn’t require holding the key down?

You’re not the first person I’ve seen say that FWIW, but I just don’t recall seeing the full proper em-dash in informal contexts before ChatGPT (not that I was paying attention). I can’t help but wonder if ChatGPT has caused some people - not necessarily you! - to gaslight themselves into believing that they used the em-dash themselves, in the before time.

carbocation• 6 months ago

Em-dashes are easy to type on a macos laptop for what it's worth: option-shift-minus.

babymetal• 6 months ago

Just my two cents: We use em-dashes in our bookstore newsletter. It's more visually appealing than than semi-colons and more versatile as it can be used to block off both ends of a clause. I even use en-dashes between numbers in a range though, so I may be an outlier.

kimixa4• 6 months ago

As a brit I'd say we tend to use "en-dashes", slightly shorter versions - so more similar to a hyphen and so often typed like that - with spaces either side.

I never saw em-dashes—the longer version with no space—outside of published books and now AI.

dang3• 6 months ago

The en-dash is also highly worthy!

Just to say, though, we em-dashers do have pre-GPT receipts:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46673869

eru2• 6 months ago

It's also easy to get them in LaTeX: just type --- and they will appear as an em-dash in your output.

susam• 6 months ago

Came here to confirm this. I grew up learning BrE and indeed in BrE, we were taught to use en-dash. I don't think we were ever taught em-dash at all. My first encounter with em-dash was with LaTeX's '---' as an adult.

rmunn2• 6 months ago

Besides the LaTeX use, on Linux if you have gone into your keyboard options and configured a rarely-used key to be your Compose key (I like to use the "menu" key for this purpose, or right Alt if on a keyboard with no "menu" key), you can type Compose sequences as follows (note how they closely resemble the LaTeX -- or --- sequences):

Compose, hyphen, hyphen, period: produces – (en dash) Compose, hyphen, hyphen, hyphen: produces — (em dash)

And many other useful sequences too, like Compose, lowercase o, lowercase o to produce the ° (degree) symbol. If you're running Linux, look into your keyboard settings and dig into the advanced settings until you find the Compose key, it's super handy.

P.S. If I was running Windows I would probably never type em dashes. But since the key combination to type them on Linux is so easy to remember, I use em dashes, degree symbols, and other things all the time.

Ericson23142• 6 months ago

I think that's just incorrect. There are varying conventions for spaces vs no spaces around em dashes, but all English manuals of style confine to en dashes just to things like "0–10" and "Louisville–Calgary" — at least to my knowledge.

dragonwriter4• 6 months ago

There are British style manuals (e.g., the Guardian’s) that prefer em-dashes for roughly the same set of uses they tend to perferred for in US style guides, but it is mixed between em-dashes and en-dashes (both usually set open), while all the influential American style guides prefer em-dashes (but split, for digressive/parenthetical use, between setting them closed [e.g., Chicago Manual] and open [e.g., AP Style].)

hayleox2• 6 months ago

It is so irritating that people now think you've used an LLM just because you use nice typography. I've been using en dashes a ton (and em dashes sporadically) since long before ChatGPT came around. My writing style belonged to me first—why should I have to change?

If you have the Compose key [1] enabled on your computer, the keyboard sequence is pretty easy: `Compose - - -` (and for en dash, it's `Compose - - .`). Those two are probably my most-used Compose combos.

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

Ericson23142• 6 months ago

Also on phones it is really easy to use em dashes. It's quite out in the open whether I posted from desktop or phone because the use of "---" vs "—" is the dead give-away.

HaZeust2• 6 months ago

Hot take, but a character that demands zero-space between the letters at the end and the beginning of 2 words - that ISN'T a hyphenated compound - is NOT nice typography. I don't care how prevalent it is, or once was.

thfuran• 6 months ago

How do you find yourself using en dashes more than em dashes?

zahlman11• 6 months ago

I configured my system to treat caps lock as compose, and also set up a bunch of custom compose sequences that better suit how I think about the fancy characters I most often want to type. My em-dash is `Compose m d`.

alekneko• 6 months ago

I've had alt+0150 (–) and alt+0151 (—) memorized for over a decade at this point and frequently use them. It sucks that they're just associated with AI nowadays (along with the poor Oxford comma).

sean2• 6 months ago

And lists! I love to use lists and blather a lot. It was from me that AI learned that:

  * Answers should be really lengthy even if you aren't saying much
  * Lists are the perfect vehicle to layout your ideas
  * Good things come in 3s.

But alas, my wonderful style of internet comments now look tooooo good, like an AI generated them.

I don't use many emoji's though -- that's one way AI has gone wrong.

amrocha2• 6 months ago

You’re absolutely right—lots of very smart people use em dashes. Thank you for correcting me on that!

forgotpwd162• 6 months ago

If you want next, I can:

- Tell you what makes em dashes appealing.

- Help you use em dashes more.

- Give you other grammatical quirks smart people have.

Just tell me.

(If bots RP as humans, it’s only natural we start RP as bots. And yes, I did use a curly quote there.)

zahlman11• 6 months ago

No problem! But it's also important to consider your image online. Here are some reasons not to use em-dashes in Internet forum posts:

* **Veneer of authenticity**: because of the difficulty of typing em-dashes in typical form-submission environments, many human posters tend to forgo them.

* **Social pressure**: even if you take strides to make em-dashes easier to type, including them can have negative repercussions. A large fraction of human audiences have internalized a heuristic that "em-dash == LLM" (which could perhaps be dubbed the "LLM-dash hypothesis"). Using em-dashes may risk false accusations, degradation of community trust, and long-winded meta discussion.

* **Unicode support**: some older forums may struggle with encoding for characters beyond the standard US-ASCII range, leading to [mojibake](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mojibake).

skipants• 6 months ago

I'm pretty sure the OP is talking about this thread. I have it top of mind because I participated and was extremely frustrated about, not just the AI slop, but how much the author claimed not to use AI when they obviously used it.

You can read it yourself if you'd like: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46589386

It was not just the em dashes and the "absolutely right!" It was everything together, including the robotic clarifying question at the end of their comments.

fresh_broccoli• 6 months ago

Did you paste the wrong link? While the OP of that thread was accussed of using LLMs, the thread doesn't really match what the article describes.

I think this one is a much closer fit: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46661308

anon_anon122• 6 months ago

Well the dialogue there involves two or more people, when commenting, why would you use that.. Even if you have collaborators, you wouldn't very likely be discussing stuff through code comments..

skwee3577• 6 months ago

The thing with em-dashes is not the em-dash itself. I use em-dashes, because when I started to blog, I was curious about improving my English writing skills (English is not my native language, and although I have learned English in school, most of my English is coming from playing RPGs and watching movies in English).

According to what I know, the correct way to use em-dash is to not surround it by spaces, so words look connected like--this. And indeed, when I started to use em-dashes in my blog(s), that's how I did it. But I found it rather ugly, so I started to put spaces around it. And there were periods where I stopped using em-dash all together.

I guess what I'm trying to say is that unless you write as a profession, most people are inconsistent. Sometimes, I use em-dashes. Sometimes I don't. In some cases I capitalize my words where needed, and sometimes not, depending on how in a hurry I am, or whether I type from a phone (which does a lot of heaving lifting for me).

If you see someone who consistently uses the "proper" grammar in every single post on the internet, it might be a sign that they use AI.

patrickmay• 6 months ago

I am a native English speaker and I agree with you completely that em-dashes look better when surrounded by spaces rather than connected directly to the words.

postexitus• 6 months ago

found the LLM bot guys!

BrtByte5• 6 months ago

When that baseline erodes, even normal human quirks start looking suspicious

0xmattf• 6 months ago

I’ve personally used them in text for as long as I can remember.

Likewise. I used to copy/paste them when I couldn't figure out how to actually type them, lol. Or use the HTML char code `—` It sucks that good grammar now makes people assume you used AI.

embedding-shape2• 6 months ago

Yeah, I mean, ultimately, aren't the LLMs actually trained to look like human language? So whatever particular "quirk" you have as a writer, there is probably an LLM emulating that either wholesale, or like 50% of the times.

LLMs use em-dash because people (in their training data) used em-dash. They use "You're absolutely right" because that's a common human phrase. It's not "You write like an LLM", it's "The LLMs write kind of like you", and for good reasons, that's exactly what people been training them to do.

And yes, "pun" intended for extra effect, that also comes from humans doing it.

forgotpwd162• 6 months ago

The LLM output isn't an unfiltered result of an unbiased model. Rather, some texts may be classified high-quality (where the em-dash, curly quotes, a more sophisticated/less-everyday vocabulary are more expected to appear), some low-quality, and some choices are driven by human feedback (aka fine-tuning), either to improve quality (OpenAI employs Kenyans, Kenyan/Nigerian English considered more colonial) or engagement through affirmative/reinforcing responses ("You're absolutely right. Universe is indeed a donut. Want me to write down an abstract? Want me to write down the equations?"). Some nice relevant articles are [1],[2].

[1] https://marcusolang.substack.com/p/im-kenyan-i-dont-write-li... [2]: https://www.nytimes.com/2025/12/03/magazine/chatbot-writing-...

topaz0• 6 months ago

I'm in your camp, that both of these are appropriate for some situations. In particular I like starting with a variation on "you're absolutely right" when it appears my interlocutor has identified the wrong disagreement, before realigning the conversation to a more useful direction (though of course there are many phrases that accomplish that).

It's still frequently identifiable in (current-generation) LLM text by the glossy superficiality that comes along with these usages. For example, in "It's not just X, it's Y", when a human does this it will be because Y materially adds something that's not captured by X, but in LLM output X and Y tend to be very close in meaning, maybe different in intensity, such that saying them both really adds nothing. Or when I use "You're absolutely right" I'll clarify what they are right about, whereas for the LLM it's just an empty affirmation.

bee_rider5• 6 months ago

You’re absolutely right. It’s not just a writing style, it’s how the ideas are expressed.

Anthony-G• 6 months ago

On my side of the Atlantic using en-dashes with spaces on either side of the dash is acceptable writing style so that’s what I use (instead of em-dashes). However, many people can’t tell the difference between the two so some might confuse my writing from that of an LLM. But I’m not going to let that dictate my writing style.

For the past 15 years, I’ve used the Unicycle Vim plugin¹ which makes it very easy to add proper typographic quotes and dashes in Insert mode. As something of a typography nerd, I’ve extended it to include other Unicode characters, e.g., prime and double-prime characters to represent minutes and seconds.

At the same time, I’ve always used a Firefox extension that launches GVim when editing a text box; currently, I’m using Tridactyl for this purpose.

¹ https://www.vim.org/scripts/script.php?script_id=1384

tonymet• 6 months ago

Most of my Wikipedia edits are converting tacky hyphens to em-dashes. I also autocomplete into em-dashes.

hyphens are so hideous that I can't stand them.

nextlevelwizard• 6 months ago

Sorry but I don’t believe you about em dashes. I don’t recall ever seeing them in online content or comments before LLM’s got popular. Normal dashes for sure, but no one actually dug out special character for it

neilv3• 6 months ago

Sunday evening musings regarding bot comments and HN...

I'm sure it's happening, but I don't know how much.

Surely some people are running bots on HN to establish sockpuppets for use later, and to manipulate sentiment now, just like on any other influential social media.

And some people are probably running bots on HN just for amusement, with no application in mind.

And some others, who were advised to have an HN presence, or who want to appear smarter, but are not great at words, are probably copy&pasting LLM output to HN comments, just like they'd cheat on their homework.

I've gotten a few replies that made me wonder whether it was an LLM.

Anyway, coincidentally, I currently have 31,205 HN karma, so I guess 31,337 Hacker News Points would be the perfect number at which to stop talking, before there's too many bots. I'll have to think of how to end on a high note.

(P.S., The more you upvote me, the sooner you get to stop hearing from me.)

bigmeme2• 6 months ago

Holy based

GMoromisato4• 6 months ago

I thought you were going for 2^15-1 and an LLM messed up the math.

neilv3• 6 months ago

31,337 can be the stopping point for active commenting.

32,767 can be the hard max., to permit rare occasional comments after that.

petermcneeley• 6 months ago

HN has survived many things but I dont think it will survive the LLMs.

jibal2• 6 months ago

Such posts are identifiable and rare, disproving Dead Internet Theory (for now).

thinkingemote• 6 months 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.

jibal2• 6 months 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.

GMoromisato4• 6 months ago

Most of this is caused by incentives:

YouTube and others pay for clicks/views, so obviously you can maximize this by producing lots of mediocre content.

LinkedIn is a place to sell, either a service/product to companies or yourself to a future employer. Again, the incentive is to produce more content for less effort.

Even HN has the incentive of promoting people's startups.

Is it possible to create a social network (or "discussion community", if you prefer) that doesn't have any incentive except human-to-human interaction? I don't mean a place where AI is banned, I mean a place where AI is useless, so people don't bother.

The closest thing would probably be private friend groups, but that's probably already well-served by text messaging and in-person gatherings. Are there any other possibilities?

8organicbits4• 6 months ago

I think incentives is the right way to think about it. Authentic interactions are not monetized. So where are people writing online without expecting payment?

Blogs can have ads, but blogs with RSS feeds are a safer bet as it's hard to monetize an RSS feed. Blogs are a great place to find people who are writing just because they want to write. As I see more AI slop on social media, I spend more time in my feed reader.

sznio• 6 months ago

I've been thinking recently about a search engine that filters away any sites that contain advertising. Just that would filter away most of the crap.

Kagi's small web lens seems to have a similar goal but doesn't really get there. It still includes results that have advertising, and omits stuff that isn't small but is ad free, like Wikipedia or HN.

account426• 6 months ago

Monetization isn't the only possible incentive for non-genuine content though CV-stuffing is another that is likely to affect blogs - and there have been plenty obviously AI-generated/"enhanced" blogs posted here.

ricardo81• 6 months ago

incentives

spot on. The number of times I've came across a poorly made video where half the comments are calling out its inaccuracies. In the end Youtube (or any other platform) and the creator get paid. Any kind of negative interaction with the video either counts as engagement or just means move on to the next whack-a-mole variant.

None of these big tech platforms that involve UGC were ever meant to scale. They are beyond accountable.

alex11387• 6 months ago

They removed the dislike count, by the way

Makes it harder to see if you're watching an ad

Completely coincidental

cal_dent2• 6 months ago

Exactly. People spend less time thinking about the underlying structure at play here. Scratch enough at the surface and the problem is always the ads model of internet. Until that is broken or is economically pointless the existing problem will persist.

Elon Musk cops a lot for the degradation of twitter to people who care about that sort of thing, and he definitely plays a part there, but its the monetisation aspect that was the real tilt to all noise in a signal to noise ratio perspective

We've taken a version of the problem in the physical world to the digital world. It runs along the same lines of how high rents (commercial or residential) limit the diversity of people or commercial offering in a place simply because only a certain thing can work or be economically viable. People always want different mixes of things and offering but if the structure (in this case rent) only permits one type of thing then that's all you're going to get

wewxjfq• 6 months ago

Scratch further and beneath the ad business you'll find more incentives to allow fake engagement. Man is a simple animal and likes to see numbers go up. Internet folklore says the Reddit founders used multiple accounts to get their platform going at the start? If they did, they didn't do that with ad fraud in mind. The incentives are plenty and from the people running the platform to the users to the investors - everyone likes to be fooled. Take the money out and you still have reasons to turn a blind eye to it.

The biggest problem I see is that the Internet has become a brainwashing machine, and even if you have someone running the platform with the integrity of a saint, if the platform can influence public opinion, it's probably impossible to tell how many real users there actually are.

intended• 6 months ago

Filtering out bots is prohibitive, as bots are currently so close to human text that the false positive rate will curtail human participation.

Any community that ends up creating utility to its users, will attract automation, as someone tries to extract, or even destroy that utility.

A potential option could be figuring out community rules that ensure all content. including bot generated content, provides utility to users. Something like the rules on change my view, or r/AITA. Theres also tests being run to see if LLMs can identify or provide bridges across flamewars.

skwee3577• 6 months ago

I remember participating on *free* phpBB forums, or IRC channels. I was amazed that I could chat with people smarter than me, on a wide range of topics, all for the cost of having an internet subscription.

It's only recently, when I was considering to revive the old-school forum interaction, that I have realized that while I got the platforms for free, there were people behind them who paid for the hosting and the storage, and were responsible to moderate the content in order to not derail every discussion to low level accusation and name calling contest.

I can't imagine the amount of time, and tools, it takes to keep discussion forums free of trolls, more so nowadays, with LLMs.

nake89• 6 months ago

I really miss the phpBB forum days. Early 2000s. It's not just nostalgia. It truly was a better experience.

rhines3• 6 months ago

Something that's been on my mind for a while now is shared moderation - instead of having a few moderators who deal with everything, distribute the moderation load across all users. Every user might only have to review a couple posts a day or whatever, so it should be a negligible burden, and send each post that requires moderation to multiple users so that if there's disagreement it can be pushed to more senior/trusted users.

This is specifically in the context of a niche hobby website where the rules are simple and identifying rule-breaking content is easy. I'm not sure it would work on something with universal scope like Reddit or Facebook, but I'd rather we see more focused communities anyway.

trinix9122• 6 months ago

I don't think it's doable with the current model of social media but:

1. prohibit all sorts of advertising, explicit and implicit, and actually ban users for it. The reason most people try to get big on SM is so they can land sponsorships outside of the app. But we'd still have the problem of telling whether something is sponsored or not.

2. no global feed, show users what their friends/followers are doing only. You can still have discovery through groups, directories, etc. But it would definitely be worse UX than what we currently have.

cjs_ac• 6 months ago

Is it possible to create a social network (or "discussion community", if you prefer) that doesn't have any incentive except human-to-human interaction? I don't mean a place where AI is banned, I mean a place where AI is useless, so people don't bother.

Yes, but its size must be limited by Dunbar's number[0]. This is the maximum size of a group of people where everyone can know everyone else on a personal basis. Beyond this, it becomes impossible to organically enforce social norms, and so abstractions like moderators and administrators and codes of conduct become necessary, and still fail to keep everyone on the same page.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunbar%27s_number

psychoslave• 6 months ago

I don’t think this is a hard limit. It’s also a matter of interest and opportunity to meet people, consolidate relationship through common endeavor, and so greatly influenced by the social super-structure and how they push individual to interact with each other.

To take a different cognitive domain, think about color. Wikitionary gives around 300 of them for English[1]. I doubt many English speakers would be able to use all of them with relevant accuracy. And obviously even RGB encoding allows to express far more nuances. And obviously most people can fathom far more nuances than what could verbalize.

[1] https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Appendix:Colors

AdrianB1• 6 months ago

> Is it possible to create a social network (or "discussion community", if you prefer) that doesn't have any incentive except human-to-human interaction?

Yes, it is possible. Like anything worth, it is not easy. I am a member of a small forum of around 20-25 active users for 20 years. We talk all kind of stuff, it was initially just IT-related, but we also touch motorcycles (at least 5 of us do or did ride, I used to go ride with a couple of them in the past), some social aspects, tend to avoid politics (too divisive) and religion (I think none is religious enough to debate). We were initially in the same country and some were meeting IRL from time to time, but now we are spread in many places around Europe (one in US), so the forum is what keeps us in contact. Even the ones in the same country, probably a minority these days, are spread too thin, but the forum is there.

If human interaction involves IRL, I met less that 10 forum members and I met frequently just 3 (2 on motorcycle trips, one worked for a few years in the same place as I), but that is not a metric that means much. It is the false sense of being close over internet while being geographically far, which works in a way but not really. For example my best friends all emigrated, most were childhood friends, communicating to them on the phone or Internet makes me never feel lonely, but seeing them every few years makes grows the distance between us. That is impacting human to human interaction, there is no way around it.

BrtByte5• 6 months ago

Private groups work because reputation is local and memory is long. You can't farm engagement from people you'll talk to again next week. That might be the key

abluecloud• 6 months ago

i had the idea of starting a forum based social network that used domain validation (e.g. work domain) as part of your registration and then displayed that as part of your profile.

the idea being that you'd somewhat ensure the person is a human that _may well_ know what they're talking about e.g. `abluecloud from @meta.com`.

DudeOpotomus3• 6 months ago

There is no definitive reason for creators to be paid. Zero. These platforms can and should stop paying people for their content. Without the platforms, the creators are dead. Make them pay for access to the audience and this whole problem disappears and makes the platforms far more profits.

Kill the influencer, kill the creator. Its all bullshit.

FeteCommuniste• 6 months ago

I miss the days when most people uploading things were doing it just for "love of the game" or to find likeminded enthusiasts. Not because it was their "hustle" or something to put on a resume. Those times are sadly long gone.

AutumnsGarden• 6 months ago

I do use AI internally for content moderation but I’m building a platform like this at https://grove.place

GorbachevyChase• 6 months ago

I’m actually happy with the way things are going. Content Mills, fake testimonials, and clandestine marketing aren’t anything new at all. But now it’s so painfully obvious that the only reason reasonable response is complete distrust of all these medium. We might actually just start taking what our neighbors more seriously than fake internet people.

mmooss2• 6 months ago

The problem is not the Internet but the author and those like them, acting like social network participants in following the herd - embracing despair and hopelessness, and victimhood - they don't realize they're the problem, not the victims. Another problem is their ignorance and their post-truth attitude, not caring whether their words are actually accurate:

What if people DO USE em-dashes in real life?

They do and have, for a long time. I know someone who for many years (much longer than LLMs have been available) has complained about their overuse.

hence, you often see -- in HackerNews comments, where the author is probably used to Markdown renderer

Using two dashes for an em-dash goes back to typewriter keyboards, which had only what we now call printable ASCII and where it was much harder add to add non-ASCII characters than it is on your computer - no special key combos. (Which also means that em-dashes existed in the typewriter era.)

amake• 6 months ago

How is the author the problem? What is the problem, in your view?

deadowl• 6 months ago

On a typewriter, you'd be able to just adjust the carriage position to make a continuous dash or underline or what have you. Typically I see XXXX over words instead of strike-throughs for typewritten text meanwhile.

mmooss2• 6 months ago

Most typefaces make consecutive underlines continuous by default. I've seen leading books on publishing, including iirc the Chicago Manual of Style, say to type two hypens and the typesetter will know to substitute an em-dash.

aashu_xd• 6 months ago

bots are everywhere and Ai bots making this theory very true.

stogot• 6 months 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.

nikeee• 6 months ago

I hope that when all online content is entirely AI generated, humanity will put their phone aside and re-discover reality because we realize that the social networks have become entirely worthless.

schrodinger2• 6 months ago

What a nice thought :)

mr_00ff00• 6 months ago

To some degree there’s something like this happening. The old saying “pics or it didn’t happen” used to mean young people needed to take their phones out for everything.

Now any photo can be faked, so the only photos to take are ones that you want yourself for memories.

account426• 6 months ago

That's not what that saying means/meant.

Davidzheng• 6 months ago

lol if they don't put the phone down now, then how can AI generated content specifically optimized to get people to stay be any better.

OvbiousError• 6 months ago

What's more likely is that a significant number of people will start having most/all of their meaningful interactions with AI instead of with other people.

ericmcer2• 6 months ago

Naww.... people have always taken the easy path and put off confronting difficult feelings and emotions. The vast majority of humanity will 100% spend hours a day swiping through computer generated content in the future. Whats the difference between a tiktok video featuring some vapid real person I will never know vs some vapid machine generated person I will never know. They both serve the same purpose.

fsckboy2• 6 months ago

The other day I was browsing my one-and-only social network — which is not a social network, but I’m tired of arguing with people online about it — HackerNews

dude, hate to break it to you but the fact that it's your "one and only" makes it more convincing it's your social network. if you used facebook, instagram, and tiktok for socializing, but HN for information, you would have another leg to stand on.

yes, HN is "the land of misfit toys", but if you come here regularly and participate in discussions with other other people on a variety of topics and you care about the interactions, that's socializing. The only reason you think it's not is that you find actual social interaction awkward, so you assume that if you like this it must not be social.

swader9992• 6 months ago

I think the Internet died long before 2016. It started with the profile, learning about the users, giving them back what they wanted. Then advertising amplified it. 1998 or 99 I'm guessing.

swader9992• 6 months 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.

amarant• 6 months ago

The notorious “you are absolutely right”, which no living human ever used before, at least not that I know of

If no human ever used that phrase, I wonder where the ai's learned it from? Have they invented new mannerisms? That seems to imply they're far more capable than I thought they were

kgeist• 6 months ago

If no human ever used that phrase, I wonder where the ai's learned it from?

Reinforced with RLHF? People like it when they're told they're right.

krige• 6 months ago

There are many phrases that exist solely in fiction.

spragl• 6 months ago

You are absolutely right!

georgeecollins• 6 months ago

I don't think only AI says "yes you are absolutely right". Many times I have made a comment here and then realized I was dead wrong, or someone disagreed with my by making a point that I had never thought of. I think this is because I am old and I have realized I wasn't never as smart as I thought I was, even when I was a bit smarter a long time ago. It's easy to figure out I am a real person and not AI and I even say things that people downvote prodigiously. I also say you are right.

neoden• 6 months 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.

enos_feedler• 6 months ago

The darkest hour is just before the dawn

jofzar• 6 months ago

The notorious “you are absolutely right”, which no living human ever used before, at least not that I know of The other notorious “let me know if you want to [do that thing] or [explore this other thing]” at the end of the sentence

There's a new one, "wired" I have "wired" this into X or " "wires" into y. Cortex does this and I have noticed it more and more recently.

It super sticks out because who the hell ever said that X part of the program wires into y?

ggm2• 6 months ago

You are absolutely right is something some people in some variants of English say all the time.

It may grate but to me, it grates less than "correct" which is a major sign of arrogant "I decide what is right or wrong" and when I hear it, outside of a context where somebody is the arbiter or teacher, I switch off.

But you're absolutely wrong about youre absolutely right.

It's a bit hokey, but it's not a machine made signifier.

account426• 6 months ago

If AI generated content uses it significantly more than the average person then it is a machine signifier, even if some humans also use it.

protocolture• 6 months 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.

mrtx01• 6 months ago

"You are absolutely right" is one of the main catchphrases in "The Unbelievable Truth" with David Mitchell.

Maybe it is a UK thing?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Unbelievable_Truth_(radio_...

I love that BBC radio (today: BBC audio) series. It started before the inflation of 'alternative facts' and it is worth (and very funny and entertaining) to follow, how this show developed in the past 19 years.

dijit• 6 months ago

You’re absolutely right, we use that phrase a lot in the UK when we emphatically agree with someone, or we’re being sarcastic.

akkad33• 6 months ago

What's wrong with using AI to write code?

nilslindemann3• 6 months ago

Nothing if you fix its errors and it fixes yours.

jmyeet• 6 months 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-...

Lammy• 6 months ago

which on most keyboard require a special key-combination that most people don’t know

I am sick of the em-dash slander as a prolific en- and em-dash user :(

Sure for the general population most people probably don't know, but this article is specifically about Hacker News and I would trust most of you all to be able to remember one of:

- Compose, hyphen, hyphen, hyphen

- Option + Shift + hyphen

(Windows Alt code not mentioned because WinCompose <https://github.com/ell1010/wincompose>)

anon_anon122• 6 months ago

It was outrageous at start, especially in 2016, but surely after AI's boom, we are heading towards it. People have stopped becoming genuine.

meander_water2• 6 months ago

Not foolproof, but a couple of easy ways to verify if images were AI generated:

- OpenAI uses the C2PA standard [0] to add provenance metadata to images, which you can check [1]

- Gemini uses SynthId [2] and adds a watermark to the image. The watermark can be removed, but SynthId cannot as it is part of the image. SynthId is used to watermark text as well, and code is open-source [3]

[0] https://help.openai.com/en/articles/8912793-c2pa-in-chatgpt-...

[1] https://verify.contentauthenticity.org/

[2] https://deepmind.google/models/synthid/

[3] https://github.com/google-deepmind/synthid-text

danielbln• 6 months ago

Synth id can be removed, run it through an image 2 image model with a reasonably high denoising value or add artificial noise and use another model to denoise and voila. It's effort that probably most aren't doing, but it's certainly possible.

adrian17• 6 months ago

I just went to a random OpenAI blog post ("The new ChatGPT Images is here"), right-click saved one of the images (the one from "Text rendering" section), and pasted it to your [1] link - no metadata.

I know the metadata is probably easy to strip, maybe even accidentally, but their own promotional content not having it doesn't inspire confidence.

meander_water2• 6 months ago

Yeah that's been my experience as well. I think most uploads strip the metadata unfortunately

hayinneedles• 6 months ago

Reminder that provenance exists to prove something as REAL, not to prove something is fake.

AI content outnumbers Real content. We are not going to decide if every single thing is real or not. C2PA is about labeling the gold in a way the dirt can't fake. A Photo with it can be considered real and used in an encyclopedia or sent court without people doubting it.

cubefox2• 6 months ago

The watermark can be removed, but SynthId cannot as it is part of the image.

That's not quite right. SynthID is a digital watermark, so it's hard to remove, while metadata can be easily removed.

peteforde2• 6 months ago

I enjoyed this post, but I do find myself disagreeing that someone sharing their source code is somehow morally or ethically obligated to post some kind of AI-involvement statement on their work.

Not only is it impossible to adjudicate or police, I feel like this will absolutely have a chilling effect on people wanting to share their projects. After all, who wants to deal with an internet mob demanding that you disprove a negative? That's not what anyone who works hard on a project imagines when they select Public on GitHub.

People are no more required to disclose their use of LLMs than they are to release their code... and if you like living in a world where people share their code, you should probably stop demanding that they submit to your arbitrary purity tests.

skwee3577• 6 months ago

Fine, I accept your point. You don't have an obligation to disclose the tools you've used. But what struck me in that particular thread, is that the author kept claiming they did not use AI, nothing at all, while there were give away signs that the code was, _at least partly_, AI generated.

It honestly felt like being gaslighted. You see one thing, but they keep claiming you are wrong.

peteforde2• 6 months ago

I admit that I got the gist of the concern and didn't actually look at the original thread.

I'd feel the same way you did, for sure.

You are absolutely right! ;)

sublimefire• 6 months ago

IMO the idea of providing more in OSS usually stems from various third parties who use that code in production but do not really contribute back to it. The only sensible thing the person publishing code online needs to do is to protect their copyright and add a license. This weird idea that somehow you become responsible for the code to the point that you need to patch every vulnerability and bug, and now identify the use of AI is wrong on so many levels. For the record I’ve been publishing OSS for years.

BrtByte5• 6 months ago

Maybe the healthier framing is cultural rather than ethical

culebron212• 6 months ago

The author of that show hn post wrote that it's a project that grew to "production ready". Reading her source code, I see a bunch of wrappers that, upon any error, will panic and crash the whole process.

This is equal to projects where guys from high school took Ubuntu, changed the logo in couple of places, and then made statements that they'd make a new OS.

Anybody minimally competent can see the childish exaggeration in both cases.

The most logical request is to grow up and be transparent of what you did, and stop lying.

renewiltord• 6 months ago

lol Hacker News is ground zero for outrage porn. When that guy made that obviously pretend story about delivery companies adding a desperation score the guys here lapped it up.

Just absolutely loved it. Everyone was wondering how deepfakes are going to fool people but on HN you just have to lie somewhere on the Internet and the great minds of this site will believe it.

DeathArrow• 6 months ago

If you show signs of literacy, people will just assume you are a bot.

Torwald• 6 months 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.

fedeb952• 6 months ago

"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.

kenty2• 6 months ago

it's common for people to be bad at a second language

Non-native speaker here: huh, is "you are absolutely right" wrong somehow? I.e., are you a bad english speaker for using it? Fully agree (I guess "fully agree" is the common one?) with this criticism of the article, to me that colloquialism does not sound fishy at all.

There might also be two effects at play:

  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.

popopo732• 6 months ago

is "you are absolutely right" wrong somehow?

It makes sense in English, however:

a) "you are" vs "you're". "you are" sounds too formal/authoritative in informal speech, and depending on tone, patronising.

b) one could say "you're absolutely right", but the "absolutely" is too dramatic/stressed for simple corrections (an example of sycophancy in LLMs)

If the prompt was something like "You did not include $VAR in func()", then a response like "You're right! Let me fix that.." would be more natural.

account426• 6 months ago

It's a valid English phrase but it's also not unlikely that someone states something as a fact and then goes immediately to "you are absolutely right" when told it's wrong - but AI does that all the time.

cannonpalms2• 6 months ago

Just don't open a comment with

You're absolutely right!

And you're good

fedeb952• 6 months ago

I'm also a non native speaker. The point is, you tend to make grammatically correct phrases (mostly), but in a way that's not very common between native speakers. You're right that there are many factors at play. I think dismissing something as AI generated just because it uses common AI-generated strings is not correct. I'm speaking in general and not about the specific case.

snickerer• 6 months ago

The Internet got its death blow in the Eternal September 1994.

But it was a long death struggle, bleeding out drop by drop. Who remembers that people had to learn netiquette before getting into conversations? That is called civilisation.

The author of this post experienced the last remains oft that culture in the 00s.

I don't blame the horde of uneducated home users who came after the Eternal September. They were not stupid. We could have built a new culture together with them.

I blame the power of the profit. Big companies rolled in like bulldozers. Mindless machines, fueled by billions of dollars, rolling in the direction of the next ad revenue.

Relationships, civilization and culture are fragile. We must take good take of them. We should. but the bulldozers destroyed every structure they lived in in the Internet.

I don't want to whine. There is a learning: money and especially advertising is poison for social and cultural spaces. When we build the next space where culture can grow, let's make sure to keep the poison out by design.

ionwake• 6 months ago

The only way I can tell, is if I see a "structure" to the edit. Usually its a tit for tat , exchange of words in a conversation, with clear spacing, as in too perfect. Followed by the scene, if it looks too oddly perfect ( like a line of foxes waiting to be fed, but all of them are somehow sitting in a line, even if there are differences between them, Ill notice. That is with well decades of age, Im not sure if that helps. But what is clear is even these "tells" will disapear in a few months.

I call this the "carpet effect". Where all carpets in Morocco have an imperfection, lest it impersonates god.

swyx• 6 months ago

semi relatedly i stumbled upon Dead Planet Theory a while back and it stasy rent free in my head. https://arealsociety.substack.com/p/the-dead-planet-theory

sph• 6 months ago

That's great, thanks for sharing. So obvious in hindsight (Pareto principle, power law, "80% of success is showing up") but the ramifications are enormous.

I wonder if this does apply to the same magnitude in the real world. It's very easy to see this phenomenon on the internet because it's so vast and interconnected. Attention is very limited and there is so much stuff out there that the average user can only offer minimal attention and effort (the usual 80-20 Pareto allocation). In the real world things are more granular, hyperlocal and less homogeneous.

gorgmah• 6 months ago

Apps that require verification of "humanity" are going to get trendy. I'm thinking of world app for instance.

Ronsenshi2• 6 months ago

I guess the point of that would be to discourage average users from making AI slop? Can't imagine that this would stop bot farms from doing what they always done - hire people to perform these "humanity" checks once in a while when necessary.

Gasp0de• 6 months ago

Great, let's just require biometric identification before posting online, what could go wrong.

shayanbahal• 6 months ago

Basically: Rage Bait is winning :/

The Oxford Word of the Year 2025 is rage bait
Rage bait is defined as “online content deliberately designed to elicit anger or outrage by being frustrating, provocative, or offensive, typically posted in order to increase traffic to or engagement with a particular web page or social media content”.

https://corp.oup.com/news/the-oxford-word-of-the-year-2025-i...

dalemhurley• 6 months ago

You are absolutely right...:P

I don't know mind people using AI to create open source projects, I use it extensively, but have a rule that I am responsible and accountable for the code.

Social media have become hellscapes of AI Slop of "Influencers" trying to make quick money by overhyping slop to sell courses.

Maybe where you are from the em dash is not used, but in Queen's English speaking countries the em dash is quite common to represent a break of thought from the main idea of a sentence.

mrweasel• 6 months ago

While I am fairly skeptical of LLMs and the current version of AI that are being peddled by companies like OpenAI, the main problem is, once again, social media.

That someone is vibe-coding their application, running the symptoms of their illness through ChatGPT, or using it to write the high school essay isn't really a problem. It's also not a massive issue that you can generate random videos, the problem is that social media not only allows propaganda to be spread at the speed of light without any filter and verification, that it actually encourage it in the name of profit.

Remove the engagement retaining algorithms from social media, stop measuring success in terms of engagement. Do that an AI will become much less of a problem. LLMs are a tool for generation, social media is transport mechanism that makes the generated content actually dangerous.

yason• 6 months ago

What is the next safe haven for smart people?

It used to be Internet back when the name was still written in the capital first letter. The barrier to utilize the Internet was high enough that mostly only the genuinely curious and thoughtful people a) got past it and b) did have the persistence to find interesting stuff to read and write about on it.

I remember when TV and magazines were full of slop of the day at the time. Human-generated, empty, meaningless, "entertainment" slop. The internet was a thousand times more interesting. I thought why would anyone watch a crappy movie or show on TV or cable, created by mediocre people for mere commercial purposes, when you could connect to a lone soul on the other side of the globe and have intelligent conversations with this person, or people, or read pages/articles/news they had published and participate in this digital society. It was ethereal and wonderful, something unlike anything else before.

Then the masses got online. Gradually, the interesting stuff got washed in the cracks of commercial internet, still existing but mostly just being overshadowed by everything else. Commercial agenda, advertisements, entertainment, company PR campaigns disguised as articles: all the slop you could get without even touching AI. With subcultures moving from Usenet to web forums, or from writing web articles to posting on Facebook, the barrier got lowered until there was no barrier and all the good stuff got mixed with the demands and supplies of everything average. Earlier, there always were a handful of people in the digital avenues of communication who didn't belong but they could be managed; nowadays the digital avenues of communication are open for everyone and consequently you get every kind of people in, without any barriers.

And where there are masses there are huge incentives to profit from them. This is why internet is no longer an infrastructure for the information superhighway but for distributing entertainment and profiting from it. First, transferring data got automated and was dirt cheap, now creating content is being automated and becomes dirt cheap. The new slop oozes out of AI. The common denominator of internet is so low the smart people get lost in all the easily accessed action. Further, smart people themselves are now succumbing in it because to shield yourself from all the crap that is the commercial slop internet you basically have to revert to being a semi-offline hermit, and that goes against all the curiosity and stimuli deeply associated with smart people.

What could be the next differentiator? It used to be knowledge and skill: you had to be a smart person to know enough and learn enough to get access. But now all that gets automated so fast that it proves to be no barrier.

Attention span might be a good metric to filter people into a new service, realm, or society eventhough, admittedly, it is shortening for everyone but smart people would still win.

Earlier solutions such as Usenet and IRC haven't died but they're only used by the old-timers. It's a shame because then the gathering would miss all the smart people grown in the current social media culture: world changes and what worked in the 90's is no longer relevant except for people who were there in the 90's.

Reverting to in-real-life societies could work but doesn't scale world-wide and the world is global now. Maybe some kind of "nerdbook": an open, p2p, non-commercial, not centrally controlled, feedless facebook clone could implement a digital club of smart people.

The best part of setting up a service for smart people is that it does not need to prioritize scaling.

lstodd• 6 months ago

As has been mentioned here, there are internets within internets. They are by definition harder to find and join. They exist.

This particular lament is nothing new, and is also known as Eternal September, first described in 1994.

l7l• 6 months ago

How would one found a human verified internet without something like worldcoins orb? And even then you could not verify that the content is not created by ai.

nilslindemann3• 6 months ago

My answer to this blogpost is this: https://share.google/aimode/nrO2drR4YsCNKr1f9

nilslindemann3• 6 months ago

That said, there need to be some new laws regarding miserable people using AI in a miserable way, like, claiming something real happened that never did, just to get attention and money. Also, the fact that AI is used has to be documented, so that people consuming it have a choice.

yosef123• 6 months 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

BrtByte5• 6 months ago

What worries me most is not bots talking to bots, but humans adapting their voice to sound like bots because thatэs what works now

narag• 6 months ago

A couple of different uses of AI, recently detected in YouTube:

1. There are channels specialized in topics like police bodycam and dashcam videos, or courtroom videos. AI there is used to generate voice (and sometimes a very obviously fake talking head) and maybe the script itself. It seems a way to automatize tasks.

2. Some channels are generating infuriating videos about fake motorbikes releases. Many.

bigchorizo• 6 months ago

you are absolutely right

maieuticagent• 6 months ago

Ground News's approach is worth modeling because it treats authenticity not as a binary detection problem but as a transparency and comparative analysis problem. It assumes bad actors exist and makes them visible rather than trying to achieve perfect filtering. The shift from "trust this AI detection algorithm" to "here are multiple independent signals for you to evaluate" is philosophically aligned with how we should handle the Dead Internet problem. It's less about building perfect walls and more about giving people the tools to navigate an already-compromised space intelligently.

funkyfiddler69• 6 months ago

short videos of pretty girls saying that the EU is bad for Poland

Reminds me of those times in Germany when mainstream media and people with decades in academia used the term "Putin Versteher" (Person who gets Putin, Putin 'understander') ad nauseaum ... it was hilarious.

Unrelated to that, sometime last year, I searched "in" ChatGPT for occult stuff in the middle of a sleepless night and it returned a story about "The Discordians", some dudes who ganged up in a bowling hall in the 70's and took over media and politics, starting in the US and growing globally.

Musk's "Daddy N** Heil Hitler" greeting, JD's and A. Heart's public court hearings, the Kushners being heavily involved with the recruitment department of the Epsteins Islands and their "little Euphoria" clubs as well as Epstein's "Gugu Gaga Cupid" list of friends and friends of friends, it's all somewhat connected to "The Discordians", apparently.

It was a fun "hallucination" in between short bits on Voodoo, Lovecraft and stuff one rarely hears about at all.

Imustaskforhelp• 6 months ago

Oh this article was a fun one to read because I have felt something like this.

Recently someone accused me of being a clanker on Hackernews (firstly lmao but secondly wow) because of my "username" (not sure how it's relevant, When I had created this account I had felt a moral obligation to learn/ask for help to improving and improve I did whether its in writing skills or learning about tech)

Then I had posted another comment on Another thread in here which was talking about something similar. The earlier comment got flagged and my response to it but this stayed. Now someone else saw that comment and accused me of being AI again

This pissed me off because I got called AI twice in 24 hours. That made me want to quit hackernews because you can see from my comments that I write long comments (partially because they act as my mini blog and I just like being authentic me, this is me just writing my thoughts with a keyboard :)

To say that what I write is AI feels such a high disrespect to me because I have spent some hours thinking about some of the comments I made here & I don't really care for the upvotes. It's just this place is mine and these thoughts are mine. You can know me and verify I am real by just reading through the comments.

And then getting called AI.... oof, Anyways, I created a tell HN: I got called clanker twice where I wrote the previous thing which got flagged but I am literally not kidding but the first comment came from an AI generated bot itself (completely new account) I think 2 minute or something afterwards which literally just said "cool"

Going to their profile, they were promoting some AI shit like fkimage or something (Intentionally not saying the real website because I don't want those bots to get any ragebait attention to conversions on their websites)

So you just saw the whole situation of irony here.

I immediately built myself a bluesky thread creator where I can write a long message and it would automatically loop or something (ironically built via claude because I don't know how browser extensions are made) just so that I can now write things in bluesky too.

Funny thing is I used to defend Hackernews and glorify it a few days ago when an much more experienced guy called HN like 4chan.

I am a teenager, I don't know why I like saying this but the point is, most teenagers aren't like me (that I know), it has both its ups and downs (I should study chemistry right now) but Hackernews culture was something that inspired me to being the guy who feels confidence in tinkering/making computers "do" what he wants (mostly for personal use/prototyping so I do use some parts of AI, you can read one of my other comments on why I believe even as an AI hater, prototyping might make sense with AI/personal-use for the most part, my opinion's nuanced)

I came to hackernews because I wanted to escape dead internet theory in the first place. I saw people doing some crazy things in here reading comments this long while commuting from school was a vibe.

I am probably gonna migrate to lemmy/bluesky/the federated land. My issue with them is that the ratio of political messages : tech content is few (And I love me some geopolitics but quite frankly I am tired and I just want to relax)

But the lure of Hackernews is way too much, which is why you still see me here :)

I don't really know what the community can do about bots.

Another part is that there is this model on Localllama which I discovered the other day which works opposite (so it can convert LLM looking text to human and actually bypasses some bot checking and also the -- I think)

Grok (I hate grok) produces some insanely real looking texts, it still has -- but I do feel like if one even removes it and modifies it just a bit (whether using localllama or others), you got yourself genuine propaganda machine.

I was part of a Discord AI server and I was shocked to hear that people had built their own LLM/finetunes and running them and they actually experimented with 2-3 people and none were able to detect.

I genuinely don't know how to prevents bots in here and how to prevent false positives.

I lost my mind 3 days ago when this happened. Had to calm myself and I am trying to use Hackernews (less) frequently, I just don't know what to say but I hope y'all realize how it put a bad taste into my mouth & why I feel a little unengaged now.

Honestly, I am feeling like writing my own blogs to my website from my previous hackernews comments. They might deserve a better place too.

Oops wrote way too long of a message, so sorry about that man but I just went with the flow and thanks man for writing this comment so that i can finally have this one comment to try to explain how I was feeling man.

notarobot1232• 6 months 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.

cannonpalms2• 6 months ago

I believe this was the original thread.

Show HN: Minikv – Distributed key-value and object store in Rust (Raft, S3 API) | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46661308

stephenlf• 6 months ago

Reading through the thread right now.

Commenter: > What % of the code is written by you and what % is written by ai

OP: > Good question!

All the code, architecture, logic, and design in minikv were written by me, 100% by hand. I did use AI tools only for a small part of the documentation—specifically the README, LEARNING.md, and RAM_COMMUNITY.md files—to help structure the content and improve clarity.
But for all the source code (Rust), tests, and implementation, I wrote everything myself, reviewing and designing every part.
Let me know if you want details or want to look at a specific part of the code!

Oof. That is pretty damning.

———

It’s unfortunate that em-dashes have become a shibboleth for AI-generated text. I love em-dashes, and iPhones automatically turn a double dash ( -- ) into an em dash.

culebron212• 6 months ago

I took a look at the source code -- well, what if it's a working thing -- and of course, 2 files in, there are instructions that panic (i.e. crash the host process), all over the code, just everywhere, in every API method. That's nowhere near "production ready" as the author's LLM says.

I've seen, 17 year ago, a schoolboy make "his own OS", which was simply Ubuntu with replaced logos. He got on TV with it, IIRC he was promoting it on the internets (forums back then), and kept insisting that this was his own work. He was bullied in response and in a few weeks disappeared from the nets.

What has it to do with me personally, if I'm not the author, nor a bully? Today I learned that I can't trust the new libraries posted in official repos. They can be just wrapper code slop. In 2012, Jack Diedrich in his speech "Stop Writing Classes" said that he'd read every library source code to find if there was anything stinky. I used to think it's a luxury of time and his qualification to read into what you use. Now it became a necessity, at least for new projects.

granitepail• 6 months ago

To me, it’s very obvious that the problem is social media. To social media, AI slop is peak efficiency. The affordances and incentives of the network encourage its creation. I don’t care for the media slop, but eg television media has more or less been producing crap like this for a while.

I don’t think LLMs and video/image models are a negative at all. And it’s shocking to me that more people don’t share this viewpoint.

MarginalGainz• 6 months ago

We are seeing this exact 'hostile information environment' play out aggressively in e-commerce search.

The 'Dead Internet' (specifically AI-generated SEO slop) has effectively broken traditional keyword search (BM25/TF-IDF). Bad actors can now generate thousands of product descriptions that mathematically match a user's query perfectly but are semantically garbage/fake.

We had to pivot our entire discovery stack to Semantic Search (Vector Embeddings) sooner than planned. Not just for better recommendations, but as an adversarial filter.

When you match based on intent vectors rather than token overlap, the 'synthetic noise' gets filtered out naturally because the machine understands the context, not just the string match. Semantic search is becoming the only firewall against the dead internet.

rhines3• 6 months ago

I'm not sure I agree - on the one hand yes, it's trivial to generate pages stuffed with keywords. But on the other hand Google is already interpreting search intent, and while this is okay for some things it is extraordinarily frustrating when trying to look for something specific.

Often I do want exact matches, and Google refuses to show them no matter what special characters you use to try to modify the search behaviour.

Personally I'd rather search engines continue to return exact matches and just de-rank content that has poor reputation, and if I want to have a more free-form experience I'll use LLMs instead.

bryanrasmussen3• 6 months ago

I think it's a little bit much to claim that no real human has ever used the phrase "You are absolutely right", it seems more likely that a lot of people have, so much, that the AI got trained to use it when its programming suggested it was the right time to be obsequious.

projektfu2• 6 months ago

I have only said it as part of an apology.

"We have been waiting 20 minutes!"

"You're absolutely right, and I apologize. We will try to schedule better in the future."

I have never said it to someone with whom I was having a regular discussion.

OTOH, I used to overuse em dashes because the Mac made proper typesetting possible. It used to be the sign that someone had read the very useful The Mac is not a Typewriter by Robin Williams.

bryanrasmussen3• 6 months ago

So, sort of like when I tell an agent "that is not what I wanted!"

and it says "You're absolutely right, and I apologize. I have fixed the issue now"

They were trained on you, mate.

roody15• 6 months ago

The amount of AI narrated videos on Youtube is seriously alarming. This is like Blade Runner level dystopian at this point. With AI help once you go down a rabbit hole you can just stay there indefinately with a never ending supply of AI generated content. Shades of truth or not doesn't seem to matter.

fhennig• 6 months 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.

skwee3577• 6 months 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.

leshenka2• 6 months 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.

DudeOpotomus3• 6 months 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...

oh_fiddlesticks• 6 months 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• 6 months 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?

DudeOpotomus3• 6 months ago

Advertising is a cancer. Adtech is the delivery mechanism.

Paying creators is the dumbest and most consequential aspect of modern media. There is no reason to reward creators, zero. They should actually be paying Youtube for access to their audience. They actually would pay to be seen, paying them is both stupid and unnecessary. Kill the incentives and you kill the cancer.

chickensong• 6 months ago

While I trust the author had good intentions, this blog post is about HN and some common themes and emotions, which was then posted to HN, resulting in more of the same.

There may be some irony to be found in this human centipede.

numeromancer• 6 months ago

"photos of giants that built the pyramids in Egypt, all the way to short videos of pretty girls saying that the EU is bad for Poland."

Those sound funny; why would they make you sad?

embedding-shape2• 6 months ago

Because of the intention and purpose of those, not because of the actual pixels your brain interprets.

greenavocado• 6 months ago

This is the original post which started it all in 2021: https://forum.agoraroad.com/index.php?threads/dead-internet-...

armcat2• 6 months ago

What's changed significantly is the "intent" behind the content. The intent today is mostly the actual "content generation", i.e. "I write a blog post or a public github repo for the sake of having a digital footprint". This is vastly different when I used the internet in mid/late 90s. The intent back then was more like an "online journal" or something you hope someone else will find useful one day. Back then we had geocities, lycos, altavista, and we browsed with netscape and IE. For example, i began my programming foray with Delphi/Pascal, and I remember browsing these "crappy" [1] websites that were mostly just text, that explained how to convert C programs to Delphi (i was working on some plugins). The content was "genuine" content - someone laboriously documenting what worked for them, knowing very well that no one may ever actually read this. This is the issue today - it's all just for show.

[1] Those "crappy websites" with a maze of iframes are actually considered surprisingly refreshing today.

agumonkey• 6 months ago

I remember when internet started to go from wild jungle to organized in structure and form.. At first I was delighted.. and then I saw how there was an industrial feel to it. Things were predictable (tooling influences you, google search algorithm too).. and whenever I found an old 90s website, you'd feel the time, craft, attention to detail, personal interest. pages and pages of long and interesting paragraphs. so crude yet so deep.

notatoad• 6 months ago

content generation isn't the intent, it's just the side effect. the real intent is to make money.

everybody is either trying to promote some product, or promote themselves as a "content creator" so they can start getting influencer marketing deals and payouts from youtube or instagram ad splits.

the internet was at it's best when most of the content on it was just because somebody had some information, and wanted to share it. that intent is still out there today, but unfortunately it's harder and harder to find buried amongst all the revenue generation.

armcat2• 6 months ago

Agree 100%! The "real intent", the true cause, is making money. Whether that's directly via social media, or via proxy (which is becoming a major player), where people generate content in order to build repertoire, which they try to monetize via other means (contracting/freelance, publishing, speaking, getting on the VC radar, etc). So yes - one can correctly say that the intent has changed from something altruistic (giving information to the masses with no monetary foresight), to explicit money-making intent.

xd1936• 6 months ago

I've used em dashes for decades — They're great.

vitaelabitur• 6 months 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.

shadowgovt3• 6 months ago

Every time I see people talk about 'dead internet' I think about what web sites looked like before Google dropped PageRank into the whole ecosystem and utterly killed the utility of putting huge blobs of black-on-black text at the bottom of a page for keyword-match purposes. This was then shortly followed by Google becoming so popular they could use user behavior itself as a signal for site quality (much to the chagrin of every new publisher ever who suddenly had a catch-22 of "Nobody visits my site because Google won't uprank it because nobody visits my site").

The Internet has never been dead. Or alive. Ever since it escaped its comfortable cage in the university / military / small-clique-of-corporations ecosystem and became a thing "anyone" can see and publish on, there has forever been a push-pull between "People wanting to use this to solve their problems" and "People wanting eyeballs on their content, no matter the reason." We're just in an interesting local minimum where the ability to auto-generate human-shaped content has momentarily overtaken the tools search engines (and people with their own brains) use to filter useful from useless, and nobody has yet come up with the PageRank-equivalent nuclear weapon to swing the equation back again.

I'm giving it time, and until it happens I'm using a smaller list of curated sites I mostly trust to get me answers or engage with people I know IRL (as well as Mastodon, which mostly escapes these effects by being bad at transiting novelty from server to server), because thanks to the domain name ownership model pedigree of site ownership still mostly matters.

hughw• 6 months ago

When I first used my own telescope to view Saturn I had a thought, "they can't fake that!" Photos in a magazine or on television could have been faked. And the moon landing truthers became unhinged about it. I had not appreciated that I subtly and unconsciously held a reservation about the truth of it all.

This is the modern epistemic crisis. And wait till Elon implants a brain computer interface in you. You won't even fully trust your eye looking through a telescope.

andyish• 6 months 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.

rossdavidh• 6 months ago

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.

ezekg• 6 months ago

Spend a few days on Threads or on Instagram and you'll see the majority of viral posts on Threads are generated by AI, and the majority of descriptions on Instagram are generated by AI. It makes me incredibly sad, because I've used the internet for human connection my entire life. I always loved meeting new people, or reading other's perspectives. But it all just feels so ... empty ... now. I hope the pendulum swings the other way soon.

tvali• 6 months ago

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".

grugagag3• 6 months ago

AI content including youtube videos, podcasta and such need a stamp that content was AI generated.

SubiculumCode• 6 months 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• 6 months 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.

turnsout• 6 months 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.

foobarian• 6 months 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

ForgotMyUUID• 6 months ago

Well, if you are not satisfied by our company of AI karma-farmers, you are welcome to join "The Diamond Mine" BBS :)

crumpled• 6 months ago

Maybe I just will...

incomingpain• 6 months ago

I strongly believe in the dead internet theory.

There are many compounding factors but I experienced the live internet and what we have today is dead.

So I go on my province's subreddit. Politicswise, if there was an election today the incumbent politician would increase their majority and may even be looking at true majority. Hugely popular.

If you find a political thread, there will be 500 comments all agreeing with each other that the incumbent is evil, 50 comments downvoted and censored because they dare have an opinion that agrees with the incumbent, 100 comments deleted by anonymous mods banning people for what reason? Enjoy your echo chamber.

Anyone who experiences being censored a few times will just stop posting. Then when the election happens they have no idea at all why people would ever vote that way because they have never seen anyone do anything but agree with their opinion.

What an utterly dead subreddit.

kouru225• 6 months ago

I’m in favor of the dead internet because the alternative was even worse.

About 10 years ago we had a scenario where bots probably were only 2-5% of the conversation and they absolutely dominated all discussion. Having a tiny coordinated minority in a vast sea of uncoordinated people is 100x more manipulative than having a dead internet. If you ever pointed out that we were being botted, everyone would ignore you or pretend you were crazy. It didn’t even matter that the Head of the FBI came out and said we were being manipulated by bots. Everyone laughed at him the same way.

Permit• 6 months ago

About 10 years ago we had a scenario where bots probably were only 2-5% of the conversation and they absolutely dominated all discussion.

This was definitively not the case on HackerNews.

Salgat2• 6 months 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).

skwee3577• 6 months 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.

Salgat2• 6 months 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.

fuddle• 6 months 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

ulf-77723• 6 months 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?

brunoborges• 6 months ago

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).

ainthusiast• 6 months ago

oogabooga13• 6 months ago

I was in engaged in a similar discussion with a co-worker where I was defending my view that I'd rather read the news than try to trust a brief video clip presented to me. I feel like I'm constantly keeping an eye out for excessive biases creeping into my 'trusted' sources. For a civilian like me, it's quite hard to grasp what lens the story is being presented to me as. Casually reading the news isn't a thing for me...it usually involves a little bit of research to ensure I'm not getting duped. The dead internet theory is important.

freakynit• 6 months ago

LLM summary of all comments: https://hn-discussions.top/dead-internet-theory/

MarkusWandel• 6 months ago

That, and the stuff on Facebook. All those AI-written articles which usually make a big ado about a minor event, but if you google the name of the protagonist or do a Google Lens on the picture, you can get the original story in 1/100 as many words. But sometimes the thing is completely made up. Does anyone even care any more? The flood of words is made to be reasonably engaging, but after you fall for them a few dozen times you just can't be bothered to read them any more, so who or what is it really for? These are not "meant to outrage" articles, just... filler.

deafpolygon• 6 months ago

Ya'll got social media? Wish I had friends to talk to -- I'm starting to think the Dead Internet Theory has some weight to it.

I cannot find a place to talk to like-minded people anymore; it's all gamified to sell you something. All folks do on Reddit is talk at you. I'm starting to doubt half the people posting are actual people now... with so many comments that are perfectly formatted and phrased like ChatGPT.

Dead Internet Theory

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