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Why is it being called dead internet theory when, as far as I can tell, what's really happening is that big centralized systems are being overrun with bots? The

Why is it being called dead internet theory when, as far as I can tell, what's really happening is that big centralized systems are being overrun with bots? The internet existed and was pretty great before these large centralized systems came into being. Anyone can still run a blog/website, and/or their own discourse server. There's no need to mourn for these centralized systems that largely existed only to exploit us in some way. Let's celebrate "small internet theory", an internet where exploitation is effectively impossible because every company that tries it is overrun with AI bots. That sounds awesome to me personally, but I was also up late last night watching clips of Conan O'Brien from 1999 and the nostalgia for that era / what the internet was like back then hit me so hard it was almost painful.

JumpCrisscross 6mo ago
> Why is it being called dead internet theory “A social networking system simulates a user using a language model trained using training data generated from user interactions performed by that user. The language model may be used for simulating the user when the user is absent from the social networking system, for example, when the user takes a long break or if the user is deceased” [1]. (More seriously: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dead_Internet_theory https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dead_Internet_theory) [1] https://patents.google.com/patent/US12513102B2 https://patents.google.com/patent/US12513102B2
- amiantos 6mo ago
  So why isn't it called "dead social media theory"? The internet is not only social media services, though I understand a lot of people seem to think that without centralized social media services there is no reason to use the internet.
  - pixl97 6mo ago
    Have you been on the internet at large lately? With google you may get one authoritative site on something and 50 bot copies of the site on different domains. Sometimes the stolen site is the number one return. Also, if you ran sites years/decades ago, you realized way back then the any local user posting was getting overran by spammers/bots. Now is so much worse that it's not worth doing in most cases. So, most posts on social media aren't real. Most user posts on non-social media are spam/not real. Most websites in searches are copies/ad spam. So yea, dead internet reality.
    - amiantos 6mo ago
      I spend all day every day on the Internet and I don't share your perspective. I might dislike centralized social media and yearn for a bygone era, but just in the past two days I had a very positive interaction with multiple real humans in the Commodore 64 subreddit that helped solve a problem I was having that isn't documented anywhere else on the internet yet. So then I went on my personal blog and blogged about it, which will get it out there on Google and help others. In this way, I am helping to keep the internet alive, I guess. "Be the change you want to see in the world," and all that.
      - nagonago 6mo ago
        I appreciate your positive attitude and I hope more people will adopt it. I am also part of some very niche communities on the internet, and although they are small they are certainly thriving.
      - dylan604 6mo ago
        > So then I went on my personal blog and blogged about it, which will get it out there on Google and help others. That's some of the boldest optimism I think I've seen in awhile. Maybe your blog is more popular than I assume, but still
        amiantos 6mo ago
        Traffic stats for my primary blog are public (I only started using simple analytics in December so there's only two full months of data): https://dashboard.simpleanalytics.com/amiantos.net https://dashboard.simpleanalytics.com/amiantos.net
        dylan604 6mo ago
        If you think a site with only 209 visitors in the past 30 days is going to move the needle, then I've got news for you. Especially if bots are the main source of that visitors count. That's very very close to the number of people visiting your site being you, you, and maybe your mom type of numbers. After that, it'll be skiddies and bots. Anybody that's run their own site has been there, but let's not make it out to be some grandiose site that will determine Google page ranking.
  - bfeist 6mo ago
    100% agree that this is what it should be called. To argue that big websites being big makes them equivalent to the whole Internet is absurd. Besides, I love the idea of the only recourse to be to go back to independently run information websites.
    - dylan604 6mo ago
      For the younger generation, social sites are the internet. They open an app on their device, they don't go to sites by searching the web. I've seen people perform a web search in an app store thinking it was the same thing.
  - jareklupinski 6mo ago
    commercial internet services would prefer that you forget the internet without them can in fact exist
  - burnto 6mo ago
    Yeah I agree. It’s an acute problem on social media platforms where there’s a market force incentivizing it. If you’re mostly engaging in specific niche interactions with known communities or people, it’s not nearly so prevalent. The internet still works fine as a whole.
- genpfault 6mo ago
  > A social networking system simulates a user using a language model trained using training data generated from user interactions performed by that user Google People[1]? [1]: https://qntm.org/perso https://qntm.org/perso
Lerc 6mo ago
It reminds me of the cartoon of two people on an escalator that stops working and one says to the other "Last time this happened I was stuck for four hours" I'm thinking there might have been a deeper message than the moment of ridiculousness.
robotswantdata 6mo ago
How would the small internet fight the bots? Aggressive moderation? Disable UGC?
- amiantos 6mo ago
  In an ideal/fantasy world under "small internet theory", every online friend group would have their own Discourse server set up (similar to how friend groups use Discord now), and traffic/usage of that Discourse server is so small that it would be a waste of resources to try to swamp it with bot traffic, and on top of that, everyone on the Discourse server are friends who can vouch for new members who join, so no bot could join the Discourse server because no one would know who they are. I understand that some may feel we are losing something, by not being able to go onto a website and anonymously talk to 1000s of other anonymous people we do not know, but I do not think that has actually been a net positive and this bot issue demonstrates the issue quite well: if you do not know who you are talking to, you do not know if they are telling the truth, or if they are someone you should even listen to at all, and now they might not even be human. So why do it? I would rather talk to my friends, people I've met in meatspace or over voice chat in a game, people who I can vouch for and that I know I can respect and trust. Let's build small communities of real friends who recognize each other and spend time with them on the internet, in that way the internet will never die.
  - pixl97 6mo ago
    >Let's build small communities of And 10 minutes later Texas demands you identify all your users age when someone posts a porn image somewhere. Facebook will gleefully laugh all the way to the court saying we need such internet ID to entrench themselves. >, in that way the internet will never die. You mean in the exact way the internet used to be... then died? I'm guessing your GenX or a Xennial, it's how we think. Relationships and friendships are hard things to acquire and keep and you have to work to do it otherwise friends disappear. The thing is the younger generations mostly don't think that way. They have mostly always lived in a world where connections are cheap and easy to maintain. Attempting to move to a system that is more difficult will be very difficult for them.
ambicapter 6mo ago
Anyone can run a blog/website and be subject to AI bot crawlers using terabytes of your bandwidth for no reason, yeah.
- ahofmann 6mo ago
  Bandwidth is only expensive in the US, somehow. Here in Germany I didn't bother about bots and their additional traffic since 1998 (there are other annoying things about bots though).
- idop 6mo ago
  More than that, it's practically impossible to find good specialized, human-written websites. Search engines don't find them, all results are AI garbage. With no real ability to be discovered, there's no incentive to maintain such websites too, and so the cycle of slop continues.
  - dwedge 6mo ago
    Kagi small Web, though their rss only seems to show 5 updates a day across thousands of sites. Also search for indieweb
- dwedge 6mo ago
  If this encourages those people to stop sending hundreds of megabytes of crap per page load of their text content, it might be a good thing
xdennis 6mo ago
> Let's celebrate "small internet theory", an internet where exploitation is effectively impossible because every company that tries it is overrun with AI bots. But isn't it even harder for small forums to resist the robot onslaught without the trillion dollar valuations to fund it? Although, part of the reason Facebook/Linkedin/Twitch/etc have bots is because those companies secretly want them, in order to inflate their usage numbers.
- chistev 6mo ago
  > Although, part of the reason Facebook/Linkedin/Twitch/etc have bots is because those companies secretly want them, in order to inflate their usage numbers. Yes, they are disincentivized to get rid of bots.
  - pixl97 6mo ago
    The people that want to get rid of the bots get crushed because said botting technology is hyper advanced and cheap to use because of the massive scale of social media. This ends up with huge numbers of them getting put behind services like cloudflare further consolidating the internet.
Retr0id 6mo ago
We're talking right now on a centralized system that's slowly being overrun by bots. We can survive without, but I'll miss it.
- deleted 6mo ago
  [deleted]
jasondigitized 6mo ago
Bring back BBS. Getting into the good ones was a process back in the day.
- amiantos 6mo ago
  It's funny you mention this, I got a Commodore 64 Ultimate the other day and one of the first things I did was load up the BBS client and browse some BBSes. Those are from before my time (my first PC was a Compaq Pentium 166) so I never got to experience them for real. But if the rest of the internet collapses under the weight of bot traffic, BBSes are quite nice.
- glimshe 6mo ago
  BBSs have been in theory replaced, but in reality they haven't even been approached by modern social media. Small forums full of dedicated users, often local. So many great memories.
gpderetta 6mo ago
signal/noise
Krei-se 6mo ago
Your welcome to link your proven human page with mine. Id even run a dedicated UT99 server lol
raincole 6mo ago
> Anyone can still run a blog/website, and/or their own discourse server Including bots.
xorvoid 6mo ago
I generally agree with this, but I think the small internet hasn't succeeded in building social replacements for the "centralized systems". The internet is a social technology. So for this to be viable, the small internet needs an answer. Occasionally, someone mentions RSS as a solution. That's only a small component of the solution.
obsidianbases1 6mo ago
> what's really happening is that big centralized systems are being overrun with bots? The internet existed and was pretty great before these large centralized systems came into being. This is a great point. Suddenly, I'm looking forward to this
zedlasso 6mo ago
it was originally called zombie web but that didn't catch so it turned into this.
keithnz 6mo ago
No, the old internet wasn't that great. There were so many problems. Finding things was hard, buying things was hard, integrating things was hard, compatibility was hard, everything was super fractured. It felt great at the time because you discovered all these random things and it was all novel at the time. Centralized (Or decentralized collaborative services like IRC or Usenet) really unlocked the power of the internet.
- spr93 6mo ago
  usenet and irc are quite old. how are they examples of some mythical point at which the internet was unlocked by services? centralized and decentralized would include almost any service. your comment is so vague and ambiguous as to be meaningless. (that's a hallmark of LLM output. are you a bot?) it was easier to find authoritative answers 20-30 years ago. google and, before that, altavista and yahoo, were quite good at directing queries to things like university-run information sites or legitimate, curated commercial sites. for the last decade the first google page has been crammed with useless SEO optimized fluff. as for shopping, that was the first dotcom boom. what really took it mainstream was covid. not centralized or decentralized collaborative nonsense.
  - keithnz 6mo ago
    no.... not a bot, and please see HN FAQ before making comments like this.... I'm talking about decentralized common services, like IRC, Usenet, email, same service and they all interact together. But the old internet was super fractured when we got websites, nearly everything did things completely different, was very hard to trust anything. It was not easier finding authoritive answer 20 to 30 years ago, I started in 91, and it was hard to find anything. Search engines were a great improvement, but kind of hard to find what you wanted, things drastically improved with google and page rank, but that brought in other problems
- orbital-decay 6mo ago
  Reasonable fragmentation and friction is a feature, not a bug. Global-scale social networks with zero resistance have turned the information superhighway into the information superconductor carrying infinite current, otherwise known as a short circuit. > buying things was hard This one is not a problem anymore.
raw_anon_1111 6mo ago
And who is going to know your blog exists? If they search on Google they are going to get an answer from AI and stop
- dwedge 6mo ago
  Kagi small web, for one
- amiantos 6mo ago
  Who cares if anyone knows my blog exists? I'm not writing my blog to farm engagement as I do not run ads on my blog. I write on my blog because I want to write my thoughts down and project them into the world. Whether or not anyone sees them is pretty unimportant. If my writing helps someone via them hitting my blog directly or them getting the answer via AI aggregation, mission accomplished.
- AngryData 6mo ago
  In my experience AI doesn't give the answer you want because it gives the most shallow and basic, many times so basic as to be worthless, response. Then I either scroll through 20 results hoping I see one that isn't an AI writeup of the exact same incomplete source, or I give up and search out a specific site I know exists that isn't AI written for that information.
  - raw_anon_1111 6mo ago
    Thats not exactly making an argument for the discovery of blogs
dwedge 6mo ago
In some ways it might be positive. My girlfriend had a small addiction to Instagram reels. The flood of AI generated videos on there just killed the magic for her and she stopped using it
- E-Reverance 6mo ago
  Happy to hear of this anecdata, as it gives me hope something similar will happen to my family
- esperent 6mo ago
  Happy for your girlfriend, and anyone else who escapes because of this. But it's not about the current generation of addicts. It's a play to capture the next generation. It remains to be seen whether they'll get caught or not but it's important to remember that even if all of us mature humans find this new AI social media weird and gross, children don't have our preconceptions. Meta is going to do everything in their power to train the next generation of young, immature brains into finding AI social media normal and addictive. They (along with TikTok) already managed to do that to the last two generations so they have a scary track record here.
coldtea 6mo ago
>Anyone can still run a blog/website, and/or their own discourse server. And those will also get chocked with fake bot "members" and bot comments. Plus, if "anyone can still run a blog/website", this includes bots. AI created and operated blogs/websites, luring in people who think they're reading actual human posts.
- lostmsu 6mo ago
  What's wrong with AI written websites? Not all of them need to lure people by pretending to be humans. Content is either useful or not.
tracerbulletx 6mo ago
Parasitic zombie internet.
nwhnwh 6mo ago
You can create a blog, yeah. But you also can write the blog with AI. So, you still need to filter the content. Over time, people will find that "The signal-to-noise ratio has hit a breaking point where the cost of verification exceeds the expected value of engagement." https://arnon.dk/the-trust-collapse-infinite-ai-content-is-awful https://arnon.dk/the-trust-collapse-infinite-ai-content-is-a...
danfunk 6mo ago
I love "small internet theory." Beautiful view of the future.
reaperducer 6mo ago
The internet existed and was pretty great before these large centralized systems came into being. The big centralized systems existed before the internet. GEnie. Delphi. Bitnet. CompuServe. The Well. American People Link. And dozens more. The internet brought them all together, then extinguished them. Now we're going back to the old days. The only difference now is that instead of paying AT&T to carry dialup connections and leased lines, we're paying our local/regional ISP for cable and fiber. It's all the same game. Only the names have changed.

JumpCrisscross 6mo ago

> Why is it being called dead internet theory “A social networking system simulates a user using a language model trained using training data generated from user interactions performed by that user. The language model may be used for simulating the user when the user is absent from the social networking system, for example, when the user takes a long break or if the user is deceased” [1]. (More seriously: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dead_Internet_theory https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dead_Internet_theory) [1] https://patents.google.com/patent/US12513102B2 https://patents.google.com/patent/US12513102B2

amiantos 6mo ago
So why isn't it called "dead social media theory"? The internet is not only social media services, though I understand a lot of people seem to think that without centralized social media services there is no reason to use the internet.
- pixl97 6mo ago
  Have you been on the internet at large lately? With google you may get one authoritative site on something and 50 bot copies of the site on different domains. Sometimes the stolen site is the number one return. Also, if you ran sites years/decades ago, you realized way back then the any local user posting was getting overran by spammers/bots. Now is so much worse that it's not worth doing in most cases. So, most posts on social media aren't real. Most user posts on non-social media are spam/not real. Most websites in searches are copies/ad spam. So yea, dead internet reality.
  - amiantos 6mo ago
    I spend all day every day on the Internet and I don't share your perspective. I might dislike centralized social media and yearn for a bygone era, but just in the past two days I had a very positive interaction with multiple real humans in the Commodore 64 subreddit that helped solve a problem I was having that isn't documented anywhere else on the internet yet. So then I went on my personal blog and blogged about it, which will get it out there on Google and help others. In this way, I am helping to keep the internet alive, I guess. "Be the change you want to see in the world," and all that.
    - nagonago 6mo ago
      I appreciate your positive attitude and I hope more people will adopt it. I am also part of some very niche communities on the internet, and although they are small they are certainly thriving.
    - dylan604 6mo ago
      > So then I went on my personal blog and blogged about it, which will get it out there on Google and help others. That's some of the boldest optimism I think I've seen in awhile. Maybe your blog is more popular than I assume, but still
      - amiantos 6mo ago
        Traffic stats for my primary blog are public (I only started using simple analytics in December so there's only two full months of data): https://dashboard.simpleanalytics.com/amiantos.net https://dashboard.simpleanalytics.com/amiantos.net
        dylan604 6mo ago
        If you think a site with only 209 visitors in the past 30 days is going to move the needle, then I've got news for you. Especially if bots are the main source of that visitors count. That's very very close to the number of people visiting your site being you, you, and maybe your mom type of numbers. After that, it'll be skiddies and bots. Anybody that's run their own site has been there, but let's not make it out to be some grandiose site that will determine Google page ranking.
- bfeist 6mo ago
  100% agree that this is what it should be called. To argue that big websites being big makes them equivalent to the whole Internet is absurd. Besides, I love the idea of the only recourse to be to go back to independently run information websites.
  - dylan604 6mo ago
    For the younger generation, social sites are the internet. They open an app on their device, they don't go to sites by searching the web. I've seen people perform a web search in an app store thinking it was the same thing.
- jareklupinski 6mo ago
  commercial internet services would prefer that you forget the internet without them can in fact exist
- burnto 6mo ago
  Yeah I agree. It’s an acute problem on social media platforms where there’s a market force incentivizing it. If you’re mostly engaging in specific niche interactions with known communities or people, it’s not nearly so prevalent. The internet still works fine as a whole.
genpfault 6mo ago
> A social networking system simulates a user using a language model trained using training data generated from user interactions performed by that user Google People[1]? [1]: https://qntm.org/perso https://qntm.org/perso

Lerc 6mo ago

It reminds me of the cartoon of two people on an escalator that stops working and one says to the other "Last time this happened I was stuck for four hours" I'm thinking there might have been a deeper message than the moment of ridiculousness.

robotswantdata 6mo ago

How would the small internet fight the bots? Aggressive moderation? Disable UGC?

amiantos 6mo ago
In an ideal/fantasy world under "small internet theory", every online friend group would have their own Discourse server set up (similar to how friend groups use Discord now), and traffic/usage of that Discourse server is so small that it would be a waste of resources to try to swamp it with bot traffic, and on top of that, everyone on the Discourse server are friends who can vouch for new members who join, so no bot could join the Discourse server because no one would know who they are. I understand that some may feel we are losing something, by not being able to go onto a website and anonymously talk to 1000s of other anonymous people we do not know, but I do not think that has actually been a net positive and this bot issue demonstrates the issue quite well: if you do not know who you are talking to, you do not know if they are telling the truth, or if they are someone you should even listen to at all, and now they might not even be human. So why do it? I would rather talk to my friends, people I've met in meatspace or over voice chat in a game, people who I can vouch for and that I know I can respect and trust. Let's build small communities of real friends who recognize each other and spend time with them on the internet, in that way the internet will never die.
- pixl97 6mo ago
  >Let's build small communities of And 10 minutes later Texas demands you identify all your users age when someone posts a porn image somewhere. Facebook will gleefully laugh all the way to the court saying we need such internet ID to entrench themselves. >, in that way the internet will never die. You mean in the exact way the internet used to be... then died? I'm guessing your GenX or a Xennial, it's how we think. Relationships and friendships are hard things to acquire and keep and you have to work to do it otherwise friends disappear. The thing is the younger generations mostly don't think that way. They have mostly always lived in a world where connections are cheap and easy to maintain. Attempting to move to a system that is more difficult will be very difficult for them.

ambicapter 6mo ago

Anyone can run a blog/website and be subject to AI bot crawlers using terabytes of your bandwidth for no reason, yeah.

ahofmann 6mo ago
Bandwidth is only expensive in the US, somehow. Here in Germany I didn't bother about bots and their additional traffic since 1998 (there are other annoying things about bots though).
idop 6mo ago
More than that, it's practically impossible to find good specialized, human-written websites. Search engines don't find them, all results are AI garbage. With no real ability to be discovered, there's no incentive to maintain such websites too, and so the cycle of slop continues.
- dwedge 6mo ago
  Kagi small Web, though their rss only seems to show 5 updates a day across thousands of sites. Also search for indieweb
dwedge 6mo ago
If this encourages those people to stop sending hundreds of megabytes of crap per page load of their text content, it might be a good thing

xdennis 6mo ago

> Let's celebrate "small internet theory", an internet where exploitation is effectively impossible because every company that tries it is overrun with AI bots. But isn't it even harder for small forums to resist the robot onslaught without the trillion dollar valuations to fund it? Although, part of the reason Facebook/Linkedin/Twitch/etc have bots is because those companies secretly want them, in order to inflate their usage numbers.

chistev 6mo ago
> Although, part of the reason Facebook/Linkedin/Twitch/etc have bots is because those companies secretly want them, in order to inflate their usage numbers. Yes, they are disincentivized to get rid of bots.
- pixl97 6mo ago
  The people that want to get rid of the bots get crushed because said botting technology is hyper advanced and cheap to use because of the massive scale of social media. This ends up with huge numbers of them getting put behind services like cloudflare further consolidating the internet.

Retr0id 6mo ago

We're talking right now on a centralized system that's slowly being overrun by bots. We can survive without, but I'll miss it.

deleted 6mo ago
[deleted]

jasondigitized 6mo ago

Bring back BBS. Getting into the good ones was a process back in the day.

amiantos 6mo ago
It's funny you mention this, I got a Commodore 64 Ultimate the other day and one of the first things I did was load up the BBS client and browse some BBSes. Those are from before my time (my first PC was a Compaq Pentium 166) so I never got to experience them for real. But if the rest of the internet collapses under the weight of bot traffic, BBSes are quite nice.
glimshe 6mo ago
BBSs have been in theory replaced, but in reality they haven't even been approached by modern social media. Small forums full of dedicated users, often local. So many great memories.

gpderetta 6mo ago

signal/noise

Krei-se 6mo ago

Your welcome to link your proven human page with mine. Id even run a dedicated UT99 server lol

raincole 6mo ago

> Anyone can still run a blog/website, and/or their own discourse server Including bots.

xorvoid 6mo ago

I generally agree with this, but I think the small internet hasn't succeeded in building social replacements for the "centralized systems". The internet is a social technology. So for this to be viable, the small internet needs an answer. Occasionally, someone mentions RSS as a solution. That's only a small component of the solution.

obsidianbases1 6mo ago

> what's really happening is that big centralized systems are being overrun with bots? The internet existed and was pretty great before these large centralized systems came into being. This is a great point. Suddenly, I'm looking forward to this

zedlasso 6mo ago

it was originally called zombie web but that didn't catch so it turned into this.

keithnz 6mo ago

No, the old internet wasn't that great. There were so many problems. Finding things was hard, buying things was hard, integrating things was hard, compatibility was hard, everything was super fractured. It felt great at the time because you discovered all these random things and it was all novel at the time. Centralized (Or decentralized collaborative services like IRC or Usenet) really unlocked the power of the internet.

spr93 6mo ago
usenet and irc are quite old. how are they examples of some mythical point at which the internet was unlocked by services? centralized and decentralized would include almost any service. your comment is so vague and ambiguous as to be meaningless. (that's a hallmark of LLM output. are you a bot?) it was easier to find authoritative answers 20-30 years ago. google and, before that, altavista and yahoo, were quite good at directing queries to things like university-run information sites or legitimate, curated commercial sites. for the last decade the first google page has been crammed with useless SEO optimized fluff. as for shopping, that was the first dotcom boom. what really took it mainstream was covid. not centralized or decentralized collaborative nonsense.
- keithnz 6mo ago
  no.... not a bot, and please see HN FAQ before making comments like this.... I'm talking about decentralized common services, like IRC, Usenet, email, same service and they all interact together. But the old internet was super fractured when we got websites, nearly everything did things completely different, was very hard to trust anything. It was not easier finding authoritive answer 20 to 30 years ago, I started in 91, and it was hard to find anything. Search engines were a great improvement, but kind of hard to find what you wanted, things drastically improved with google and page rank, but that brought in other problems
orbital-decay 6mo ago
Reasonable fragmentation and friction is a feature, not a bug. Global-scale social networks with zero resistance have turned the information superhighway into the information superconductor carrying infinite current, otherwise known as a short circuit. > buying things was hard This one is not a problem anymore.

raw_anon_1111 6mo ago

And who is going to know your blog exists? If they search on Google they are going to get an answer from AI and stop

dwedge 6mo ago
Kagi small web, for one
amiantos 6mo ago
Who cares if anyone knows my blog exists? I'm not writing my blog to farm engagement as I do not run ads on my blog. I write on my blog because I want to write my thoughts down and project them into the world. Whether or not anyone sees them is pretty unimportant. If my writing helps someone via them hitting my blog directly or them getting the answer via AI aggregation, mission accomplished.
AngryData 6mo ago
In my experience AI doesn't give the answer you want because it gives the most shallow and basic, many times so basic as to be worthless, response. Then I either scroll through 20 results hoping I see one that isn't an AI writeup of the exact same incomplete source, or I give up and search out a specific site I know exists that isn't AI written for that information.
- raw_anon_1111 6mo ago
  Thats not exactly making an argument for the discovery of blogs

dwedge 6mo ago

In some ways it might be positive. My girlfriend had a small addiction to Instagram reels. The flood of AI generated videos on there just killed the magic for her and she stopped using it

E-Reverance 6mo ago
Happy to hear of this anecdata, as it gives me hope something similar will happen to my family
esperent 6mo ago
Happy for your girlfriend, and anyone else who escapes because of this. But it's not about the current generation of addicts. It's a play to capture the next generation. It remains to be seen whether they'll get caught or not but it's important to remember that even if all of us mature humans find this new AI social media weird and gross, children don't have our preconceptions. Meta is going to do everything in their power to train the next generation of young, immature brains into finding AI social media normal and addictive. They (along with TikTok) already managed to do that to the last two generations so they have a scary track record here.

coldtea 6mo ago

>Anyone can still run a blog/website, and/or their own discourse server. And those will also get chocked with fake bot "members" and bot comments. Plus, if "anyone can still run a blog/website", this includes bots. AI created and operated blogs/websites, luring in people who think they're reading actual human posts.

lostmsu 6mo ago
What's wrong with AI written websites? Not all of them need to lure people by pretending to be humans. Content is either useful or not.

tracerbulletx 6mo ago

Parasitic zombie internet.

nwhnwh 6mo ago

You can create a blog, yeah. But you also can write the blog with AI. So, you still need to filter the content. Over time, people will find that "The signal-to-noise ratio has hit a breaking point where the cost of verification exceeds the expected value of engagement." https://arnon.dk/the-trust-collapse-infinite-ai-content-is-awful https://arnon.dk/the-trust-collapse-infinite-ai-content-is-a...

danfunk 6mo ago

I love "small internet theory." Beautiful view of the future.

reaperducer 6mo ago

The internet existed and was pretty great before these large centralized systems came into being. The big centralized systems existed before the internet. GEnie. Delphi. Bitnet. CompuServe. The Well. American People Link. And dozens more. The internet brought them all together, then extinguished them. Now we're going back to the old days. The only difference now is that instead of paying AT&T to carry dialup connections and leased lines, we're paying our local/regional ISP for cable and fiber. It's all the same game. Only the names have changed.