The feed certainly is, but I suspect most activity left on Facebook is happening in group pages. Groups are the only thing I still log in for as some of them, particularly the local ones, have no other way of taking part. They are also commonly membership by request and actively moderated. If I had the time (and energy) I might put some effort into advocating to moving to something else, but it will be an uphill battle.

And I don't understand why people lump all AI together as if a coding assistant is the same thing as AI generated spam and other garbage. I'm pretty sure no-one here is excited about that.

I'm excited about the former since AI has massively improved my productivity as a programmer to a point where I can't imagine going back. Everything is not black or white and people can be excited about one part of something and hate another at the same time.

That's actually the preferred outcome. The open internet noise ratio will be so high that it turns into pure randomness. The traditional old venues (reputed blogs, small communities forums, pay for valued information, pay for your search, etc..) will resurface again. The Popular Web has been in a slow decline, time to kill it.

I get your frustration of a scorched internet. But I don't think it's all that gloomy. Whether we like it or not, LLMs and some kind of a "down-to-earth AI" is here to stay, once the dust settles. Right now, it feels like everything is burning because we're in the thick of an evolving situation; and the Silicon Valley tech-bros are in a hurry to ride the wave and make a quick buck with their ChatGPT wrapper. (I can't speak of social networks, I don't have any accounts for 10+ years, except for HN.)

    * * *

On "collective losing of minds", you might appreciate this quote from 1841 (!) by Charles MacKay. I quoted it in the past[1] here, but is worth re-posting:

"In reading the history of nations, we find that, like individuals, they have their whims and their peculiarities; their seasons of excitement and recklessness, when they care not what they do. We find that whole communities suddenly fix their minds upon one object, and go mad in its pursuit; that millions of people become simultaneously impressed with one delusion, and run after it, till their attention is caught by some new folly more captivating than the first [...]

"Men, it has been well said, think in herds; it will be seen that they go mad in herds, while they only recover their senses slowly, and one by one."

— from MacKay's book, 'Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds'

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25767454

I think there's room for a middle-ground. I agree that there's a lot of slop being generated and shared around. Part of it is due to the initial excitement over these AI tools. Part of it is that most AI tools still kinda suck at the moment. In the long term I expect tools to get way better, which I'm hopefully could help enable smaller teams of people than ever before to execute on their creative vision.

Personally I have tons of creative ideas which I think would be interesting and engaging but for which I lack the resources to bring into this world, so I'm hoping that in the long term AI tools can help bridge this gap. I'm really hopeful for a world where people from all over the world can share their creative stories, rather than being mostly limited to a few rich people in Hollywood.

Unfortunately I do expect this to end up being the minority of content, especially as we continue being flooded by increasing amounts of trash. But maybe that's just opening up the opportunity for someone to develop new content curation tools. If anything, even before the rise of AI stuff there were mountains of content, and we saw with the rise of TikTok that a good recommendation algorithm still leaves room for new platforms.

They're trajectory is so close to AOL's it's almost implausible. Their cash cow flagship product is widely panned by tech insiders as abusive, manipulative, and toxic but they also place significant financial resources in high quality open source projects out of what can only be described as benevolence and some commitment to the common good.

In regards to the dead internet hypothesis, the content that you're enjoying today, will still be there tomorrow. What I mean is if you, for example, like Mr.Beast, AI is not going to replace him and the content that he produces. Now, he might use AI to boost the productivity of his company, but the end result is still "making the best video ever" as he's often said.

Are we going to end up with rererecapture where to post you need something on your phone/laptop measuring typing speed and scanning your face with an IR cam? Or a checkmark showing typed out by hand? Wouldn't get rid of ai content but may slow down bots posting it.

I agree with the overall sentiment, but it's is not necessarily the case that "the world has collectively decided to lose their minds with this AI crap". You only need a relatively small number of bad actors for this to be the case.

I am one of those people unironically excited - the social parts of the internet have been dead and filled with bots for a long time. Now people just see it more.

Maybe they’ll go outside.

Every content that exists on the web could now be rewritten and repurposed by LLMs. This could lead into an explosion of web sites that could easily double in size every few years. Good luck indexing all that crap and deciding what is duplicate and what not.

Hear, hear!