And i'm looking forward to none of them.
Or if I want, I can verify that I'm myself, and eschew anonymity, and certain platforms should only accept contributions from people who don't hide their identity.
Everyone knows who you are in the town square.
What we're missing is a way to have cryptographically secure pseudonymity: you log in to a website, you don't give any information whatsoever, but you cannot make two different accounts.
Many years ago I left a small town and moved to a big city for this exact reason.
Applied ZKPs are being actively worked on in the blockchain sphere.
If you make the price high enough sure, but I'm unsure you can find the right price to simultaneously 1) deter bot traffic and 2) be appealing to actual users.
the individual user is now priced out and cannot speak candidly and anonymously, while large, wealthy orgs simply price that into their market-capture and consensus-building techniques
Dead internet is the prequel to dead world, let's seize the opportunity to learn how to coexist with synthetics and develop the code that will make life with a higher intelligence species possible on Earth. And remember, we humans vary widely, and just like there are people happy to share LinkedIn slop today, there will be humans gladly living surrounded exclusively by overpowering synthetics. So lower your expectations for universal solutions and focus on niche.
The corporate internet was never good to begin with, it was just forced on the masses.
Actually, if I'm thinking about it. Social Media platforms already started this with the paid blue badge for verification, and it's also monthly subscription. But it's for their respective platform only, not universal.
The issue, as I understand it, is literally a new Eternal November, just that instead of “noobs” there are “clankers” this time.
Personally, I don’t give a flying fuck about things like gender, organs (like skin or genitalia) or absence thereof, or anything alike when someone posts something online, unless posted content is strongly related to one of those topics. Ideas matter no matter who or what produces them. Species fit into the same aspects-I-don’t-care-about list just fine - on the Internet nobody knows^W cares you’re a dog. Or a bunch of matrices in a trench coat. As long as you behave socially appropriate.
The problem with bots is that they’re not just noobs - unlike us meatbags they don’t just do wrong and stupid things but can’t possibly learn to stop (because models are static). Solving that, I think, is the true solution, bringing Internet back to life. Anything else seems to be just addressing the correlations to the symptoms.
(Yea, I’m leaning towards technooptimist and transhumanist views - I was raised in culture that had a lot of those, and was sold a dream of a progress that transcends worlds, and haven’t found a reason to denounce that. Your mileage may vary.)
There, sadly, needs to be some gatekeeping and then it can work.
For example I'm member, since years, of a petrolhead forum where it works like that: a fancy car brand, with lots of "tifosi" (and you don't necessarily want all these would-be owners on the forum). To be part of the forum you must be introduced by some other members who have met you in real-life and who confirm that you did show up with a car of that brand.
If you're not a "confirmed owner", you can only access the forum in read-only mode.
It's not 100% foolproof but it does greatly raise the bar.
It's international too: people do travel and they organize meetups / see each others at cars and coffee, etc.
Or take a real extreme, maybe the most expensive social network: the Bloomberg terminal. People/companies paying $30K/year or so per seat each year probably won't be going to let employees hook a LLM to chat for them and risk screwing their reputation. Although I take it you never know.
It is the way it is but gatekeeping does exist and it does work.
All it takes is one invited user to open the door to bots.
Bittorrent trackers, as absolute retarded as they are, have performed this experiment for us and the lesson we're supposed to learn is that this does not work. Someone, somewhere, has an incentive to invite the wrong sort eventually, which because of the social network graph math stuff, eventually means "soon". Once that happens, that bot will invite 10 trillion other bots.
The bots exist for a reason, usually to covertly advertise a product, and by themselves already cost money to run. Someone looking to astroturf their AI B2B SaaS would probably be more willing to pay $10 to post than a random user from a less wealthy country who just wants to leave a comment on an interesting discussion.
History also shows you can take a $10 fee and maintain quality on SomethingAwful for quite some time.
Could we just add complex and varied captcha to the comment & posting forms?
I have not seen or heard of a single person who is excited about AI generated blog posts, or TikToks, or commercials, or images. In fact it’s the opposite, the internet coined the term AI slop, and my non-internet addicted friends hate the fact that chatGPT is killing the environment.
The only people I’ve ever seen champion AI are the few who are excited by the bleeding edge, and the many many peddlers
It's too bad we weren't more skeptical about the ways emerging technologies would eventually be used against us. Some warned about it but many (including me) ignored them. Perhaps we could be forgiven for that naivete, but there's no excuse to be ignorant of what's going on now.
Social media, HN and the rest of internet first business can go broke
I don't see anyone out there propping me up directly. Why would I give crap if some open source hacker or etsy dealer doesn't have a home next month? Yeah I don't because they're not caring in the same way
Thoughts and prayers everyone else but your effort is clear, not going to be 1984'd into caring for people who clearly don't care back.
That is Facebook. I hear it is full of bots posting under verified identities.
In that case, I will certainly embrace the slop net. Perhaps this is even good because many don't dare to venture beyond the black wall.
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.
“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)
Google People[1]?
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.
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.
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.
> buying things was hard
This one is not a problem anymore.
Occasionally, someone mentions RSS as a solution. That's only a small component of the solution.
Aggressive moderation? Disable UGC?
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.
That is a simple method in phpBB. Using ranks one can set new accounts to be able to post and nobody can see their message until verified by a moderator. For small groups and semi-private (invite only) forums this is fairly easy to manage. Spammers and grifters influence nobody. Only cranky old bastards like me see the message. There are other means to keep bots off a tiny site but that is a longer topic. Even better one can send a header to redirect those using the Torbrowser to the Tor link and when states come along and demand some third party process, one simply disables the Clear-Web access. More friction, less data leakage and no corporate capture. This also eliminates the people that can't handle an extra step to access the site and eliminates lazy governments that need money trails.
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.
Yes, they are disincentivized to get rid of bots.
I'm thinking there might have been a deeper message than the moment of ridiculousness.
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.
This is a great point. Suddenly, I'm looking forward to this
Including bots.
If my writing helps someone via them hitting my blog directly or them getting the answer via AI aggregation, mission accomplished.
Id even run a dedicated UT99 server lol
It's a shame though that this is gonna kill so many sites and projects. Sure we have ChatGPT, but also with things like Google AI summary getting so much better traffic to sites is going to plummet. Without people visiting I think the incentive, heck even motivation, for a ton of the sites is gone. We've seen it with sites like Stack Overflow, but it's probably going to happen to just about everything..
Things are definitely going to change in significant ways. The internet of the past is definitely dead, it just doesn't know it yet.
As I see it, this is just an extra step in a long series of tools to just serve information more quickly. Search snippets for search results have always (?) been displayed for each link/page returned. If the information you were looking for was included in those snippets, then you wouldn't need to visit the actual site.
Then at some point there were knowledge cards/panels. Again, if the information you were looking for was in those cards/panels, then you didn't need to click on the links.
Now with LLMs/Gemini, the information is sometimes summarized at the top of the page. You need even less to visit the search results.
Google has always been a kind of cache for the Internet. It's just way more efficient at extracting and displaying information from that cache now.
So, yes, traffic keeps going down. But new knowledge will still need to be produced, right?
(anecdotally, my mother loves AI generated videos, perhaps it's just novelty at the moment and it will wear off)
Obviously that burns down the human Internet, but it’s also a business that will have a short lifespan and bring about its own demise.
I guess they don’t care about anything enduring as long as they can grab some quick cash on the way out.
As far as I can tell, that is basically all AI-related businesses. Including those non-AI ones jumping on the bandwagon to throw all their employees in the bin and expect 10x productivity somehow: if they are right and these tools do become that good, well the economy as we know it is over as white collar knowledge work disappears.
But hey, we made money in those few years right!
A good example is this, car companies don't make cars for the most part, they make loans. Financial companies first, car companies second.
Consolidation, collusion, and rent-seeking behaviors by companies are going out of control too. The fact AI companies can do what they are doing has much to do with the previous brick and mortar businesses weakening any business regulations down to nothing.
Wild-ass business idea: what if Yahoo 2026 recreated Yahoo 1996 and also any of the video sites it bought up back in the day get relaunched as deshittified ad-selling mechanisms to fund the whole thing… there’s gotta be Yahoo 1996 money in whatever scraps YouTube is missing.
It used to be faster and easier to follow actual content.
What the OP is talking about is bots that participate in public discourse. That's the actual problem.
I think it can be handled to a degree though. Private communities, private Internet on top of existing Internet, and social media platforms without public APIs and with strict, enforceable ToS would all help.
But now convincing fake video generation is easily accessible, so one more holdout stands to fall.
It does seem like some kind of ID system is going to be the only way. Sucky but inevitable.
I often have the following thought: technological advancement, for all its boons, inevitably leads down destructive roads in the long run. Sooner or later we open a pandora's box.
Is it though? I have absolutely no doubt we'll get there but I haven't seen any evidence of this in the wild. My Youtube feed is becoming overrun with content with clearly generated scripts and often generated narration. But I haven't seen a single instance (that I'm aware of) of generated video being passed off as real.
Yes I have seen hundreds of tweets and reddit posts showcasing game-changing video technologies like AI face replacement and yes they look incredible in the 45 second demo reels, but every instance I have seen of real-world usage was comically bad.
There comes some hypothetical point where technology has advanced so much that anyone has the power to destroy the world.
Also, I forgot to mention: google AI overview included the AI garbage page as it's answer.
It's dead Jim.
And the vast majority will just be driven to more AI-mediated interactions.
The fundamental issue is that a plurality of humans pref the direction things have gone and are moving in. Is it a good direction? By this crowd’s standards, no.
To be clear, i dont like either but when i watch the speed kids swap between 5 insta accounts and 3 reddit accounts, it seems the majority are happy with it.
LLM’s for all their faults are well-trained to produce what we want.
https://github.com/tanrax/org-social
:-)
It’s not even like commercial astroturfing, it’s just karma farming and public sentiment manipulation.
Or maybe we have finally accepted that our entire economy is the naked emperor.
The grand bargain of the web is gone and it ain’t coming back.
I wrote about it here: https://blog.picheta.me/post/the-future-of-social-media-is-h...
Internet promised ability to connect with anyone anywhere around the world. It felt limitless and infinite.
Turns out in an infinite world, the loudest voices are the ragebaits, the algorithmically-amplified, or the outright scammers.
Human social brain doesn't work in an infinite world, it works for a Dunbar's Number world. And we all like our psuedo-anonymous soapboxes (I'm standing on one right now), but trick will be to realize that the glitter of infinite quantity isn't the same as small-scale connection.
Hence you'll end up with defectors getting paid to siphon off all the conversations to some ad companies that will work on tying them with real world identities and then serving them more detailed ads in the places they cannot avoid interfacing with the open internet.
But I wonder if there's a size of conversation after which people will still choose AI assisted summaries. Discord had/(has?) a feature where it used LLMs summarize and then notify you about a discussion happening.
Now, there are tools to achieve that kind of moderation automagically, and even better, consistently. This is an opportunity to build out a community that is useful for everyone. The first platform that guarantees anonymity supported by human-independent moderation will likely attract significant and persistent user support.
There is still the issue of cost - how does the community pay for such a platform? Perhaps like the Google of yore - very limited ads? Avoiding enshittification can be done through the Wikipedia model - non-profit to manage the whole thing?
The elephant in the room is that a lot of social media companies have a conflict of interest. They can juice their user metrics by not moderating bots as well as they could be.
>Can we go back to an internet like this? I guess we can’t.
Gary Brolsma is still at it with Numa Numa (2023) https://youtu.be/ZBKm1MBsTbk. There's just a bunch of other stuff out there too.
The good news is that the community internet - for the community, by the community - is just starting.
What is a community internet? The internet is layered protocols. UDP, ICMP, TCP, HTTP, HTTPS etc. The community internet is just a new layer of protocols. Coming soon.
I think I'll just take up blacksmithing.
- banner blindness to blue check accounts (instantly scroll past, the blue check is extremely prominent visually)
- a very long Ublock Origin text filter regex for emojis (green check mark in particular) and $currentHotTopic keywords where the signal to noise ratio is close to 0.
What's even funnier is this is literally how "agent teams" (the latest hotness) work. They just do it all on your laptop rather than spamming GitHub.
I imagine it will be way closer to Ghost in the Shell/Cyberpunk in the end than we realize.
A. People want to connect with other people, not talk to computers, and
B. AI slop peddlers know this and have an incentive to lie about their content.
If GenAI content was always reliably declared and people's choices were respected, we wouldn't have a problem.
It's like saying, what does it matter if the news article was fake, as long as you enjoyed reading it? It matters because when I read the news, I want to read about things that actually happened, not stories that manage to fool me into believing they're true.
I think the age of algorithmic curation is dead - but it may, through a „RenaiSSance“, bring back true human connection.
bring back the old internet
While back was toying with the idea of building out a new web on a new protocol (not http based). Thus no existing browser would understand it. Deliberately obscure to force a "Reset" button of sorts.
Though would be short lived, over time we've learned to ruin stuff faster and faster. I'm not sure there's any network so alien that it could hold on to that golden era of innocence from the past, it would be found then expediently and expertly exploited.
[no, not that gemini]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dead_Internet_theory
Wasn’t WP supposed to be impartial and avoid passing judgement?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Dead_Internet_theory#c-Bo...
Mastodon wasn't really it and neither was Substack, although maybe it got slightly closer. TikTok and Telegram, maybe, for different reasons, but they'll face the same destiny.
I'd suppose the much despised "mainstream media" might be a winner here eventually. But beyond that, I am thinking about something like the following:
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2026/mar/10/uk-societ...
2) Reddit... doesn't have much of an incentive to fix the astroturf issue. The site "organically" censors, a lot
I get nostalgia for the 90s/00s, but that time was never coming back anyways.
The best we can hope now is for people to be less online. And if it comes from people drowning in AI crap, I think it's kind of funny.
I actually think it’s more about getting people off browsers and other tracking software.
And how do you create this without it being overran by bots, spam, and people posting gargantuan amounts of porn?
>allow people to control their own databases
There are two types of people that want to control databases. 1: The freedom seeking type who want information sovereignty. 2: The type of people that want to hoover up as much data as possible for money and power.
Guess who has more ability to control the world out of those two.
Lastly, most people want to use curated websites free of spam and content they don't want. Almost nobody wants to do that curation themselves. Hence curated platforms will attract the most people via network effects.
ah shoot, that wasn't lastly...
> getting people off browsers
and putting them on what exactly? phone apps, that's not better at all. Multimedia attracts people like flies to poop. It's seemingly a natural human response to move to an application that is more visually interesting regardless of it's security safety.
Or, you know, the internet just dies and we all meet at bowling alleys again.
And for those who are near, the cost of having a coffee or a drink is too much now on top of expenses that are already stretching,
Maybe when we switched to a fully online adult world with its hyper-optimization of everything, we've put our potential friends in the same bucket with recommendation system-driven content like music and tv-shows. Dating too.
There are certain benefits in getting by with limited choice, when we learn to communicate with people who are not a 100% match.
And as for having a drink or a coffee- we can always just invite the friends over. Hanging out in each others' apartments is fun and cheap
