And the vast majority will just be driven to more AI-mediated interactions.
Year or so ago I took an Uber and was mesmerized by the driver. He had his phone up mounted on the left and was pretty constantly interacting with it. Checking for new rides, watching a video, checking facebook. It was quite impressive how much content he consumed while at a red light and how dexterously he navigated to and through like 10 different apps.
I very much got the feeling that this was a person that was terminally online and suspected that he's not alone. A bit alienating really, living in the same country speaking the same language but realizing there's this huge cultural/behavior divide between us.
50% of US teenagers describe themselves as terminally online.
Go any place where people work and have time to goof, and you'll see them online.
Go to a bar/club, you see people with a phone in front of their face.
The idea there is an online and offline is crumbling further every day. Cameras are small, bandwidth is high in relation to our compression algorithms. Anything happening in the world can be broadcast live. More and more types of machines are coming online that accept digital instructions that make things happen in real life.
Furthermore it's an odd rejection of the printing press on your part. That methods of information exchange affect the real world around them. If the book brought about the industrial revolution, what does an always available global communications network bring?
At least based on your writing here on HN it seems like you're probably an introvert, or at least a person that likes quiet pondering and reflections. Reading a book would be far more interesting than most online activities, right? If I'm right and that is the case, then you may be missing just how many people are horrifically addicted to being on social media all the time.
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,
Modern technology kind of broke friendship in the sense that not very long ago maintaining friendships over any distance was expensive. That is it costs long distance fees, gas, or letter writing. Because of those expenses it was very common to make friends locally pretty quickly.
But the internet broke that, especially modern social media. Wherever you moved your friends were a free website away, and long distance calling was gone. At first this seemed fine because sites connected you to your friends, but as the lock in happened it became a contest of getting you pissed off and showing you ads.
Going to take a long time to socially fix this problem. Especially as some large number of people are going to talk to AI instead.
And i'm looking forward to none of them.
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
I can’t really articulate why, but this doesn’t feel true to me. There are plenty of things humans do especially at scale that we don’t like, or we do that we don’t like others doing, and don’t stop
Hence why we have to keep feeding the orphan crushing machine.
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.
History also shows you can take a $10 fee and maintain quality on SomethingAwful for quite some time.
Assuming the money isn't wasted and is actually used to fund moderation 10$ is probably comfortably above the cost to detect and ban most malicious users.
"my2cents"
0.02 to post or send a message
TLDR: Mail storage is the sender's responsibility. The message isn't copied to the receiver. All the receiver needs is a brief notification that a message is available.
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.
Could we just add complex and varied captcha to the comment & posting forms?
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.
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.
We're scratching our heads wondering why there's no forward motion when it's simply that no one is pushing it.
They haven't added or really changed anything since the acquisition AFAICT, it's just trucking along exactly as it was the day Zoom bought them out. Twitter account proofs were broken by the API changes years ago and nobody is at the wheel to fix or even just deprecate them.
Applied ZKPs are being actively worked on in the blockchain sphere.
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.
Even if it's some kind of government encoded key, governments cannot be trusted to create imaginary people and hand them out to companies like palantir for large scale population manipulation.
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.
All it takes is one invited user to open the door to bots.
Invite only. You get a number of invites per year etc. And once a year an open door or so
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.
Unlike most public trackers which are either dead or on a life-support, member-only and invite-only sites are still kicking.
And you are personally responsible for your invitee
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.
That is Facebook. I hear it is full of bots posting under verified identities.
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 progress that transcends worlds and haven’t found a reason to denounce that. Your mileage may vary.)
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]
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.
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.
Invite only, very exclusionary. Private club with public posting? Worst of both worlds.
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.
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.
I think I'll just take up blacksmithing.
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)
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.
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
When AI can post a million times a day the internet is FUBAR.
Google People[1]?
I'm thinking there might have been a deeper message than the moment of ridiculousness.
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.
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.
That doesn't make it wrong, it just might make the last 20 years a mistake.
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.
Would you like me to help you create a copy of this centralized system with a CAPTCHA to filter out the bots?
Id even run a dedicated UT99 server lol
Including bots.
This is a great point. Suddenly, I'm looking forward to this
Occasionally, someone mentions RSS as a solution. That's only a small component of the solution.
If my writing helps someone via them hitting my blog directly or them getting the answer via AI aggregation, mission accomplished.
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.
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.
2) Reddit... doesn't have much of an incentive to fix the astroturf issue. The site "organically" censors, a lot
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 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.
The grand bargain of the web is gone and it ain’t coming back.
bring back the old internet
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.
https://github.com/tanrax/org-social
:-)
It's dead Jim.
I wrote about it here: https://blog.picheta.me/post/the-future-of-social-media-is-h...
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...
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.
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?
I think the age of algorithmic curation is dead - but it may, through a „RenaiSSance“, bring back true human connection.
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.
artemonster•1h ago
artemonster•1h ago