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.
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.
> 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.
Hipster used to mean that but meaning changed to being someone who “doesn’t fit in” but only for performative reasons, not really “for real” but just to project an image of how cool they are
> Its odd to me to still use "luddite" disparagingly while implying that avoiding certain tech would actually have some high impact benefits
They didn't say to avoid certain tech. They said to avoid takes and news headlines.
Your conflation of those two is like someone saying "injecting bleach into your skin is bad" and you responding with "oh, so you oppose cleaning bathrooms [with bleach]?"
How so? The OP referenced how difficult it is to avoid said takes and news without being a complete luddite. That certainly implies avoiding certain tech, I have to assume they meant much of the digital tech we use today rather than the power loom luddites were pushing back on.
Your bleach scenario is confusing to me, its also you arguing against something completely unrelated to the discussion here.
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.
I think fatigue will set in and the next generation will 'tock' back from this 'tick.' Getting outraged by things is already feeling antiquated to me, and I'm in my 30's.
There's a massive industry built around this on YT, exemplified by the OP's post about his parents. To a first-order approximation, every story with a theme of "X does sexist/racist/ageist/abusive thing to Y and then gets their comeuppance" on YouTube is AI-generated clickbait. The majority of the "X does nice thing for Y and gets a reward or surprise" dating from the last year or two are also AI-generated clickbait, but far more of the former. Outrage gets a lot more clicks than compassion.
> news outlets and journalists have always had incentive to present extreme takes to get people angry, cause that sells.
As someone who’s read a newspaper daily for 30+ years, that is definitely not true. The news has always tried to capture your attention but doing so using anger and outrage, and using those exclusively, is a newer development. Newspapers and broadcast news used to use humor, suspense, and other things to provoke curiosity. When the news went online, it became focused on provoking anger and outrage. Even print edition headlines tend to be tamer than what’s in the online edition.
> 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.
I think the comment you're replying to isn't necessarily a question of opting out of such news, it's the fact that it's so hard to escape it. I swipe on my home screen and there I am, in my Google news feed with the constant barrage of nonsense.
I mostly get gaming and entertainment news for shows I watch, but even between those I get CNN and Fox News, both which I view as "opinion masquerading as news" outlets.
My mom shares so many articles from her FB feed that are both mainstream (CNN, etc) nonsense and "influencer" nonsense.
Right, and my point is how easy opting out actually is.
I have no news feed on my phone. I doubt on android it is any harder to evade. Social media itself is gone. The closest I get to click-bait is when my mother spouts something gleaned from the Daily Mail. That vector is harder to shift I concede!
Fair points on both fronts! Though I think you may be conflating simple with easy. Removing social media from one's life is certainly simple (just uninstall the app!), but it's not that easy for some people because it's their only method of communication with some folks. I mostly don't use SM but I log onto Instagram because some of my friends only chat there, same with Facebook.
> 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.
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).
Completely agree, but at the same time I can't bring myself to believe that reinforcing systems like the electoral college or reinstating a state-legislature-chosen Senate would yield better outcomes.
Most people I know who have strong political opinions (as well as those who don't) can't name their own city council members or state assemblyman, and that's a real problem for functioning representative democracy. Not only for their direct influence on local policy, but also because these levels of government also serve as the farm team or proving grounds for higher levels of office.
By the time candidates are running with the money and media of a national campaign, in some sense it's too late to evaluate them on matters of their specific policies and temperaments, and you kind of just have to assume they're going to follow the general contours of their party. By and large, it seems the entrenched political parties (and, perhaps, parties in general) are impediments to good governance.
I think it's an inherent problem with democracy in itself, and something that will have to be worked out at some time, somewhere.
The accidents that let it occur may no longer be present - there are arguments that "democracy" as we understand it was impossible before rapid communication, and perhaps it won't survive the modern world.
We're living in a world where a swing voter in Ohio may have more effect/impact on Iran than a person living there - or even more effect on Europe than a citizen of Germany.
The issue is the disconnect between professed principles and action. And the fact that nowadays there are not many ways to pick and choose principles except two big preset options.
It's easier to focus on fewer representatives, and because the federal government has so much power (and then state governments), life-changing policies mainly come top-down. Power should instead flow bottom-up, with the top being the linchpin, but alas.
I feel like you people are intentionally misconstruing what "Luddite" means. It doesn't mean "avoids specific new tech." It means "avoiding ALL new tech because new things are bad."
A luddite would refuse the covid vaccine. They'd refuse improved trains. They'd refuse EVs. etc. This is because ludditism is the blanket opposition to technological improvements.
you have completely misunderstood what it means to be a luddite.
the luddites were a labor movement opposed to the negative externalities imposed by rapid industrialization of formerly-craft/artisinal markets. it was a movement that stood for the protection of workers rights and the quality of goods produced; it was not opposed to new technologies. what it did oppose was the irresponsible use of those technologies at the expense of workers and consumers.
what you're referring to is probably more accurately described as primitivism.
> I feel like you people are intentionally misconstruing what "Luddite" means.
That’s a very unfair accusation to throw at someone off the cuff. Anyway, what you wrote is not what a Luddite is at all, especially not the anti-vaccine accusation. I don’t think you’re being deliberately deceptive here, I think you just don’t know what a Luddite is (was).
For starters: They were not anti-science/medicine/all technology. They did not have “blanket opposition to all technological improvement.” You’re expressing a common and simplistic misunderstanding of the movement and likely conflating it with (an also flawed understanding of) the Amish.
They were, at their core, a response against industrialization that didn’t account for the human cost. This was at the start of the 19th century. They wanted better working conditions and more thoughtful consideration as industrialization took place. They were not anti-technology and certainly not anti-vaccine.
The technology they were talking about was mostly related to automation in factories which, coupled with anti-collective bargaining initiatives, led to further dehumanization of the workforce as well as all sorts novel and horrific workplace accidents for adults and children alike. Their call for “common sense laws” and “guardrails” are echoed today with how many of us talk about AI/LLM’s.
> 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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
Not scold (that is how we shape social behavior), but only note that Safe Harbor essentially grants the opposite of this (away from the potential default of "By transiting malware you are complicit and liable in the effect of the malware") so it'd have to be a finely-crafted law to have the desired effect without shutting down the ability to do both online advertising and online forums at all.
... which doesn't sound impossible. It's also entirely possible that the value of Section 230 has run its course and it should generally be remarkably curtailed (its intent was to make online forums and user-generated-content networks, of which ad networks are a kind, possible, but one could make the case that it has been demonstrated that operators of online forums have immense responsibility and need to be held accountable for more of the harms done via the online spaces they set up).
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.
It's never going to happen, but I felt we solved all of this with forums and IRC back in the day. I wish we gravitated towards that kind of internet again.
Group sizes were smaller and as such easier to moderate. There could be plenty of similar interest forums which meant even if you pissed of some mods, there were always other forums. Invite only groups that recruited from larger forums (or even trusted members only sections on the same forum) were good at filtering out low value posters.
There were bots, but they were not as big of a problem. The message amplification was smaller, and it was probably harder to ban evade.
> I wish we gravitated towards that kind of internet again.
So do it. Forums haven't gone away, you just stopped going to them. Search for your special interest followed by "Powered by phpbb" (or Invision Community, or your preferred software) and you'll find plenty of surprisingly active communities out there.
Yeah, you are right! I have started going down that road the last year or so, but mostly in the IRC sphere. I started hanging out libera.chat, but found a smaller community on irc.inthemansion.com which I really enjoy.
I'm probably just jaded as most of the forums I visited back in the day became ghost towns during the 2010s. I should make more of an effort here
> It's never going to happen, but I felt we solved all of this with forums and IRC back in the day. I wish we gravitated towards that kind of internet again.
IME young people use Discord, and those servers often require permission to even join. Nearly all my fandom communications happen on a few Discord servers, most of which you cannot join without an invitation, and if you're kicked (bad actors will be kicked), you cannot re-join (without permission).
I guess I am kind of describing Discord in some sense, I personally discounted Discord as I've only ever used it as a free voice chat for small groups. But to be fair, I would rather leverage basic HTTP websites for consuming social media content than everything being that boring discord client.
>and be absolutely ruthless in permabanning anyone who posts AI content unmarked,
It would certainly be fun to trick people I dislike into posting AI content unknowingly. Maybe it has to be so low-key that they aren't even banned on the first try, but that just seems ripe for abuse.
I want a solution to this problem too, but I don't think this is reasonable or practical. I do wonder what it would mean if, philosophically, there were a way to differentiate between "free speech" and commercial speech such that one could be respected and the other regulated. But if there is such a distinction I've never been able to figure it out well enough to make the argument.
Worst is... the bots, spam and ads are still there, even if there is no-one to read them.
Usenet might still be alive (for piracy/binaries at least), and maybe a handfull of still-alive text-groups, but in the text-groups I used to read, it's nothing but a constant flow of spam since 15+ years.
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.
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.
> Those subreddits label content wrong all the time.
Intentionally if I might add. Reddit users aren't particularly interested in providing feedback that will inevitably be used to make AI tools more convincing in the future, nobody's really moderating those subs, and that makes them the perfect target for poisoning via shitposting in the comments.
> You're training yourself with a very unreliable source of truth.
I don’t just look at the bot decision or accept every consensus blindly. I read the arguments.
If I watch a video and think it’s real and the comments point to the source, which has a description saying they use AI, how is that unreliable?
Alternatively, I watch a video and think it’s AI but a commenter points to a source like YT where the video was posted 5 years ago, or multiple similar videos/news articles about the weird subject of the video, how is that unreliable?
I don't understand. In the grandparent comment you say you have a problem spending too much time on those subreddits and watching too many of those videos, but then you push back here.
Personally, I don't think that behavior is very healthy, and the other parent comment suggested an easy "get out of jail free" way of not thinking about it anymore while also limiting anxiety: they're unreliable subreddits. I'd say take that advice and move on.
I show my young daughter this stuff and try to role model healthy skepticism. Critical thinking YT like Corridor Crew’s paranormal UFO/bigfoot/ghosts/etc series is great too. Peer pressure might be the deciding factor in what she ultimately chooses to believe, though.
I think the broader response and re-evaluation is going to take a lot longer. Children of today are growing up in an obviously hostile information environment whereas older folk are trying to re-calibrate in an environment that's changing faster than they are.
If the next generation can weather the slop storm, they may have a chance to re-establish new forms of authentic communication, though probably on a completely different scale and in different forms to the Web and current social media platforms.
It was always easy to fake photos too. Just organize the scene, or selectively frame what you want. There is no such thing as any piece of media you can trust.
The construction workers having lunch on the girder in that famous photo were in fact about four feet above a safety platform; it's a masterpiece of framing and cropping. (Ironically the photographer was standing on a girder out over a hundred stories of nothing).
Yeah this is what I always expected to happen. Cryptographic signing of source material so you can verify who the initial claimant is, and base credibility on the identity of that person.
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.
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
AI is capable of consistent characters now, yes, but the platforms themselves provide little incentive to. TikTok/Instagram Reels are designed to serve recommendations, not a user-curated feed of people you follow, so consistency is not needed for virality
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.
Content farms, whether AI generated or not their incentive is to pump out low quality high output. Most of their content even it involves a human narrator are heavily packed with AI generated media.
I use them – well, mostly en dashes because that's the custom where I'm from – because I'm a bit of a typography nerd and have grown to dislike the barrenness of ASCII.
In this case Apple has cared about typography since its very beginning. Steve Jobs obsessed over it. The OS also replaces simple quotes with fancier ones.
I do the same on my websites. It's embedded into my static site generator.
Not long ago, a statistical study found that AI almost always has an 'e' in its output. It is a firm indicator of AI slop. If you catch a post with an 'e', pay it no mind: it's probably AI.
Uh-oh. Caught you. Bang to rights! That post is firmly AI. Bad. Nobody should mind your robot posts.
I'm incredibly impressed that you managed to make that whole message without a single usage of the most frequently used letter, except in your quotations.
Such omission is a hobby of many WWW folk. I can, in fact, think back to finding a community on R*ddit known as "AVoid5", which had this trial as its main point.
I did ask G'mini for synonyms. And to do a cursory count of e's in my post. Just as a 2nd opinion. It found only glyphs with quotation marks around it. It graciously put forward a proxy for that: "the fifth letter".
It's not oft that you run into such alluring confirmation of your point.
My first post took around 6 min & a dictionary. This post took 3. It's a quick skill.
No LLMs. Ctrl+f shows you all your 'e's without switching away from this tab. (And why count it? How many is not important, you can simply look if any occur and that's it)
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.
> 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.
It's not built to make people angry per se - it's built to optimise for revenue generation - which so happens to be content that makes people angry.
People have discovered that creating and posting such content makes them money, and the revenue is split between themselves and the platforms.
In my view if the platforms can't tackle this problem then the platforms should be shutdown - promoting this sort of material should be illegal, and it's not an excuse to say our business model won't work if we are made responsible for the things we do.
ie while it turns out you can easily scale one side of publishing ( putting stuff out their and getting paid by ads ), you can't so easily scale the other side of publishing - which is being responsible for your actions - if you haven't solved both sides you don't have a viable business model in my view.
In social networks, revenue is enhanced by stickiness.
Anger increases stickiness. Once one discovers there are other people on the site, and they are guilty of being wrong on the internet, one is incentivized to correct them. It feels useful because it feels like you're generating content that will help other people.
I suspect the failure of the system that nobody necessarily predicted is that people seem to not only tolerate, but actually like being a little angry online all the time.
Sure -it's a mix - but to be honest I think it's over-emphasized - in that in the US most of that kind of money driving politics operates in plain sight.
For example, the 'Russian interference' in the 2016 US election, was I suspect mostly people trying to make money, and more importantly, was completely dwarfed by US direct political spending.
There is also a potentially equally, if not larger problem, in the politicisation of the 'anti-disinformation' campaigns.
To be honest I'm not sure if there is much of a difference between a grifter being directly paid to promote a certain point of view, and somebody being paid indirectly ( by ads ).
In both cases neither really believes in the political point they are making they are just following the money.
> 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.
I don't see anything like outrage in GP, just a vaguely implied sense of superiority (political, not racial!).
I agree with grandparent and think you have cause and effect backwards: people really do want to be outraged so Facebook and the like provide rage bait. Sometimes through algos tuning themselves to that need, sometimes deliberately.
But Facebook cannot "require" people do be angry. Facebook can barely even "require" people to log in, only those locked into Messenger ecosystem.
I don't use Facebook but I do use TikTok, and Twitter, and YouTube. It's very easy to filter rage bait out of your timeline. I get very little of it, mark it "uninterested"/mute/"don't recommend channel" and the timeline dutifully obeys. My timelines are full of popsci, golden retrievers, sketches, recordings of local trams (nevermind), and when AI makes an appearance it's the narrative kind[1] which I admit I like or old jokes recycled with AI.
The root of the problem is in us. Not on Facebook. Even if it exploits it. Surfers don't cause waves.
No, they do not. Nobody[1] wants to be angry. Nobody wakes up in the morning and thinks to themselves, "today is going to be a good day because I'm going to be angry."
But given the correct input, everyone feels that they must be angry, that it is morally required to be angry. And this anger then requires them to seek out further information about the thing that made them angry. Not because they desire to be angry, but because they feel that there is something happening in the world that is wrong and that they must fight.
I disagree. Why are some of the most popular subreddits things like r/AmITheAsshole, r/JustNoMIL, r/RaisedByNarcissists, r/EntitledPeople, etc.: forums full of (likely fake) stories of people behaving egregiously, with thousands of outraged comments throwing fuel on a burning pile of outrage: "wow, your boyfriend/girlfriend/husband/wife/father/mother/FIL/MIL/neighbor/boss/etc. is such an asshole!" Why are advice/gossip columns that provide outlets for similar stories so popular? Why is reality TV full of the same concocted situations so popular? Why is people's first reaction to outrageous news stories to bring out the torches and pitchforks, rather than trying to first validate the story? Why can an outrageous lie travel halfway around the world while the truth is still getting its boots on?
As someone who used to read some of these subreddits before they became swamped in AI slop, I did not go there to be angry but to be amused and/or find like-minded people.
I suppose the subtlety is that people want to be angry if (and only if) reality demands it.
My uneducated feeling is that, in a small society, like a pre-civilisation tribal one where maybe human emotions evolved, this is useful because it helps enact change when and where it's needed.
But that doesn't mean that people want to be angry in general, in the sense that if there's nothing in reality to be angry about then that's even better. But if someone is presented with something to be angry about, then that ship has sailed so the typical reaction is to feel the need to engage.
>in a small society, like a pre-civilisation tribal one where maybe human emotions evolved, this is useful because it helps enact change when and where it's needed
Yes, I think this is exactly it. A reaction that may be reasonable in a personal, real-world context can become extremely problematic in a highly connected context.
It's both that, as an individual, you can be inundated with things that feel like you have a moral obligation to react. On the other side of the equation, if you say something stupid online, you can suddenly have thousands of people attacking you for it.
Every single action seems reasonable, or even necessary, to each individual person, but because everything is scaled up by all the connections, things immediately escalate.
The issue right now is that the only things you can do to protect yourself from certain kinds of predators is literally what will get you blown up on social media when taken out of context.
There's a difference between wanting to be angry and feeling that anger is the correct response to an outside stimulus.
I don't wake up thinking "today I want to be angry", but if I go outside and see somebody kicking a cat, I feel that anger is the correct response.
The problem is that social media is a cat-kicking machine that drags people into a vicious circle of anger-inducing stimuli. If people think that every day people are kicking cats on the Internet, they feel that they need to do something to stop the cat-kicking; given their agency, that "something" is usually angry responses and attacks, which feeds the machine.
Again, they do not do that because they want to be angry; most people would rather be happy than angry. They do it because they feel that cats are being kicked, and anger is the required moral response.
And if you seek out (and push ‘give me more’ buttons on) cat kicking videos?
At some point, I think it’s important to recognize the difference between revealed preferences and stated preferences. Social media seems adept at exposing revealed preferences.
If people seek out the thing that makes them angry, how can we not say that they want to be angry? Regardless of what words they use.
And for example, I never heard anyone who was a big Fox News, Rush Limbaugh, or Alex Jones fan who said they wanted to be angry or paranoid (to be fair, this was pre-Trump and awhile ago), yet every single one of them I saw got angry and paranoid after watching them, if you paid any attention at all.
>If people seek out the thing that makes them angry, how can we not say that they want to be angry?
Because their purpose in seeking it out is not to get angry, it's to stop something from happening that they perceive as harmful.
I doubt most people watch Alex Jones because they love being angry. They watch him because they believe a global cabal of evildoers is attacking them. Anger is the logical consequence, not the desired outcome. The desired outcome is that the perceived problem is solved, i.e. that people stop kicking cats.
The reason they feel that way (more) is because of those videos. Just like most people who watch Alex Jones probably didn’t start by believing all the crazy things.
We can chicken/egg about it all day, but at some point if people didn’t want it - they wouldn’t be doing it.
Depending on the definition of ‘want’ of course. But what else can we use?
I don’t think anyone would disagree that smokers want cigarettes, eh? Or gamblers want to gamble?
I think most people have experienced relatives of theirs falling down these rabbit holes. They didn't seek out a reason to be angry; they watched one or two episodes of these shows because they were on Fox, or because a friend sent it, or because they saw it recommended on Facebook. Then they became angry, which made them go back because now it became a moral imperative to learn more about how the government is making frogs gay.
None of these people said to themselves, "I want to be angry today, and I heard that Alex Jones makes people angry, therefore I will watch Alex Jones."
A lot of people really do, and it predates any sort of media too. When they don't have outrage media they form gossip networks so they can tell each other embellished stories about mundane matters to be outraged and scandalized about.
> When they don't have outrage media they form gossip networks so they can tell each other embellished stories about mundane matters to be outraged and scandalized about.
But again in this situation the goal is not to be angry.
This sort of behaviour emerges as a consequence of unhealthy group dynamics (and to a lesser extent, plain boredom). By gossiping, a person expresses understanding of, and reinforces, their in-group’s values. This maintains their position in the in-group. By embellishing, the person attempts to actually increase their status within the group by being the holder of some “secret truth” which they feel makes them important, and therefore more essential, and therefore more secure in their position. The goal is not anger. The goal is security.
The emotion of anger is a high-intensity fear. So what you are perceiving as “seeking out a reason to be angry” is more a hypervigilant scanning for threats. Those threats may be to the dominance of the person’s in-group among wider society (Prohibition is a well-studied historical example), or the threats may be to the individual’s standing within the in-group.
In the latter case, the threat is frequently some forbidden internal desire, and so the would-be transgressor externalises that desire onto some out-group and then attacks them as a proxy for their own self-denial. But most often it is simply the threat of being wrong, and the subsequent perceived loss of safety, that leads people to feel angry, and then to double down. And in the world we live in today, that doubling down is more often than not rewarded with upvotes and algorithmic amplification.
I disagree. In these gossip circles they brush off anything that doesn't make them upset, eager to get to the outrageously stuff. They really do seek to be upset. It's a pattern of behavior which old people in particular commonly fall into, even in absence of commercialized media dynamics.
> In these gossip circles they brush off anything that doesn't make them upset
Things that they have no fear about, and so do not register as warranting brain time.
> eager to get to the outrageously stuff.
The things which are creating a feeling of fear.
It’s not necessary for the source of a fear to exist in the present moment, nor for it to even be a thing that is real. For as long as humans have communicated, we have told tales about things that go bump in the dark. Tales of people who, through their apparent ignorance of the rules of the group, caused the wrath of some spirits who then punished the group.
It needn’t matter whether a person’s actions actually caused a problem, or whether it caused the spirits to be upset, or indeed whether the spirits actually ever existed at all. What matters is that there is a fear, and there is a story about that fear, and the story reinforces some shared group value.
> It's a pattern of behavior which old people in particular commonly fall into,
Here is the fundamental fear of many people: the fear of obsolescence, irrelevance, abandonment, and loss of control. We must adapt to change, but also often have either an inability or unwillingness to do so. And so the story becomes it is everyone else who is wrong. Sometimes there is wisdom in the story that should not be dismissed. But most often it is just an expression of fear (and, again, sometimes boredom).
What makes this hypothesis seem so unbelievable? Why does it need to be people seeking anger? What would need to be true for you to change your opinion? This discussion thread is old, so no need to spend your energy on answering if you don’t feel strongly about it. Just some parting questions to mull over in the bath, perhaps.
Thank you for raising this idea originally, and for engaging with me on it.
The opposite question - why so insistent that people wouldn’t seek it out, when behavior pretty strongly shows it?
Why are you so insistent that people don’t do what they clearly seem to do?
Why is that hypothesis so unbelievable?
Is it the apparent lack of (actual) agency for many people? Or the concerning worry that we all could be steering ourselves to our own dooms, while convincing ourself we aren’t?
> Why are you so insistent that people don’t do what they clearly seem to do?
I’m not rejecting the idea that people fixate on stimuli that produce anger. The question is why they do that, and the answer is unlikely to be “people just want to be angry”.
> Why is that hypothesis so unbelievable?
Because it runs counter to the best available literature I am aware of and is a conclusion based on a superficial observation which has no underlying theoretical basis, whereas the hypothesis I present is grounded in some amount of actual science and evidence. Even the superficial Wikipedia article on anger emphasises the role of threat response here. Mine isn’t, as far as I can tell, some fringe position; it is very much in line with the research. It is also in line with my personal experience. “People just want to be angry” is not.
It is important to understand that the things people try to avoid through gossip, exaggeration, and expressions of anger are not all mortal threats. They can also be very mundane things like not wanting to eat something that they just think tastes bad. So make sure not to take the word “threat” too narrowly when considering this hypothesis.
I don’t have any skin in the game here other than an interest in the truth of the matter and a willingness to engage since I find this sort of thing both interesting and sociologically very important. If you or anyone have some literature to shove in my face that offers some compelling data in support of the “people love feeling angry” hypothesis, then sure, I would accept that and integrate that into my understanding of human behaviour.
You may be vastly overestimating average media competence. This is one of those things where I'm glad my relatives are so timid about the digital world.
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.
Is a video documenting racist behavior a racist or an anti-racist video? Is faking a video documenting racist behavior (that never happened) a racist or an anti-racist video? Is the act of faking a video documenting racist behavior (that never happened) or anti-racist behavior?
Video showing racist behavior is racist and anti-racist at the same time. A racist will be happy watching it, and anti-racist will forward it to forward their anti-racist message.
Faking a racist video that never happend is, first of all, faking. Second, it's the same: racist and anti-racist at the same time. Third, it's falsifying the prevalence of occurrence.
If you'll add to the video a disclaimer: "this video has been AI-generated, but it shows events that happen all across the US daily" then there's no problem. Nobody is being lied to about anything. The video shows the message, it's not faking anything. But when you impersonate a real occurence, but it's a fake video, then you're lying, and it's simple as that.
Can a lie be told in good faith? I'm afraid that not even philosophy can answer that question. But it's really telling that leftist are sure about the answer!
That's not necessarily just a leftist thing. Plenty of politicians are perfectly fine with saying things they know are lies for what they believe are good reasons. We see it daily with the current US administration.
Well yes, that's what he wrote, but that's like saying: stealing can be done for variety of reasons, including by someone who intends the theft to be discovered? Killing can be done for variety of reasons, including by someone who intends the killing to be discovered?
I read it as "producing racist videos can sometimes be used in good faith"?
They're saying one example of a reason someone could fake a video is so it would get found out and discredit the position it showed. I read it as them saying that producing the fake video of a cop being racist could have been done to discredit the idea of cops being racist.
There is significant differences between how the information world and the physical world operate.
Creating all kinds of meta-levels of falsity is a real thing, with multiple lines of objective (if nefarious) motivation, in the information arena.
But even physical crimes can have meta information purposes. Putin for instance is fond of instigating crimes in a way that his fingerprints will inevitably be found, because that is an effective form of intimidation and power projection.
I think they’re just saying we should interpret this video in a way that’s consistent with known historical facts. On one hand, it’s not depicting events that are strictly untrue, so we shouldn’t discredit it. On the other hand, since the video itself is literally fake, when we discredit it we shouldn’t accidentally also discredit the events it’s depicting.
So make fake videos of events that never actually happened, because real events surely did that weren’t recorded? Or weren’t viral enough? Or something?
How about this question: Can generating an anti-racist video be justified as a good thing?
I think many here would say "yes!" to this question, so can saying "no" be justified by an anti-racist?
Generally I prefer questions that do not lead to thoughts being terminated. Seek to keep a discussion not stop it.
On the subject of this thread, these questions are quite old and are related to propaganda: is it okay to use propaganda if we are the Good Guys, if, by doing so, it weakens our people to be more susceptible to propaganda from the Bad Guys. Every single one of our nations and governments think yes, it's good to use propaganda.
Because that's explicitly what happened during the rise of Nazi Germany; the USA had an official national programme of propaganda awareness and manipulation resistance which had to be shut down because the country needed to use propaganda on their own citizens and the enemy during WW2.
So back to the first question, its not the content (whether it's racist or not) it's the effect: would producing fake content reach a desired policy goal?
Philosophically it's truth vs lie, can we lie to do good? Theologically in the majority of religions, this has been answered: lying can never do good.
Game theory tells us that we should lie if someone else is lying, for some time. Then we should try trusting again. But we should generally tell the truth at the beginning; we sometimes lose to those who lie all the time, but we can gain more than the eternal liar if we encounter someone who behaves just like us. Assuming our strategy is in the majority, this works.
But this is game theory, a dead and amoral mechanism that is mostly used by the animal kingdom. I'm sure humanity is better than that?
Propaganda is war, and each time we use war measures, we're getting closer to it.
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?"
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.
Not AI. Not bots. Not Indians or Pakistanis. Not Kremlin or Hasbara agents. All the above might comprise a small percentage of it, but the vast majority of the rage bait and rage bait support we’ve seen over the past year+ on the Internet (including here) is just westerners being (allowed and encouraged by each other to be) racist toward non-whites in various ways.
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.
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)
The em-dash=LLM thing is so crazy. For many years Microsoft Word has AUTOCORRECTED the typing of a single hyphen to the proper syntax for the context -- whether a hyphen, en-dash, or em-dash.
I would wager good money that the proliferation of em-dashes we see in LLM-generated text is due to the fact that there are so many correctly used em-dashes in publicly-available text, as auto-corrected by Word...
Which would matter but the entry box in no major browser do was this.
The HN text area does not insert em-dashes for you and never has. On my phone keyboard it's a very lot deliberate action to add one (symbol mode, long press hyphen, slide my finger over to em-dash).
The entire point is it's contextual - emdashes where no accomodations make them likely.
Yeah, I get that. And I'm not saying the author is wrong, just commenting on that one often-commented-upon phenomenon. If text is being input to the field by copy-paste (from another browser tab) anyway, who's to say it's not (hypothetically) being copied and pasted from the word processor in which it's being written?
Well, its probably lower false positive than en-dash but higher false negative, especially since AI generated video, even when it has audio, may not have AI generated audio. (Generation conditioned on a text prompt, starting image, and audio track is among the common modes for AI video generation.)
Thank you for saving me the time writing this. Nothing screams midwit like "Em-dash = AI". If AI detection was this easy, we wouldn't have the issues we have today.
With the right context both are pretty good actually.
I think the emoji one is most pronounced in bullet point lists. AI loves to add an emoji to bullet points. I guess they got it from lists in hip GitHub projects.
The other one is not as strong but if the "not X but Y" is somewhat nonsensical or unnecessary this is very strong indicator it's AI.
Similarly: "The indication for machine-generated text isn't symbolic. It's structural." I always liked this writing device, but I've seen people label it artificial.
When I see emojis in code, especially log statements, it is 100% giveaway AI was involved. Worse, it is an indicator the developer was lazy and didn't even try to clean up the most basic slop.
If nobody used em-dashes, they wouldn’t have featured heavily in the training set for LLMs. It is used somewhat rarely (so e people use it a lot, others not at all) in informal digital prose, but that’s not the same as being entirely unused generally.
That's the only way I know how to get an em dash. That's how I create them. I sometimes have to re-write something to force the "dash space <word> space" sequence in order for Word to create it, and then I copy and paste the em dash into the thing I'm working on.
Windows 10/11’s clipboard stack lets you pin selections into the clipboard, so — and a variety of other characters live in mine. And on iOS you just hold down -, of course.
Ctrl+Shit+U + 2014 (em dash) or 2013 (en dash) in Linux. Former academic here, and I use the things all the time. You can find them all over my pre-LLM publications.
I didn't know these fancy dashes existed until I read Knuth's first book on typesetting. So probably 1984. Since then I've used them whenever appropriate.
Because I could not stop for Death –
He kindly stopped for me –
The Carriage held but just Ourselves –
And Immortality.
We slowly drove – He knew no haste
And I had put away
My labor and my leisure too,
For His Civility –
Her dashes have been rendered as en dashes in this particular case rather than em dashes, but unless you're a typography enthusiast you might not notice the difference (I certainly didn't and thought they were em dashes at first). I would bet if I hunted I would find some places where her poems have been transcribed with em dashes. (It's what I would have typed if I were transcribing them).
Dickinson's dashes tended to vary over time, and were not typeset during her lifetime (mostly). Also, mid-19th century usage was different—the em-dash was a relatively new thing.
But many have built their writing habits about LaTeX typing, and a – or even an — are hardcoded into their text editors / operating systems, much like other correct diacritics and ligatures may be.
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.
It's not really any different that stopping selling counterfeit goods on a platform. Which is a challenge, but hardly insurmountable and the pay off from AI videos won't be nearly so good. You can make a few thousand a day selling knock offs to a small amount of people and get reliably paid within 72 hours. To make the same off of "content" you would have to get millions of views and the pay out timeframe is weeks if not months. Youtube doesn't pay you out unless you are verified, so ban people posting AI and not disclosing it and the well will run dry quickly.
Well then email spam will never have an incentive. That is a relief! I was going to predict that someday people would start sending millions of misleading emails or texts!
It's not a band-aid at all. In fact, recognition is nearly always algorithmically easier than creation. Which would mean fake-AI detectors could have an inherent advantage over fake-AI creators.
I have no insight, but I assume they are doing it because they can use AI to make a few variations of a video and then automatically A/B test them to see which ones get more engagement, and then use that to make videos that are more engaging than what the author actually uploaded.
This is "innocent" if you accept that the author's goal is simplify to maximize engagement and YouTube is helping them do that. It's not if you assume the author wants users to see exactly what they authored.
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.
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.
> “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.
Just have video cameras (mostly phones these days) record a crypto hash into the video that the video sharing platforms read and display. That way we know a video was recorded with the uploader's camera and not just generated in a computer software.
There aren't that many big tech companies that are responsible for creating the devices people use to record and host the platforms and software that people use to play back the content.
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.
True for videos, but not true for any type of "text claim", which were already plenty 10 years ago and they were already hard to fight (think: misquoting people, strangely referring to science article, dubiously interpreting facts, etc.).
But I would claim that "trusting blindly" was much more common hundreds of years ago than it is now, so we might make some progress in fact.
If people learn to be more skeptical (because at some point they might get that things can be fake) it might even be a gain. The transition period can be dangerous though, as always.
But today’s text manufacturing isn’t our grand.., well yesterday’s text manufacturing.
And pretty soon it will be very persuasive models with lots of patience and manufactured personalized credibility and attachment “helping” people figure out reality.
The big problem isn’t the tech getting smarter though.
It’s the legal and social tolerance for conflict of interests at scale. Like unwanted (or dark pattern permissioned) surveillance which is all but unavoidable, being used to manipulate feeds controlled by third parties (between us and any organic intentioned contacts), toward influencing us in any way anyone will pay for. AI is just walking through a door that has been left wide open despite a couple decades of hard lessons.
Incentives, as they say, matter.
Misinformation would exist regardless, but we didn’t need it to be a cornerstone business model with trillions of dollars of market cap unifying its globally coordinated efficient and effective, near unavoidable, continual insertion into our and our neighbors lives. With shareholders relentlessly demanding double digit growth.
Doesn’t take any special game theory or economic theory to see the problematic loop there. Or to predict it will continue to get worse, and will be amplified by every AI advance, as long as it isn’t addressed.
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?
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 :)
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
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?"
"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.
People stopped falling for photoshopped pictures and staged Chinese reels pretty quickly. I think people will pretty quickly decide anything outrageous is probably AI. And by people I mean the right half of the bell curve, which is all you can hope for. The left half will have problems in the world as they always have.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
>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.
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.
> 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.
Are you using the word tweens in some sense other than its usual definition of pre-teen? My understanding is that discord, like most online services, requires registered users to be 13 years old.
Nope, that's exactly what I meant. That requirement just means that they have to check a box which says that they're 13 or older. Surely no child would ever break the rules, right?
Having been out of university since before Discord was much of a thing, that's news to me. It also is eerily reminiscent of Facebook's beginning sign up requirements.
I guess that depends on the University and whether or not you get to keep your email address after you graduate. From what I understand from my college-aged kids, most people get kicked out of the hub after they graduate.
It's similar in Apple's strategy of trying to get Macintosh into the classrooms (in the 80s/90s), and student discounts on Adobe products.
I am not a huge fan of Discord, although I do use it. It's very good at what it does, and the communities it houses are well moderated, at least the ones that I have joined. I dislike that they've taken over communities and walled them off from the "searchable" internet.
That is actually something I quite like about Discord. Whatever I write and post, while not "private" is not indexed or searchable by anyone other tgan those people that have been vetted (invited) by the respective community. Not that I'm mostly on small friendgroup Discords with 10 - 100 members.
Discord's initial core demographic was online gaming. From there it has radiated outwards due to being the best group messaging (and voice chat) solution out there. The more overlap your friend group has with gaming and adjacent groups the more likely they are to use Discord
Definitely. My friend group consists of gen-z and millenials and we met irl but have a shared interest of gaming that gets us together on weekends.
What Discord does so well is that you start using it for gaming but then it also becomes the space for all kinds of things. We discuss news there, music/popculture, organize events etc
Whatsapp is more for the "formal" stuff and when it's time critical since not everybody has Discord notifications enabled.
I'd say Discord is definitely more popular among gen-z (or even younger) and gamers but it's kinda become reddit 2.0 where every niche has its discord.
- bots (like we had on IRC)
- first class clients on all platforms (mobile, tablet, desktop, browser)
- voice chat
- video chat
Telegram and Discord are the only ones that satisfy all these.
And of these Telegram is just one channel, on Discord we can separate subjects by channels in seconds. If I see a message on #general, I go check what it is. On #memes I know it's not urgent.
Matrix if you want to play IT support on your free time.
Maybe, but at least in my circles it’s a structure thing- until the group actually can be organised in a single chat sanely something else will be used-
but as soon as multiple chats are required the thing is moved on discord.
Yeah same as sibling comments, I'm in multiple discord servers for IRL friend groups. I personally run one with ~50 people that sees a hundreds of messages a day. By far my most used form of social media. Also as OP said, I'll be migrating to Matrix (probably) when they IPO, we've already started an archival project just in case.
And you won't. I will NOT invite anyone from "social media" to any of the 3 very-private, yet outrageously active, servers, and that's why they have less than 40 users collectively. They're basically for playing games and re-streaming movies among people on first name basis or close to it. And I know those 40 people have others of their own, and I know I'll never ever have access to them either. Because I dont know those other people in them.
And I know server like these are in the top tier of engagement for discord on the whole because they keep being picked for AB testing new features. Like, we had activities some half a year early. We actually had the voice modifiers on two of them, and most people don't even know that was a thing.
The split where social networking is mostly for people you “know” and social media is… some other thing, mostly for scrolling videos, definitely is significant.
But, the “know IRL” split is a bit artificial I think. For example my discord is full of people I knew in college: I knew them IRL for four years, and then we all moved around and now we’ve known each other online for decades. Or childhood friends. By now, my childhood friend and college friend circles are partially merged on discord, and they absolutely know each other (unfortunately there’s no way for you to evaluate this but I know them all quite well and it would be absurd to me, to consider them anything other than friends).
The internet is part of the real world now. People socialize on it. I can definitely see a distinction between actually knowing somebody, and just being in a discord channel with them. But it is a fuzzy social thing I think, hard to nail down exactly where the transition is (also worth noting that we have acquaintances that we don’t really “know” offline, the cashier at our favorite shops for example).
While it's also used to socialize with people you don't know IRL, most of my experience with Discord (mostly in uni) was to aggregate people IRL together. We had discords for clubs, classes, groups of friends, etc. The only reason I use discord now is for the same reason. Private space for a group of people to interact asynchronously in a way that's more structured than a text group chat.
I'm sorry but what?! 'Socializing with people you know IRL' is almost exclusively what I've seen Discord used for, and almost solely what I personally use it for. There are vastly more Discord servers set up among IRL friend groups (or among classmates, as another popular use case) than there are Discord servers for fandoms of people who have never met IRL.
> "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.
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.
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.
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.
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...
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.
> Discord has much better user experience for new users.
Until you join a server that gives you a whole essay of what you can and cannot do with extra verification. This then requiring you to post in some random channel waiting for the moderator to see your message.
You're then forced to assign roles to yourself to please a bot that will continue to spam you with notifications announcing to the community you've leveled up for every second sentence. Finally, everyone glaring at you in channel or leaving you on read because you're a newbie with a leaf above your username. Each to their own, I guess.
/server irc.someserver.net
/join #hello
/me says Hello
I think I'll stick with that.
At least Discord and IRC are interchangeable in the sake of idling.
This only happens if the server is BIG _or_ if the admin is a grifter who's 100% sure their server will hit it big and has 120 channels and 40 bots and 9 users total.
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.
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.
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).
Right.... how is that different from IRC other than being controlled by a big company with no exit ability and (again) extremely tenuous privacy promises?
IRC doesn't offer voice/video, which is unimaginable for Discord alternative.
When we get to alternative proposals with functioning calls I'd say having them as voice channels that just exist 24/7 is a big thing too. It's a tiny thing from technical perspective, but makes something like Teams unsuitable alternative for Discord.
In Teams you start a call and everyone phone rings, you distract everyone from whatever they were doing -- you better have a good reason for doing so.
In Discord you just join empty voice channel (on your private server with friends) w/o any particular reason and go on with your day. Maybe someone sees that you're there and joins, maybe not. No need to think of anyone's schedule, you don't annoy people that don't have time right now.
For the text chat, it's different in the way that it lets one make their own 'servers' without having to run the actual hardware server 24/7, free of charge, no need to battle with NATs and weird nonstandard ways of sending images, etc.
The big thing is the voice/videoconferencing channels which are actually optimized insanely well, Discord calls work fine even on crappy connections that Teams and Zoom struggle with.
Simply put it's Skype x MSN Messenger with a global user directory, but with gamers in mind.
> 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.
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.)
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.
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.
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”
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.
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.
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`.
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).
Not OP, but I find the space-en-space convention easier to read than the nospace-em-nospace convention. American style guides prefer the latter – in my eyes they are wrong about that
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.
I don't know if my language grammar rules (Italian) are different than English, but I've always seen spaces before and after em-dashes. I don't like the em-dash being stuck to two unrelated words.
That's because in Italian, like in many other European languages, you use en-dashes to separate parenthetical clauses. The en-dash is used with space, the em-dash (mostly) without space and that's why it's longer. On old typewriters they were frequently written as "--" and "---" respectively. So yes, it's mostly an English thing. Stick to your trattinos, they're nice!
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.
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].)
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.
> 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.
There are compose key implementations for Windows, too.
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.
HMRC style guide: "Avoid the shorter en dash as they are treated differently by different screen readers" [0].
But I see what you mean. There used to be a distinction between a shorter dash that is used for numerical ranges, or for things named after multiple people, and a longer dash used to connect independent clauses in a sentence [1]. I am shocked to hear that this distinction is being eroded.
That guy's style guide seems to conflict with the Cambridge editorial services guidelines - though that is for books rather than papers:
> Spaced en rules (or ‘en dashes’) must be used for parenthetical dashes. Hyphens or em rules
(‘em dashes’) will not be accepted for either UK or US style books. En rules (–) are longer than
hyphens (-) but shorter than em rules (—).
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.)
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.
That's not as easy as just hitting the hyphen key, nor are most people going to be aware that even exists. I think it's fair to say that the hyphen is far easier to use than an em dash.
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.
In British English you'd be wrong for using an em-dash in those places, with most grammar recommendations being for an en-dash, often with spaces.
It's be just as wrong as using an apostrophe instead of a comma.
Grammar is often wooly in a widely used language with no single centralised authority. Many of the "Hard Rules" some people thing are fundamental truths are often more local style guides, and often a lot more recent than some people seem to believe.
Interesting, I’m an American English speaker but that’s how it feels natural to me to use dashes. Em-dashes with no spaces feels wrong for reasons I can’t articulate. This first usage—in this meandering sentence—feels bossy, like I can’t have a moment to read each word individually. But this second one — which feels more natural — lets the words and the punctuation breathe. I don’t actually know where I picked up this habit. Probably from the web.
It can also depend on the medium. Typically, newspapers (e.g. the AP style guide) use spaces around em-dashes, but books / Chicago style guide does not.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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].
> 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.
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.
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.
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..
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
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?
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.
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.
I dont know if it's true or not. But I remember reading about this person who would do the community reports for cheating for a game like cs or something. They had numerous bot accounts and spent a hour a day on it. Set up in a way that when they reviewed a video the bots would do the same.
But all the while they were doing legitimate reporting, when they came across their real cheating account they'd report not cheating. And supposedly this person got away with it for years for having good reputable community reporting with high alignment scores.
I know 1 exception doesnt mean it's not worth it. But we must acknowledge the potential abuse. Id still rather have 1 occasionally ambitious abuser over countless low effort ones.
Yeah I can definitely see that being a threat model. In the gaming case I think it's harder because it's more of a general reputation system and it's based on how people feel while playing with you, whereas for a website every post can be reviewed by multiple parties and the evidence is right there. But certainly I would still expect some people to try to maximize their reputation and use that to push through content that should be more heavily moderated, and in the degenerate case the bad actors comprise so much of the userbase that they peer review their own content.
>> 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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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`.
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.
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.
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.
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.
It's challenging to decide where to draw the line. Is it OK that wikipedia begs for donations? Sites that use affiliate links can be full of crap too, although technically ad free.
I think its worth exploring.
BTW, HN has ads. They post job openings at their start ups, these appear like posts but you can't vote on them. Launch HN is another way this site is monetized, although that seems quite reasonable and you can vote/flag those posts like any other.
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.
Sure, but with a feed reader I unsubscribe when ever I see slop. News aggregators don't have the same filtering ability; I don't think you can ban a site from HN for posting slop, for example.
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]
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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…
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.
The Methyl 4-methylpyrrole-2-carboxylate vs ∂²ψ/∂t² = c²∇²ψ distinction. My bet is on Methyl 4-methylpyrrole-2-carboxylate being more actionable. For better or worse.
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).
I think state of the art LLMs would pass the Turing test for 95% people if those people could (text) chat to them in a time before LLM chatbots became widespread.
That is, the main thing that makes it possible to tell LLM bots apart from humans is that lots of us have over the past 3 years become highly attuned to specific foibles and text patterns which signal LLM generated text - much like how I can tell my close friends' writing apart by their use of vocabulary, punctuation, typical conversation topics, and evidence (or lack) of knowledge in certain domains.
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.
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
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?
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?
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
Thanks for that. I had no idea either. I'm genuinely surprised Windows buries such a crucial thing like this. Or why they even bothered adding it in the first place when it's so complicated.
The Windows version is an escape hatch for keying in any arbitrary character code, hence why it's so convoluted. You need to know which code you're after.
To be fair, the alt-input is a generalized system for inputting Unicode characters outside the set keyboard layout. So it's not like they added this input specifically. Still, the em dash really should have an easier input method given how crucial a symbol it is.
It's a generalized system for entering code page glyphs that was extended to support Unicode. 0150 and 0151 only work if you are on CP1252 as those aren't the Unicode code points.
And Em Dash is trivially easy on iOS — you simply hold press on the regular dash button - I’ve been using it for years and am not stopping because people might suddenly accuse me of being an AI.
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.
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.
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.
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).
> 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.
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.
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.
> 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.
Drivers are literally the biggest cause of deaths of young people. We should start applying the same safety standards we do to every other part of life.
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.
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.)
Why specifically be worried about cyclists in this weird and unusual mental state? Do holier than thou cyclists have more momentum or something? (I’ve never met one).
Anyway, a fix that should work fine for both of you is to take a lane from cars and devote it to cyclists. Nobody actually wants to bike where people walk, some places just have bad infrastructure.
> Do holier than thou cyclists have more momentum or something?
They think they're martyrs or something. What am I then if i take a backpack and do my shopping on foot? I'm even more eco because I didn't spend manufacturing resources on a bike, and even more of a martyr because walking is slow.
> to take a lane from cars and devote it to cyclists. Nobody actually wants to bike where people walk
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.
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.
I really liked working in the office when it had lots of people I directly worked with, and was next to lots of good restaurants and a nice gym. You got to know people well and stuff could get done just by wandering over to someone's desk (as long as you were not too pesky too often).
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
Ha! Despite the fact that I tend to proof read my posts before publishing, right after publishing, and sometimes re-reading them few months after publishing, I still tend to not notice some obvious typos. Kinda makes you feel appreciation for the profession of editors and spell checkers. (And yes, I use LanguageTools in neovim, but I refuse to feed my articles to LLMs).
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.
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.
A few writer friends even had a coffee mug with the alt+number combination for em-dash in Windows, given by a content marketing company. It was already very widespread in writing circles years ago. Developers keep forgetting they're in a massively isolated bubble.
> 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.
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.
> 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?
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.
I'd say it depends on the situation and what the cost of false positives/negatives are for it. When you are looking at a practically infinite list of things to read and are looking to filter out AI garbage as not worth reading then filtering out the occasional typographical nerd is not that much of a problem.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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".
"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.
> 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.
Thanks for the thorough explanation, that, indeed, is a level of nuance that's hard for me to spot.
Interestingly, "absolutely right" is very common in German: "du hast natürlich absolut Recht" is something which I can easily imagine a friend's voice (or my voice) say at a dinner table. It's "du hast Recht" that sounds a little bit too formal and strong x[.
Agreed on the sycophancy point, in Gemini I even have a preamble that basically says "don't be a sycophant". It still doesn't always work.
> in Gemini I even have a preamble that basically says "don't be a sycophant". It still doesn't always work.
Using this kind of strategy eventually leads to the LLM recurrently advertising what it just produced as «straight to the point, no fluff, no bullshit». («Here is the blunt truth»).
Of course no matter how the LLM advertise its production, it is too often non devoid of sycophancy.
There's likely a cultural element to it as well regarding how we admit mistakes and correct ourselves.
With how blame-avoidant western individualist culture can be, seeing something "admit" doing wrong so quickly, and so emphatically, could be uncanny valley-level jarring.
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.
It fails the basic human behaviour. In general humans are not ready to admit fault. At least when there is no social pressure. They might apologize and admit mistake. Or they might ask for clarification. But very rarely "You are absolute right" and go on entirely new tangent...
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.
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.
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).
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.
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).
Well then in that case, maybe we need a “vetted internet”. Like the opposite of the dark web, this would only index vetted websites, scanned for AI slop, and with optional parental controls, equipped with customized filters that leverage LLMs to classify content into unwanted categories. It would require a monthly subscription fee to maintain but would be a nonprofit model.
The original Yahoo doesn't exist (outside archive.org), but I'm guessing would be a keen person or two out there maintaining a replacement. It would probably be disappointing, as manually curated lists work best when the curator's interests are similar to your own.
What you want might be Kagi Search with the AI filtering on? I've never used Kagi, so I could be off with that suggestion.
The original dmoz/open directory project/Yahoo directory database is being hosted (but not maintained; I don't think it's being updated) at odp.org, which also includes links to other directory projects at http://odp.org/Computers/Internet/Searching/Directories
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.
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.
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.
> 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
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.
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.
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
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"?)
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.
The wrongthink issue was always secondary, and generally easy to avoid by not mixing certain topics with your account (don't comment on political threads with your furry porn gooner account, etc). At a certain point, the person calling out a mostly benign profile is the one who will look ridiculous, and if not, the sub is probably not worth participating in anyway.
But recently it seems everything is more overrun than usual with bot activity, and half of the accounts are hidden which isn't helping matters. Utterly useless, and other platforms don't seem any better in this regard.
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.
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.
> 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
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.
No, it's not really true. Media companies have a whole host of KPI's and tracking methods to evaluate the success/failure of their campaigns/single ads: here's a small summary of some of the KPI's and methods https://www.themediaant.com/blog/methods-of-measuring-advert...
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)
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.
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.
This is my current Reddit use case. I unsubscribed from everything other than a dozen or so niche communities. I’ve turned off all outside recommendations so my homepage is just that content (though there is feed algorithm there). It’s quick enough to sign in every day or two and view almost all the content and move on.
> why would you look at the "front page" if you only wanted to see things you subscribed to?
"Latest" ignores score and only sorts by submission time, which means you see a lot of junk if you follow any large subreddits.
The default home-page algorithm used to sort by a composite of score, recency, and a modifier for subreddit size, so that posts from smaller subreddits don't get drowned out. It worked pretty well, and users could manage what showed up by following/unfollowing subreddits.
There were some dedicated submissions about ad fraud on HN. In long term companies tend to reach equilibrium, where both reducing and increasing ad budget decreases profit. It is a classic prisoners dilemma, giving up on ads with poor ROI would be obvious decision if it wasn't for competitors who will benefit both from some actual conversions and lower bids for domain specific keywords.
the alternative - not buying ads - is worse though. No one knows about you, and you sell nothing. so it ends up being seen as a cost of doing business. that is passed on to paying customers.
I'm really starting to wonder how much of the "ground level" inflation is actually caused by "passing on" the cost of anti-social behaviors to paying customers, as opposed to monetary policy shenanigans.
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!
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.
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.
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
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.)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
"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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
PowerToys has a wonderful QuickAccent feature. The dashes and hyphens are on hyphen-KEY and some other characters are on comma-KEY, and many symbols are on the key that they resemble, like ¶ is on P-KEY where KEY is the follower key you want to use. I turned off using SPACE because it conflicted with some other software, but right arrow works great for me.
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.
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").
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.”
> 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”.
> 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:
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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
>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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
I didn't use it disparagingly.
In fact, it's easier than ever to see the intended benefit of such a lifestyle.
Fair enough! I must have just misread you then, I'm too used to see it described as a bad thing.
Which also has a term with stigma: hipster
Hipster used to mean that but meaning changed to being someone who “doesn’t fit in” but only for performative reasons, not really “for real” but just to project an image of how cool they are
Alas, something something capitalism.
> Its odd to me to still use "luddite" disparagingly while implying that avoiding certain tech would actually have some high impact benefits
They didn't say to avoid certain tech. They said to avoid takes and news headlines.
Your conflation of those two is like someone saying "injecting bleach into your skin is bad" and you responding with "oh, so you oppose cleaning bathrooms [with bleach]?"
How so? The OP referenced how difficult it is to avoid said takes and news without being a complete luddite. That certainly implies avoiding certain tech, I have to assume they meant much of the digital tech we use today rather than the power loom luddites were pushing back on.
Your bleach scenario is confusing to me, its also you arguing against something completely unrelated to the discussion here.
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.
I think fatigue will set in and the next generation will 'tock' back from this 'tick.' Getting outraged by things is already feeling antiquated to me, and I'm in my 30's.
There's a massive industry built around this on YT, exemplified by the OP's post about his parents. To a first-order approximation, every story with a theme of "X does sexist/racist/ageist/abusive thing to Y and then gets their comeuppance" on YouTube is AI-generated clickbait. The majority of the "X does nice thing for Y and gets a reward or surprise" dating from the last year or two are also AI-generated clickbait, but far more of the former. Outrage gets a lot more clicks than compassion.
> news outlets and journalists have always had incentive to present extreme takes to get people angry, cause that sells.
As someone who’s read a newspaper daily for 30+ years, that is definitely not true. The news has always tried to capture your attention but doing so using anger and outrage, and using those exclusively, is a newer development. Newspapers and broadcast news used to use humor, suspense, and other things to provoke curiosity. When the news went online, it became focused on provoking anger and outrage. Even print edition headlines tend to be tamer than what’s in the online edition.
> 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.
I think the comment you're replying to isn't necessarily a question of opting out of such news, it's the fact that it's so hard to escape it. I swipe on my home screen and there I am, in my Google news feed with the constant barrage of nonsense.
I mostly get gaming and entertainment news for shows I watch, but even between those I get CNN and Fox News, both which I view as "opinion masquerading as news" outlets.
My mom shares so many articles from her FB feed that are both mainstream (CNN, etc) nonsense and "influencer" nonsense.
Right, and my point is how easy opting out actually is.
I have no news feed on my phone. I doubt on android it is any harder to evade. Social media itself is gone. The closest I get to click-bait is when my mother spouts something gleaned from the Daily Mail. That vector is harder to shift I concede!
Fair points on both fronts! Though I think you may be conflating simple with easy. Removing social media from one's life is certainly simple (just uninstall the app!), but it's not that easy for some people because it's their only method of communication with some folks. I mostly don't use SM but I log onto Instagram because some of my friends only chat there, same with Facebook.
>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
> 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.
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).
Completely agree, but at the same time I can't bring myself to believe that reinforcing systems like the electoral college or reinstating a state-legislature-chosen Senate would yield better outcomes.
Most people I know who have strong political opinions (as well as those who don't) can't name their own city council members or state assemblyman, and that's a real problem for functioning representative democracy. Not only for their direct influence on local policy, but also because these levels of government also serve as the farm team or proving grounds for higher levels of office.
By the time candidates are running with the money and media of a national campaign, in some sense it's too late to evaluate them on matters of their specific policies and temperaments, and you kind of just have to assume they're going to follow the general contours of their party. By and large, it seems the entrenched political parties (and, perhaps, parties in general) are impediments to good governance.
I think it's an inherent problem with democracy in itself, and something that will have to be worked out at some time, somewhere.
The accidents that let it occur may no longer be present - there are arguments that "democracy" as we understand it was impossible before rapid communication, and perhaps it won't survive the modern world.
We're living in a world where a swing voter in Ohio may have more effect/impact on Iran than a person living there - or even more effect on Europe than a citizen of Germany.
I disagree.
Voting on principles is fine and good.
The issue is the disconnect between professed principles and action. And the fact that nowadays there are not many ways to pick and choose principles except two big preset options.
It's easier to focus on fewer representatives, and because the federal government has so much power (and then state governments), life-changing policies mainly come top-down. Power should instead flow bottom-up, with the top being the linchpin, but alas.
Nothing wrong with being a Luddite these days. It’s the only way to not have your mind assaulted.
I feel like you people are intentionally misconstruing what "Luddite" means. It doesn't mean "avoids specific new tech." It means "avoiding ALL new tech because new things are bad."
A luddite would refuse the covid vaccine. They'd refuse improved trains. They'd refuse EVs. etc. This is because ludditism is the blanket opposition to technological improvements.
you have completely misunderstood what it means to be a luddite.
the luddites were a labor movement opposed to the negative externalities imposed by rapid industrialization of formerly-craft/artisinal markets. it was a movement that stood for the protection of workers rights and the quality of goods produced; it was not opposed to new technologies. what it did oppose was the irresponsible use of those technologies at the expense of workers and consumers.
what you're referring to is probably more accurately described as primitivism.
> I feel like you people are intentionally misconstruing what "Luddite" means.
That’s a very unfair accusation to throw at someone off the cuff. Anyway, what you wrote is not what a Luddite is at all, especially not the anti-vaccine accusation. I don’t think you’re being deliberately deceptive here, I think you just don’t know what a Luddite is (was).
For starters: They were not anti-science/medicine/all technology. They did not have “blanket opposition to all technological improvement.” You’re expressing a common and simplistic misunderstanding of the movement and likely conflating it with (an also flawed understanding of) the Amish.
They were, at their core, a response against industrialization that didn’t account for the human cost. This was at the start of the 19th century. They wanted better working conditions and more thoughtful consideration as industrialization took place. They were not anti-technology and certainly not anti-vaccine.
The technology they were talking about was mostly related to automation in factories which, coupled with anti-collective bargaining initiatives, led to further dehumanization of the workforce as well as all sorts novel and horrific workplace accidents for adults and children alike. Their call for “common sense laws” and “guardrails” are echoed today with how many of us talk about AI/LLM’s.
Great comic on this: https://thenib.com/im-a-luddite/
> 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.
> 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.
This has been going on since Usenet. Nothing new.
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...
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.
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.
Not scold (that is how we shape social behavior), but only note that Safe Harbor essentially grants the opposite of this (away from the potential default of "By transiting malware you are complicit and liable in the effect of the malware") so it'd have to be a finely-crafted law to have the desired effect without shutting down the ability to do both online advertising and online forums at all.
... which doesn't sound impossible. It's also entirely possible that the value of Section 230 has run its course and it should generally be remarkably curtailed (its intent was to make online forums and user-generated-content networks, of which ad networks are a kind, possible, but one could make the case that it has been demonstrated that operators of online forums have immense responsibility and need to be held accountable for more of the harms done via the online spaces they set up).
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.
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.
It's never going to happen, but I felt we solved all of this with forums and IRC back in the day. I wish we gravitated towards that kind of internet again.
Group sizes were smaller and as such easier to moderate. There could be plenty of similar interest forums which meant even if you pissed of some mods, there were always other forums. Invite only groups that recruited from larger forums (or even trusted members only sections on the same forum) were good at filtering out low value posters.
There were bots, but they were not as big of a problem. The message amplification was smaller, and it was probably harder to ban evade.
> I wish we gravitated towards that kind of internet again.
So do it. Forums haven't gone away, you just stopped going to them. Search for your special interest followed by "Powered by phpbb" (or Invision Community, or your preferred software) and you'll find plenty of surprisingly active communities out there.
Yeah, you are right! I have started going down that road the last year or so, but mostly in the IRC sphere. I started hanging out libera.chat, but found a smaller community on irc.inthemansion.com which I really enjoy.
I'm probably just jaded as most of the forums I visited back in the day became ghost towns during the 2010s. I should make more of an effort here
https://hashbang.sh / #!:matrix.org
Been running for over 20 years and pick up new randos every day or two.
> It's never going to happen, but I felt we solved all of this with forums and IRC back in the day. I wish we gravitated towards that kind of internet again.
IME young people use Discord, and those servers often require permission to even join. Nearly all my fandom communications happen on a few Discord servers, most of which you cannot join without an invitation, and if you're kicked (bad actors will be kicked), you cannot re-join (without permission).
It happens in some places like Russia (MAX App) or in China (WeChat/Alipay) but do we want to go down that authoritarian road?
You're describing Discord today
Bots are a major problem on Discord. I frequently receive messages to buy MMO gold.
That's a flaw in the GP's plan, not a flaw in the observation that Discord is a good example of what they're asking for.
I guess I am kind of describing Discord in some sense, I personally discounted Discord as I've only ever used it as a free voice chat for small groups. But to be fair, I would rather leverage basic HTTP websites for consuming social media content than everything being that boring discord client.
>and be absolutely ruthless in permabanning anyone who posts AI content unmarked,
It would certainly be fun to trick people I dislike into posting AI content unknowingly. Maybe it has to be so low-key that they aren't even banned on the first try, but that just seems ripe for abuse.
I want a solution to this problem too, but I don't think this is reasonable or practical. I do wonder what it would mean if, philosophically, there were a way to differentiate between "free speech" and commercial speech such that one could be respected and the other regulated. But if there is such a distinction I've never been able to figure it out well enough to make the argument.
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
Worst is... the bots, spam and ads are still there, even if there is no-one to read them. Usenet might still be alive (for piracy/binaries at least), and maybe a handfull of still-alive text-groups, but in the text-groups I used to read, it's nothing but a constant flow of spam since 15+ years.
Of course - because everyone is banned upon first suspicion.
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.
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.
> Those subreddits label content wrong all the time.
Intentionally if I might add. Reddit users aren't particularly interested in providing feedback that will inevitably be used to make AI tools more convincing in the future, nobody's really moderating those subs, and that makes them the perfect target for poisoning via shitposting in the comments.
Also, most Reddit users are AI.
> You're training yourself with a very unreliable source of truth.
I don’t just look at the bot decision or accept every consensus blindly. I read the arguments.
If I watch a video and think it’s real and the comments point to the source, which has a description saying they use AI, how is that unreliable?
Alternatively, I watch a video and think it’s AI but a commenter points to a source like YT where the video was posted 5 years ago, or multiple similar videos/news articles about the weird subject of the video, how is that unreliable?
I don't understand. In the grandparent comment you say you have a problem spending too much time on those subreddits and watching too many of those videos, but then you push back here.
Personally, I don't think that behavior is very healthy, and the other parent comment suggested an easy "get out of jail free" way of not thinking about it anymore while also limiting anxiety: they're unreliable subreddits. I'd say take that advice and move on.
Which themselves are arguments from bots.
This itself could be a bot argument casting doubt on reddit. It's an endless cycle.
If bots reference real sources it's still a valid argument.
"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
I’m really hoping that we’re about to see an explosion in critical thinking and skepticism as a response to generative AI.
Any day now… right?
I show my young daughter this stuff and try to role model healthy skepticism. Critical thinking YT like Corridor Crew’s paranormal UFO/bigfoot/ghosts/etc series is great too. Peer pressure might be the deciding factor in what she ultimately chooses to believe, though.
I think the broader response and re-evaluation is going to take a lot longer. Children of today are growing up in an obviously hostile information environment whereas older folk are trying to re-calibrate in an environment that's changing faster than they are.
If the next generation can weather the slop storm, they may have a chance to re-establish new forms of authentic communication, though probably on a completely different scale and in different forms to the Web and current social media platforms.
Haha, AGI happens because some future generation just 'forgets' that it was all bullshit slop before
One can hope!
Yeah, one can. But then I see people just accepting the weak google search AI summary as plain facts and my hope fades away.
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.
It was always easy to fake photos too. Just organize the scene, or selectively frame what you want. There is no such thing as any piece of media you can trust.
The construction workers having lunch on the girder in that famous photo were in fact about four feet above a safety platform; it's a masterpiece of framing and cropping. (Ironically the photographer was standing on a girder out over a hundred stories of nothing).
Although I do use the dead internet, I didn't see much of "fake news" like that...
Yeah this is what I always expected to happen. Cryptographic signing of source material so you can verify who the initial claimant is, and base credibility on the identity of that person.
Ah yes the good old days of witch trials and pogroms.
I am no big fan of AI but misinformation is a tale as old as time.
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.
What if AI is running RealOrAI to trick us into never quite knowing the truth?
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
> [...] 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?
AI is capable of consistent characters now, yes, but the platforms themselves provide little incentive to. TikTok/Instagram Reels are designed to serve recommendations, not a user-curated feed of people you follow, so consistency is not needed for virality
Or they are reposting other people's content
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.
New AI narration is a dead giveaway to us but many people can’t tell they’re not listening to a human. It is very concerning.
How can they look repetitive while being inconsistent? Do you mean in terms of presentation / "editing" style?
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.
Content farms, whether AI generated or not their incentive is to pump out low quality high output. Most of their content even it involves a human narrator are heavily packed with AI generated media.
A giveaway for detecting AI-generated text is the use of em-dashes, as noted in op - you are caught bang to rights!
Some keyboards and operating systems — iOS is one of them — convert two dashes into an emdash.
And macOS, at least my keyboard layout, has both en and em dashes easily typeable with Alt+- and Alt+Shift+- respectively.
I use emdashes and endashes all the time—but maybe that's because I'm an academic?
I use them – well, mostly en dashes because that's the custom where I'm from – because I'm a bit of a typography nerd and have grown to dislike the barrenness of ASCII.
I can’t wait for my keyboard to start auto-completing “Your” with “are absolutely right!”
In this case Apple has cared about typography since its very beginning. Steve Jobs obsessed over it. The OS also replaces simple quotes with fancier ones.
I do the same on my websites. It's embedded into my static site generator.
Very related: https://practicaltypography.com/
Agreed that is useful, despite the unintended consequences of dash meddling.
Not long ago, a statistical study found that AI almost always has an 'e' in its output. It is a firm indicator of AI slop. If you catch a post with an 'e', pay it no mind: it's probably AI.
Uh-oh. Caught you. Bang to rights! That post is firmly AI. Bad. Nobody should mind your robot posts.
I'm incredibly impressed that you managed to make that whole message without a single usage of the most frequently used letter, except in your quotations.
Such omission is a hobby of many WWW folk. I can, in fact, think back to finding a community on R*ddit known as "AVoid5", which had this trial as its main point.
Down with that foul fifth glyph! Down, I say!
second vowel actually.
Bet they asked an AI to make the bit work /s
:-D
I did ask G'mini for synonyms. And to do a cursory count of e's in my post. Just as a 2nd opinion. It found only glyphs with quotation marks around it. It graciously put forward a proxy for that: "the fifth letter".
It's not oft that you run into such alluring confirmation of your point.
I'm having my thumbs-up back >:(
My first post took around 6 min & a dictionary. This post took 3. It's a quick skill.
No LLMs. Ctrl+f shows you all your 'e's without switching away from this tab. (And why count it? How many is not important, you can simply look if any occur and that's it)
I apprEciatE your dEdication to ExclusivEly using 'e' in quotEd rEfErEncE, but not in thE rEst of your clEarly human-authorEd tExt.
I rEgrEt that I havE not donE thE samE, but plEase accEpt bad formatting as a countErpoint.
Finally a human in this forum. Many moons did I long for this contact.
(Assuming you did actually hand craft that I thumbs-up both your humor and industry good sir)
https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/47342
https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/La_Disparition_(roman)
nice try but u used caps and punctuation lol bot /s
My AI generator loves to write ergo, concordantly, and vis-a-vis.
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.
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.
> 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.
It's not built to make people angry per se - it's built to optimise for revenue generation - which so happens to be content that makes people angry.
People have discovered that creating and posting such content makes them money, and the revenue is split between themselves and the platforms.
In my view if the platforms can't tackle this problem then the platforms should be shutdown - promoting this sort of material should be illegal, and it's not an excuse to say our business model won't work if we are made responsible for the things we do.
ie while it turns out you can easily scale one side of publishing ( putting stuff out their and getting paid by ads ), you can't so easily scale the other side of publishing - which is being responsible for your actions - if you haven't solved both sides you don't have a viable business model in my view.
In social networks, revenue is enhanced by stickiness.
Anger increases stickiness. Once one discovers there are other people on the site, and they are guilty of being wrong on the internet, one is incentivized to correct them. It feels useful because it feels like you're generating content that will help other people.
I suspect the failure of the system that nobody necessarily predicted is that people seem to not only tolerate, but actually like being a little angry online all the time.
> it's built to optimise for revenue generation
I think blaming it all on money ignores that this also serve political goals.
Groups spend money to manipulate public opinion. It’s a goal in and of itself that has value rather than a money making scheme.
Sure -it's a mix - but to be honest I think it's over-emphasized - in that in the US most of that kind of money driving politics operates in plain sight.
For example, the 'Russian interference' in the 2016 US election, was I suspect mostly people trying to make money, and more importantly, was completely dwarfed by US direct political spending.
There is also a potentially equally, if not larger problem, in the politicisation of the 'anti-disinformation' campaigns.
To be honest I'm not sure if there is much of a difference between a grifter being directly paid to promote a certain point of view, and somebody being paid indirectly ( by ads ).
In both cases neither really believes in the political point they are making they are just following the money.
These platforms are enabling both.
> 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.
I don't see anything like outrage in GP, just a vaguely implied sense of superiority (political, not racial!).
> outraged at people who think racism is a problem.
This is one level of abstraction more than I deal with on a normal day.
The fake video which plays into people’s indignation for racism, is actually about baiting people who are critical about being baited by racism?
That's not what I said.
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I agree with grandparent and think you have cause and effect backwards: people really do want to be outraged so Facebook and the like provide rage bait. Sometimes through algos tuning themselves to that need, sometimes deliberately.
But Facebook cannot "require" people do be angry. Facebook can barely even "require" people to log in, only those locked into Messenger ecosystem.
I don't use Facebook but I do use TikTok, and Twitter, and YouTube. It's very easy to filter rage bait out of your timeline. I get very little of it, mark it "uninterested"/mute/"don't recommend channel" and the timeline dutifully obeys. My timelines are full of popsci, golden retrievers, sketches, recordings of local trams (nevermind), and when AI makes an appearance it's the narrative kind[1] which I admit I like or old jokes recycled with AI.
The root of the problem is in us. Not on Facebook. Even if it exploits it. Surfers don't cause waves.
[1] https://www.tiktok.com/@gossip.goblin
> people really do want to be outraged
No, they do not. Nobody[1] wants to be angry. Nobody wakes up in the morning and thinks to themselves, "today is going to be a good day because I'm going to be angry."
But given the correct input, everyone feels that they must be angry, that it is morally required to be angry. And this anger then requires them to seek out further information about the thing that made them angry. Not because they desire to be angry, but because they feel that there is something happening in the world that is wrong and that they must fight.
[1]: for approximate values of "nobody"
>Nobody wants to be angry.
I disagree. Why are some of the most popular subreddits things like r/AmITheAsshole, r/JustNoMIL, r/RaisedByNarcissists, r/EntitledPeople, etc.: forums full of (likely fake) stories of people behaving egregiously, with thousands of outraged comments throwing fuel on a burning pile of outrage: "wow, your boyfriend/girlfriend/husband/wife/father/mother/FIL/MIL/neighbor/boss/etc. is such an asshole!" Why are advice/gossip columns that provide outlets for similar stories so popular? Why is reality TV full of the same concocted situations so popular? Why is people's first reaction to outrageous news stories to bring out the torches and pitchforks, rather than trying to first validate the story? Why can an outrageous lie travel halfway around the world while the truth is still getting its boots on?
As someone who used to read some of these subreddits before they became swamped in AI slop, I did not go there to be angry but to be amused and/or find like-minded people.
If you think for a bit on what you just wrote, I’m pretty sure you’re agreeing with what they wrote.
You’re literally saying why people want to be angry.
I suppose the subtlety is that people want to be angry if (and only if) reality demands it.
My uneducated feeling is that, in a small society, like a pre-civilisation tribal one where maybe human emotions evolved, this is useful because it helps enact change when and where it's needed.
But that doesn't mean that people want to be angry in general, in the sense that if there's nothing in reality to be angry about then that's even better. But if someone is presented with something to be angry about, then that ship has sailed so the typical reaction is to feel the need to engage.
>in a small society, like a pre-civilisation tribal one where maybe human emotions evolved, this is useful because it helps enact change when and where it's needed
Yes, I think this is exactly it. A reaction that may be reasonable in a personal, real-world context can become extremely problematic in a highly connected context.
It's both that, as an individual, you can be inundated with things that feel like you have a moral obligation to react. On the other side of the equation, if you say something stupid online, you can suddenly have thousands of people attacking you for it.
Every single action seems reasonable, or even necessary, to each individual person, but because everything is scaled up by all the connections, things immediately escalate.
The issue right now is that the only things you can do to protect yourself from certain kinds of predators is literally what will get you blown up on social media when taken out of context.
If people are bored, they’ll definitely seek out things that make them less bored. It’s hard to be less bored than when you’re angry.
There's a difference between wanting to be angry and feeling that anger is the correct response to an outside stimulus.
I don't wake up thinking "today I want to be angry", but if I go outside and see somebody kicking a cat, I feel that anger is the correct response.
The problem is that social media is a cat-kicking machine that drags people into a vicious circle of anger-inducing stimuli. If people think that every day people are kicking cats on the Internet, they feel that they need to do something to stop the cat-kicking; given their agency, that "something" is usually angry responses and attacks, which feeds the machine.
Again, they do not do that because they want to be angry; most people would rather be happy than angry. They do it because they feel that cats are being kicked, and anger is the required moral response.
And if you seek out (and push ‘give me more’ buttons on) cat kicking videos?
At some point, I think it’s important to recognize the difference between revealed preferences and stated preferences. Social media seems adept at exposing revealed preferences.
If people seek out the thing that makes them angry, how can we not say that they want to be angry? Regardless of what words they use.
And for example, I never heard anyone who was a big Fox News, Rush Limbaugh, or Alex Jones fan who said they wanted to be angry or paranoid (to be fair, this was pre-Trump and awhile ago), yet every single one of them I saw got angry and paranoid after watching them, if you paid any attention at all.
>If people seek out the thing that makes them angry, how can we not say that they want to be angry?
Because their purpose in seeking it out is not to get angry, it's to stop something from happening that they perceive as harmful.
I doubt most people watch Alex Jones because they love being angry. They watch him because they believe a global cabal of evildoers is attacking them. Anger is the logical consequence, not the desired outcome. The desired outcome is that the perceived problem is solved, i.e. that people stop kicking cats.
The reason they feel that way (more) is because of those videos. Just like most people who watch Alex Jones probably didn’t start by believing all the crazy things.
We can chicken/egg about it all day, but at some point if people didn’t want it - they wouldn’t be doing it.
Depending on the definition of ‘want’ of course. But what else can we use?
I don’t think anyone would disagree that smokers want cigarettes, eh? Or gamblers want to gamble?
I think most people have experienced relatives of theirs falling down these rabbit holes. They didn't seek out a reason to be angry; they watched one or two episodes of these shows because they were on Fox, or because a friend sent it, or because they saw it recommended on Facebook. Then they became angry, which made them go back because now it became a moral imperative to learn more about how the government is making frogs gay.
None of these people said to themselves, "I want to be angry today, and I heard that Alex Jones makes people angry, therefore I will watch Alex Jones."
> "They didn't seek out a reason to be angry"
A lot of people really do, and it predates any sort of media too. When they don't have outrage media they form gossip networks so they can tell each other embellished stories about mundane matters to be outraged and scandalized about.
> When they don't have outrage media they form gossip networks so they can tell each other embellished stories about mundane matters to be outraged and scandalized about.
But again in this situation the goal is not to be angry.
This sort of behaviour emerges as a consequence of unhealthy group dynamics (and to a lesser extent, plain boredom). By gossiping, a person expresses understanding of, and reinforces, their in-group’s values. This maintains their position in the in-group. By embellishing, the person attempts to actually increase their status within the group by being the holder of some “secret truth” which they feel makes them important, and therefore more essential, and therefore more secure in their position. The goal is not anger. The goal is security.
The emotion of anger is a high-intensity fear. So what you are perceiving as “seeking out a reason to be angry” is more a hypervigilant scanning for threats. Those threats may be to the dominance of the person’s in-group among wider society (Prohibition is a well-studied historical example), or the threats may be to the individual’s standing within the in-group.
In the latter case, the threat is frequently some forbidden internal desire, and so the would-be transgressor externalises that desire onto some out-group and then attacks them as a proxy for their own self-denial. But most often it is simply the threat of being wrong, and the subsequent perceived loss of safety, that leads people to feel angry, and then to double down. And in the world we live in today, that doubling down is more often than not rewarded with upvotes and algorithmic amplification.
I disagree. In these gossip circles they brush off anything that doesn't make them upset, eager to get to the outrageously stuff. They really do seek to be upset. It's a pattern of behavior which old people in particular commonly fall into, even in absence of commercialized media dynamics.
> In these gossip circles they brush off anything that doesn't make them upset
Things that they have no fear about, and so do not register as warranting brain time.
> eager to get to the outrageously stuff.
The things which are creating a feeling of fear.
It’s not necessary for the source of a fear to exist in the present moment, nor for it to even be a thing that is real. For as long as humans have communicated, we have told tales about things that go bump in the dark. Tales of people who, through their apparent ignorance of the rules of the group, caused the wrath of some spirits who then punished the group.
It needn’t matter whether a person’s actions actually caused a problem, or whether it caused the spirits to be upset, or indeed whether the spirits actually ever existed at all. What matters is that there is a fear, and there is a story about that fear, and the story reinforces some shared group value.
> It's a pattern of behavior which old people in particular commonly fall into,
Here is the fundamental fear of many people: the fear of obsolescence, irrelevance, abandonment, and loss of control. We must adapt to change, but also often have either an inability or unwillingness to do so. And so the story becomes it is everyone else who is wrong. Sometimes there is wisdom in the story that should not be dismissed. But most often it is just an expression of fear (and, again, sometimes boredom).
What makes this hypothesis seem so unbelievable? Why does it need to be people seeking anger? What would need to be true for you to change your opinion? This discussion thread is old, so no need to spend your energy on answering if you don’t feel strongly about it. Just some parting questions to mull over in the bath, perhaps.
Thank you for raising this idea originally, and for engaging with me on it.
The opposite question - why so insistent that people wouldn’t seek it out, when behavior pretty strongly shows it?
Why are you so insistent that people don’t do what they clearly seem to do?
Why is that hypothesis so unbelievable?
Is it the apparent lack of (actual) agency for many people? Or the concerning worry that we all could be steering ourselves to our own dooms, while convincing ourself we aren’t?
> Why are you so insistent that people don’t do what they clearly seem to do?
I’m not rejecting the idea that people fixate on stimuli that produce anger. The question is why they do that, and the answer is unlikely to be “people just want to be angry”.
> Why is that hypothesis so unbelievable?
Because it runs counter to the best available literature I am aware of and is a conclusion based on a superficial observation which has no underlying theoretical basis, whereas the hypothesis I present is grounded in some amount of actual science and evidence. Even the superficial Wikipedia article on anger emphasises the role of threat response here. Mine isn’t, as far as I can tell, some fringe position; it is very much in line with the research. It is also in line with my personal experience. “People just want to be angry” is not.
It is important to understand that the things people try to avoid through gossip, exaggeration, and expressions of anger are not all mortal threats. They can also be very mundane things like not wanting to eat something that they just think tastes bad. So make sure not to take the word “threat” too narrowly when considering this hypothesis.
I don’t have any skin in the game here other than an interest in the truth of the matter and a willingness to engage since I find this sort of thing both interesting and sociologically very important. If you or anyone have some literature to shove in my face that offers some compelling data in support of the “people love feeling angry” hypothesis, then sure, I would accept that and integrate that into my understanding of human behaviour.
You may be vastly overestimating average media competence. This is one of those things where I'm glad my relatives are so timid about the digital world.
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#... )
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Is a video documenting racist behavior a racist or an anti-racist video? Is faking a video documenting racist behavior (that never happened) a racist or an anti-racist video? Is the act of faking a video documenting racist behavior (that never happened) or anti-racist behavior?
It doesn’t have to be either for it to be morally bad.
Video showing racist behavior is racist and anti-racist at the same time. A racist will be happy watching it, and anti-racist will forward it to forward their anti-racist message.
Faking a racist video that never happend is, first of all, faking. Second, it's the same: racist and anti-racist at the same time. Third, it's falsifying the prevalence of occurrence.
If you'll add to the video a disclaimer: "this video has been AI-generated, but it shows events that happen all across the US daily" then there's no problem. Nobody is being lied to about anything. The video shows the message, it's not faking anything. But when you impersonate a real occurence, but it's a fake video, then you're lying, and it's simple as that.
Can a lie be told in good faith? I'm afraid that not even philosophy can answer that question. But it's really telling that leftist are sure about the answer!
That's not necessarily just a leftist thing. Plenty of politicians are perfectly fine with saying things they know are lies for what they believe are good reasons. We see it daily with the current US administration.
It's a general ideologue thing.
Think they did the exact opposite
> Also, faked evidence can be done for a variety of reasons, including by someone who intends for the faking to be discovered
Well yes, that's what he wrote, but that's like saying: stealing can be done for variety of reasons, including by someone who intends the theft to be discovered? Killing can be done for variety of reasons, including by someone who intends the killing to be discovered?
I read it as "producing racist videos can sometimes be used in good faith"?
They're saying one example of a reason someone could fake a video is so it would get found out and discredit the position it showed. I read it as them saying that producing the fake video of a cop being racist could have been done to discredit the idea of cops being racist.
There is significant differences between how the information world and the physical world operate.
Creating all kinds of meta-levels of falsity is a real thing, with multiple lines of objective (if nefarious) motivation, in the information arena.
But even physical crimes can have meta information purposes. Putin for instance is fond of instigating crimes in a way that his fingerprints will inevitably be found, because that is an effective form of intimidation and power projection.
I think they’re just saying we should interpret this video in a way that’s consistent with known historical facts. On one hand, it’s not depicting events that are strictly untrue, so we shouldn’t discredit it. On the other hand, since the video itself is literally fake, when we discredit it we shouldn’t accidentally also discredit the events it’s depicting.
Are you saying that if there is 1 instance of a true event, then fake videos done in a similar way as this true event is rational and needed?
The insinuation that racism in the US is not systemic reeks of ignorance
Edit: please, prove your illiteracy and lack of critical thinking skills in the comments below
So make fake videos of events that never actually happened, because real events surely did that weren’t recorded? Or weren’t viral enough? Or something?
Do you realize how crazy this sounds?
How do I know that most of racist indicents weren't simulated by you guys? Since you clearly say that it's OK to generate lies about it?
Edit: I literally demonstrate my ability to think critically.
I don't think so. I was trying to respond to a comment in a way that was diplomatic and constructive. I can see that came out unclear.
How about this question: Can generating an anti-racist video be justified as a good thing?
I think many here would say "yes!" to this question, so can saying "no" be justified by an anti-racist?
Generally I prefer questions that do not lead to thoughts being terminated. Seek to keep a discussion not stop it.
On the subject of this thread, these questions are quite old and are related to propaganda: is it okay to use propaganda if we are the Good Guys, if, by doing so, it weakens our people to be more susceptible to propaganda from the Bad Guys. Every single one of our nations and governments think yes, it's good to use propaganda.
Because that's explicitly what happened during the rise of Nazi Germany; the USA had an official national programme of propaganda awareness and manipulation resistance which had to be shut down because the country needed to use propaganda on their own citizens and the enemy during WW2.
So back to the first question, its not the content (whether it's racist or not) it's the effect: would producing fake content reach a desired policy goal?
Philosophically it's truth vs lie, can we lie to do good? Theologically in the majority of religions, this has been answered: lying can never do good.
Game theory tells us that we should lie if someone else is lying, for some time. Then we should try trusting again. But we should generally tell the truth at the beginning; we sometimes lose to those who lie all the time, but we can gain more than the eternal liar if we encounter someone who behaves just like us. Assuming our strategy is in the majority, this works.
But this is game theory, a dead and amoral mechanism that is mostly used by the animal kingdom. I'm sure humanity is better than that?
Propaganda is war, and each time we use war measures, we're getting closer to it.
The reading comprehension on this website is piss poor.
The quality of comments is also not that great.
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?"
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....
Wut? If you listen to what real people say, racism is quite common has all the power right now.
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.
[flagged]
I'm noticing more of these race baiting comments on YC too lately. AI?
No, that’s a common cope.
Not AI. Not bots. Not Indians or Pakistanis. Not Kremlin or Hasbara agents. All the above might comprise a small percentage of it, but the vast majority of the rage bait and rage bait support we’ve seen over the past year+ on the Internet (including here) is just westerners being (allowed and encouraged by each other to be) racist toward non-whites in various ways.
How's your day been?
You sure about that? I think actions of the US administration together with ICE and police work provide quite enough
Wrong takeaway. There are plenty of real incidents. The reason for posting fake incidents is to discredit the real ones.
That's why this administration is working hard to fill the demand.
Political!
More like observation. Have you seen the videos DHS puts out?
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.
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.
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)
The em-dash=LLM thing is so crazy. For many years Microsoft Word has AUTOCORRECTED the typing of a single hyphen to the proper syntax for the context -- whether a hyphen, en-dash, or em-dash.
I would wager good money that the proliferation of em-dashes we see in LLM-generated text is due to the fact that there are so many correctly used em-dashes in publicly-available text, as auto-corrected by Word...
Which would matter but the entry box in no major browser do was this.
The HN text area does not insert em-dashes for you and never has. On my phone keyboard it's a very lot deliberate action to add one (symbol mode, long press hyphen, slide my finger over to em-dash).
The entire point is it's contextual - emdashes where no accomodations make them likely.
Is this—not an em-dash? On iOS I generated it by double tapping dash. I think there are more iOS users than AIs, although I could be wrong about that…
Yeah, I get that. And I'm not saying the author is wrong, just commenting on that one often-commented-upon phenomenon. If text is being input to the field by copy-paste (from another browser tab) anyway, who's to say it's not (hypothetically) being copied and pasted from the word processor in which it's being written?
The audio artifacts of an AI generated video are a far more reliable heuristic than the presence of a single character in a body of text.
For now. A year ago they weren't even Gen AI videos. Give it a few months...
Well, its probably lower false positive than en-dash but higher false negative, especially since AI generated video, even when it has audio, may not have AI generated audio. (Generation conditioned on a text prompt, starting image, and audio track is among the common modes for AI video generation.)
Thank you for saving me the time writing this. Nothing screams midwit like "Em-dash = AI". If AI detection was this easy, we wouldn't have the issues we have today.
Of note is theother terrible heuristic I've seen thrown around, where "emojis = AI", and now the "if you use not X, but Y = AI".
With the right context both are pretty good actually.
I think the emoji one is most pronounced in bullet point lists. AI loves to add an emoji to bullet points. I guess they got it from lists in hip GitHub projects.
The other one is not as strong but if the "not X but Y" is somewhat nonsensical or unnecessary this is very strong indicator it's AI.
>I guess they got it from lists in hip GitHub projects.
I see this way more often on GitHub now than I did before, though.
Similarly: "The indication for machine-generated text isn't symbolic. It's structural." I always liked this writing device, but I've seen people label it artificial.
Em-dashes are completely innocent. “Not X but Y” is some lame rhetorical device, I’m glad it is catching strays.
When I see emojis in code, especially log statements, it is 100% giveaway AI was involved. Worse, it is an indicator the developer was lazy and didn't even try to clean up the most basic slop.
No one uses em dashes
If nobody used em-dashes, they wouldn’t have featured heavily in the training set for LLMs. It is used somewhat rarely (so e people use it a lot, others not at all) in informal digital prose, but that’s not the same as being entirely unused generally.
Microsoft Word automatically converts dashes to em dashes as soon as you hit space at the end of the next word after the dash.
That's the only way I know how to get an em dash. That's how I create them. I sometimes have to re-write something to force the "dash space <word> space" sequence in order for Word to create it, and then I copy and paste the em dash into the thing I'm working on.
Option shift - in macOS (option - gives you an en dash).
Alt-0151 on the numpad in Windows.
Long-press on the hyphen on most Android keyboards.
Or open whenever "Character Map" application that usually comes with any desktop OS, and copy it from there.
Windows 10/11’s clipboard stack lets you pin selections into the clipboard, so — and a variety of other characters live in mine. And on iOS you just hold down -, of course.
You can Google search "em-dash" then copy/paste from the resulting page.
Ctrl+Shit+U + 2014 (em dash) or 2013 (en dash) in Linux. Former academic here, and I use the things all the time. You can find them all over my pre-LLM publications.
I do—all the time. Why not?
I also use en dashes when referring to number ranges, e.g., 1–9
I didn't know these fancy dashes existed until I read Knuth's first book on typesetting. So probably 1984. Since then I've used them whenever appropriate.
Except for Emily Dickenson, who is an outlier and should not be counted.
Seriously, she used dashes all the time. Here is a direct copy and paste of the first two stanzas of her poem "Because I count not stop for Death" from the first source I found, https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/47652/because-i-could...
Her dashes have been rendered as en dashes in this particular case rather than em dashes, but unless you're a typography enthusiast you might not notice the difference (I certainly didn't and thought they were em dashes at first). I would bet if I hunted I would find some places where her poems have been transcribed with em dashes. (It's what I would have typed if I were transcribing them).Here is an image of the original manuscript page:
https://www.edickinson.org/editions/1/image_sets/12174893
Dickinson's dashes tended to vary over time, and were not typeset during her lifetime (mostly). Also, mid-19th century usage was different—the em-dash was a relatively new thing.
When I type in English and needs an em dash, I simply switch to the Chinese IME.
Except for highly literate people, and people who care about typography.
Think about it— the robots didn’t invent the em-dash. They’re copying it from somewhere.
My impression of people that say they’re em dash users is that they’re laundering their dunning kruger through AI.
Tell me you never worked with LaTeX and an university style guide without telling me you never worked with LaTeX and an university style guide.
Approximately no one writes internet comments or even articles in LaTeX.
But many have built their writing habits about LaTeX typing, and a – or even an — are hardcoded into their text editors / operating systems, much like other correct diacritics and ligatures may be.
I really wish Google will flag videos with any AI content, that they detect.
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.
It's not really any different that stopping selling counterfeit goods on a platform. Which is a challenge, but hardly insurmountable and the pay off from AI videos won't be nearly so good. You can make a few thousand a day selling knock offs to a small amount of people and get reliably paid within 72 hours. To make the same off of "content" you would have to get millions of views and the pay out timeframe is weeks if not months. Youtube doesn't pay you out unless you are verified, so ban people posting AI and not disclosing it and the well will run dry quickly.
The Payoff from AI videos could get someone in the Whitehouse.
Well then email spam will never have an incentive. That is a relief! I was going to predict that someday people would start sending millions of misleading emails or texts!
I said something to a friend about this years ago with AI... We're going to stretch the legal and political system to the point of breaking.
> eventually AI content will be indistinguishable from real-world content
You get it wrong. Real-world content will become indistinguishable from "AI" content because that's what people will consider normal.
It's not a band-aid at all. In fact, recognition is nearly always algorithmically easier than creation. Which would mean fake-AI detectors could have an inherent advantage over fake-AI creators.
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...
Wow! I hadn't seen this, thanks. Do you think they are doing it with relatively innocent motives?
I have no insight, but I assume they are doing it because they can use AI to make a few variations of a video and then automatically A/B test them to see which ones get more engagement, and then use that to make videos that are more engaging than what the author actually uploaded.
This is "innocent" if you accept that the author's goal is simplify to maximize engagement and YouTube is helping them do that. It's not if you assume the author wants users to see exactly what they authored.
In reciprocity, my parents call "AI" anything they don't like or want to believe.
We truly live in wonderful times!
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
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.
That was already the case for anything printed or written. You have no way of telling if this is true or not.
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.
> “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
Seems rather simple to solve to me.
Just have video cameras (mostly phones these days) record a crypto hash into the video that the video sharing platforms read and display. That way we know a video was recorded with the uploader's camera and not just generated in a computer software.
There aren't that many big tech companies that are responsible for creating the devices people use to record and host the platforms and software that people use to play back the content.
The current situation is not as bad as it can get; this is accelerant on the fire and it can get a lot worse
I've been using "It will get worse before it gets worse" more and more lately
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.
True for videos, but not true for any type of "text claim", which were already plenty 10 years ago and they were already hard to fight (think: misquoting people, strangely referring to science article, dubiously interpreting facts, etc.).
But I would claim that "trusting blindly" was much more common hundreds of years ago than it is now, so we might make some progress in fact.
If people learn to be more skeptical (because at some point they might get that things can be fake) it might even be a gain. The transition period can be dangerous though, as always.
You are right that text had this problem.
But today’s text manufacturing isn’t our grand.., well yesterday’s text manufacturing.
And pretty soon it will be very persuasive models with lots of patience and manufactured personalized credibility and attachment “helping” people figure out reality.
The big problem isn’t the tech getting smarter though.
It’s the legal and social tolerance for conflict of interests at scale. Like unwanted (or dark pattern permissioned) surveillance which is all but unavoidable, being used to manipulate feeds controlled by third parties (between us and any organic intentioned contacts), toward influencing us in any way anyone will pay for. AI is just walking through a door that has been left wide open despite a couple decades of hard lessons.
Incentives, as they say, matter.
Misinformation would exist regardless, but we didn’t need it to be a cornerstone business model with trillions of dollars of market cap unifying its globally coordinated efficient and effective, near unavoidable, continual insertion into our and our neighbors lives. With shareholders relentlessly demanding double digit growth.
Doesn’t take any special game theory or economic theory to see the problematic loop there. Or to predict it will continue to get worse, and will be amplified by every AI advance, as long as it isn’t addressed.
>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?
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 :)
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
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?"
"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.
People stopped falling for photoshopped pictures and staged Chinese reels pretty quickly. I think people will pretty quickly decide anything outrageous is probably AI. And by people I mean the right half of the bell curve, which is all you can hope for. The left half will have problems in the world as they always have.
You don't need AI for that.
https://youtu.be/xiYZ__Ww02c
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!
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
>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.
> 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.
> 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.
I'm in multiple Discord servers with people I know IRL.
In fact, I'd say it's probably the easiest way to bootstrap a community around a friend-group.
Is this a generational thing? All my groups of this type are on WhatsApp (unfortunately).
Yes. Whatsapp requires a phone number and Discord does not. The tweens who do not have a phone yet can join Discord with their siblings / friends.
The other part of this is that Discord has official University hubs, so the college kids are all in there. You need an email address from that Univeristy to join: https://support.discord.com/hc/en-us/articles/4406046651927-...
Are you using the word tweens in some sense other than its usual definition of pre-teen? My understanding is that discord, like most online services, requires registered users to be 13 years old.
Nope, that's exactly what I meant. That requirement just means that they have to check a box which says that they're 13 or older. Surely no child would ever break the rules, right?
Having been out of university since before Discord was much of a thing, that's news to me. It also is eerily reminiscent of Facebook's beginning sign up requirements.
I guess that depends on the University and whether or not you get to keep your email address after you graduate. From what I understand from my college-aged kids, most people get kicked out of the hub after they graduate.
It's similar in Apple's strategy of trying to get Macintosh into the classrooms (in the 80s/90s), and student discounts on Adobe products.
I am not a huge fan of Discord, although I do use it. It's very good at what it does, and the communities it houses are well moderated, at least the ones that I have joined. I dislike that they've taken over communities and walled them off from the "searchable" internet.
That is actually something I quite like about Discord. Whatever I write and post, while not "private" is not indexed or searchable by anyone other tgan those people that have been vetted (invited) by the respective community. Not that I'm mostly on small friendgroup Discords with 10 - 100 members.
Right, and they're blending two things together -- group chats and public forums. I'm sad about losing the public forums.
Discord's initial core demographic was online gaming. From there it has radiated outwards due to being the best group messaging (and voice chat) solution out there. The more overlap your friend group has with gaming and adjacent groups the more likely they are to use Discord
When Bloomberg’s podcasts have a Discord channel (eg: Odd Lots), you know it has broken free of its gaming origins.
Definitely. My friend group consists of gen-z and millenials and we met irl but have a shared interest of gaming that gets us together on weekends.
What Discord does so well is that you start using it for gaming but then it also becomes the space for all kinds of things. We discuss news there, music/popculture, organize events etc
Whatsapp is more for the "formal" stuff and when it's time critical since not everybody has Discord notifications enabled.
I'd say Discord is definitely more popular among gen-z (or even younger) and gamers but it's kinda become reddit 2.0 where every niche has its discord.
I want my community to have:
- bots (like we had on IRC) - first class clients on all platforms (mobile, tablet, desktop, browser) - voice chat - video chat
Telegram and Discord are the only ones that satisfy all these.
And of these Telegram is just one channel, on Discord we can separate subjects by channels in seconds. If I see a message on #general, I go check what it is. On #memes I know it's not urgent.
Matrix if you want to play IT support on your free time.
might be a regional thing instead, i don't know many americans with whatsapp -- all of my friends are on discord.
Maybe, but at least in my circles it’s a structure thing- until the group actually can be organised in a single chat sanely something else will be used- but as soon as multiple chats are required the thing is moved on discord.
You're essentially saying you haven't seen anyone's private chats.
I'm in a friend Discord server. It's naturally invisible unless someone sends you an invite.
Yeah same as sibling comments, I'm in multiple discord servers for IRL friend groups. I personally run one with ~50 people that sees a hundreds of messages a day. By far my most used form of social media. Also as OP said, I'll be migrating to Matrix (probably) when they IPO, we've already started an archival project just in case.
And you won't. I will NOT invite anyone from "social media" to any of the 3 very-private, yet outrageously active, servers, and that's why they have less than 40 users collectively. They're basically for playing games and re-streaming movies among people on first name basis or close to it. And I know those 40 people have others of their own, and I know I'll never ever have access to them either. Because I dont know those other people in them.
And I know server like these are in the top tier of engagement for discord on the whole because they keep being picked for AB testing new features. Like, we had activities some half a year early. We actually had the voice modifiers on two of them, and most people don't even know that was a thing.
The split where social networking is mostly for people you “know” and social media is… some other thing, mostly for scrolling videos, definitely is significant.
But, the “know IRL” split is a bit artificial I think. For example my discord is full of people I knew in college: I knew them IRL for four years, and then we all moved around and now we’ve known each other online for decades. Or childhood friends. By now, my childhood friend and college friend circles are partially merged on discord, and they absolutely know each other (unfortunately there’s no way for you to evaluate this but I know them all quite well and it would be absurd to me, to consider them anything other than friends).
The internet is part of the real world now. People socialize on it. I can definitely see a distinction between actually knowing somebody, and just being in a discord channel with them. But it is a fuzzy social thing I think, hard to nail down exactly where the transition is (also worth noting that we have acquaintances that we don’t really “know” offline, the cashier at our favorite shops for example).
While it's also used to socialize with people you don't know IRL, most of my experience with Discord (mostly in uni) was to aggregate people IRL together. We had discords for clubs, classes, groups of friends, etc. The only reason I use discord now is for the same reason. Private space for a group of people to interact asynchronously in a way that's more structured than a text group chat.
Idk most of the people I "met" on the internet happened originally on IRC. I didn't know them till a decade or more later.
I'm sorry but what?! 'Socializing with people you know IRL' is almost exclusively what I've seen Discord used for, and almost solely what I personally use it for. There are vastly more Discord servers set up among IRL friend groups (or among classmates, as another popular use case) than there are Discord servers for fandoms of people who have never met IRL.
I'd say WhatsApp is a better example
WhatsApp really feels to me more like group chat. Not really breaking barrier of social media. But then again I am not in any mass chats.
Discord is many things. Private chat groups, medium communities and then larger communities with tens of thousands of users.
> WhatsApp really feels to me more like group chat.
So what's wrong with that?
900 lb. Gorillas don't weigh 9000 lbs
> "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.
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.
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.
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.
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...
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.
> Discord has much better user experience for new users.
Until you join a server that gives you a whole essay of what you can and cannot do with extra verification. This then requiring you to post in some random channel waiting for the moderator to see your message.
You're then forced to assign roles to yourself to please a bot that will continue to spam you with notifications announcing to the community you've leveled up for every second sentence. Finally, everyone glaring at you in channel or leaving you on read because you're a newbie with a leaf above your username. Each to their own, I guess.
/server irc.someserver.net
/join #hello
/me says Hello
I think I'll stick with that.
At least Discord and IRC are interchangeable in the sake of idling.
This only happens if the server is BIG _or_ if the admin is a grifter who's 100% sure their server will hit it big and has 120 channels and 40 bots and 9 users total.
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.
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.
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).
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
Right.... how is that different from IRC other than being controlled by a big company with no exit ability and (again) extremely tenuous privacy promises?
IRC doesn't offer voice/video, which is unimaginable for Discord alternative.
When we get to alternative proposals with functioning calls I'd say having them as voice channels that just exist 24/7 is a big thing too. It's a tiny thing from technical perspective, but makes something like Teams unsuitable alternative for Discord.
In Teams you start a call and everyone phone rings, you distract everyone from whatever they were doing -- you better have a good reason for doing so.
In Discord you just join empty voice channel (on your private server with friends) w/o any particular reason and go on with your day. Maybe someone sees that you're there and joins, maybe not. No need to think of anyone's schedule, you don't annoy people that don't have time right now.
For the text chat, it's different in the way that it lets one make their own 'servers' without having to run the actual hardware server 24/7, free of charge, no need to battle with NATs and weird nonstandard ways of sending images, etc.
The big thing is the voice/videoconferencing channels which are actually optimized insanely well, Discord calls work fine even on crappy connections that Teams and Zoom struggle with.
Simply put it's Skype x MSN Messenger with a global user directory, but with gamers in mind.
> 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.
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.)
It would be nice if the social media company actually showed their posts in the feed
I'm hopeful that one day engineers at Meta will crack the chronological sort code. It's a tough algorithm but I bet Llama can help 'em out.
Better back button handling and fixing the location bugs in event creation may well be entirely beyond Llama, sadly.
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.
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.
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”
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
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.
And lists! I love to use lists and blather a lot. It was from me that AI learned that:
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.
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`.
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).
How do you find yourself using en dashes more than em dashes?
Not OP, but I find the space-en-space convention easier to read than the nospace-em-nospace convention. American style guides prefer the latter – in my eyes they are wrong about that
They're wrong about preferring the style you find easier to read?
Did you mean American style guides prefer the latter?
brain fart, fixed
For me I use en dashes a lot for ranges like 1–N
Maybe they write out a lot of ranges?
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.
I don't know if my language grammar rules (Italian) are different than English, but I've always seen spaces before and after em-dashes. I don't like the em-dash being stuck to two unrelated words.
That's because in Italian, like in many other European languages, you use en-dashes to separate parenthetical clauses. The en-dash is used with space, the em-dash (mostly) without space and that's why it's longer. On old typewriters they were frequently written as "--" and "---" respectively. So yes, it's mostly an English thing. Stick to your trattinos, they're nice!
It's a US thing
That sounds like a strongly held opinion rather than a fact.
I like em-dashes and will continue to use them.
That'll show em'.
>That sounds like a strongly held opinion rather than a fact.
Yes, that is more or less what "hot take" means.
agree. it implies a strong relationship between the two words it is inserted between - not the sentences.
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.
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
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].)
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.
> 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.
There are compose key implementations for Windows, too.
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.
The Oxford style guide page 18 https://www.ox.ac.uk/public-affairs/style-guide
> m-dash (—)
> Do not use; use an n-dash instead.
> n-dash (–)
> Use in a pair in place of round brackets or commas, surrounded by spaces.
Remember I'm specifically speaking about british english.
HMRC style guide: "Avoid the shorter en dash as they are treated differently by different screen readers" [0].
But I see what you mean. There used to be a distinction between a shorter dash that is used for numerical ranges, or for things named after multiple people, and a longer dash used to connect independent clauses in a sentence [1]. I am shocked to hear that this distinction is being eroded.
[0] https://design.tax.service.gov.uk/hmrc-content-style-guide/
[1] https://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~tmj32/styleguide/
That guy's style guide seems to conflict with the Cambridge editorial services guidelines - though that is for books rather than papers:
> Spaced en rules (or ‘en dashes’) must be used for parenthetical dashes. Hyphens or em rules (‘em dashes’) will not be accepted for either UK or US style books. En rules (–) are longer than hyphens (-) but shorter than em rules (—).
Section 2.1, "Editorial services style guide for academic books" https://www.cambridge.org/authorhub/resources/publishing-gui...
It's also easy to get them in LaTeX: just type --- and they will appear as an em-dash in your output.
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.
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.
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 :)
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.
You’re absolutely right—lots of very smart people use em dashes. Thank you for correcting me on that!
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.)
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).
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.
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.)
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.
Em-dashes are easy to type on a macos laptop for what it's worth: option-shift-minus.
Also on Linux when you enable the compose key: alt-dash-dash-dash (--- → —) and for the en-dash: alt-dash-dash-dot (--. → –)
That's not as easy as just hitting the hyphen key, nor are most people going to be aware that even exists. I think it's fair to say that the hyphen is far easier to use than an em dash.
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.
No. En-dash doesn't work "just as well" as an em-dash, anymore than a comma works as an apostrophe. They are different punctuation marks.
Also, I was a curmudgeon with strong opinions about punctuation before ChatGPT—heck, even before the internet. And I can produce witnesses.
In British English you'd be wrong for using an em-dash in those places, with most grammar recommendations being for an en-dash, often with spaces.
It's be just as wrong as using an apostrophe instead of a comma.
Grammar is often wooly in a widely used language with no single centralised authority. Many of the "Hard Rules" some people thing are fundamental truths are often more local style guides, and often a lot more recent than some people seem to believe.
Interesting, I’m an American English speaker but that’s how it feels natural to me to use dashes. Em-dashes with no spaces feels wrong for reasons I can’t articulate. This first usage—in this meandering sentence—feels bossy, like I can’t have a moment to read each word individually. But this second one — which feels more natural — lets the words and the punctuation breathe. I don’t actually know where I picked up this habit. Probably from the web.
It can also depend on the medium. Typically, newspapers (e.g. the AP style guide) use spaces around em-dashes, but books / Chicago style guide does not.
They mean the same thing to 99.999% of the population.
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.
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.
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.
You’re absolutely right. It’s not just a writing style, it’s how the ideas are expressed.
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
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.
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-...
> 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.
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.
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
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..
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.
When that baseline erodes, even normal human quirks start looking suspicious
found the LLM bot guys!
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
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?
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.
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.
I dont know if it's true or not. But I remember reading about this person who would do the community reports for cheating for a game like cs or something. They had numerous bot accounts and spent a hour a day on it. Set up in a way that when they reviewed a video the bots would do the same.
But all the while they were doing legitimate reporting, when they came across their real cheating account they'd report not cheating. And supposedly this person got away with it for years for having good reputable community reporting with high alignment scores.
I know 1 exception doesnt mean it's not worth it. But we must acknowledge the potential abuse. Id still rather have 1 occasionally ambitious abuser over countless low effort ones.
Yeah I can definitely see that being a threat model. In the gaming case I think it's harder because it's more of a general reputation system and it's based on how people feel while playing with you, whereas for a website every post can be reviewed by multiple parties and the evidence is right there. But certainly I would still expect some people to try to maximize their reputation and use that to push through content that should be more heavily moderated, and in the degenerate case the bad actors comprise so much of the userbase that they peer review their own content.
So the Slashdot model?
Everyone gets a random set of messages to review and if they agree with the original judgement, stuff happens.
Is that different from voting on comments?
It's more like jury duty where the decision of one or a few people can have a huge impact (modded or not).
I really miss the phpBB forum days. Early 2000s. It's not just nostalgia. It truly was a better experience.
>> 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.
>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.
They removed the dislike count, by the way
Makes it harder to see if you're watching an ad
Completely coincidental
> 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
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
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
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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`.
I do use AI internally for content moderation but I’m building a platform like this at https://grove.place
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.
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.
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.
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.
It's challenging to decide where to draw the line. Is it OK that wikipedia begs for donations? Sites that use affiliate links can be full of crap too, although technically ad free.
I think its worth exploring.
BTW, HN has ads. They post job openings at their start ups, these appear like posts but you can't vote on them. Launch HN is another way this site is monetized, although that seems quite reasonable and you can vote/flag those posts like any other.
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.
Sure, but with a feed reader I unsubscribe when ever I see slop. News aggregators don't have the same filtering ability; I don't think you can ban a site from HN for posting slop, for example.
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
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.
Yeah that's been my experience as well. I think most uploads strip the metadata unfortunately
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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! ;)
Maybe the healthier framing is cultural rather than ethical
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.
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.
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.
That's not what that saying means/meant.
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.
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.
What a nice thought :)
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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…
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.
The Methyl 4-methylpyrrole-2-carboxylate vs ∂²ψ/∂t² = c²∇²ψ distinction. My bet is on Methyl 4-methylpyrrole-2-carboxylate being more actionable. For better or worse.
Sorry, I have absolutely no idea what you're trying to say with that.
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.
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.
I think state of the art LLMs would pass the Turing test for 95% people if those people could (text) chat to them in a time before LLM chatbots became widespread.
That is, the main thing that makes it possible to tell LLM bots apart from humans is that lots of us have over the past 3 years become highly attuned to specific foibles and text patterns which signal LLM generated text - much like how I can tell my close friends' writing apart by their use of vocabulary, punctuation, typical conversation topics, and evidence (or lack) of knowledge in certain domains.
on one hand
on the other hand
Are you implying that this was an AI bot comment?
I think it was a grammar/idiom correction.
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.
The said hypothetical social media, if gaining any traction, will be the heaven for adversarial training.
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
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?
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?
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.
There are mastodon communities such https://mastodon.art/ where AI is explicitly banned.
Apparently the vine restart will explicitly ban ai content. Thus providing an excellent source of untainted training data, but that's beside the point
Not actually banned on Bluesky, but the community at large is so hostile to it that, generally, there's very little AI stuff.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
Ah, apologies, misread your post.
> 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.
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?
One way to use em-dash and look human is to write it incorrectly with two hyphens: --
I still use 'em. Fuck what everybody else thinks.
There's always the 3-em dash⸻a dastardly long strike.
That is fantastic.
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.
I can’t be the only one who has ever read https://practicaltypography.com/hyphens-and-dashes.html
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.
I suspect whatever you try to do to not appear to be an LLM… LLM's also will do in time.
Might as well be yourself.
Indeed. I found that recently, Claude has been using hyphens instead of emdashes.
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.
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.
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.
Ha ha, my first use of an em-dash on HN was 2016 which was the year I started my account.
I'm safe. It must be one of you that are the LLM!
(Hey, I'm #21 on the leaderboard!).
First time I’m hearing about a shortcut for this. I always use 2 hyphens. Is that not considered an em-dash ?
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.
Wow thanks for the enlightenment. I dug into this a bit and found out:
Hyphen (-) — the one on your keyboard. For compound words like “well-known.”
En dash (–) — medium length, for ranges like 2020–2024. Mac: Option + hyphen. Windows: Alt + 0150.
Em dash (—) — the long one, for breaks in thought. Mac: Option + Shift + hyphen. Windows: Alt + 0151.
And now I also understand why having plenty of actual em-dashes (not double hyphens) is an “AI tell”.
If you have the compose key enabled it's trivial to write all sorts of things. Em dash is compose (right alt for me) ---
En dash is compose --.
You can type other fun things like section symbol (compose So) and fractions like ⅐ with compose 17, degree symbol (compose oo) etc.
https://itsfoss.com/compose-key-gnome-linux/
On phones you merely long press hyphen to get the longer dash options.
Thanks for that. I had no idea either. I'm genuinely surprised Windows buries such a crucial thing like this. Or why they even bothered adding it in the first place when it's so complicated.
The Windows version is an escape hatch for keying in any arbitrary character code, hence why it's so convoluted. You need to know which code you're after.
To be fair, the alt-input is a generalized system for inputting Unicode characters outside the set keyboard layout. So it's not like they added this input specifically. Still, the em dash really should have an easier input method given how crucial a symbol it is.
It's a generalized system for entering code page glyphs that was extended to support Unicode. 0150 and 0151 only work if you are on CP1252 as those aren't the Unicode code points.
And Em Dash is trivially easy on iOS — you simply hold press on the regular dash button - I’ve been using it for years and am not stopping because people might suddenly accuse me of being an AI.
Thanks for delving into this key insight!
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.
The long --- if you're that way minded --- is just 3 hyphens :)
Yep I realize this now, as I said in my other comment.
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.
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.
This site is social media because I scroll it all day and get mad.
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.
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).
> 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.
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.
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.
> 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.
Drivers are literally the biggest cause of deaths of young people. We should start applying the same safety standards we do to every other part of life.
>Most drivers don't ever hit someone with their car.
Accidents Georg, who lives in a windowless car ans hits someone over 10,000 times each day, is an outlier and should not have been counted
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.
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.)
Why specifically be worried about cyclists in this weird and unusual mental state? Do holier than thou cyclists have more momentum or something? (I’ve never met one).
Anyway, a fix that should work fine for both of you is to take a lane from cars and devote it to cyclists. Nobody actually wants to bike where people walk, some places just have bad infrastructure.
> Do holier than thou cyclists have more momentum or something?
They think they're martyrs or something. What am I then if i take a backpack and do my shopping on foot? I'm even more eco because I didn't spend manufacturing resources on a bike, and even more of a martyr because walking is slow.
> to take a lane from cars and devote it to cyclists. Nobody actually wants to bike where people walk
Yep, see my NL reference :)
You might like David Mason's short story "Road Stop":
https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/61309
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.
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.
I really liked working in the office when it had lots of people I directly worked with, and was next to lots of good restaurants and a nice gym. You got to know people well and stuff could get done just by wandering over to someone's desk (as long as you were not too pesky too often).
The Last of the Winnebagos by Connie Willis
> 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....
That I'm a real human being that is stupid in English sometimes? :)
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
Ha! Despite the fact that I tend to proof read my posts before publishing, right after publishing, and sometimes re-reading them few months after publishing, I still tend to not notice some obvious typos. Kinda makes you feel appreciation for the profession of editors and spell checkers. (And yes, I use LanguageTools in neovim, but I refuse to feed my articles to LLMs).
Your stared typo passes spellcheck.
Or the user has "ChatGPT, add random misspellings so it looks like a human wrote this" in their system config.
That's just what an AI would say :)
Nice article, though. Thanks.
I'd read 100 blog posts by humans doing their best to write coherent English rather than one LLM-sandblasted post
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.
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.
A few writer friends even had a coffee mug with the alt+number combination for em-dash in Windows, given by a content marketing company. It was already very widespread in writing circles years ago. Developers keep forgetting they're in a massively isolated bubble.
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).
You don't use em dashes then, you use en dash.
I think they are saying they are using an en dash where they should use an em dash.
Yup. Note that I didn't name the dash.
They don't use the en dash, at least not in their comment—they are using the hyphen-minus as en dash–em dash substitute.
(Looks more like a tee-dash to me.)
> 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.
An LLM cannot explain itself and its explanations have no relation to what actually caused the text to be generated.
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
Those are hyphens.
> 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?
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.
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.
It could add to a weighted score. That's about as far as I'd go personally.
I'd say it depends on the situation and what the cost of false positives/negatives are for it. When you are looking at a practically infinite list of things to read and are looking to filter out AI garbage as not worth reading then filtering out the occasional typographical nerd is not that much of a problem.
So interesting this is right next to https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46673809 on the HN homepage. Really demonstrates how polarizing AI is.
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.
Article adjacency on HN typically lasts less than 10 minutes ... you did include an actual link though, so thanks for that.
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
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.
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.
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.
Sounds like the old what.cd
Lets all just get together and go bowling, shall we?
Discord fills some of the pockets of human interaction. We really need more invite only platforms.
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.
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".
"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.
> 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:
>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.
Thanks for the thorough explanation, that, indeed, is a level of nuance that's hard for me to spot.
Interestingly, "absolutely right" is very common in German: "du hast natürlich absolut Recht" is something which I can easily imagine a friend's voice (or my voice) say at a dinner table. It's "du hast Recht" that sounds a little bit too formal and strong x[.
Agreed on the sycophancy point, in Gemini I even have a preamble that basically says "don't be a sycophant". It still doesn't always work.
> in Gemini I even have a preamble that basically says "don't be a sycophant". It still doesn't always work.
Using this kind of strategy eventually leads to the LLM recurrently advertising what it just produced as «straight to the point, no fluff, no bullshit». («Here is the blunt truth»).
Of course no matter how the LLM advertise its production, it is too often non devoid of sycophancy.
There's likely a cultural element to it as well regarding how we admit mistakes and correct ourselves.
With how blame-avoidant western individualist culture can be, seeing something "admit" doing wrong so quickly, and so emphatically, could be uncanny valley-level jarring.
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.
It fails the basic human behaviour. In general humans are not ready to admit fault. At least when there is no social pressure. They might apologize and admit mistake. Or they might ask for clarification. But very rarely "You are absolute right" and go on entirely new tangent...
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.
Just don't open a comment with
> You're absolutely right!
And you're good
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
That’s why we need a parallel internet.
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).
Well then in that case, maybe we need a “vetted internet”. Like the opposite of the dark web, this would only index vetted websites, scanned for AI slop, and with optional parental controls, equipped with customized filters that leverage LLMs to classify content into unwanted categories. It would require a monthly subscription fee to maintain but would be a nonprofit model.
That's the original "Yahoo Directory", which was a manually curated page.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yahoo#Founding
The original Yahoo doesn't exist (outside archive.org), but I'm guessing would be a keen person or two out there maintaining a replacement. It would probably be disappointing, as manually curated lists work best when the curator's interests are similar to your own.
What you want might be Kagi Search with the AI filtering on? I've never used Kagi, so I could be off with that suggestion.
The original dmoz/open directory project/Yahoo directory database is being hosted (but not maintained; I don't think it's being updated) at odp.org, which also includes links to other directory projects at http://odp.org/Computers/Internet/Searching/Directories
What safeguards would be in place to prevent this parallel internet from also, with time, becoming a dead internet?
Social stigma against any monetary incentives. (I recognize the irony in saying this on HN.)
When it becomes a dead parallel internet, we'll make a internet'' and go again
Plenty of crass jokes advertisers don’t want in line with their content is how 4chan avoided commercialization.
What would stop them from scraping it and infecting it?
It's bimodal
Like wearing a mask on one's head to ward tigers.
A̶O̶L̶ Humans Online
Internot.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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
>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.
There are many phrases that exist solely in fiction.
You are absolutely right!
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.
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.
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
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"?)
> But we have to remove + from searches
Wasn't that functionality just replaced? Parts of a query that are in quotation marks, are required to appear in any returned result.
Yeah, but quotes aren't as convenient and I think I've heard they're less accurate than + used to be
> 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.
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.
The wrongthink issue was always secondary, and generally easy to avoid by not mixing certain topics with your account (don't comment on political threads with your furry porn gooner account, etc). At a certain point, the person calling out a mostly benign profile is the one who will look ridiculous, and if not, the sub is probably not worth participating in anyway.
But recently it seems everything is more overrun than usual with bot activity, and half of the accounts are hidden which isn't helping matters. Utterly useless, and other platforms don't seem any better in this regard.
You can still see them in search. The bots don’t seem to bother hiding posts though.
> allow even more bots to increase traffic which drives up ad revenue
Isn't that just fraud?
It is. Reddit is probably 99% fraud/bots at this point.
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.
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.
> 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
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.
No, it's not really true. Media companies have a whole host of KPI's and tracking methods to evaluate the success/failure of their campaigns/single ads: here's a small summary of some of the KPI's and methods https://www.themediaant.com/blog/methods-of-measuring-advert...
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)
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.
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.
This is my current Reddit use case. I unsubscribed from everything other than a dozen or so niche communities. I’ve turned off all outside recommendations so my homepage is just that content (though there is feed algorithm there). It’s quick enough to sign in every day or two and view almost all the content and move on.
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.
> why would you look at the "front page" if you only wanted to see things you subscribed to?
"Latest" ignores score and only sorts by submission time, which means you see a lot of junk if you follow any large subreddits.
The default home-page algorithm used to sort by a composite of score, recency, and a modifier for subreddit size, so that posts from smaller subreddits don't get drowned out. It worked pretty well, and users could manage what showed up by following/unfollowing subreddits.
The front page when I used reddit only contained posts from your subscribed subreddits, sorted by the upvote ranking algorithm.
Isn't showing ads to bots...pointless?
If the advertisers don't know the difference between a human and a bot then they will still pay money to display the ad.
You’d think they would eventually notice their ROI is terrible…?
There were some dedicated submissions about ad fraud on HN. In long term companies tend to reach equilibrium, where both reducing and increasing ad budget decreases profit. It is a classic prisoners dilemma, giving up on ads with poor ROI would be obvious decision if it wasn't for competitors who will benefit both from some actual conversions and lower bids for domain specific keywords.
the alternative - not buying ads - is worse though. No one knows about you, and you sell nothing. so it ends up being seen as a cost of doing business. that is passed on to paying customers.
I'm really starting to wonder how much of the "ground level" inflation is actually caused by "passing on" the cost of anti-social behaviors to paying customers, as opposed to monetary policy shenanigans.
I hope so but I don't know.
Wouldn’t taking the API away hurt the bots?
the bots just scrape
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!
[dead]
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.
> 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.
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.
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
> 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?
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...
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.)
HN has survived many things but I dont think it will survive the LLMs.
I thought you were going for 2^15-1 and an LLM messed up the math.
31,337 can be the stopping point for active commenting.
32,767 can be the hard max., to permit rare occasional comments after that.
Holy based
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
"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.
You’re absolutely right, we use that phrase a lot in the UK when we emphatically agree with someone, or we’re being sarcastic.
If you show signs of literacy, people will just assume you are a bot.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
This is the original post which started it all in 2021: https://forum.agoraroad.com/index.php?threads/dead-internet-...
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.
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.
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.
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.
LLM summary of all comments: https://hn-discussions.top/dead-internet-theory/
[dead]
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).
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
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.
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-...
> 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.
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.
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.
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.)
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.
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.
How is the author the problem? What is the problem, in your view?
My answer to this blogpost is this: https://share.google/aimode/nrO2drR4YsCNKr1f9
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.
"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?
Because of the intention and purpose of those, not because of the actual pixels your brain interprets.
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.
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.
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.
PowerToys has a wonderful QuickAccent feature. The dashes and hyphens are on hyphen-KEY and some other characters are on comma-KEY, and many symbols are on the key that they resemble, like ¶ is on P-KEY where KEY is the follower key you want to use. I turned off using SPACE because it conflicted with some other software, but right arrow works great for me.
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.
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").
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
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
you can absolutely still use `--`, but you need to add spaces around them.
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.
Well, if you are not satisfied by our company of AI karma-farmers, you are welcome to join "The Diamond Mine" BBS :)
Maybe I just will...
It was outrageous at start, especially in 2016, but surely after AI's boom, we are heading towards it. People have stopped becoming genuine.
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.
If you can ride the Metra from your city to Chicago proper, you're in Chicago!
What worries me most is not bots talking to bots, but humans adapting their voice to sound like bots because thatэs what works now
Apps that require verification of "humanity" are going to get trendy. I'm thinking of world app for instance.
Great, let's just require biometric identification before posting online, what could go wrong.
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.
Are em dashes in language models particularly close to a start token or something? Somehow letting the model continue to keep outputting.
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.
AI content including youtube videos, podcasta and such need a stamp that content was AI generated.
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.
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.
Such posts are identifiable and rare, disproving Dead Internet Theory (for now).
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
I've used em dashes for decades — They're great.
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.
What's wrong with using AI to write code?
Nothing if you fix its errors and it fixes yours.
> 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.
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.
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.”
The darkest hour is just before the dawn
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...
> 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>)
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
bots are everywhere and Ai bots making this theory very true.
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.
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
:(
you are absolutely right
But what about the children improving their productivity 10x? What about their workflows?
Think of the children!!!
What is now certain is Dead StackOverflow Theory.
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!
>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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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Hiding post history doesn’t really work. You can just search for all the users activity.
The hiding of post history only serves to hide bot activity.
This is what you made an account to do? To dump on this community as you tell us not to dump on another community? Pot/kettle and all that.
You’ve got some ideas here I actually agree with, but your patronizing tone all but guarantees 99% of people won’t hear it.