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Comment by woeirua | Hacker News Reader

This article gets it. ChatGPT heralds the end of free user comments, forums and social media. Because when everything and everyone online is fake, why even log on to Insta or FB or Twitter? The internet will still be useful, but Web 2.0 will go the way of the dodo unless it adapts and the easiest way to cut down on spam is to charge users money for access. Spam campaigns are a lot less lucrative when it costs money to participate. Hell, charge $0.05 per email. The amount of spam would decrease significantly.

Side note, I’ve long thought that identity verification is the _one_ area that a public blockchain could actually add legitimate value to. But I’ve seen no efforts in that direction to date.

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The volumes of email spam are absolutely staggering, but its detection and filtering, with minuscule amounts of false negatives, are nearly perfect. It has been largely a solved problem for a decade to which we give very little credit. Me personally, it blows my mind out of the water every time I'm reminded of it.

Spam filters are indeed amazing, but I do get a non-trivial number of false positives these days.

Spam is a moving target.

And the movement of spam just accelerated with ChatGPT.

I have a feeling Bayesian spam filters will be highly effective at picking out patterns in anything generated by a particular model. The arms race will move from spammers coming up with new templates to spammers coming up with new models.

There is as much spam as there is email. Did people quit email?

There is more than twice spam as there is legitimate email (source: ran a corporate email server). However, so far most spam is automatically detected.

In the near future, It's likely that this is no longer going to be the case and in the moment that most of your email is spam you are going to stop trusting everything you receive.

Even right now inside corps people already (should?) distrust and double checks everything that comes from another domain.

Obviously people didn’t quit email. But I also don’t “engage” with email with anything near the intensity that I used to. 20 years ago…? One of the hottest romcoms ever, was built around our feverish engagement with email: “You’ve got Mail!” Can you imagine that being a pitch for a romcom next year? They’d laugh you out of the room. Because while people still use email, they don’t engage with it the way they used to.

I think this sense of disengagement is what the author is trying to metaphorically capture with the idea of “logging off”. It might just be my family and peer groups, but I do sense this in general. The internet and its various “social” constructs feel more and more like they’ve crossed that line in dating relationships where the other person becomes “clingy/needy” and it starts to grow wearisome and cringy. I think that causes people to quietly disengage.

I can't help but wonder how we will ensure official government/legal->user communication is legitimate in the face of software that can dodge spam filters at a whim. Is it back to letters for us?

A lot of people did. Most business communication happens in virtual meetings or on platforms like Slack and Teams. Most informal communication occurs through voice calls and instant messaging. All that used to be email around Y2K, as far as I remember.

Yes, they did. Both my work and personal email inboxes are pretty much exclusively various kinds of automated messages (order details, newsletters, announcements from various tools), I get essentially zero personal communication over it anymore; that all happens on other platforms. Email has more or less gone the way of regular mail: still used for various businesses to get in touch with you, but for personal communication it is dead.

No, because spam filters are pretty good. But that may change, too.

Will something like the precursor to Bitcoin, meant to combat spam -- Hashcash -- become important again?

The enabling technology behind micropayments is ironically looking like a CBDC a lot more than Bitcoin (+other cryptos), for scalability reasons.

> the easiest way to cut down on spam is to charge users money for access

Which realistically means everyone will log off and touch grass instead of pay to interact with other verified humans.

> but Web 2.0 will go the way of the dodo

What does Web 2.0 have to do with any of this?

It’s a reference to user generated content (web 2.0) and saying it will become AI generated content.

I think we’ve already been seeing it, just done badly. Most content marketing is somewhat automated. The tools (ChatGPT) have made a leap and the internet will be riddled with it and it’s brethren.

What’s interesting though is that future AIs will train on AI generated content which trained on AI generated… etc. Possibly missing legitimate feedback?

AI is inevitably unleashed on AI in a game of cat and mouse driven by that unholy god “marketing“ thus eventually rendering the internet useless in a race to the bottom of legitimate human interaction.

many ways it is already happening with those content farms and sock puppets but also with Tiktok style feeds where you don't follow users but mindlessly watch what algorithm will provide for you.

Web 2.0 often refers to the "second wave" of consumer-facing internet sites that allowed users to leave comments and interact with each other, as opposed to the Web 1.0 of static HTML sites.

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