It really seems like the internet as we know it is about to break down under an never-ending ocean of ChatGPT spam.
Trust and curation should become even more valuable than they are today.
Trust and curation should become even more valuable than they are today.
Frankly it's too difficult to moderate at scale. And either way most users don't want to be part of the same big community as everyone else. They just want to be able to share content between their communities without a tonne of unnecessary friction or many different needless login credentials.
Twitter succeeded here because it allowed these communities to seamlessly blend into each other while allowing individual users to prune problematic individuals from their view of the community in a way that just wasn't feasible with other social media or forum platforms.
The fediverse (if the projects could fix their UX issues) look like they have the best shot of recreating this "small, discrete communities all intermixed" kind of environment. Hopefully however without a lot of the forced discovery and content rotating that Twitter currently pushes.
We've got to see the large scale problems in the last decade, but I think a lot of people either forgot, or were not alive for the small scale problems that existed back in the days of BBS's and early websites. The biggest issue with with most small communities is they tend to die quickly unless they have some unique bonding factor. For example a local RC car racing group. But that isn't generally interesting over a wide range of topics outside a few topics. So now you're looking at building multiple communities and managing them. But you'll find most people won't manage that well and they'll tend to gravitate to a few busier larger communities. But then those larger communities will grow much like the seed of a star via gravity, someone will know someone else that invites them and suddenly you'll have your own little facebook/twatter rife with all the same problems and split views on what is acceptable.
There are just a number of problems here that seem intractable when you have hundreds of millions/billions of people that want to be online and in communities of one kind or another, but an unending number of social problems that occur when you get large numbers of people gravitating towards interesting things.
You could get that tight nit group and maybe it kinda dies out for a year or two but something revitalized the community and it came back. With smaller, centralised communities this falls apart unfortunately since you have to rely on the host to maintain that service and if they shut it down, it's just gone. Federated services on the other hand have the advantage that as long as the participants continue to be part of that community, it can be revived on demand.
So in this sense, I think some of the major issues that prevented small communities from persisting and thriving have been solved. Of course like you mentioned the moderation, growth management, and UX aspects have yet to be solved but those have the advantage of being able to be largely independent of the core functionality and can be improved with time without breaking the world.
I also think the twitter approach to community formation works really well here. It has it's own issues but a lot of the more niche twitter communities tend to just fracture back into manageable micro-communities once they get bigger than a certain size. It's not as noticeable since what community you see depends on who you follow but it's 100% a thing that happens. I've personally seen it happen more times than I can count at this point.
Two solutions for intentionally keeping communities small and preventing low quality content are making joining "referral only" (like https://tildes.net/ for example) or requiring small fee entry (like https://forums.somethingawful.com/index.php) but each of those has their own problem. The prior has an issue of creating echo chambers as only "like minded individuals" can/will join while the latter can promote the exclusion of less well off individuals or those in regions with limited access to digital finance as well as posing a privacy concern unless some form of privacy preserving money is used.
Honestly I'm excited. Social Media from a technical perspective is finally getting interesting again.
Everyone will sit under their own vine
and under their own fig tree,
and no one will make them afraid,
for the Lord Almighty has spoken.
Part of the problem with being on a site like HN is we see everyone here bitching and groaning about how much 'big web' sucks and how we should get away with it, while missing that most of us here are also visiting that same big web with a few billion other people every day. I'll believe twitter/FB/etc is dying when I watch them turn off their servers for the last time.
No pictures and great moderation is basically the opposite of Instagram and I think exactly why real discussion takes place on here.
This is a fundamental shift that we're setting coming out of 2021-2022 and it's incredible.
I don't know what the next wave of the internet will look like but i'm actually excited because ChatGPT+DallE is making a whole space a commodity. People will need to learn how to adapt and unlike the previous shifts, it's not immediately obvious to me how things will net out.
I'll be the first to pay tribute to our Skynet overlord.
One immediately and obviously has thousands of use cases while one we are still trying to figure out the use case 13 years later.
Give it a few generations and I honestly don't know if I am reading this board anymore as opposed to just discussing things with the AI assistant.
If anything it is exactly why crypto is such bullshit. Something that is revolutionary doesn't need much convincing. If anything chatGPT reminds me of Myspace. All of the sudden everyone is just using it. No need for all kinds of childish and naive readings of Rothbard and Mises to convince people of its utility.
Eh, isn't that what the technological singularity people would say would happen?
Way back in the day I'd hear people go "oh the internet won't amount to anything, it's just a fad", and while I didn't know what the internet would become, I believed they were totally wrong. The internet was very useful.
Back in the very early days of bitcoin, back when I thought it was potentially useful but that people was highly confused if it was going to escape regulatory issues. When the bitcoin hype cycle started I knew people that knew nothing about blockchain were spouting dumb shit and that it would eventually end in a bust. Now, in my typical fashion I underestimated how dumb people can be on things like this and didn't keep the few bitcoins I had back in the early days and lost access to them missing out on a few hundred thousand dollars at the peak.
When looking at the different GPT-like models coming out I actually see useful products that can be made from technologies like this. For example there is one on the front page called 'universal summarizer' that can take a large body of text and turn it into a small and seemingly accurate summary. That is worth something for sure. The ChatGPT is presenting useful information to some of its users too. The biggest question about it's long term success is cost of operation. If that drops over time then GPT and whatever comes after that will be here to stay no matter what you think about hype cycles.
humans can adapt and find ways to navigate info on the internet, just like whales have evolved in their ocean environment.
love, creativity, and regulation will shape the future, not just trust and curation