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Comment by tomohelix | Hacker News Reader

Anecdotally, I have drastically reduced my internet activity in recent years. So many of the websites are just noise with crappy information. The good answers are often found on reddit in one or two clicks or directly asked on discord so there is no need to spend hours with google anymore (the crappy algo doesn't help). I also refrained from posting or discussing anything on social media after some bad experience with the users there. It takes effort to make good quality posts, but it rarely goes anywhere in those massive social media sites and often it may even get punished if it is against the public opinion.

So I am tired and only make a few posts every few days now on HN. I am sure while my activity has dropped, the bots are getting more active so nothing is lost. Maybe some quality and how the traffic share look like, but I don't know.

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> So many of the websites are just noise with crappy information.

What I hate the most about today's internet is how search engines allow blatant scrapers to feature so high in search results. So many times I Google for something to find Stack Overflow as the main search hits, and right next to it there are a couple of sites that copied Stack Overflow's questions verbatim. Once I googled for FLOSS projects I had on GitHub and lo and behold there were half a dozen obscure sites that also claim to host my project, with everything copied verbatim from git repo to project descriptions.

It's better than one thing at least: Internet scraping is the process of...

you can already see where this is going. Sites with 6 pages of boilerplate that sounds like an 6th grader padded an essay around a 2 word answer they've scraped from somewhere else. Worst of the 2 words of content aren't even all that accurate most of the time. At least sites that copy the answer verbatim still give you the answer!

The scary thing is those websites will only become more common (and factually incorrect) as LLMs become more and more accessible.

My main gripe with Discord is the somewhat ephemeral nature of it, due to the search being horrible, as well as not publicly indexed nor easily accessible without an account + an invite to a specific server.

Discord becoming the main replacement to subreddits/forums has been a harder blow to the collection of knowledge than most anything else.

The nice thing is the Discord API doesn’t seem to ban you for archiving servers as long as you do so responsibly.

I think LLMs are useful because they’re effectively trained on Reddit. It’s for sure one of the most useful places to find good information and advice on the web.

That'll change once 90% of posts on Reddit are bot posts. It's already happening...

Counter point: the whole internet can be distilled into an LLM and shared in a super condensed format.

Both of these things will happen (old web getting spammed, old web being distilled and crystalized), and the future will be weird and unpredictable to us now.

> the whole internet can be distilled into an LLM and shared in a super condensed format

> the future will be weird and unpredictable to us now

I'm going to play devil's advocate for those people who always drop by saying LLM is pretty much like a human and human is pretty much like an LLM anyway, and say it would be no different to now

Except bots aren't like humans at all. They have no life experience. It's basically a text interface to a dictionary. A company can pay 100000 bots to spam your favorite messaging board with half baked propaganda, hate and advertisements. A human doesn't have that bandwidth, motivation, or interest.

An internet saturated by bots is like reading reviews on Amazon without pictures. Pointless, intentionally misleading, and often confidently wrong.

Yep. I don't know how enthusiasts manage to say human is the same as AI and also say that everything will certainly change for sure because of AI, they should pick one...

Dead Internet Theory is terrifying, honestly

You can get your Internet back alive if you simply sacrifice your retina scans and all other biometrics that prove your humanity. There may be a reason OpenAI and Worldcoin have the same founder: profit from ruining a nice thing, then profit from saving it (via bringing it back from the dead as a zombie).

If you completely ignore the fact that many humans congregate on the internet to be social with other humans then sure. There's a lot of opinions, art, ideas, jokes, and meaningful life long connections that happen because of the internet. In my mind that was it's only real utility. Sure search engines are good for research, and shopping. But community, talking to people with life experience in an area of interest have changed who I am as a person. Condensing the internet into a binary, is effectively meaningless to me unless I end up on a remote island with enough battery power to look up edible plants and not internet connection...

Not all bots are created equal.

I think a ton of reddit is already bots. But usually they copy comments word-for-word.

Also, I think voting and moderation will upvote and downvote the AI generated comments in such a way that they don't poison Redditch as a training data source.

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