AI Is Ruining the Internet | Hacker News Reader

AI Is Ruining the Internet

businessinsider.com

32 pointspseudolus36 comments

BusinessInsider is ruining the internet.

AI is just accelerating the race to spam cycle of the Internet.

The good news about the Internet is that it’s diverse and resilient so I can just ignore the parts I don’t like and focus on the parts that I like. I don’t need to connect to every server.

I just need a search service that overlays my filter and site weights so it ignores all the crap as well. I think the money for this is hard because the crappiest sites need to advertise the most, so a google-style model won’t want to apply my quality ranking filters (that I select or select from people I trust).

Well said. The internet has been a cesspool of thin and spun content for a while. They are just angry that it is now a commodity.

I think the truth is search engine accessible internet has been garbage for a long time. Most content is SEO nonsense that doesn’t even answer the question you had. AI at least would provide an answer in the soup of garbage. The death of SEO content farms isn’t to be mourned when they’re automated, and it’s over blown to claim anything was ruined.

To me the internet was always blogs, forums, HN, and whatever other space you find with people you relate with and talk to. Search engines were clever for a while, but are a poor substitute for communities and always were.

Finally I think perhaps Yahoo and curated indexes might have a place in the new world.

All sites need some revenue stream to survive.

Not all sites need to survive.

If I have a business that exists and makes money but is horrible, then I shouldn’t want to do that business.

“I have to shovel pop up ads and trash to people or I won’t be able to make my Tesla payments” is not a good reason.

Telemarketers have a revenue stream. Transatlantic slave trade had a revenue stream. Etc etc (yes, businessinsider is exactly the same as slave ships /s)

I wasn't justifying shitty sites or business practices. just saying it's paying the bills some how. May it's charity maybe it's from someone's salary.

If you want mostly unbiased opinions about products pay for consumer reports or something like that.

No, not all sites need some revenue stream to survive. There are excellent sites that have existed for decades without monetizing at all.

yep the exception that proves the rule.

Are you able to provide support for this claim?

entropy, eventually you need to pay for stuff some how. even if you run your own server it's going to break.

I'm not saying there aren't charity sites.

I guess I should have said "all sites have costs" and they need paid somehow.

And if all a sites users are doing is taking then eventually the owner of the site is going to tire of it.

I keep wondering how actually costly/difficult it would be to make a text-only index of the parts of the web I actually need to regularly search.

One of these days I'm gonna scratch this itch.

There are prepackaged crawlers that you can setup yourself, limit the locations, etc. Its really not a huge undertaking, probably a day or less

Kagi has the ability to customize site weights which I really like.

Should read "People Are Ruining The ̶I̶n̶t̶e̶r̶n̶e̶t̶ World By Using AI To Try To Harvest Passive Income Instead Of Getting A Fucking Job."

Time to start persecuting the lazy again, you ask me.

It’s not laziness exactly. Laziness is mere idleness. These people are not idle. It’s hustle culture.

These people work very hard managing all their bots and offshore gig workers to churn out spam, run dropship hustles, set up bullshit web sites, spam marketplaces with counterfeit goods, …

The goal is to make outsized profits on a lifestyle where you don’t answer to anyone. It’s more of a way of life and even a bit of a cult. Andrew Tate for instance gets all the press for being rapey but one of his biggest gigs is “hustlers university” where he teaches this stuff. This of course is also a hustle. It’s hustles all the way down.

Yes, and culturally we respect it, even as it sets fire to our tablecloth. Good hustle son, I know your dropshipped replacement will look fantastic.

We need to learn the difference between value creation and value extraction.

Making money does not mean you have created value. A casino is usually more profitable than a hospital.

The closest economic concept is rent-seeking, although I'm not sure whether casinos would be considered rent-seekers.

Is it much different than startup culture. most saas products are just marketing automation products anymore. analytics just feeds the metrics for automation. And you happen to find an idea that isn't your going to need it to scale. Bring in the growth hackers. VCs could give 2 shits about the tech. they only care about the current hype cycle.

Yeah, it's a similar tune. That's why I have a serious issue with "startup culture".

Sad thing is a lot of people don't take you seriously unless you have a B after your name

This is exactly what happened with blockchain. Some people built blockchain and had a community who thought the idea was cool. Then people came in and realized they could use it to build scams and make money, ruining the reputation of blockchain tech and hurting naive people.

It seems that people kind of suck.

That's the lifecycle of most subcultures: https://meaningness.com/geeks-mops-sociopaths

To be fair, it was pretty obvious that would happen to anyone who gave it a moment's thought. There is nothing inherently better about decentralization.

Same goes for AI...

AI is a bunch of executives huffing their own turd vapors.

It will take a bit of time for the hype to die down because there are some genuinely great uses for the current tech, but it's instead going to be another cycle of pumping video cards so everyone can have a shitty Star Trek Ship's Computer.

Won't AI be taking everyone's fucking jobs?

I hope that it will finally be impossible to prove that I'm not a "robot" because there will be no challenge AI couldn't deal with.

Why does it matter if I'm a robot or not? In the end websites only care about that because robots don't buy stuff. So check that instead and stop invading my privacy.

PLEASE DRINK A VERIFICATION CAN.

AI and robots cant drink the verification can

The obvious, inevitable outcome. None of this singularity hopium, you'll eat your spam tsunami and you'll like it.

Last year is the new this year. Can I now say that I despise businessinsider?

Please do, as often as possible. It'll be the next "big" site to sink, with people from other death spiral "news" organizations lamenting the death of "journalism." Meanwhile, I know without looking that the site is so awful because it was purchased by PE at some stupid valuation, and really, REALLY needs to make a lot of money, no matter how shamefully...

Yuuup. Nailed it.

https://archive.is/HjiZq

I agree, but in some way I do not believe that this is a bad thing.

The more people realize that the internet isn't "real" or "social", the more they will be pushed to find an alternative.

There is no need to save or kill the web. Let it evolve.

No, no people using AI are ruining the internet.

AI has nothing to do with intelligence

Reply on news.ycombinator.com