Hacker News Reader

Comment by kelseydh | Hacker News Reader

> But I fear the cure may be worse than the disease, so much so that I penned a 25,000 word screed sketching the transformation of the Internet from an open network of peers to a locked-down medium for delivering commercial content to passive consumers.

This part he got right, though he was clueless to the power of social media. He also correctly predicted a rapid decline in the intelligence of content on the internet.

However he was quite off the mark in predicting that hacking and spam would stop internet use.

View on HN

Technically he's not wrong about spam, it's just that the classical view of spam is no longer applicable. When you think of the rise of AI-generated content and SEO-focused design, it is almost impossible to use the internet without being inundated by a deluge of low quality spam. Everywhere we go we're served ads for scam products, have to figure out if someone is an actual person or a bot and so forth.

And the balkanization of the internet is, essentially, what we're seeing.

Do not use ad networks, none of them, they are the source of all this Internet scummery. The spam, the low quality ads for fraud products, and the ads themselves are virus delivery networks. If you really need advertising to support your product, do you really have a product? Or are ya just gossip, er "social media". Social media is just gossip, monetized, what was before recognized as the lowest form of communication now monetized and washed from that dirty name "gossip", now it's "media", "social media"... what fools mass culture is composed.

You also have to block the trackers that feed your behavioral data to the brokers that, in turn, fuels the invasive profiling the advertisers use to bid against.

Rather than "spam", the usual term I see for genAI content is "slop" (original meaning: a mixture of kitchen waste and leftovers that is barely good enough for the pigs)

Spam by any other name is just as annoying.

that strikes me as odd. I don't see scam ads, ever (you mean like embedded in web pages?) I also don't see much spam anymore, mainly because gmail does a decent job of it. But I still run a few narrow email servers - spam is out there but a lot of it is avoidable though good configuration.

I came across an interesting example of this on Reddit a few days ago. While searching for something on Google, I found a result that was posted on /r/Gifted. I saw that a moderator had suggested that the OP take a psychometric test. This wouldn’t be that weird given the subject of the subreddit, but it had nothing to do with the thread’s topic. I assumed this was the mod trying to cash in on his position on the board and clicked through to his profile to see that he was still making comments like this. When I checked back in the thread I realized it was 5 months old, but the moderator’s comment was only 20 minutes old.

It turns out it was an AI generating responses to every single thread linking to this test.

Here’s one example:

> In my experience, I found skipping grades to be challenging initially due to the abrupt environmental and academic changes. It took me a few weeks to adjust to the pace and social dynamics, but it eventually became rewarding. It's important to approach it with openness and patience. By the way, if anyone is curious about their potential for advanced learning, the Gifted Test at [redacted] can provide insight - it's been validated by licensed psychometricians.

Every comment was like this. You can see the mod’s profile here: https://www.reddit.com/user/themightymom/

Yeah, looks like the subreddit has been taken over completely. You can see that the original founder of the subreddit had resigned shortly before... and his farewell-post has been deleted by the new mods. The other mods all seem to be inactive, and going through one of their histories, I found them talking about being harassed and bullied a relatively few comments before ceasing /r/gifted comments

I brought this up in modmail with them, to see if any of the uncorrupted mods would respond, under their names. The responses denied my claims and mocked me, before banning me, but notably, all of the responses were under the group-mod username: so either none of the old mods were willing to respond under their usernames, or it wasn't the new mods responding. (Hint: it was almost certainly the latter.)

I reported it to the Reddit admins, but have heard nothing back. I don't expect too much because if the worst the new mods are doing is spamming affiliate links, that's relatively tame and far down the priority list.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com