It feels like every time I do a web search, more and more of the results are AI generated nonsense.
I'm worried that it's going to become much more difficult to find the human-generated content.
How can we keep a part of the web human? Any ideas? (I'm not keen on Sam Altman’s eyeball-scanning Orb being the "solution.")
That’s the fundamental dilemma of not just the web, but the Internet, as a pull medium opposed to a push medium like television or radio. A human can not remember every URL. From your blank web browser you can only go to URLs you know. Then the only web pages you will ever see are ones that are linked, directly or indirectly, from the ones you know.
Most people only know Google, Facebook, etc. Anything that isn’t linked to from those sites effectively does not exist.
But it does exist. It’s a whole forest full of trees falling and not making a sound. It’s up to you to do what you can to find it.
would be interesting to do mapping yourself though probably pointless with how much effort/time it would take
does remind me of this fun video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JcJSW7Rprio
My comment is about finding random websites that exist regardless of ranking, just randomly find stuff on the Internet.
We should move forward, not sideways.
The neat internet thing was neat for a while because power hadn't worked out how to exploit it for their own ends. They have now, the genie doesn't go back in the bottle.
And you can find a curated list of these people on r/LinkedInLunatics, though I'm not sure the curation is necessary as it seems like pretty much the _entirety_ of LinkedIn posts are the kind that make you question whether the poster is human.
There's marketing and building a personal brand, and then there's whatever the heck LinkedIn in 2025 is...
Ah, so Worldcoin then?
uh... for security awareness.
None of you see it, and doesn’t even change how dang behaves toward me when I’m hangry.
How do you ensure the accounts aren't AI bots or people who scrap and serve it all back to the AI soup pot? The identity seems to be quite a problem online.
In the same way advertising is money spent hoping for revenue, shaping the visibility of posts by your actually human coworkers and customers work similarly.
The entry fee let them be a lot more chaotic too - people who go too far and piss someone off would get kicked out and forced to pay money to rejoin again. But it put a price tag on trolling, unlike platforms like Instagram. So people could do it and somehow get better at it until it turns into comedy.
So, maybe we have to choose between isolated human islands vs. an ad-and-SEO-infested world?
They worked and they often worked quite well. Unfortunately, many of those “working” forums I frequented are now inactive. It’s tough to visit some and see it’s been many years since the last post on some - and those are just the ones that are still online.
Always be on the lookout for the next small thing! :)
When I learned how to use the web, google and Facebook were not around. I remember switching search engines as well as adopting and adapting search strategies multiple times. Then, there was a relatively long era of google (as in: It was simply the best and fastest way to find what you were looking for) - but as giants get too big, they inevitably fall, so keeping ready to continue adopting and adapting is - IMO - always a good idea.
I'm hoping that good webrings can hold the integrity of human networks on the web.
a) offers posting under anonymity, b) allows users to associate with exactly one physical passport, c) has no knowledge of who an account belongs to, d) allows for filtering on content by passport-authenticated users.
In the long run...I couldn't tell you. This feels like the sort of schism Cyberpunk stories are made of, when a utopia of data sharing is perverted into a swamp of automated bots and agents, blindly following obsolete programming and untethered from the controls of their creators, harming whatever infrastructure is connected to the public internet without adequate security. I'd like to think smarter people than myself (shoutout to Xe Iaso for Anubis) will create tools to protect humans and our online presence from the bots, but I'm not super hopeful of their success in the face of present profit-motives for AI Companies to defeat them.
Perhaps the answer is to simply devalue the internet as an entity, and thereby destroy incentive to scrape or pollute it at such a scale. Maybe it's yanking services offline and putting them back in the real world, or privacy laws and insurance companies making data hoarding untenable and unaffordable for companies to engage in. Maybe it's identity validation at the point of connectivity, verifying smart cards or identification before you're allowed online (incredibly dystopian and the stuff of Pal*ntir's wet dreams).
I honestly couldn't tell you right now what the long game looks like. Only to find your humans, build your digital fortresses, and help each other as best you can.
I can't see how the prevalent value system could avoid being "sapio-supremacist" ? is "future proof" to include intelligences that are artificial but whose "sentience" is otherwise human equivalent or "greater"
People have been charged with telecommunication related crimes for hscking, and the tos csn indicate access denial.
This gated access won't stop AI, but will make account usage illegal.
People have been convicted for far less. May as well use such laws to our advantage for once.
That's the best path I can see.
New technologies are going to break old ones. We'll probably see more discovery tech emerge again with AI in mind.
We expanded it to social media accounts like FB and Google. It went up a bit. But FB caused a lot of issues with little gain. Eventually Apple ID came in, let people make anon accounts and forced us to adopt it. So we cut out social media accounts along with all the people who had accounts. All in all, non-phone made up about 10% of logins, so it was fine.
Or alternatively, improve pagerank to exclude low quality content and pages that contain ads.
On the democratic curation though, how do you ensure that bots aren't voting?
I guess you can start with a super small group of curators who you know personally and then slowly branch out?