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Comment by boh | Hacker News Reader

AI is pretty much killing social media in the long term. Even pre-AI, a good chunk of posts/comment sections on sites were bots/paid. Reddit is becoming less believable than ChatGPT. I guess there's still the Onion-verse.

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Yes, Dead Internet Theory went from joke to reality in what feels like overnight.

Was it a joke?

Am I to mourn the loss of what I personally consider one of the worst manipulative toxins to ever exist?

Thanks AI.

It was never a joke because bots are older than AI

as a black box, a 4k context LLM AI (text in, text out) is no different than a highly effective search engine indexing all possible 4k bodies of text (also - text in, text out)

The usual goal of professional propaganda - of disinformation - is to paralyze, to prevent constructive communication, discourse, progress.

I'm not convinced you can have an impromptu global conversation to any positive end. Humans are not well suited to this task and an unsupervised mostly anonymous forum plays to those weaknesses and provides no support to generate positive outcomes.

It was never a particularly good idea at the scale it's currently deployed at.

Reddit was pretty solid before people started cultivating their personal "brand"/only fans page/crypto pick.

Reddit has been an absolute dumpster fire from the get-go. Its Wikipedia page has one of the largest “controversies” sections of any publicly listed company. Many of the controversies are so significant they have their own Wikipedia page.

Not wanting to particularly defend Reddit but a controversies section on a wikipedia page is hardly a good metric, in my opinion. Wikipedia is often used to malign various entities (and protect others).

Absolutely not. From almost day 1 Reddit has been plagued with jokey meme-speak, which is partially why specialist forums are still thriving (audio/video stuff, XDA-developers, European soccer teams, SomethingAwful boards and up until a few years ago, Notebook-Review).

BBSes and forums have existed for literally longer than the internet

Were they global or local? I made that distinction intentionally.

Usenet was US-centric but somewhat global and certainly not local. Even dialup BBS's were sometimes nationwide despite long distance phone charges. I wasn't into the BBS thing though.

Were they global or local? I made that distinction intentionally.

Either or both, depending on the SYSOP's resources. I ran a BBS that did store-and-forward between the U.S. and Europe.

The ones with global connections could take a day to a week to forward messages, but that turned out to be a feature. We went outside in the real world instead of staying online arguing with strangers.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FidoNet

The demographics of who was online before the internet went mainstream matter a lot, here. It wasn't exactly a representative slice of the general population.

Forums were still going strong a decade after the Internet went mainstream. They only started to fade after smartphones took off and many forums took years to introduce mobile themes. For sports teams however, forums never faded, there tens of millions of users on team-specific soccer forums for example.

That's a good point. I think a lot of forums were less vulnerable for a number of reasons. They typically don't have a large audience (not all, but most), which makes them less of a target. They're also organized around niche interests that don't intersect much with politics and cultural issues, off-topic forums aside. And they're probably more heavily moderated than social media and blog comments.

I think the general point stands when considering large-scale platforms.

Forums also didn't have personalized content recommendation engines... usually, I think

The demographics have nothing to do with that, the economic incentive is what changed when it becomes mainstream.

> The demographics have nothing to do with that, [..] changed when it becomes mainstream.

So it's not unreasonable to say that when demographics of forums was changed, the economic incentive appeared? So it actually depends on demographics?

Adding recommendation engines that optimise for anger makes it even worse.

How about Hacker News?

I have the opposite experience. While these anonymous groups tend to be high on vulgarity and directness, there are much more peaceful examples than the other way around. Propaganda got strong when we began to restrict content on social media by the companies themselves or external actors.

This human nature shit is empirically wrong. There are quite a few scammers around. You also meet these people in real life, you just don't notice immediately.

This is a good thing. More and more people will stop consuming it, going back to the mainstream media, so will perhaps become more sensible.

Reddit died to me when they allowed private profiles this summer.

Interestingly, you can still use `author:username` to search for posts. For my part, if something seems suspicious and the profile is private then I assume it's a bot.

Yeah, I saw some posts on there the other day that felt a bit suspect, went to look at their profile, and nothing. I'd already become an infrequent user of reddit since some earlier changes, but that makes me even less likely to go back.

I thought the same. I'm still 90% of the same mindset. But it does worry me how much people like slop. But is it because it's novel? and will people get tired of it?

People like AI created slop because they already like human created slop. AI slop is the way it is because it was trained on human slop.

> Reddit is becoming less believable than ChatGPT.

Hard disagree, and I’ll cite a simple example: Reddit isn’t one community. It’s a hub and spoke model. There are many good communities with curators and SMEs.

My canonical example that’s counter to this is HN. No offense to anyone but Reddit doesn’t have a hive mind - communities do. And HN hive mind is wrong more often than right and has been targeted by all sorts of astroturfers along the way. I personally take very few comments on here seriously, no takes seriously, and mostly show up to read comments by some actual hard cred people (f.e. animats). Everyone else might as well be a shill bot. AI doesn’t change this. I still get cream of the crop from Reddit.

Having said that, social media isn’t dead. It’ll transform. Two things are eternal: 1) women’s need for attention, 2) men’s need to get laid.

I mean, yes and no. The default Reddit experience is absolutely overrun by fake content. Or, there are tens of thousands of real people who have nothing else to do in their life but to go to /r/news or other "front page" subreddits and post the same political talking points multiple times a day, whether the story warrants it or not. Frankly, the AI / paid-shill explanation is greatly preferable in my book.

The non-default experience is a mixed bag. Specialized communities are usually moderated pretty strictly, including rules against outgoing links, product reviews, etc. That said, you definitely see product placement disguised as questions / off-the-cuff recommendations where some previously-unheard-of Chinese brand is all of sudden mentioned every day.

HN has its problems, mostly in the form of people pretending to be experts and saying unhinged nonsense, but it's far less commercialized. If you want your brand to be on the front page, you sort of need to make an effort to write at least a mildly interesting blog post. Now, AI is changing that dynamic a bit because we now get daily front-page stories that are AI-generated... but it's happening more slowly than elsewhere.

IME some of the smaller communities on reddit that are based around hobbies are actually MORE astroturfed

The bots have gotten a lot smarter about making their ads look organic too. Even easier now with the ability to hide post history

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