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Comment by ThrowawayR2 | Hacker News Reader

If the dead Internet theory wasn't true before, it sure will be soon.

It's kinda exciting. The social media status quo has its upsides but a lot of downsides. I'm hopeful that the change will be good. We'll have to figure out a way to authenticate the people we're talking to, which will encourage tighter-knit communities.

This will end with the only way to authenticate the people we're talking to is meeting them at the coffeeshop in the morning.

Did you forget about Blade Runner?

... Did you ...?

That might be okay. We'd lose a lot, obviously, but if you could 100% trust that the person you met at a coffee shop is real, and you could 99% trust that the person they met the day before is real, and you could 98% trust the person that person met is real, you've got three degrees of Kevin Bacon.

But can you trust that the things they say aren't just laundered AI blogspam?

Well I trust that the things my friends say aren't laundered AI blogspam. And if they trust the things their friends say, I can likely trust that too.

Until the humanoid robots gain the ability to process caffeine, then we’re all hosed.

is anyone using keybase any more? i put it on my website and socials to do just that but it doesn’t seem to have stuck around.

It's not really the right kind of authentication. A bot can use keybase too.

Dead Internet is a product now, why aren't you monetizing it yet?

I would argue SEO should already be considered dead internet theory. Most of it is not intended to do anything but convince Google.

A dentist buying freelance articles from a guy off Upwork is not intending to communicate anymore than this guy generating articles is.

SEO also showed that Google abuses its market position. One wonders why the USA promotes a de-facto monopoly here.

Only if we allow it to happen. It is time for the Empire of common man and woman to strike back against AI slop and companies that promote it - such as microslop.

Common man and woman don’t care that much.

Great point! At this point the Dead Internet Theory isn't a conspiracy – it's a roadmap. It's worth noting he distinction between "authentic" and "synthetic" online spaces is eroding faster than most people realize – that's a genuinely important conversation to be have.

Great imitation

The dead internet theory terrifies me. I don't think we're at the point where it's mostly dead but we're already way past the point where any discussion worth anything can be had on the internet itself. The problem is not that everything could be AI slop but that anything could. It simply takes the wind out the sails and makes one question what's even the point if anything could just be written by a clanker. Anything you write could just be screaming out into the void, affecting no one, and just maybe adding to the training corpus for the next generation of clankers.

Just writing this made me question "what's the point" several times. If you or anyone replies cogently, I still won't have any idea if it's a person or a Chinese room.

> The dead internet theory terrifies me. I don't think we're at the point where it's mostly dead

Well - I would say the internet is not totally dead yet, but we approach the point of it being very useless now. I remember the 1990s era and early 2000s - it was almost innocent compared to the total slop era we have now. Young people today don't even know that Google Search was useful at one point in time. If you use Google Search now, you get so much irrelevant crap output that it is really useless now.

Ironically, the reason I used Google the most then was because it indexed Usenet while so many other parts of the Internet offered by the other engines were "slop". My, how the turn tables.

> to be have.

Meatbag spotted, get 'im boys.

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