alt Hacker NewsI had a very interesting discussion with a friend today, where I was talking to her about the /r/golang thread about Rob Pike's comments to OpenAI and how the thread was full of bots talking with other bots. No idea why the density of bots was so high in that thread, it was kind of absurd to see.
Then she said: "I know nobody that comments on online forums. Nobody would ever comment to strangers on the internet. It's too dangerous."
Took me a while to grasp what she meant with that, but I think she's right. Trust has eroded so much over the last two decades that most forums are either full of bots or full of annoyed and toxic people. It's very rare to find welcoming communities to newbies, and most of the ones I have discovered were offline connections.
She also mentioned that all of her friends use private profiles only, because having public profiles is too dangerous because of stalkers.
To me this sounded a bit absurd at first, but maybe that's a different perception on "how to use" the internet from a different younger generation that grew up post-socialmedia? My first contact with the internet was MIT opencourseware, her first contact was receiving dick pics at the age of 10 from assholes on the other side of the planet.
I miss the old phpbb forum days when the most toxic comment was someone being snarky and derailing the discussion into "did you use the search function?"
No idea how to fix the internet, maybe it's time to move to gopher or another protocol :-/
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Most of her friends are probably women. Try making an account with an obvious female name and you will see a marked difference on most social platforms I am saying this as a guy we really don't understand the world women live in online or offline.
Thats just what the internet of the mid to late 90s was like. People rarely used their real name, there were hundreds of forums, some private. You could have different nicks on them.
Nobody knew you were a dog on the internet[1] until the rise of Facebook and linking your real identity with an online identity.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_the_Internet,_nobody_knows_...
But your friend is wrong. She does know at least one person who comments on online forums. I bet she knows more too.
Most of the internet users are passive content consumers, and it’s been the case since a long time ago. There's a post about it from 2019:
https://bewilderbeast.org/2019/08/16/most-of-what-you-read-o...
I never tell people I comment online. No one I know knows my Reddit username (as far as I know…). Few of my friends even know what HN is.
> No idea how to fix the internet, maybe it's time to move to gopher or another protocol :-/
Fido and Usenet are still around. Kind-of. IMO google virtually killed that, too, when they started peddling google groups and did the classic embrace-extend-extinguish on the Usenet.
To be fair, back in those "good old phpbb days", people trolled just as hard as anyone does now, and maybe worse, since the consequences of it were not as visible, and getting in trouble for things you said online was virtually nonexistent. Everyone used a fake name, and while it might be possible to dox someone, it wasn't an operational concern for anyone who just wanted to be a jerk...
They don't write on forums but they like or share a story. It's just more passive/consumer-minded.
I don’t see any obvious evidence of bot activity on that thread (and all of my spot checks strongly leaned human). Were some comments removed or something?
All my real HN friends are on https://news.ysimulator.run/news
I know I self-censor a LOT.
> she said: "I know nobody that comments on online forums.
Yet she knows you and you and me are strangers talking to each other on this forum. I think we don't know even close friends what online communities people hang out - the reason she didn't know about you being on HN.
I think the idea that nobody would talk to strangers online is a bit too general. We are all mostly doing it here. I do it on reddit all the time in the same recurring subreddits that I've grown to trust. IRC was also pretty hostile back in the 90s. But again it depended on the communities. Just think you can't generalize the internet this way.
Which Reddit thread was that, out of curiosity? And how do you know which commenters were bots?
And yet, here you are, posting ...
BTW, I don't explicitly disagree with what you're saying, but it would be good to look at actual data instead of anecdata to know for sure, and the people who have the data are not telling ...
most people just don't tell other people about what they do online. it's very private.
like, it's a running on joke on most social media websites that "i hope no one i know irl finds this account..."
i think your friend is just overestimating her knowledge of her friends' lives
This thread is working pretty decently. No bots so far
> how the thread was full of bots talking with other bots
I am sure there are some dead giveaways, but how can you be sure about that?
What I have experienced is both going into forums/discussions someone said was bots talking to bots, with no real clear indication by any of the many markers I am aware of that it was in fact bots; and also comments calling responses bots seemingly as a manipulative dismissal in response to something that was not the consensus or commonly approved position.
I say that because my impression is that what is happening is a full on breakdown of civic discussion and conversation as a whole. The internet destroyed IRL public forums (pubs/bars, clubs, etc) and the draconian COVID policies took the death knell to many more, and now bots and the seemingly bigger issue of immediate distrust of everything, seems to also be destroying online conversations of all sorts.
Yes, you’ll be able to have small group meetings and maybe even voice/video only conversations, but that brings a whole host of other systems changes with it, especially as mass surveillance long surpassed anything the worst tyrants of history could have ever even dreamed of implementing. It all seems a shift into unhealthy territory as a civilization in general, including since essentially all western governments cannot be trusted by their own people anymore.
I’m a man who had to do this because of stalkers. Literally serious, life damaging stalkers.
> Trust has eroded so much over the last two decades that most forums are either full of bots or full of annoyed and toxic people. It's very rare to find welcoming communities to newbies, and most of the ones I have discovered were offline connections.
Tumblr is still doing pretty well on that front. I'm there for a fandom, and it's a super positive atmosphere where everyone just wants to make and talk about cool art.
For what its worth. I recently joined "Carpokes" which is a free members only Porsche forum being run by a man hell bent on keeping it a friendly, bot-free, community. Its been great engaging in a forum again where I look at it maybe once a week.
Reputation management is what it will take to bring trust back to all forms of media. It means creating a trusted identity that can be verified, and that the identity is known to be a real human with a reputation to lose if exposed as being a bot or otherwise untrustworthy.
Unfortunately, for common people whose aim is not celebrity, this means handing over your privacy in order to have a voice.
We can do this in our IRL circles of trust, people know you because they have met or interacted with you personally.
Online, this means someone like Zuck creating a digital identity for us after we entrust them with our privacy, or some kind of open source complicated technology identifier like a cryptographically verified signature that is techno bro-free that will only be adopted or understood by tech literate.
It's a dark day for genuine human interaction and trust.
I think some of this is caused by the non-obvious mechanisms of how interactions on these platforms work.
When you replied to a thread on a phpbb forum (or when you reply to this HN thread), your reply „lived” in that thread, on that forum, and that was that. The algorithm wouldn’t show that reply to your dad.
I remember liking a comment on Facebook years ago, and being horrified when some of my friends and family got a „John liked this comment, join the discussion!” notification served straight onto their timelines, completely out of context. I felt spied on. I thought I was interacting with a funny stranger, but it turned out that that tiny interaction would be recorded and rebroadcast to whomever, without my knowledge.
Similarly, commenting on a youtube video was a much different experience when your youtube account wasn’t linked to all your personal information.
If you comment on a social media post, what’s going to happen? How sure are you that that comment, however innocuous it may seem now, won’t be dredged up 8 years by a prospective employer? Even if not, your like or comment it’s still a valuable data point that you’re giving to Zuckerberg or similar. Every smallest interaction enriches some of the worst people in the industry, if not in the world.
The way I speak, the tone I use, the mannerisms I employ, they all change depending on the room I’m in and on the people I’m speaking to - but on modern social media, you can never be sure who your audience is. It’s safer to stay quiet and passive.