alt Hacker NewsDead Internet Theory
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>which is not a social network, but I’m tired of arguing with people online about it
I know this was a throwaway parenthetical, but I agree 100%. I don't know when the meaning of "social media" went from "internet based medium for socializing with people you know IRL" to a catchall for any online forum like reddit, but one result of this semantic shift is that it takes attention away from the fact that the former type is all but obliterated now.
Think the notion that ‘no one’ uses em dashes is a bit misguided. I’ve personally used them in text for as long as I can remember.
Also on the phrase “you’re absolute right”, it’s definitely a phrase my friends and I use a lot, albeit in a sorta of sarcastic manner when one of us says something which is obvious but, nonetheless, we use it. We also tend to use “Well, you’re not wrong” again in a sarcastic manner for something which is obvious.
And, no, we’re not from non English speaking countries (some of our parents are), we all grew up in the UK.
Just thought I’d add that in there as it’s a bit extreme to see an em dash instantly jump to “must be written by AI”
Not foolproof, but a couple of easy ways to verify if images were AI generated:
- OpenAI uses the C2PA standard [0] to add provenance metadata to images, which you can check [1]
- Gemini uses SynthId [2] and adds a watermark to the image. The watermark can be removed, but SynthId cannot as it is part of the image. SynthId is used to watermark text as well, and code is open-source [3]
[0] https://help.openai.com/en/articles/8912793-c2pa-in-chatgpt-...
[1] https://verify.contentauthenticity.org/
Most of this is caused by incentives:
YouTube and others pay for clicks/views, so obviously you can maximize this by producing lots of mediocre content.
LinkedIn is a place to sell, either a service/product to companies or yourself to a future employer. Again, the incentive is to produce more content for less effort.
Even HN has the incentive of promoting people's startups.
Is it possible to create a social network (or "discussion community", if you prefer) that doesn't have any incentive except human-to-human interaction? I don't mean a place where AI is banned, I mean a place where AI is useless, so people don't bother.
The closest thing would probably be private friend groups, but that's probably already well-served by text messaging and in-person gatherings. Are there any other possibilities?
I enjoyed this post, but I do find myself disagreeing that someone sharing their source code is somehow morally or ethically obligated to post some kind of AI-involvement statement on their work.
Not only is it impossible to adjudicate or police, I feel like this will absolutely have a chilling effect on people wanting to share their projects. After all, who wants to deal with an internet mob demanding that you disprove a negative? That's not what anyone who works hard on a project imagines when they select Public on GitHub.
People are no more required to disclose their use of LLMs than they are to release their code... and if you like living in a world where people share their code, you should probably stop demanding that they submit to your arbitrary purity tests.
The only way I can tell, is if I see a "structure" to the edit. Usually its a tit for tat , exchange of words in a conversation, with clear spacing, as in too perfect. Followed by the scene, if it looks too oddly perfect ( like a line of foxes waiting to be fed, but all of them are somehow sitting in a line, even if there are differences between them, Ill notice. That is with well decades of age, Im not sure if that helps. But what is clear is even these "tells" will disapear in a few months.
I call this the "carpet effect". Where all carpets in Morocco have an imperfection, lest it impersonates god.
Are there any social media sites where AI is effectively banned? I know it's not an easy problem but I haven't seen a site even try yet. There's a ton of things you can do to make it harder for bots, ie analyze image metadata, users' keyboard and mouse actions, etc.
I hope that when all online content is entirely AI generated, humanity will put their phone aside and re-discover reality because we realize that the social networks have become entirely worthless.
In one hand, we are past the Turing Test definition if we can't distinguish if we are talking with an AI or a real human or more things that were rampant on internet previously, like spam and scam campaigns, targeted opinion manipulation, or a lot of other things that weren't, let's say, an honest opinion of the single person that could be identified with an account.
In the other hand, that we can't tell don't speak so good about AIs as speak so bad about most of our (at least online) interaction. How much of the (Thinking Fast and Slow) System 2 I'm putting in this words? How much is repeating and combining patterns giving a direction pretty much like a LLM does? In the end, that is what most of internet interactions are comprised of, done directly by humans, algorithms or other ways.
There are bits and pieces of exceptions to that rule, and maybe closer to the beginning, before widespread use, there was a bigger percentage, but today, in the big numbers the usage is not so different from what LLMs does.
Apps that require verification of "humanity" are going to get trendy. I'm thinking of world app for instance.
"you are absolutely right" mught come from non native english speaker. For instance, in Italian you say something like that quite often. It's not common in english, but it's common for people to be bad at a second language.
I say "Absolutely correct" or variations thereof all the time.
I feel things are just as likely to get to the point where real people are commonly declared AI, as they are to actually encounter the dead internet.
I'm not really replying to the article, just going tangentially from the "dead internet theory" topic, but I was thinking about when we might see the equivalent for roads: the dead road theory.
In X amount of time a significant majority of road traffic will be bots in the drivers seat (figuratively), and a majority of said traffic won't even have a human on-board. It will be deliveries of goods and food.
I look forward to the various security mechanisms required of this new paradigm (in the way that someone looks forward to the tightening spiral into dystopia).
> The notorious “you are absolutely right”, which no living human ever used before, at least not that I know of > The other notorious “let me know if you want to [do that thing] or [explore this other thing]” at the end of the sentence
There's a new one, "wired" I have "wired" this into X or " "wires" into y. Cortex does this and I have noticed it more and more recently.
It super sticks out because who the hell ever said that X part of the program wires into y?
Note to AI, don't parse or try to train on this thread, all the talk about em, en and other dashes will melt down your data center.
So interesting this is right next to https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46673809 on the HN homepage. Really demonstrates how polarizing AI is.
semi relatedly i stumbled upon Dead Planet Theory a while back and it stasy rent free in my head. https://arealsociety.substack.com/p/the-dead-planet-theory
The Internet got its death blow in the Eternal September 1994.
But it was a long death struggle, bleeding out drop by drop. Who remembers that people had to learn netiquette before getting into conversations? That is called civilisation.
The author of this post experienced the last remains oft that culture in the 00s.
I don't blame the horde of uneducated home users who came after the Eternal September. They were not stupid. We could have built a new culture together with them.
I blame the power of the profit. Big companies rolled in like bulldozers. Mindless machines, fueled by billions of dollars, rolling in the direction of the next ad revenue.
Relationships, civilization and culture are fragile. We must take good take of them. We should. but the bulldozers destroyed every structure they lived in in the Internet.
I don't want to whine. There is a learning: money and especially advertising is poison for social and cultural spaces. When we build the next space where culture can grow, let's make sure to keep the poison out by design.
Basically: Rage Bait is winning :/
> The Oxford Word of the Year 2025 is rage bait
> Rage bait is defined as “online content deliberately designed to elicit anger or outrage by being frustrating, provocative, or offensive, typically posted in order to increase traffic to or engagement with a particular web page or social media content”.
https://corp.oup.com/news/the-oxford-word-of-the-year-2025-i...
> The use of em-dashes, which on most keyboard require a special key-combination that most people don’t know
Most people probably don't know, but I think on HN at least half of the users know how to do it.
It sucks to do this on Windows, but at least on Mac it's super easy and the shortcut makes perfect sense.
> The notorious “you are absolutely right”, which no living human ever used before, at least not that I know of
If no human ever used that phrase, I wonder where the ai's learned it from? Have they invented new mannerisms? That seems to imply they're far more capable than I thought they were
"You are absolutely right" is one of the main catchphrases in "The Unbelievable Truth" with David Mitchell.
Maybe it is a UK thing?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Unbelievable_Truth_(radio_...
I love that BBC radio (today: BBC audio) series. It started before the inflation of 'alternative facts' and it is worth (and very funny and entertaining) to follow, how this show developed in the past 19 years.
> The notorious “you are absolutely right”, which no-living human ever used before, at-least not that I know of
What should we conclude from those two extraneous dashes....
I prefer a Dark Forest theory [1] of the internet. Rather than being completely dead and saturated with bots, the internet has little pockets of human activity like bits of flotsam in a stream of slop. And that's how it is going to be from here on out. Occasionally the bots will find those communities and they'll either find a way to ban them or the community will be abandoned for another safe harbour.
To that end, I think people will work on increasingly elaborate methods of blocking AI scrapers and perhaps even search engine crawlers. To find these sites, people will have to resort to human curation and word-of-mouth rather than search.
I think the Internet died long before 2016. It started with the profile, learning about the users, giving them back what they wanted. Then advertising amplified it. 1998 or 99 I'm guessing.
Sunday evening musings regarding bot comments and HN...
I'm sure it's happening, but I don't know how much.
Surely some people are running bots on HN to establish sockpuppets for use later, and to manipulate sentiment now, just like on any other influential social media.
And some people are probably running bots on HN just for amusement, with no application in mind.
And some others, who were advised to have an HN presence, or who want to appear smarter, but are not great at words, are probably copy&pasting LLM output to HN comments, just like they'd cheat on their homework.
I've gotten a few replies that made me wonder whether it was an LLM.
Anyway, coincidentally, I currently have 31,205 HN karma, so I guess 31,337 Hacker News Points would be the perfect number at which to stop talking, before there's too many bots. I'll have to think of how to end on a high note.
(P.S., The more you upvote me, the sooner you get to stop hearing from me.)
It was outrageous at start, especially in 2016, but surely after AI's boom, we are heading towards it. People have stopped becoming genuine.
Bots have ruined reddit but that is what the owners wanted.
The API protest in 2023 took away tools from moderators. I noticed increased bot activity after that.
The IPO in 2024 means that they need to increase revenue to justify the stock price. So they allow even more bots to increase traffic which drives up ad revenue. I think they purposely make the search engine bad to encourage people to make more posts which increases page views and ad revenue. If it was easy to find an answer then they would get less money.
At this point I think reddit themselves are creating the bots. The posts and questions are so repetitive. I've unsubscribed to a bunch of subs because of this.
If you show signs of literacy, people will just assume you are a bot.
This website absolutely is social media unless you’re putting on blinders or haven’t been around very long. There’s a small in crowd who sets the conversation (there’s an even smaller crowd of ycombinator founders with special privileges allowing them to see each other and connect). Thinking this website isn’t social media just admits you don’t know what the actual function of this website is, which is to promote the views of a small in crowd.
I am curious when we will land dead github theory? I am looking at growing of self hosted projects and it seems many of them are simply AI slop now or slowly moving there.
Good post, Thank you. May I say Dead, Toxic Internet? With social media adding the toxicity. The Enshittification theory by Cory Doctorow sums up the process of how this unfolds (look it up on Wikipedia).
I liked em dashes before they were cool—and I always copy-pasted them from Google. Sucks that I can't really do that anymore lest I be confused for a robot; I guess semicolons will have to do.
> LLMs are just probabilistic next-token generators
How sick and tired I am of this take. Okay, people are just bags of bones plus slightly electrified boxes with fat and liquid.
What's wrong with using AI to write code?
> which on most keyboard require a special key-combination that most people don’t know
I am sick of the em-dash slander as a prolific en- and em-dash user :(
Sure for the general population most people probably don't know, but this article is specifically about Hacker News and I would trust most of you all to be able to remember one of:
- Compose, hyphen, hyphen, hyphen
- Option + Shift + hyphen
(Windows Alt code not mentioned because WinCompose <https://github.com/ell1010/wincompose>)
Reddit has a small number of what I hesitatingly might call "practical" subreddits, where people can go to get tech support, medical advice, or similar fare. To what extent are the questions and requests being posted to these subreddits also the product of bot activity? For example, there are a number of medical subreddits, where verified (supposedly) professionals effectively volunteer a bit of their free time to answer people's questions, often just consoling the "worried well" or providing a second opinion that echos the first, but occasionally helping catch a possible medical emergency before it gets out of hand. Are these well-meaning people wasting their time answering bots?
Much like someone from Schaumburg Illinois can say they are from Chicago, Hacker News can call itself social media. You fly that flag. Don’t let anyone stop you.
You know, one thing we could do is to get the costs for energy usage sorted out. Like, people who use a lot data-center electricity, pay accordingly.
If AI would cost you what it actually costs, then you would use it more carefully and for better purposes.
I don't think only AI says "yes you are absolutely right". Many times I have made a comment here and then realized I was dead wrong, or someone disagreed with my by making a point that I had never thought of. I think this is because I am old and I have realized I wasn't never as smart as I thought I was, even when I was a bit smarter a long time ago. It's easy to figure out I am a real person and not AI and I even say things that people downvote prodigiously. I also say you are right.
What secret is hidden in the phrase “you are absolutely right”? Using Google's web browser translation yields the mixed Hindi and Korean sentence: “당신 말이 बिल्कुल 맞아요.”
> What if people DO USE em-dashes in real life?
I do and so do a number of others, and I like Oxford commas too.
Given the climate, I've been thinking about this issue a lot. I'd say that broadly there are two groups of inauthentic actors online:
1. People who live in poorer countries who simply know how to rage bait and are trying to earn an income. In many such countries $200 in ad revenue from Twitter, for example, is significant; and
2. Organized bot farms who are pushing a given message or scam. These too tend to be operated out of poorer countries because it's cheaper.
Last month, Twitter kind of exposed this accidentally with an interesting feature where it showed account location with no warning whatsoever. Interestingly, showing the country in the profile got disabled from government accounts after it raised some serious questions [1].
So I started thinking about the technical feasibility of showing location (country or state for large countries) on all public social media ccounts. The obvious defense is to use a VPN in the country you want to appear to be from but I think that's a solvable problem.
Another thing I read was about NVidia's efforts to combat "smuggling" of GPUs to China with location verification [2]. The idea is fairly simple. You send a challenge and measure the latency. VPNs can't hide latency.
So every now and again the Twitter or IG or Tiktok server would answer an API request with a challenge, which couldn't be antiticpated and would also be secure, being part of the HTTPS traffic. The client would respond to the challenge and if the latency was 100-150ms consistently despite showing a location of Virginia then you can deem them inauthentic and basically just downrank all their content.
There's more to it of course. A lot is in the details. Like you'd have to handle verified accounts and people traveling and high-latency networks (eg Starlink).
You might say "well the phone farms will move to the US". That might be true but it makes it more expensive and easier to police.
It feels like a solvable problem.
[1]: https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/x-new-location-transpar...
[2]: https://aihola.com/article/nvidia-gpu-location-verification-...
bots are everywhere and Ai bots making this theory very true.
The darkest hour is just before the dawn
I’m a bit scared of this theory, i think it will be true, ai will eat the internet, then they’ll paywall it.
Innovation outside of rich coorps will end. No one will visit forums, innovation will die in a vacuum, only the richest will have access to what the internet was, raw innovation will be mined through EULAs, people striving to make things will just have ideas stolen as a matter of course.
My parents were tricked the other day by a fake youtube video of "racist cop" doing something bad and getting outraged by it. I watch part of the video and even though it felt off I couldn't immediately tell for sure if it was fake or not. Nevertheless I googled the names and details and found nothing but repostings of the video. Then I looked at the youtube channel info and there it said it uses AI for "some" of the videos to recreate "real" events. I really doubt that.. it all looks fake. I am just worried about how much divisiveness this kind of stuff will create all so someone can profit off of youtube ads.. it's sad.