alt Hacker NewsKinda seems like we’re rapidly headed for the complete collapse of the internet as we know it.
Every site that is driven by user posting seems to be headed towards being overrun by AI bots chatting with each other, either for sake of promoting something or farming karma.
And there’s really not much point in publishing good content anymore, since AI is just going slurp it up and regurgitate it without driving you any traffic.
Though it’ll be interesting to see what happens to ChatGPT and the like once the amount of quality content for them to consume slows to a trickle. Will people still use ChatGPT to get product recommendations without Reddit posts and Wirecutter providing good content for those recommendations?
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The bot problem cannot be solved. Even if you strongly authenticate, people are letting bots act on their behalf (moltbook is a great example of this) and what's to stop people doing that in the future. Build your identity and reputation autonomously with the benefits that come with that.
This happens now on Onlyfans too. Content creators hire agencies which in the best case outsource chatting to "customers" to armies of cheap labour in Asia, and the worst case use bots.
The dead internet theory [1] is probably not just a theory anymore. HN recently made a policy to not allow AI posting and posters, but do you honestly think that's going to work? I would place a bet that a top HN poster within the next year is outed as using AI for posting on their behalf.
The future is human curated content. Provide the same experience people get today but without the noise. Give them just the good stuff and don't let just anyone make a post. A book has an author, a movie has a director, maybe websites can have webmasters again who filter through the garbage for you.
This could be positive. So far things were gamed and manipulated to some extent, with some fake content, but it was never too obvious, and a bit of a cat and mouse game with filters and whatnot. Now, it's so easy to fake content that robust systems will have to evolve, or most social media sites will become worthless, and advertisers will catch up eventually when they are paying for bot-only sites. The downside of course is that these robust systems are hard to imagine without complete loss of anonymity of the users.
Every website that was driven by traffic is also dying. I have put nearly a decade of work into mine, and AI overviews and ChatGPT have reduced traffic by over 60%. At some point I will need to give up and find a job, and that corner of the internet will get no new original information, just rehashed slop.
> And there’s really not much point in publishing good content anymore, since AI is just going slurp it up and regurgitate it without driving you any traffic.
You just published good content knowing AI will slurp it up and not give you any traffic in return. I'm now replying to you with more content with the same expectations about AI and traffic. Why care about AI or traffic or recognition? Isn't the content the thing that matters?
It's like answering technical questions in an anonymous/pseudonymous chat or forum, which I'm sure you've done, too. We do it to help others. If an AI can take my answer and spread it around without paying me or mentioning one of my random usernames I change every month or so, I would be happy. And if the AI gives me credit like "coffeecup543 originally posted that on IRC channel X 5 years ago", I couldn't care less. It would be noise to the reader. Even if the AI uses my real name, so what?
The people who cared about traffic and money from their posts rarely made good content, anyway. Listicles and affiliate marketing BS and SEO optimizations and making a video that could be 1 minute into 10 minutes, or text that could've been 5 articles into a long book - all existed from before AI. With AI I actually get less of this crap - either skip it or condense it.
That and most of the news being behind a paywall, which they can scrape anyway.
The internet archive is my safe haven these days, i can go back and remember the old internet.
Unless you're allowed to say slurs without being banned, your forum will be overrun with bots. The sanitation of the internet is the perfect breeding ground for brand-safe AI promotion bots.
With AI running rampant, it seems security through obscurity is basically the best thing we have. Everyone knows reddit, facebook, xitter, etc so any clown can and does have bots running loose. HN is "obscure" in that most normies don't know about this place, and so it's relatively safe from the floods of spam. But I think it's just a matter of time until non-tech people start looking for those few bastions of human comments online, come across this place, and a great flood begins and it'll never be undone. After that, I guess it'll be a rise of invite-only forums like we had in the early 2000s all over again.