alt Hacker NewsOne truism of the Internet is that it always used to be better. LLMs are the latest wave in the Eternal September, changing the Internet forever, yet again.
I only want to interact with real people, building real connections or pissing off real people. Directly, without any LLM intermediary. Trolling an LLM is joyless. Tricking an LLM into a goatse link does not make the good lulz.
Maybe the places we do this have to change, but really, I'll shed zero tears if exploitative rent-extracting 2010s era Internet beasts like Twitter, Reddit, Facebook, etc. die under a mountain of LLM slop.
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> One truism of the Internet is that it always used to be better. LLMs are the latest wave in the Eternal September, changing the Internet forever, yet again.
I think that's reductionist. Convenient online shopping aside, what made the internet great was the ability to interact with people on an unprecedented scale. The dynamics of these interactions changed over time - from narrow academic circles to billions of complete strangers, often trying to sell you something - but the core premise never changed until now. But think of the newcomer experience today: unless they're very careful, 50%+ of the content they will consume and 50%+ of the conversations they will be having are not going to involve humans at all.
They're already dying. Reddit is thinking of going sign-in only. I don't think that's a good sign for them at all.
https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2026/10/reddit-will-require-...
Agreed. As an example:
> I only want to interact with real people, building real connections or pissing off real people. Directly [...]
Many people consider offline, direct face-to-face, as the real interaction with real people, with online communication a bland facsimile.
LLMs just add another layer to it.
Many aspects of the internet have improved. For all its issues YouTube is better now than it was ten years ago... at least, given the way I use it and with the curation I apply. There are plenty of other things that have improved too.
However, what used to be a diversity of communities has been horrifically, horrifically crushed into a vastly less diverse set and it's not just nostalgia saying so. Everyone has been herded into centralized systems all of which are so large that they have significantly converged into the same thing, whether you're on Reddit or Facebook or X, despite the superficial differences and the various reactions people may have to various elements of that list.
My local BBS, run by high school students for the local high school students, had picnics. It's been a long time since I was a member of a community that could do something like that routinely. And to the extent you want to say well jerf that's obviously because..., the things that come after "because" are the point I'm making here. I'm not mystified by the effect. Nor is it the only thing that has changed for the worse, it's just a nice little snapshot that is easy to ponder.
Everything on the internet is structured to constantly make things bigger and bigger. But there's a time and place for not bigger.