The dead Internet is not a theory anymore

artemonster

I think next step will be an isolated version of invite-only internet where you have to be physically present with your invitee to give them access. There will be a beautiful navigation widget where you can access a unified "addon" to any page: community moderated comment section, version history of that page, backlinks, carefully curated "related" section(so that you can continue browsing beautiful human written content on 1910 era steam locomotives, similar to 90s era webrings), donate button so that you can support he author and much more! Oh, the dream

jeandejean

Next step is: we get back to speaking to each other in the real world. That would successfully close the loop.

Ancalagon

Hey it’s what executives want. Fake everything. Slop and robots everywhere. Have at it, I say. Maybe then people will go outside again

bsaul

I only see two outcomes for this problem : an internet of verified identities (start by uploading your ID card). Or a paid internet, where it doesn't matter who you are, but since you're going to pay for that email or that reddit account, the probability that it's AI spam is greatly reduced. And i'm looking forward to none of them.

ticulatedspline

Kinda been dead a while, also not dead there's still good stuff out there. Lots of it, but it's in the corners and under the carpets. Things created in the original spirit of the "let me show you my interests" that the older web was built on. While back was toying with the idea of building out a new web on a new protocol (not http based). Thus no existing browser would understand it. Deliberately obscure to force a "Reset" button of sorts. Though would be short lived, over time we've learned to ruin stuff faster and faster. I'm not sure there's any network so alien that it could hold on to that golden era of innocence from the past, it would be found then expediently and expertly exploited.

drykiss

Maybe the only parts of a future internet people will actually hang out in is going to be one where any profit-making is completely de-incentivized. No recommendations. No product reviews. No opinions on companies or services. More slow web. Maybe we'll slowly head back to what websites used to look like when Yahoo was the biggest search engine.

Computer0

Just yesterday in a local non profit organization's Signal groupchat a user who had just offered to take meeting minutes the day prior emitted an open claw error message to the chat. They are now banned from the organization.

toddmorey

I see many, many startups that promise to be an automated marketing agent that will do this exact thing: scour sites for conversations and post links to your product. Obviously that burns down the human Internet, but it’s also a business that will have a short lifespan and bring about its own demise. I guess they don’t care about anything enduring as long as they can grab some quick cash on the way out.

august-

do you think small, invite-only communities will end up being the last holdout for genuine human conversation online? or will bots eventually infiltrate those too?

d--b

Well, it's not such terrible news, is it? I get nostalgia for the 90s/00s, but that time was never coming back anyways. The best we can hope now is for people to be less online. And if it comes from people drowning in AI crap, I think it's kind of funny.

chuckadams

The funny thing about the LinkedIn post is that the parody is dead-on as to the kind of mindless slop a human on LI would post. LinkedIn was the Dead Internet before LLMs were even a thing. And I guess AI doesn't even have to be posting everything for Dead Internet Theory to hold, it just has to be the default perception in order to cause everything to be treated skeptically. I think I'll just take up blacksmithing.

halyconWays

The only place that reminds me of the old Internet is VRChat, funny enough. You're guaranteed to be interacting with a nerdy, culturally similar human who's present in the moment.

amiantos

Why is it being called dead internet theory when, as far as I can tell, what's really happening is that big centralized systems are being overrun with bots? The internet existed and was pretty great before these large centralized systems came into being. Anyone can still run a blog/website, and/or their own discourse server. There's no need to mourn for these centralized systems that largely existed only to exploit us in some way. Let's celebrate "small internet theory", an internet where exploitation is effectively impossible because every company that tries it is overrun with AI bots. That sounds awesome to me personally, but I was also up late last night watching clips of Conan O'Brien from 1999 and the nostalgia for that era / what the internet was like back then hit me so hard it was almost painful.

_pdp_

The Internet was always full of bots. Not chatbots, but bots like crawlers, scrapers, automated scripts. That was fine. What the OP is talking about is bots that participate in public discourse. That's the actual problem. I think it can be handled to a degree though. Private communities, private Internet on top of existing Internet, and social media platforms without public APIs and with strict, enforceable ToS would all help.

alex1138

1) Holy fuck I'd borderline forgotten about Numa Numa 2) Reddit... doesn't have much of an incentive to fix the astroturf issue. The site "organically" censors, a lot

aerhardt

I have to use LinkedIn to sell. I only occasionally look at the feed but I am ruthlessly muting or blocking anyone who is blatantly foisting their AI drivel on other humans. I’ve had enough of this shit.

empath75

Reddit in particular is overwhelmed by bots. There are small niche communities where it’s mostly people talking to people, but the vast majority of popular posts are made by bots, voted on by bots and commented on by bots. It’s not even like commercial astroturfing, it’s just karma farming and public sentiment manipulation.

rustystump

Everyone here is so far from a normie it is almost painful. Dead internet is an outcome of supply and demand. The fundamental issue is that a plurality of humans pref the direction things have gone and are moving in. Is it a good direction? By this crowd’s standards, no. To be clear, i dont like either but when i watch the speed kids swap between 5 insta accounts and 3 reddit accounts, it seems the majority are happy with it.

kmbfjr

Lots of interesting ideas to fix it, I’ll offer mine: let it die. The grand bargain of the web is gone and it ain’t coming back.

pixl97

Dead internet prophecy.