HN

Comments (194)

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  seiferteric
  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.
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  viccis
  >which is not a social network, but I’m tired of arguing with people online about itI 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.
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  makingstuffs
  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”
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  GMoromisato
  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?
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  nikeee
  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.
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  pants2
  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.
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  BLKNSLVR
  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).
• swader999
  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.
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  mrbluecoat
  So interesting this is right next to https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46673809 on the HN homepage. Really demonstrates how polarizing AI is.
• swader999
  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.
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  gmuslera
  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.
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  f311a
  > The use of em-dashes, which on most keyboard require a special key-combination that most people don’t knowMost 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.
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  chrisjj
  > The notorious “you are absolutely right”, which no-living human ever used before, at-least not that I know ofWhat should we conclude from those two extraneous dashes....
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  neilv
  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.)
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  chongli
  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.[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_forest_hypothesis
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  secretsatan
  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.
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  flopslop
  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.
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  lizknope
  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.
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  dvt
  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.
• anon
  undefined
• ex3ndr
  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.
• anon
  undefined
• stogot
  > 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.
• CommenterPerson
  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).
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  mmooss
  The problem is not the Internet but the author and those like them, acting like social network participants in following the herd - embracing despair and hopelessness, and victimhood - they don't realize they're the problem, not the victims. Another problem is their ignorance and their post-truth attitude, not caring whether their words are actually accurate:> What if people DO USE em-dashes in real life?They do and have, for a long time. I know someone who for many years (much longer than LLMs have been available) has complained about their overuse.> hence, you often see -- in HackerNews comments, where the author is probably used to Markdown rendererUsing two dashes for an em-dash goes back to typewriter keyboards, which had only what we now call printable ASCII and where it was much harder add to add non-ASCII characters than it is on your computer - no special key combos. (Which also means that em-dashes existed in the typewriter era.)
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  anonnon
  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?
• aashu_xd
  bots are everywhere and Ai bots making this theory very true.
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  rickcarlino
  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.
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  weddingbell
  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.”
• jibal
  Such posts are identifiable and rare, disproving Dead Internet Theory (for now).
• fsckboy
  >The other day I was browsing my one-and-only social network — which is not a social network, but I’m tired of arguing with people online about it — HackerNewsdude, hate to break it to you but the fact that it's your "one and only" makes it more convincing it's your social network. if you used facebook, instagram, and tiktok for socializing, but HN for information, you would have another leg to stand on.yes, HN is "the land of misfit toys", but if you come here regularly and participate in discussions with other other people on a variety of topics and you care about the interactions, that's socializing. The only reason you think it's not is that you find actual social interaction awkward, so you assume that if you like this it must not be social.
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  foxes
  Are em dashes in language models particularly close to a start token or something? Somehow letting the model continue to keep outputting.
• nl
  The irony is that I submitted one of my open source projects because it was vibe-coded and people accused me of not vibe coding it!
• kelseydh
  What is now certain is Dead StackOverflow Theory.
• heliumtera
  But what about the children improving their productivity 10x? What about their workflows?Think of the children!!!
• brianbest101
  [dead]
• cboyardee
  [dead]
• cande
  [dead]
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  bigmeme
  [flagged]