[calebcannon]

The internet is most definitely not fine. There is an incoming tsunami of chat gpt generated bullshit that is going to make most open discussion sites more or less useless. Twitter requiring accounts and Reddit shutting down apis are both related: chat gpt et al are a threat to the social media business and ironically made possible because of the social media business. TBF I think we should all be exercising extreme (even more than usual) skepticism on any discussion sites any more.

[mattbrewsbytes]

Social media companies are acting like a drug user who was getting their dope for free but now has to turn tricks behind the dumpster. Easy money (aka low loan rates) has dried up or much harder to justify so companies that have used their user population as a means to profit are realizing they need to charge money for things like blue check marks or API usage when all the VC's won't give them a hit anymore.

Publicly free content from users devolves to garbage content. I think the Chat GPT effect is they're realizing its easier for companies/entities to generate garbage that is at or exceeding the intelligence of comments by actual people (a low bar). Sure there are pockets of usefulness but this is tiny amongst the firehose of garbage.

If all that is publicly available on social platforms is just garbage nonsense, people will just stop going if any barrier is thrown in front of them. The internet as a technology stack is fine. This is how social media dies (hopefully).

[mark_l_watson]

+1 your concern is valid.

A potential saving grace: I bet within a year or so it will be easy to self-host LLMs that are easy to fine tune and run. Then there will be a few open source tools that you can use yourself, privately, to capture your level of interest while reading, and periodically make a reader/summarize/filter agent.

This is not scary if people can fairly easily run it all themselves, keeping their data private. It would help wade through crap, and there is some irony in using LLMs to have personal filtering and summarization.

Compared to future versions of ChatGPT, Bard, etc. the models that individuals can self host will be much weaker, but I think that they will be strong enough for personal agents and eventually be cheap to run, and affordable to fine tune.

[hext]

Right, if you aren’t already doing this, you’re about to have to screen every single comment online in a fucked up game of ‘human or robot’

[KronisLV]

> Right, if you aren’t already doing this, you’re about to have to screen every single comment online in a fucked up game of ‘human or robot’

Hah, this might mean that we'd be one step closer to the dead internet (conspiracy) theory actually being reality: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dead_Internet_theory

What an interesting concept.

[XorNot]

I mean this has been true for a while: we've all laboured under the fiction that any given screen name maps 1:1 with a human being.

On every large platform, this hasn't been the majority for a long time.

[berniedurfee]

And don’t forget net neutrality. ISPs haven’t!

The clock is ticking until you’ll need to decide which internet package you prefer, based on content providers and limited by region.

At least Yahoo will probably come free with the base package.

[safety1st]

Sounds to me like the Internet is, in fact, fine. It's only those "open" discussion sites which are having trouble.

Those sites never fit my definition of open anyway (free, permissively licensed technology and content). The ones that do are smaller, aren't a monoculture and seem to be pretty untroubled so far. No one wants to scrape the little Mastodon or Lemmy instances or other small community sites I pay attention to.

Big deal if something is a threat to the social media business. The social media business is a cancer which should be destroyed anyway. Go outside and engage in real socializing instead of the depression-spawning, teen-girl-murdering version peddled by Zuckerberg and Musk. It's much better and once you change your habits you'll never look back. Maybe it has something to do with all the vitamin D you get from being outside.