[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.

[JumpCrisscross]

> Why is it being called dead internet theory

“A social networking system simulates a user using a language model trained using training data generated from user interactions performed by that user. The language model may be used for simulating the user when the user is absent from the social networking system, for example, when the user takes a long break or if the user is deceased” [1].

(More seriously: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dead_Internet_theory)

[1] https://patents.google.com/patent/US12513102B2

[amiantos]

So why isn't it called "dead social media theory"? The internet is not only social media services, though I understand a lot of people seem to think that without centralized social media services there is no reason to use the internet.

[pixl97]

Have you been on the internet at large lately? With google you may get one authoritative site on something and 50 bot copies of the site on different domains. Sometimes the stolen site is the number one return. Also, if you ran sites years/decades ago, you realized way back then the any local user posting was getting overran by spammers/bots. Now is so much worse that it's not worth doing in most cases.

So, most posts on social media aren't real.

Most user posts on non-social media are spam/not real.

Most websites in searches are copies/ad spam.

So yea, dead internet reality.

[amiantos]

I spend all day every day on the Internet and I don't share your perspective. I might dislike centralized social media and yearn for a bygone era, but just in the past two days I had a very positive interaction with multiple real humans in the Commodore 64 subreddit that helped solve a problem I was having that isn't documented anywhere else on the internet yet. So then I went on my personal blog and blogged about it, which will get it out there on Google and help others. In this way, I am helping to keep the internet alive, I guess. "Be the change you want to see in the world," and all that.

[dylan604]

> So then I went on my personal blog and blogged about it, which will get it out there on Google and help others.

That's some of the boldest optimism I think I've seen in awhile. Maybe your blog is more popular than I assume, but still

[amiantos]

Traffic stats for my primary blog are public (I only started using simple analytics in December so there's only two full months of data): https://dashboard.simpleanalytics.com/amiantos.net

[nwhnwh]

You are a kind soul, but your mind is afraid to see reality. It doesn't matter if you share that perspective or not, and "Be the change you want to see in the world" doesn't really say anything here. See this for example https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9kWeAhMponc, and this https://arnon.dk/the-trust-collapse-infinite-ai-content-is-a...

And check these books "Superbloom: How Technologies of Connection Tear Us Apart" and "No Sense of Place", maybe it would help you to see the overall effects of the internet (and other communication mediums) and forget this simplistic view that a lot of programmers have. The nature of the communication medium doesn't just affect the message, it shapes everything in society. Ignoring that because you had a good experience here and there won't change anything.

[pixl97]

"You can do everything right and still lose".

At the end of the day there is no real penalty for being a bad actor on the internet. They get unlimited retries on spamming and otherwise causing problems. In many ways this helps Google entrench itself as the search/ad company. No one else has the money or compute resources to continuously update the internet. Furthermore they have told us it's their job to shove unskippable ads in our faces. They'll gladly let the public internet die in the future if they can push out their own version of "SafeInternet by Google/now with more ads!".

[amiantos]

Every single one of your comments in this thread is some slippery slope stuff where you think corporations and federal government are going to work together to kill off the (public?) internet. It's okay that you feel that way, even if it's just a big ol' fallacy, but you don't need to repeat it in six different places. You made your point, you think the internet is doomed no matter what happens, great, let's move on.

[nagonago]

I appreciate your positive attitude and I hope more people will adopt it.

I am also part of some very niche communities on the internet, and although they are small they are certainly thriving.

[myvoiceismypass]

To be really blunt - why do you think your blog takes will 'get out there on google' and also 'help others'?

[amiantos]

They already do. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47343123

[TitaRusell]

It is inevitable that in a few years we can't even tell a real user from a bot without forensic analysis.

When AI can post a million times a day the internet is FUBAR.

[ruszki]

The problem is that average people cannot tell even now. Heck, I'm quite sure that /r/all is completely bot driven, yet I still check it occasionally. I'm not even sure about HN, but I didn't find yet so obvious manipulation than on Reddit.

[TitaRusell]

It's funny when people start accusing eachother of being chatGPT.

[bfeist]

100% agree that this is what it should be called. To argue that big websites being big makes them equivalent to the whole Internet is absurd. Besides, I love the idea of the only recourse to be to go back to independently run information websites.

[dylan604]

For the younger generation, social sites are the internet. They open an app on their device, they don't go to sites by searching the web. I've seen people perform a web search in an app store thinking it was the same thing.

[burnto]

Yeah I agree. It’s an acute problem on social media platforms where there’s a market force incentivizing it. If you’re mostly engaging in specific niche interactions with known communities or people, it’s not nearly so prevalent. The internet still works fine as a whole.

[jareklupinski]

commercial internet services would prefer that you forget the internet without them can in fact exist

[genpfault]

> A social networking system simulates a user using a language model trained using training data generated from user interactions performed by that user

Google People[1]?

[1]: https://qntm.org/perso

[coldtea]

>Anyone can still run a blog/website, and/or their own discourse server.

And those will also get chocked with fake bot "members" and bot comments.

Plus, if "anyone can still run a blog/website", this includes bots. AI created and operated blogs/websites, luring in people who think they're reading actual human posts.

[lostmsu]

What's wrong with AI written websites? Not all of them need to lure people by pretending to be humans. Content is either useful or not.

[dwedge]

In some ways it might be positive. My girlfriend had a small addiction to Instagram reels. The flood of AI generated videos on there just killed the magic for her and she stopped using it

[esperent]

Happy for your girlfriend, and anyone else who escapes because of this.

But it's not about the current generation of addicts. It's a play to capture the next generation.

It remains to be seen whether they'll get caught or not but it's important to remember that even if all of us mature humans find this new AI social media weird and gross, children don't have our preconceptions.

Meta is going to do everything in their power to train the next generation of young, immature brains into finding AI social media normal and addictive.

They (along with TikTok) already managed to do that to the last two generations so they have a scary track record here.

[E-Reverance]

Happy to hear of this anecdata, as it gives me hope something similar will happen to my family

[ambicapter]

Anyone can run a blog/website and be subject to AI bot crawlers using terabytes of your bandwidth for no reason, yeah.

[ahofmann]

Bandwidth is only expensive in the US, somehow. Here in Germany I didn't bother about bots and their additional traffic since 1998 (there are other annoying things about bots though).

[dwedge]

If this encourages those people to stop sending hundreds of megabytes of crap per page load of their text content, it might be a good thing

[idop]

More than that, it's practically impossible to find good specialized, human-written websites. Search engines don't find them, all results are AI garbage. With no real ability to be discovered, there's no incentive to maintain such websites too, and so the cycle of slop continues.

[dwedge]

Kagi small Web, though their rss only seems to show 5 updates a day across thousands of sites. Also search for indieweb

[keithnz]

No, the old internet wasn't that great. There were so many problems. Finding things was hard, buying things was hard, integrating things was hard, compatibility was hard, everything was super fractured. It felt great at the time because you discovered all these random things and it was all novel at the time. Centralized (Or decentralized collaborative services like IRC or Usenet) really unlocked the power of the internet.

[spr93]

usenet and irc are quite old. how are they examples of some mythical point at which the internet was unlocked by services?

centralized and decentralized would include almost any service. your comment is so vague and ambiguous as to be meaningless. (that's a hallmark of LLM output. are you a bot?)

it was easier to find authoritative answers 20-30 years ago. google and, before that, altavista and yahoo, were quite good at directing queries to things like university-run information sites or legitimate, curated commercial sites. for the last decade the first google page has been crammed with useless SEO optimized fluff.

as for shopping, that was the first dotcom boom. what really took it mainstream was covid. not centralized or decentralized collaborative nonsense.

[keithnz]

no.... not a bot, and please see HN FAQ before making comments like this.... I'm talking about decentralized common services, like IRC, Usenet, email, same service and they all interact together. But the old internet was super fractured when we got websites, nearly everything did things completely different, was very hard to trust anything. It was not easier finding authoritive answer 20 to 30 years ago, I started in 91, and it was hard to find anything. Search engines were a great improvement, but kind of hard to find what you wanted, things drastically improved with google and page rank, but that brought in other problems

[orbital-decay]

Reasonable fragmentation and friction is a feature, not a bug. Global-scale social networks with zero resistance have turned the information superhighway into the information superconductor carrying infinite current, otherwise known as a short circuit.

> buying things was hard

This one is not a problem anymore.

[xorvoid]

I generally agree with this, but I think the small internet hasn't succeeded in building social replacements for the "centralized systems". The internet is a social technology. So for this to be viable, the small internet needs an answer.

Occasionally, someone mentions RSS as a solution. That's only a small component of the solution.

[nwhnwh]

You can create a blog, yeah. But you also can write the blog with AI. So, you still need to filter the content. Over time, people will find that "The signal-to-noise ratio has hit a breaking point where the cost of verification exceeds the expected value of engagement." https://arnon.dk/the-trust-collapse-infinite-ai-content-is-a...

[robotswantdata]

How would the small internet fight the bots?

Aggressive moderation? Disable UGC?

[amiantos]

In an ideal/fantasy world under "small internet theory", every online friend group would have their own Discourse server set up (similar to how friend groups use Discord now), and traffic/usage of that Discourse server is so small that it would be a waste of resources to try to swamp it with bot traffic, and on top of that, everyone on the Discourse server are friends who can vouch for new members who join, so no bot could join the Discourse server because no one would know who they are.

I understand that some may feel we are losing something, by not being able to go onto a website and anonymously talk to 1000s of other anonymous people we do not know, but I do not think that has actually been a net positive and this bot issue demonstrates the issue quite well: if you do not know who you are talking to, you do not know if they are telling the truth, or if they are someone you should even listen to at all, and now they might not even be human. So why do it? I would rather talk to my friends, people I've met in meatspace or over voice chat in a game, people who I can vouch for and that I know I can respect and trust.

Let's build small communities of real friends who recognize each other and spend time with them on the internet, in that way the internet will never die.

[pixl97]

>Let's build small communities of

And 10 minutes later Texas demands you identify all your users age when someone posts a porn image somewhere. Facebook will gleefully laugh all the way to the court saying we need such internet ID to entrench themselves.

>, in that way the internet will never die.

You mean in the exact way the internet used to be... then died?

I'm guessing your GenX or a Xennial, it's how we think. Relationships and friendships are hard things to acquire and keep and you have to work to do it otherwise friends disappear. The thing is the younger generations mostly don't think that way. They have mostly always lived in a world where connections are cheap and easy to maintain. Attempting to move to a system that is more difficult will be very difficult for them.

[ianbutler]

> Attempting to move to a system that is more difficult will be very difficult for them.

That doesn't make it wrong, it just might make the last 20 years a mistake.

[pixl97]

Large scale mistakes are very difficult to fix and have entrenched groups to ensure they continue. See: Internal combustion engines, Cigarettes.

[senordevnyc]

So I’m a member of a group of about 70 middle-aged guys who have a discord server exactly like this. We live all over the country, but most of us have met in person, we travel the world together, and we do an annual retreat where usually about half of us meet up. In addition to discord, we have a bunch of groups on Marco Polo, and we have little sub-groups that do zoom calls regularly. Really wish some of them lived nearby, but in spite of that it’s been one of the best things in my life for years now.

[kjkjadksj]

It would be interesting if we had some sort of local verification in the real world. As in picking up some key from some physical place or having it sent to some physical place. Some services like nextdoor are set up like this and mail out account auth to make sure the user is local to their next door group. Obviously you can imagine how it might be abused but it is impossible to do so at the scale you can abuse digital only methods.

[robotswantdata]

Pokémon go was ahead of its time

[ahofmann]

Small internet isn't very attractive for most bots. Also, I use websites that are invite-only. This is effectively a web of trust. This works pretty well, bots aren't a real problem there.

[jasondigitized]

Run your site like an old school BBS. You only run into these problems when you invite the world to your site and want big numbers. You don't have to do that.

[Bender]

Aggressive moderation?

That is a simple method in phpBB. Using ranks one can set new accounts to be able to post and nobody can see their message until verified by a moderator. For small groups and semi-private (invite only) forums this is fairly easy to manage. Spammers and grifters influence nobody. Only cranky old bastards like me see the message. There are other means to keep bots off a tiny site but that is a longer topic. Even better one can send a header to redirect those using the Torbrowser to the Tor link and when states come along and demand some third party process, one simply disables the Clear-Web access. More friction, less data leakage and no corporate capture. This also eliminates the people that can't handle an extra step to access the site and eliminates lazy governments that need money trails.

[thesz]

HashCash.

[xdennis]

> Let's celebrate "small internet theory", an internet where exploitation is effectively impossible because every company that tries it is overrun with AI bots.

But isn't it even harder for small forums to resist the robot onslaught without the trillion dollar valuations to fund it?

Although, part of the reason Facebook/Linkedin/Twitch/etc have bots is because those companies secretly want them, in order to inflate their usage numbers.

[chistev]

> Although, part of the reason Facebook/Linkedin/Twitch/etc have bots is because those companies secretly want them, in order to inflate their usage numbers.

Yes, they are disincentivized to get rid of bots.

[pixl97]

The people that want to get rid of the bots get crushed because said botting technology is hyper advanced and cheap to use because of the massive scale of social media. This ends up with huge numbers of them getting put behind services like cloudflare further consolidating the internet.

[Lerc]

It reminds me of the cartoon of two people on an escalator that stops working and one says to the other "Last time this happened I was stuck for four hours"

I'm thinking there might have been a deeper message than the moment of ridiculousness.

[reaperducer]

The internet existed and was pretty great before these large centralized systems came into being.

The big centralized systems existed before the internet. GEnie. Delphi. Bitnet. CompuServe. The Well. American People Link. And dozens more.

The internet brought them all together, then extinguished them. Now we're going back to the old days.

The only difference now is that instead of paying AT&T to carry dialup connections and leased lines, we're paying our local/regional ISP for cable and fiber.

It's all the same game. Only the names have changed.

[obsidianbases1]

> 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.

This is a great point. Suddenly, I'm looking forward to this

[raincole]

> Anyone can still run a blog/website, and/or their own discourse server

Including bots.

[jasondigitized]

Bring back BBS. Getting into the good ones was a process back in the day.

[amiantos]

It's funny you mention this, I got a Commodore 64 Ultimate the other day and one of the first things I did was load up the BBS client and browse some BBSes. Those are from before my time (my first PC was a Compaq Pentium 166) so I never got to experience them for real. But if the rest of the internet collapses under the weight of bot traffic, BBSes are quite nice.

[glimshe]

BBSs have been in theory replaced, but in reality they haven't even been approached by modern social media. Small forums full of dedicated users, often local. So many great memories.

[Retr0id]

We're talking right now on a centralized system that's slowly being overrun by bots. We can survive without, but I'll miss it.

[raw_anon_1111]

And who is going to know your blog exists? If they search on Google they are going to get an answer from AI and stop

[amiantos]

Who cares if anyone knows my blog exists? I'm not writing my blog to farm engagement as I do not run ads on my blog. I write on my blog because I want to write my thoughts down and project them into the world. Whether or not anyone sees them is pretty unimportant.

If my writing helps someone via them hitting my blog directly or them getting the answer via AI aggregation, mission accomplished.

[AngryData]

In my experience AI doesn't give the answer you want because it gives the most shallow and basic, many times so basic as to be worthless, response. Then I either scroll through 20 results hoping I see one that isn't an AI writeup of the exact same incomplete source, or I give up and search out a specific site I know exists that isn't AI written for that information.

[raw_anon_1111]

Thats not exactly making an argument for the discovery of blogs

[dwedge]

Kagi small web, for one

[Krei-se]

Your welcome to link your proven human page with mine.

Id even run a dedicated UT99 server lol

[danfunk]

I love "small internet theory." Beautiful view of the future.

[zedlasso]

it was originally called zombie web but that didn't catch so it turned into this.

[tracerbulletx]

Parasitic zombie internet.

[gpderetta]

signal/noise