[pilsetnieks]

Great point! At this point the Dead Internet Theory isn't a conspiracy – it's a roadmap. It's worth noting he distinction between "authentic" and "synthetic" online spaces is eroding faster than most people realize – that's a genuinely important conversation to be have.

/s

[IsTom]

> to be have.

Meatbag spotted, get 'im boys.

[nubg]

Great imitation

[pilsetnieks]

The dead internet theory terrifies me. I don't think we're at the point where it's mostly dead but we're already way past the point where any discussion worth anything can be had on the internet itself. The problem is not that everything could be AI slop but that anything could. It simply takes the wind out the sails and makes one question what's even the point if anything could just be written by a clanker. Anything you write could just be screaming out into the void, affecting no one, and just maybe adding to the training corpus for the next generation of clankers.

Just writing this made me question "what's the point" several times. If you or anyone replies cogently, I still won't have any idea if it's a person or a Chinese room.

[shevy-java]

> The dead internet theory terrifies me. I don't think we're at the point where it's mostly dead

Well - I would say the internet is not totally dead yet, but we approach the point of it being very useless now. I remember the 1990s era and early 2000s - it was almost innocent compared to the total slop era we have now. Young people today don't even know that Google Search was useful at one point in time. If you use Google Search now, you get so much irrelevant crap output that it is really useless now.

[thadt]

Ironically, the reason I used Google the most then was because it indexed Usenet while so many other parts of the Internet offered by the other engines were "slop". My, how the turn tables.