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amiantos commented on The dead Internet is not a theory anymore   adriankrebs.ch/blog/dead-... · Posted by u/hubraumhugo
dylan604 · a day ago
If you think a site with only 209 visitors in the past 30 days is going to move the needle, then I've got news for you. Especially if bots are the main source of that visitors count. That's very very close to the number of people visiting your site being you, you, and maybe your mom type of numbers. After that, it'll be skiddies and bots. Anybody that's run their own site has been there, but let's not make it out to be some grandiose site that will determine Google page ranking.
amiantos · a day ago
Why are you putting words/desires in my mouth that I did not voice? No one said anything about moving the needle. I said that my blog will go into Google results and help people, you said that sounded optimistic, so then I provided you proof that my blog already shows in google results and receives traffic. I've received messages from real people who have been helped by my writing on my blog, so it's not just bots.

I do not know what "move the needle" means or why you think I am trying to do that. Your excessive negativity and pessimism is unwarranted and I dislike it. Honestly between you and that other guy replying to my comments with seemingly thinly veiled vitriol for my perspective, it's just further proof of my point that being able to communicate with large groups of anonymous people is typically a net negative. Most anonymous people seem to be quite nasty. I'd rather write on my blog where no one like you will see it, and if you do see it, you likely won't go out of your way to send me an email with your negative comments because it's likely you do this for public attention.

amiantos commented on The dead Internet is not a theory anymore   adriankrebs.ch/blog/dead-... · Posted by u/hubraumhugo
pixl97 · a day ago
"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 · a day ago
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.
amiantos commented on The dead Internet is not a theory anymore   adriankrebs.ch/blog/dead-... · Posted by u/hubraumhugo
dylan604 · a day ago
> 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 · a day ago
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
amiantos commented on The dead Internet is not a theory anymore   adriankrebs.ch/blog/dead-... · Posted by u/hubraumhugo
raw_anon_1111 · a day ago
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 · a day ago
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.

amiantos commented on The dead Internet is not a theory anymore   adriankrebs.ch/blog/dead-... · Posted by u/hubraumhugo
jasondigitized · a day ago
Bring back BBS. Getting into the good ones was a process back in the day.
amiantos · a day ago
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.
amiantos commented on The dead Internet is not a theory anymore   adriankrebs.ch/blog/dead-... · Posted by u/hubraumhugo
pixl97 · a day ago
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 · a day ago
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.
amiantos commented on The dead Internet is not a theory anymore   adriankrebs.ch/blog/dead-... · Posted by u/hubraumhugo
robotswantdata · a day ago
How would the small internet fight the bots?

Aggressive moderation? Disable UGC?

amiantos · a day ago
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.

amiantos commented on The dead Internet is not a theory anymore   adriankrebs.ch/blog/dead-... · Posted by u/hubraumhugo
JumpCrisscross · a day ago
> 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 · a day ago
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.
amiantos commented on The dead Internet is not a theory anymore   adriankrebs.ch/blog/dead-... · Posted by u/hubraumhugo
amiantos · a day ago
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.

amiantos commented on I miss thinking hard   jernesto.com/articles/thi... · Posted by u/jernestomg
topspin · a month ago
I'm using LLMs to code and I'm still thinking hard. I'm not doing it wrong: I think about design choices: risks, constraints, technical debt, alternatives, possibilities... I'm thinking as hard as I've ever done.
amiantos · a month ago
I use Claude Code a lot, and it always lets me know the moment I stopped thinking hard, because it will build something completely asinine. Garbage in, garbage out, as they say...

u/amiantos

KarmaCake day509July 24, 2019View Original