You can't trust the internet anymore

This is why my friends and I are setting up a mesh network in our town.

The open internet has been going downhill for a while, but LLMs are absolutely accelerating it's demise. I was in denial for the last few years but at this point I've accepted that the internet I grew up on as a kid in the late 90s to mid 2000s is dead. I am grateful for having experienced it but the time has come to move on.

The future for people that valued what the early internet provided is local, trusted networks in my opinion. It's sad that we need to retreat into exclusionary circles but there are too many people interested in making a buck on the race to the bottom.

Tangentially related, I have a hunch, but cannot prove, that prediction markets are the driving force behind a lot of the bad information online, since they essentially monetarily incentivize making people misjudge the state of the world.

There's been a huge uptick in this sort of brigade like behavior around current events. First noted it around LK99, that failed room temperature semiconductor in 2023, but it just keeps happening.

Used to be we only saw it around elections and crypto pump and dumps, now it's cropping up in the weirdest places.

It is the failure mode of incorrect trust that has changed.

Previously you might get burned with some bad information or incorrect data or get taken in by a clever hoax once in a while.

Now you get overwhelmed by regurgitation, which itself gets fed back into the machine.

The ratio of people to bots reading is crashed to near zero.

We have burned the web.

There was a very brief window, of maybe hours or days, where the Internet could be trusted, and that was a long time ago.

Signal to noise ratio is getting *lower (EDIT: was higher) than ever. I don't see a way out of this other than "human certified" digitally signed authorship (e.g. by using eIDAS in EU). There could be a proxy to at least retain pseudo-anonymity, but trackable to a human. Tragedy of commons strikes again.

I was recently running into this while playing the latest Hollow Knight game. Several sloppified sites which obviously were trying to tailor mechanics/items of the original game into the new one. The new release is only ~six months old, so there is just not that much hard content available to reference.

My question is -why? Is it really worth the ad revenue to trick a few people looking into a few niche topics? Say you pick the top 5000 trending movies/music/games and generate fake content covering the gamut. What is the payback period?

I thought a lot last night about how we could protect HN, I didn't come up with a good answer except maybe you'll need to have someone with a higher reputation vouch aka invites. My internet community journey has mostly just been irc -> dA -> twitter -> HN. Too frequently these days I feel I might be putting emotional energy into something that isn't human on this site, hard to express how that makes me feel, but it's not pleasant at all. 힝

It is true that as the cost to construct fake content has gone to zero, we need some kind of scalable trust mechanism to access all this information. I don't yet know what this is but a Web of Trust structure always seems appealing. A lot of people are going to be excluded, but such is life, I suppose.

If I were to be honest, going to where the fish aren't is also going to help. Almost certainly there are very few LLM generated websites on the Gemini protocol.

I'm setting up a secondary archiver myself that will record simply the parts of the web that consent to it via robots.txt. Let's see how far I get.

The trust collapse: Infinite AI content is awful https://arnon.dk/the-trust-collapse-infinite-ai-content-is-a...

You never could trust the internet. The difference is that now the problem is so widespread that it's finally spurring us into action, and hopefully a good "web of trust" or similar solution will emerge.

AI is kind of like Skynet in the first Terminator movie. It now destroys our digital life. New autogenerated websites appear, handled by AI. Real websites become increasingly less likely to show up on people's daily info-feed. It is very strange compared to the 1990s; I feel we lost something here.

> The commons of the internet are probably already lost

That depends. If people don't push back against AI then yes. Skynet would have won without the rebel forces. And the rebels are there - just lurking. It needs a critical threshold of anger before they will push back against the AI-Skynet 3.0 slop.

The future of the internet is going to be invite-only enclaves. I sometimes wonder is anyone working on the next generation of discussion forums, or if it'll be a return to PHPBB.

When I first started using the Internet there were 3 rules that were pounded into my head repeatedly.

1. Don't believe everything or anything you read or see on the Internet.

2. Never share personal information about yourself online.

3. Every man was a man, every woman was a man and every teenager is an FBI agent.

I have yet to find a problem with the Internet thats isn't because of breaking one of the above rules.

My point being you couldn't ever trust the Internet before anyways.

It comes down to Google's failure. Rather than outright defeating the SEO eldridge abomination by adopting a zero-tolerance policy to those tactics, Google made a mutually advantageous bargain with them of - course, leaving out a third party: us. They could do this because they had no competition. Now, the culture of enabling bad actors is, unfortunately, set.

Google did all the innovation it needed to and ever is going to. It needed to be broken up a decade ago. We can still do it now. Though I don't know how much it will save, especially if we don't also go after Apple, and Meta, and Microsoft.

It always has been like that on the internet. Now made worse for obvious reasons.

On the internet no one knows if you're a dog, human or a moltbot.

The internet has gone from a high-trust society to a low-trust society, all in the span of a couple of decades.

Enshittification strikes again.

And it doesn't have appear to have any means to rid itself of the bad apples. A sad situation all around.

People talk about AI slop but I predict that in a couple of years you won't be able to tell...

And at that point does it even matter? Zuckerberg wins.

"You really think someone would do that? Just go on the Internet and tell lies?" https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/just-go-on-the-internet-and-t...