Comment by tracker1 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by tracker1 | Hacker News Reader

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I'm a mod/admin on a topic site, similar to HN in structure... one of the posts I removed a few weeks ago literally made me feel ill... it was a guide on setting up a website, then using an LLM to generate hundreds of "articles" for said site.

I've started seeing content sites that are obviously generated content looking at it... mostly in terms of recipe content for lower carb, or sugar free... some list ingredients, but no measurements, others list directions that don't match ingredients. TBH, these kinds of activities make the internet less useful overall.

Between the above and sock puppet accounts, I can't help but think it may be a time to return to self-hosted systems like the BBSes of the 80's and early 90's. I know some still exist, but they're mostly around those that were into the tech, or otherwise into the older turn based text games or artwork. I know there's various systems from discorse to lemmy that are a bit more modern. I can't help but think something closer to a single server version of Facebook Groups +_Chat might go a long way... not even federated, but single-interrest groups that aren't beholden to a larger org (reddit, etc).

That's fascinating. I'm also seeing the sort of effects that this recession has been having on people especially online, where a lot of the guides you're talking about are being pushed more and more as a way to "side hustle". Having a side hustle is pushed more and more these days because a "main" hustle doesn't exist anymore due to wage stagnation.

Part of the popularity of these sort of things stems entirely from how much money is reportedly up for grabs. If you tell people they can do this and bring in 2k a month on the side, they're all in. Likewise, if we had enough funds to not have to worry, these sort of things would rarely be used as there's no real joy in the pursuit of it. My theory on why AI is accelerating garbage content much faster than any other potential benefits.

Even the highlight of recipes is notable, recipe blogs are great earners due to the stability of ads and output of content. This becomes a target for AI (when I say AI here I mean people consuming AI API) due to the high ad value target. That way even if they do eventually drop, get found out, reported to google, all of that, they would have still made enough to do it again.

My Twitter verse is filled with people making websites with thousands of pageviews from ai generated content. Google obviously is turning a blind eye to this possibly because they are planning on something a lot bigger than chatgpt with ai. And when it happens the internet will be littered with ai generated content that it is impossible for anyone to accuse them and them alone for stealing content.

>I can't help but think it may be a time to return to self-hosted systems like the BBSes of the 80's and early 90's

I couldn't agree more. We need to stop using other people's computers to host our stuff. (Or, at least we need to rent the machines ourselves). These days, the BitTorrent protocol is popular enough that you could likely host the equivalent of a YouTube channel for very little actual bandwidth cost.

Text, forums, etc... without media, are almost free until you scale into millions of users.

Doesn’t the BitTorrent protocol use other people’s computers to host your stuff?

It uses everyone who has already downloaded a file to help share it, so the more popular a file is, the more people host it.

You don't have to keep sharing though, once you've downloaded it. It's voluntary.

To the above, have thought about trying to create some kind of turn-key option or close to it that can run on Cloudflare workers + D1 or similar... just to let people get started relatively inexpensively.

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