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Comment by gumballindie | Hacker News Reader

In a world where everything is procedurally generated and people’s property stolen there is no benefit of using the internet for anything else but e-commerce or porn. Perhaps a few communities here and there populated by sane people otherwise it will be filled with dubious content.

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So we build AI tooling to parse the internet on our behalf and find us the content we want. News will still be available, and users, to some level of verification or another, will still be communicating - we're not all going to just stop using the internet...even with massive amounts of noise it's still better than nothing. We'll just build better and better tools for sifting through the chaos.

Probably, we'll end up with a new paradigm for web browsers that involves a lot of filtering on top of the morass of raw internet. Dunno exactly what it'll look like, but it'll probably involve multiple LLMs and some kind of abstraction on top of 'web pages'.

Maybe the web of trust will finally become a useful tool.

Is it old and curmudgeonly of me to say that sounds terrible and I want no part of it? As though our filter bubbles aren't already driving us into our own realities already.

I agree. The very notion seems unacceptably dystopian and likely to make a lot of the bad things about the web even worse.

Problem is that building these tools at the expense of genuine content creators will alienate said content creators.

The end result with be a south park type of human centipede that few sane people will want to be a part of. I expect communities to become more segregated - as in real life where small communities isolate away from criminals - and more closed. It makes sense considering rampant theft, misinformation and ever increasing dubiousness that plagues the internet as a medium - in no small part thanks to procedural content generators that are schizoidly compared to human intelligence.

If we need to use AI in order to make the web even moderately useful, then the web is truly dead.

> even with massive amounts of noise it's still better than nothing

Nothing isn't the alternative. If the web literally vanished tomorrow, we still have other existing ways of communicating, researching, and recreating.

I've regularly thought "what's the point of creating, taking photographs or putting effort into [artistic endeavour] if it means that it's just going to be stolen and reposted on Instagram, Reddit, TikTok ad nauseum?"

Obviously there ARE points to doing so, but it feels ultra-shitty that you're consigning yourself to having your work stolen if you're good enough.

You're assuming some place that's not the internet will exist. At least in the US with our worse than lax privacy laws, devices that turn IRL occurrences into digital data will multiply until there is simply no where left unconnected.

Is your friend running a phone app that's identifying the people around them and the topics they are interested in, all while earning a few dollars?

Where are you getting news from that's not just the firehose of falsehood? Do you really trust the people sending it to you, or are they profiting off of shoveling bullshit in to the feed?

The silver lining might be its hardly worse than how its already been. People complain we are entering an era of a firehose of falsehood. Its been that way since propaganda was rebranded as public relations after the first world war, probably longer even. You never are exposed to the full truth, the facts, the contexts. The incentives to shift opinions are too high to ever simply faithfully educate the populace. Control of the common narrative of “truth” is highly profitable, and these reins of power will never not be controlled by some entity.

> there is no benefit of using the internet for anything else but e-commerce or porn.

For me, this is already about 80% true. The web is largely a vast wasteland at this point.

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