Hacker News Reader

HNHacker News

Top New Best Ask Show Jobs

Comment by flir | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

flir·

There's something darkly funny about that - I remember when the web wasn't considered reliable either.

There's certainly echoes of that previous furore in this one.

View on HN

> I remember when the web wasn't considered reliable either.

That changed?

There are certainly reliable resources available via the web but those definitely account for the minority of the content.

I think it got backgrounded. I'm talking about the first big push, early 90s. I remember lots of handwringing from humanities peeps that boiled down to "but just anyone can write a web page!"

I don't think it changed, I do think people stopped talking about it.

The web remains unreliable. It's very useful, so good web users have developed a variety of strategies to extract and verify reliable information from the unreliable substrate, much as good AI users can use modern LLMs to perform a variety of tasks. But I also see a lot of bad web users and bad AI users who can't reliably distinguish between "I saw well written text saying X" and "X is true".

> I remember when the web wasn't considered reliable either

It still isn't.

Yes, it still isn't, we all know that. But we all also know that it was MUCH more unreliable then. Everyone's just being dishonest to try to make a point on this.

I'm more talking about the conversation around it, rather than its absolute unreliability, so I think they're missing the point a bit.

It's the same as the "never use your real name on the internet" -> facebook transition. Things get normalized. "This too shall pass."

Reply on news.ycombinator.com