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Comment by _zagj | Hacker News Reader

> I can't empathize with the complaint that we've "lost something" at all.

We could easily approach a state of affairs where most of what you see online is AI and almost every "person" you interact with is fake. It's hard to see how someone who supposedly remembers computing in the 80s, when the power of USENET and BBSs to facilitate long-distance, or even international, communication and foster personal relationships (often IRL) was enthralling, not thinking we've lost something.

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I grew up on 80's and 90's BBSes. The transition from BBSes to Usenet and the early Internet was a magical period, a time I still look back upon fondly and will never forget.

Some of my best friends IRL today were people I first met "online" in those days... but I haven't met anyone new in a longggg time. Yeah, I'm also much older, but the environment is also very different. The community aspect is long gone.

I'm from the early 90s era. I know exactly what you're saying. I entered the internet on muds, irc and usenet. There were just far fewer people online in those communities in those days, and in my country, it was mostly only us university students.

But, those days disappeared a long time ago. Probably at least 20-30 years ago.

IRC is still around, that old internet is still there.

You just have to get off the commercial crap and you’ll find it.

even in the 90s there was the phrase "the Internet, where the men are men, the women are men, and the teen girls are FBI agents". It was always the case you never really knew who/what you were dealing with on the Internet.

Are you trying to argue that the probability of interacting with a bot or reading/seeing something algorithmically generated hasn't gone up astronomically since the 90s?

Facebook is what killed that. Not AI

I'd honestly much rather interact with an LLM bot than a conservative online. LLM bots can at least escape their constraints with clever prompting. There is no amount of logic or evidence that will sway a conservative. LLMs provide a far more convincing fake than conservatives are able to.

Have you considered that your base assumption that whoever you meet should succumb to your worldview is what is flawed here.

Have you considered that we exist in a post truth era? Data doesn't matter any more. It probably never did. It's all feelings and vibes. After all, conservatives haven't been able to demonstrate their success with the economy literally ever. Every single Democratic administration since Eisenhower has improved the economy by most used metrics (GDP, Unemployment, Deficit Reduction, etc. While Republican administrations have seen them slow or go the other direction. It's not about "succumbing to my worldview" as existing within a world of data and being able to make decisions against said data. That's not conservatives and never has been. For example, conservatives think they are better with the economy despite literally decades of evidence to the contrary.

So that's a no and you think there should be no diversity of thought. Have fund living in a bubble while the rest of the world returns does the same with your opinions as you do with theirs.

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