Going back two years on Hacker News is like entering another, better universe

At every juncture there have been people reminiscing about the good old days that never actually existed at all. About how great it used to be compared to today.

I think the funniest are the constant "man, remember when the BIGS used to engage with us proles?" Ignoring that there are still many founders and the like hanging out here, present, future and past, what a weird thing to reminisce about. It's like "I used to be in the presence of people who mattered". I mean, matter yourself, because pretending you're in a club with them is foolhardy.

While HN is part of the set, I think we need to look larger. Is it just HN, or is it everywhere? If it's not everywhere, what percentage of sites is it? What are the sites that don't have this issue like or do different.

I think part of it is that HN has grown a lot because of a lot of other sites getting worse. The problem is that growing makes it worse. Then add on top of that there are a lot of high value targets here on HN that bots try to target, financially or politically.

Internet is a messy place now. I remember years and years ago, like early 2000s people thought that things like astro-turfing weren't real, and governments were not targeting individuals/groups on forums. How nieve their were.

I'd bet the closure of other walled gardens like reddit drives traffic more than anything of content.

These comment sections follow the same trajectory of all comment sections since the birth of the internet.

While it has always been a thing on here to some degree, the one growing trend I will note is that people are increasingly more forceful in demanding that everyone know about the things they aren't interested in, and more demanding that other people don't talk about things that don't interest them.

It's like people can't just skip a submission on the front page. They absolutely must go in to every discussion to tell everyone how much they don't want to read about or talk about that subject, and how much they want everyone to stop talking about it.

It's tilting at windmills. Right now this can mostly be seen in AI discussions where just about every AI-related submission will have a number of people declaring that it's all so boring and they wish there was an HN ban on such submissions. Cue someone foolishly believing them making yet another "HN without the AI" variant that sits unloved.

But the same thing could previously be seen against things that people don't want to be a thing. When WWDC happens people will announce that they're sick of all of the Apple news. The same for Google during I/O. Etc. People are against some thing and they really, truly think they can shame or scold others into falling in line.

But I'm a creep

I'm a weirdo

What the hell am I doing here?

I don't belong here

Then their children show up and the cycle repeats again.

Time flows like a river, and history repeats itself...

Eventually you end up with stackexchange or Reddit or 4chan where 95%+ of posts are bots or at least LLM generated, and the remaining 5% is crazy people who refuse to leave. HN is behind in that cycle but will inevitably and unavoidably catch up because as I stated there's no repair mechanism. All successful online orgs and communities attract bots and LLMs that kill the organization. There is no immune system other than unplugging and touching grass IRL.

My guess about "large scale socioeconomic effects" is we can't talk about Dead Internet Theory in public in polite company, but we can talk about "too much LLMs" or whatever in a vague sense while describing all the symptoms of Dead Internet Theory. Like those people who complain about poop on the sidewalks but can't be permitted socially to declare any sort of dislike of homeless people, so the talk is focused solely on the symptoms as if the symptoms appeared magically, an uncaused causation. The advertising fraud bubble will pop, eventually, and it'll all be blamed on LLM bots on social media, it totally wasn't planned and aided and abetted by the companies themselves, no, LOL. Their profits off advertising fraud were totally accidental and unintentional, you see, so they should get away with it. The people to blame are those vague AI bot things that magically appeared and totally had no legally prosecutable humans behind them.

Another large scale effect to talk about is massively pulled forward demand. A decade or two of Facebook and that pulls a lifetime of demand forward. What happens when the bill's due and nobody left but a tiny fraction of hopeless addicts? If the population as a whole does a lifetime of doomscrolling in 20 years, the next generation at least will be a total drought. Internet access will never go away because its too useful to pay your bills online, but social media will almost certainly go the way of the late 1970s CB Radio crash. I assure you CB radios are still being made, people still making money off them, and people are still using them, however only a microscopic fraction of the population uses CB Radios. So it will be soon, for "socializing online".

But Reddit's shitposting culture makes threads difficult to follow and powerfully impacts the culture there. On the better, closely moderated subreddits, threads are swiss-cheesed with deleted comments. It's just a very different reading experience.

But I can't see the Reddit comment change as anything other than a cynical "astroturfing as a service" to advertisers. Doesn't seem to be working out for them though given their stock performance this year.

In general, something akin to this has been said at every political movement throughout history. Stop complaining, stop making waves, know your place, stop disrupting order. Such admonishments are not apolitical! Rather they are inherently political - in favor of preserving the status quo.

Our world and our societies are facing many problems. Technology has a part in most of them, which is why discussion of technology tends to surface criticisms. You may desire to live in a bubble where you don't have to see such criticisms, but this is an open public discussion forum and most people are not. Sorry.