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points by goldenarm 3 days ago | 0 comments

Since the robocall tsunami of the 2020s, people stopped answering phone calls entirely.

The same thing might happen to the entire internet.

Definitely. There are still some areas of the internet with high enough signal to noise ratio, but many areas of the internet I just don't go now (pretty much anywhere remotely mainstream that is valuable to monetize attention and not heavily curated against it) because I just feel my self being manipulated the entire time and its mostly anger and frustration they use to activate a response from you.

[–] Arubis 3 days ago

The descriptor that I ran across the other day that kinda lumps this all together: the internet is a store. Some of us remember that it used to be a library.

[–] tracerbulletx 3 days ago

Yes that's good. I recently told someone going on Facebook was like standing in the check out aisle at Walmart and forced to look at all the old celeb gossip mags and conspiracy tabloids from the pre-internet era. A lot of what seems like everyone getting dumber is partially just people who normally would have avoided that stuff getting it put in their face too.

[–] order-matters 3 days ago

the pillaging will continue to wherever people go. the only reason we can avoid it is because others are sacrificing by being subject to it.

no one answers their phone now, and as such legitimate businesses rarely do cold calls as a main lead. they find you online instead. they buy data to figure out your email and habits. etc.

once the public internet becomes unbearable they will adapt. i dont know how and if i did i wouldnt give them the idea without working for it, but all the effort put into manipulating social media sites will absoutely go somewhere else once those sites dry up from real human signals

[–] CodingJeebus 3 days ago

I've had this exact experience a few times now on Reddit where I see a viral video and people point out that it's AI, and I don't always realize it right away. It's just not worth consuming content anymore that I don't feel confident about the provenance of.

So much of the front page was ragebait before AI, but ragebait that could be AI-generated is a hard nope for me.

[–] Loughla 3 days ago

I deleted my Reddit account when they killed 3rd party apps. I have no social media except Reddit and HN. My excuse for keeping Reddit was that the content was good, if you just curated your subs.

After killing it, and never going back to that site since, I can tell you that it gets your blood pressure up. Before chatbots, most popular content, even in the better subreddits were, essentially, ragebait.

Do your blood pressure a favor and stop going to reddit. HN is okay because it's slower paced and, typically, ragebait is discouraged here.

[–] pixl97 3 days ago

Just visiting a single site doesn't make much of a society for humans.

Even before AI was faking everything social media manipulation was doing a great job of breaking people apart. It filled them with rage bait until you had to cut them out of your life. Even what we called traditional media is mostly just garbage these days otherwise its almost completely unprofitable.

I don't know where this leads in the end. The attackers still have a lot of options as society disintegrates.

[–] nkrisc 3 days ago

Good. I think society as a whole has swung too far towards the internet and all things online.

I hope AI will help things swing back away from the internet.