This was probably always the likely outcome of an internet economy that revolves around the production and monetization of "content".
We started by putting advertisements on existing content, then moved to social networking and social media, which was essentially an engine for crowdsourcing the production of greater amounts of content against which to show advertisements. Because money is up for grabs, producing content is now a significant business, and as such, technology is meeting the demand with a way to produce content that is cheaper than the money it can make.
The problem of moderating undesirable human-generated content was already starting to intrude into this business model, but now generative tools are also producing undesirable content faster than moderation can keep up. And at some point of saturation, people will become disinterested, and tools which could previously use algorithmic heuristics to determine which content is good vs bad will begin to become useless. The only way out I can see is something along the lines of human curation of human-generated content. But I'm not sure there is a business model there at the scale the industry demands.
> We started by putting advertisements on existing content, then moved to social networking and social media, which was essentially an engine for crowdsourcing the production of greater amounts of content against which to show advertisements.
I see a lot of people talk nostalgically about blogs, but they were an early example of the internet changing from ever green content to churning out articles on content farms. If people remember the early internet, it was more like browsing a library. You weren’t expecting most sites to get updated on a daily - or often even a monthly - basis. Articles were almost always organized by content, not by how recent they were.
Blogging’s hyper-focus on what’s new really changed a lot of that, and many sites got noticeably worse as they switched from focusing on growing a library of evergreen content to focusing on churning out new hits. Online discussions went through a similar process when they changed from forums to Reddit/HN style upvoting. I still have discussions on old forums that are over a decade old. After a few hours on Reddit or HN, the posts drop off the page and all discussion dies.
Blogs were great when they supported RSS, you could subscribe to feed and get updates if they happened every day, or randomly months or years in the future. There was no need for refreshing to see if there was something new.
I feel like RSS feeds made it to easy for me to follow lots of blogs to the point where the amount of content was too much. Being forced to manually review blogs for updates works as a filter in that I only go through the effort (albeit still small) of visiting the page if I was interested enough in keeping up to date with it. Not saying RSS didn’t have great advantages; just that your comment made me think of this potential downside.
Also with some blogs we started to attach content to personalities, which was different than consuming content from another internet stranger.
And with personalities you have some form of relation to, you want these more recent updates instead of sticking to topics of interest.
Reddit is at least still focused on topics instead of people. I think this is why for some it still is more interesting than platforms like Insta, Facebook or Twitter.
That's a fascinating perspective. I imagine A blog should do something like press releases and describe and progress made on the actual website or plans for-. Forums should then play with ideas and chat is for hammering out details that are hard to communicate or overly noisy and for talking about stuff unrelated to the project.
> I imagine A blog should do something like press releases and describe and progress made on the actual website or plans for-
A lot of older websites actually used to do this with a “what’s new” section or page. With blogging, “what’s new” became the entire site, with almost the entirety of the content (everything that wasn't new) now hidden.
Ironically, after mentioning that discussion dies off incredibly quickly when HN stories fall of the front page, this discussion was moved off the front page to a day old discussion. My guess is that almost no one will see it now.
People some how forgot the concept of accumulated value. It use to be my main argument against platforms. You dump your stuff onthere and then it vanishes into the memory hole entirely by design. The point is to keep you on the website not to make your stuff available. It is a strange contradiction that really shouldn't be.
I remember when forums gradually turned into q&a repos.
Ive seen it! But yeah, I typically only browse the best stories section, basically I really want some human curation in my feed which might help with the vast amount of infogarbage generated by llms?
There isn't, because human trust can barely scale past 100 people, much less the entire internet. I think humans will recede into the tribes we were always built to understand and be a part of. Private group chats are far more popular and ubiquitous than we give them credit for, and I only see that accelerating in this climate.
"Echo chambers" have been the default for almost all of human civilization right up until about 10-20 years ago. You communicated with your immediate circle of friends and coworkers rather than arguing politics with LLM bots on Twitter.
No, this is different. A local bubble populated with a normal-ish distribution of people is different from a distributed bubble populated with people who became grouped either voluntarily or algorithmically.
At some level there is always a private mode. Think family and friends. Do you not have any issue with everything being public? I think the parent suggests we’re not made for very large groups and I kind of agree. I can’t name 100 people I know or known in my life. Maybe I can (barely) but with great effort.
Its not a coincidence that the printing press brought devastating war to europe in the form of the wars of reformation [1] .
The internet is another real tool for knocking down fences for free, by anyone. Its only a matter of time when there's pushback by angry fence-owners.
We absolutely need less friction and more of minding our own business and focusing on our own back yard instead of chiming in on someone thousands of miles away.
Don't get me wrong, I'm 100% for the free flow of information, but what people (HN crowd?) don't understand is that a significant subgroup of humans cannot tolerate relentless change or challenges to their worldview for too long.
The fact that you made a throwaway in order to make a personal attack rather than substantively engage with the point indicates that you don't actually have a good argument against it.
Im not sure all private chat groups are really private. Maybe some are but can’t help thinking the industry isn’t at least running AI on private chats and summarize what people are talking about.
Human curation is possible in an open system, but when you have a few large silos this algorithmic efficiency is put to use and we can observe the result. But I agree and hope people will lose interest and stop consuming trash. The gamble on the other side is that people will get used to poorer and poorer algo served content and the industry will continue squeeze profit out by any means necessary and indefinately. By looking at the history of cable television it appears there is a breaking point.
> The only way out I can see is something along the lines of human curation of human-generated content.
That's retweets.
> undesirable human-generated content was already starting to intrude into this business model, but now generative tools are also producing undesirable content faster than moderation can keep up.
> people will become disinterested, and tools which could previously use algorithmic heuristics to determine which content is good vs bad will begin to become useless.
So what these parts are saying is, tiny monoculture of bored college kids are always going to figure out the algorithm and dominate the platform with porn and spams and chew up all resources, and that both improved toolings and tie-in to monetary incentives intended to empower weaker groups to curb kids only worsens the gap, and that that's problematic because financial influencers are paying to be validated by the masses, not to be humiliated by few content market influencers.
But what is the problem with that? Those "undesirable content" producers are just optimizing for what market values most. If that's problematic, then the existence of the market itself is the problem. What are we going to do with that? Simply destroying it might make sense, perhaps.
>This was probably always the likely outcome of an internet economy that revolves around the production and monetization of "content".
hasn't publishing since Gutenberg been driven by the monetization of content? Looking at the history of the Catholic Church, potentially before that too.
I’ve been idly wondering about something like the Web of Trust. A social network where users vouch for one another's actually-a-real-humanness. There could be setting that let you adjust the size of the network you see (people you’ve actually met? One remove from that?)
What you’re describing is early Facebook. Your feed was only from your 1st degree connections. Content mattered because it was from people you cared about (and inherently knew, because users wouldn’t accept friend requests from people they didn't know). It really was the pinnacle of social media.
> But I'm not sure there is a business model there at the scale the industry demands.
This is the kicker. When unfettered by regulation or leaders/workers with morals, most industries would rather avoid human curation because they want to sell you something. Amazon sellers would rather you not see or not trust the ratings because they want you to buy their stuff without knowing it's going to fall apart. Amazon makes a profit off it, so they somewhat encourage it (although they also have the dual pressure of knowing that if people distrust Amazon enough they'll leave and go somewhere else, so they have to keep customers somewhat happy).
No, curation has to come from individuals, grassroots organizations, and/or companies without a financial interest in the things being curated - and it has to revolve around a web of trust, because as Reddit has shown, anonymous curation doesn't work once the borderline criminal content marketers find the forum and exploit it.
> The only way out I can see is something along the lines of human curation of human-generated content.
...however, unfortunately, curation doesn't solve the problem of people desiring AI-generated content. That's a much harder problem. Even verifying that something was created by a human in the first place is hard. I don't want to think about that. I'm just going to focus on curation because that's easier and it's also incredibly important for the lowering quality of physical goods as well.
No offense and I understand, but that use of "AI-generated content" sounds like somewhat of an euphemism. I think there are not significant number of people who specifically prefer AI generated versions, but rather it's referring to certain kind of content that the attempt to democratize and trivialize its generation by releasing AI models had completely backfired.
This distinction is important, because while AI is faster than humans, it's at best cheap gateway drugs into skilled human generations.
We started by putting advertisements on existing content, then moved to social networking and social media, which was essentially an engine for crowdsourcing the production of greater amounts of content against which to show advertisements. Because money is up for grabs, producing content is now a significant business, and as such, technology is meeting the demand with a way to produce content that is cheaper than the money it can make.
The problem of moderating undesirable human-generated content was already starting to intrude into this business model, but now generative tools are also producing undesirable content faster than moderation can keep up. And at some point of saturation, people will become disinterested, and tools which could previously use algorithmic heuristics to determine which content is good vs bad will begin to become useless. The only way out I can see is something along the lines of human curation of human-generated content. But I'm not sure there is a business model there at the scale the industry demands.