Bots have taken over
Bots have taken over
I recently invited a job applicant to a first-round interview. Their CV looked promising and my AI slop detection didn’t go off. But then I got this reply:
This made me realize that the dead Internet arrived faster than expected. A few other purely qualitative examples confirmed the feeling.
HackerNews
HN now restricts ShowHN for new accounts after an influx of vibe-coded and low-quality ShowHN submissions.
Coincidentally as I’m writing this, HN also just updated their guidelines with the following rule:
Don’t post generated comments or AI-edited comments. HN is for conversation between humans.
When I revisited an old Reddit post about a sideproject of mine, I found bots clearly astroturfing a SaaS product in the comments. These profiles hide their comments on their accounts, but it’s easy to find hundreds of similar comments.
On the rare occasion I open LinkedIn, my timeline is mostly AI-generated slop among very few actually interesting professional updates.
GitHub
And of course let’s not forget AI spamming OSS repos with nonsensical PRs. What’s even funnier is when the reviewer turns out to be AI too.
Can we go back to an internet like this? I guess we can’t.
Read the original article
Comments
I only see two outcomes for this problem : an internet of verified identities (start by uploading your ID card). Or a paid internet, where it doesn't matter who you are, but since you're going to pay for that email or that reddit account, the probability that it's AI spam is greatly reduced.
And i'm looking forward to none of them.
I want cool cryptography where I can, e.g. verify where I'm writing from and what my age is without giving away any other information.
Or if I want, I can verify that I'm myself, and eschew anonymity, and certain platforms should only accept contributions from people who don't hide their identity.
Everyone knows who you are in the town square.
By ekropotin 2026-03-1121:43 What stops someone from handing over their idendity’s private keys to an agent?
Zero Knowledge Proof schemes
Applied ZKPs are being actively worked on in the blockchain sphere.
By DANmode 2026-03-126:10 “A zero-knowledge rollup (zk-rollup) is a layer-2 scaling solution that moves computation and state off-chain into off-chain networks while storing transaction data on-chain on a layer-1 network (for example, Ethereum). State changes are computed off-chain and are then proven as valid on-chain using zero-knowledge proofs.”
By nathancahill 2026-03-1121:012 reply I think this was the premise of Keybase?
By wizzwizz4 2026-03-126:11 Keyoxide still exists: https://keyoxide.org/.
It's kind of bizarre that Zoom is still bothering to keep the lights on at Keybase when it's been completely fossilized for six years now. The writing is so obviously on the wall that nobody should be relying on it for anything, and yet they just won't let it die.
It's not fossilized, it's just that no one uses it. Put hot chicks on there or make it mandatory for logging into Slack and suddenly everyone will be using keybase.io, and honestly I think web of trust is a good idea and if a webapp can make it seem easy or intuitive then I'm all for it.
We're scratching our heads wondering why there's no forward motion when it's simply that no one is pushing it.
By jsheard 2026-03-1121:37 Looks pretty fossilized to me: https://keybase.io/blog
They haven't added or really changed anything since the acquisition AFAICT, it's just trucking along exactly as it was the day Zoom bought them out. Twitter account proofs were broken by the API changes years ago and nobody is at the wheel to fix or even just deprecate them.
By DANmode 2026-03-125:54 > We're scratching our heads wondering why there's no forward motion
Did you miss “Zoom”?
IMHO, this is the exact instinct and there's a way to verify identity, location, and age without even having to share those directly.
By soco 2026-03-1121:43 Switzerland just voted recently to officially implement Selective Disclosure JWT, which does exactly all that. Social network registration can ask "are you 18?" and run with that - and only that. Or the club entrance. Or whatever, because it's all controlled by yourself in your app.
By wizzwizz4 2026-03-1121:07 I don't hide my identity, but I've yet to find a "non-anonymous" platform that actually accepts my identity.
By littlestymaar 2026-03-1121:171 reply Anonymity is important for many things. But on the flip side it's responsible of many issues with the internet today, because it makes moderation pretty much impossible (anyone can always just create a new account).
What we're missing is a way to have cryptographically secure pseudonymity: you log in to a website, you don't give any information whatsoever, but you cannot make two different accounts.
By pixl97 2026-03-1121:45 Most likely because your second sentence is impossible in one way or another.
Even if it's some kind of government encoded key, governments cannot be trusted to create imaginary people and hand them out to companies like palantir for large scale population manipulation.
By JohnMakin 2026-03-1122:34 Paid option doesn't really deter this behavior, it encourages it - a botter will see a price tag on a "real" account (see what happened to twitter's blue checkmark sub) and go oh goody, I can pay for people to think I'm real.
If you make the price high enough sure, but I'm unsure you can find the right price to simultaneously 1) deter bot traffic and 2) be appealing to actual users.
By drdaeman 2026-03-1121:51 Neither of those solves it, just tries to conserve the status quo.
The issue, as I understand it, is literally a new Eternal November, just that instead of “noobs” there are “clankers” this time.
Personally, I don’t give a flying fuck about things like gender, organs (like skin or genitalia) or absence thereof, or anything alike when someone posts something online, unless posted content is strongly related to one of those topics. Ideas matter no matter who or what produces them. Species fit into the same aspects-I-don’t-care-about list just fine - on the Internet nobody knows^W cares you’re a dog. Or a bunch of matrices in a trench coat. As long as you behave socially appropriate.
The problem with bots is that they’re not just noobs - unlike us meatbags they don’t just do wrong and stupid things but can’t possibly learn to stop (because models are static). Solving that, I think, is the true solution, bringing Internet back to life. Anything else seems to be just addressing the correlations to the symptoms.
(Yea, I’m leaning towards technooptimist and transhumanist views - I was raised in culture that had a lot of those, and was sold a dream of a progress that transcends worlds, and haven’t found a reason to denounce that. Your mileage may vary.)
Friend of a friend verification could side-step that, if there is a good way to penalize bad actors willing to violate the principle.
By rpcope1 2026-03-1121:18 I guess we're coming full circle back to red offbrand Hacker News
Someone, somewhere, salivating at the idea of combining both ideas. A paid for digital ID service that you can use as authentication for the web.
Actually, if I'm thinking about it. Social Media platforms already started this with the paid blue badge for verification, and it's also monthly subscription. But it's for their respective platform only, not universal.
By roxolotl 2026-03-1121:05 Isn’t this what World Coin is? Definitively not a fan of the project but I think the general goal is to get people to verify they are human and then somehow “waves hands blockchain” that can be carried with them on the internet.
Would that work though? Unless it checks your pulse every 30 minutes I don't see how that would make it better. Bots would use stolen IDs for that. It would only contain it at a smaller scale probably
By booi 2026-03-1120:56 There's definitely a price where it doesn't scale and that price is almost certainly lower than what people would be willing to pay once for themselves.
By pphysch 2026-03-1120:57 It would have to integrate with some kind of official government ID, so that there can be extremely serious criminal penalties for ID theft. But that's something for the next republic, because the current one's justice system is unlikely to be up to the task.
Members only comment blogs. Where you need an invite to comment also solves the problem. You need to know a real human to get access.
By MeetingsBrowser 2026-03-1121:202 reply That might raise the initial barrier, but it assumes every user behaves appropriately.
All it takes is one invited user to open the door to bots.
By Bombthecat 2026-03-1121:25 Then we go back to torrent sites.
Invite only. You get a number of invites per year etc. And once a year an open door or so
By throwaway94275 2026-03-1121:511 reply Blog admin sees who invited the bots and recursively kicks that account and any invited by it.
By MeetingsBrowser 2026-03-1122:201 reply I invite myself multiple times in addition to other real humans. Then I use my duplicate accounts to invite bots.
By throwaway94275 2026-03-121:041 reply I'm assuming there's tracking on the invites. So a recursive kick on X and all who X invited would still do the trick. If an IP address appears more than 5 times in an invite tree, ban the /24 or ASN if not from a friendly country for 10 minutes or other reasonable timeframe.
By MeetingsBrowser 2026-03-124:03 Getting unique IPs in any country you want is trivial for anyone but people building toy bots.
How far up the tree do you kick? Going too far up makes it so malicious people can "sabotage" by botting to get huge swatch of legitimate users banned.
Going to shallow means I just need to create N+1 distance between myself and my bot accounts
By TacticalCoder 2026-03-1121:43 > Members only comment blogs.
There, sadly, needs to be some gatekeeping and then it can work.
For example I'm member, since years, of a petrolhead forum where it works like that: a fancy car brand, with lots of "tifosi" (and you don't necessarily want all these would-be owners on the forum). To be part of the forum you must be introduced by some other members who have met you in real-life and who confirm that you did show up with a car of that brand.
If you're not a "confirmed owner", you can only access the forum in read-only mode.
It's not 100% foolproof but it does greatly raise the bar.
It's international too: people do travel and they organize meetups / see each others at cars and coffee, etc.
Or take a real extreme, maybe the most expensive social network: the Bloomberg terminal. People/companies paying $30K/year or so per seat each year probably won't be going to let employees hook a LLM to chat for them and risk screwing their reputation. Although I take it you never know.
It is the way it is but gatekeeping does exist and it does work.
By NoMoreNicksLeft 2026-03-1121:221 reply >Where you need an invite to comment also solves the problem. You need to know a real human to get access.
Bittorrent trackers, as absolute retarded as they are, have performed this experiment for us and the lesson we're supposed to learn is that this does not work. Someone, somewhere, has an incentive to invite the wrong sort eventually, which because of the social network graph math stuff, eventually means "soon". Once that happens, that bot will invite 10 trillion other bots.
By DiskoHexyl 2026-03-1121:58 Actually it does work for those invite-only trackers, especially in niche fields.
Unlike most public trackers which are either dead or on a life-support, member-only and invite-only sites are still kicking.
And you are personally responsible for your invitee
Verified entities defecting by using AI to generate their content for them will break this.
I can't recall the last time I did the Dew. Should I turn myself in to a reeducation camp?
I recall a WSJ article during the 2024 election that was about the fact that Tim Walz and JD Vance were both big consumers of Diet Mountain Dew, and how basically America ran across the board on various types of Mountain Dew. Can you really call yourself "American" if you're not doing the dew?
By hinkley 2026-03-1122:32 I drank enough for three people in college. My lifetime average is probably still in the margin of error.
By gr8tyeah 2026-03-1121:00 I pay for my ISP and the financial institution the money comes from has age verification
Social media, HN and the rest of internet first business can go broke
I don't see anyone out there propping me up directly. Why would I give crap if some open source hacker or etsy dealer doesn't have a home next month? Yeah I don't because they're not caring in the same way
Thoughts and prayers everyone else but your effort is clear, not going to be 1984'd into caring for people who clearly don't care back.
Honestly the $10 barrier to SomethingAwful back in the day (and I guess now since it’s still around) definitely made a huge difference. I hate the idea of subscribing to a site like HN or Reddit… but one time $10 to post? I’d accept that if it meant less bots.
A $10 one time not-an-asshole fee is totally reasonable.
History also shows you can take a $10 fee and maintain quality on SomethingAwful for quite some time.
I would probably not pay $10 to post on HN, but many spammers who expect some kind of tangible return would pay that, so the fee just makes the problem worse.
The spammers wouldn't pay it once though - the idea is that it's a good way to scale moderation. Each time an admin needs to ban a user there is a 10$ subsidy supporting that action - and if the bots come back then they get to pay 10$ to be banned again.
Assuming the money isn't wasted and is actually used to fund moderation 10$ is probably comfortably above the cost to detect and ban most malicious users.
By jnettome 2026-03-1122:53 That’s basically what Valve does on cheaters with premier accounts on cs:go/cs2. And the revenue still growing up.
By AngryData 2026-03-1122:51 Yeah, I love HN, but I wouldn't pay and I know many if not the majority of other people wouldn't. It would increase quality for awhile for sure, but what happens a year or two down the road? It would kill the user count and reduce comments and become less valuable over time.
By hinkley 2026-03-1121:09 I wonder how much that functions as an age gate since kids usually don't have credit cards?
Didn't that fee allowed to change account names of other users or something like that?
By yakattak 2026-03-1122:32 You could pay another $10 (or maybe $15?) to change someone else's avatar.
reminds me of Bill Gates in the 90s when asked about email spam. He said it would make sense to make an email cost like 1 cent so the spammers can't spam as much but this didn't sit right with the mindset of the people at the time.
By ryandrake 2026-03-1121:17 Also, while real people probably would not be willing to pay to E-mail, spammers who are making money would pay and consider it a cost of doing business. So the fee is having the opposite of its intended effect.
By selfsimilar 2026-03-1121:231 reply Hashcash was a proof-of-work system that would have put a computational tax on email. I don't know what kept it from getting more traction other than simple chicken-and-egg network effects, but it's a good idea, and worth resurrecting.
By ramses0 2026-03-1122:11 Email2000 is the only answer: https://cr.yp.to/im2000.html
TLDR: Mail storage is the sender's responsibility. The message isn't copied to the receiver. All the receiver needs is a brief notification that a message is available.
By plagiarist 2026-03-1122:38 We need something else, we need an "extreme" (~$1) fine that anyone can claim from any sender who bothered them, no questions asked. Spammers will stop instantly overnight. This would work for phone spam as well.
By 650 2026-03-1121:18 community idea:
"my2cents"
0.02 to post or send a message
By twentyfiveoh1 2026-03-1121:10 payment would need a delay too. Pay $10 and then wait a week or so for the payment to clear without it being reversed. Hopefully that stops the card stealers from dumping as much as possible before getting booted.
Could we just add complex and varied captcha to the comment & posting forms?
By bakugo 2026-03-1121:00 Odds are it would harm real discussions more than it would harm bot spam.
The bots exist for a reason, usually to covertly advertise a product, and by themselves already cost money to run. Someone looking to astroturf their AI B2B SaaS would probably be more willing to pay $10 to post than a random user from a less wealthy country who just wants to leave a comment on an interesting discussion.
By entrox 2026-03-1120:56 Given how easy it was to get banned, the :tenbux: were almost like a subscription.
By morkalork 2026-03-1120:54 Now we could only pay $$ to overwrite people's social media pfps, now that'd be fun.
By apazzolini 2026-03-1120:531 reply It's a beautiful system. And if you were a dipshit and got banned, you paid another $10 and hopefully learned your lesson.
By jacquesm 2026-03-1120:59 Exponential backoff: second time is $100 etc.
By zem 2026-03-1120:55 I think metafilter had a similar system and it was definitely one of the higher quality forums
By hackingonempty 2026-03-1121:26 > an internet of verified identities (start by uploading your ID card)
That is Facebook. I hear it is full of bots posting under verified identities.
By agumonkey 2026-03-1122:24 I wonder what would be the effect of a minuscule tax (0,01c) on network use. Could reuse addiction, abuse, create a fund to finance other things.
By bakugo 2026-03-1120:56 This 3-year old meme video is becoming more and more relevant by the day: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-gGLvg0n-uY
By basch 2026-03-1121:27 How would you overcome a local llm embedded into a keyboard?
By apitman 2026-03-1121:32 People can also move to smaller communities
By armchairhacker 2026-03-1121:11 There's a third option: web-of-trust. https://lobste.rs/ has some problems but not bot spam.
By raincole 2026-03-1121:57 It turns out that Twitter selling the blue marks is the correct direction, but no one would admit it.
You could have easily said this twenty years ago when photoshopped photos were going viral on the early internet. Turns out people are completely fine with ai content and photoshop.
By crab_galaxy 2026-03-1120:532 reply Fine in what way? What people?
I have not seen or heard of a single person who is excited about AI generated blog posts, or TikToks, or commercials, or images. In fact it’s the opposite, the internet coined the term AI slop, and my non-internet addicted friends hate the fact that chatGPT is killing the environment.
The only people I’ve ever seen champion AI are the few who are excited by the bleeding edge, and the many many peddlers
By officeplant 2026-03-1121:04 The most common people just seem to be the elderly who don't care / don't know any better. The same ones who told us never to believe anything from the internet. They seem to be hooked on weird AI jesus facebook posts, daily AI generated motivational content, talking to the chatbot in Whatsapp, etc.
There are probably more than 10^17 AI model executions occurring per day. I know in ye olde HN there are many Purists that are Too Good For AI, but the majority of the human race is consuming AI at a blinding rate, and if they really didn't like it, they would stop.
> and if they really didn't like it, they would stop.
I can’t really articulate why, but this doesn’t feel true to me. There are plenty of things humans do especially at scale that we don’t like, or we do that we don’t like others doing, and don’t stop
>The "Moloch problem" or "Moloch trap" refers to a scenario where individual, rational self-interest leads to a collective outcome that is disastrous for everyone. It describes competitive, zero-sum dynamics—often called a "race to the bottom"—where participants sacrifice long-term sustainability for short-term gains, resulting in a loss for all involved.
Hence why we have to keep feeding the orphan crushing machine.
By pseudalopex 2026-03-1122:421 reply Who wrote what you quoted?
Instead of getting judgy about Google responses, read the original story.
https://www.slatestarcodexabridged.com/Meditations-On-Moloch
By pseudalopex 2026-03-1123:47 I read the story before. Don't post generated comments or AI-edited comments. HN is for conversation between humans.[1]
By AngryData 2026-03-1122:55 And how much of that consumption is voluntary or willful? I don't want to get AI slop in my search results or in my forum discussions, it muddys the water with shallow at best information, often in excessively verbose ways that helps hide its more subtle falsehoods that it picked up.
By gdulli 2026-03-1120:55 Your comment doesn't make sense because the fact that "dead internet" has been coined since then (along with the popularization of "slop" and "hallucination") means there is a line and we have crossed it. Denial doesn't stand up to any scrutiny.
It's too bad we weren't more skeptical about the ways emerging technologies would eventually be used against us. Some warned about it but many (including me) ignored them. Perhaps we could be forgiven for that naivete, but there's no excuse to be ignorant of what's going on now.
By csallen 2026-03-1120:53 There's a huge difference between fake content and fake authors.
Why is it being called dead internet theory when, as far as I can tell, what's really happening is that big centralized systems are being overrun with bots? The internet existed and was pretty great before these large centralized systems came into being.
Anyone can still run a blog/website, and/or their own discourse server. There's no need to mourn for these centralized systems that largely existed only to exploit us in some way. Let's celebrate "small internet theory", an internet where exploitation is effectively impossible because every company that tries it is overrun with AI bots. That sounds awesome to me personally, but I was also up late last night watching clips of Conan O'Brien from 1999 and the nostalgia for that era / what the internet was like back then hit me so hard it was almost painful.
By JumpCrisscross 2026-03-1121:092 reply > Why is it being called dead internet theory
“A social networking system simulates a user using a language model trained using training data generated from user interactions performed by that user. The language model may be used for simulating the user when the user is absent from the social networking system, for example, when the user takes a long break or if the user is deceased” [1].
(More seriously: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dead_Internet_theory)
So why isn't it called "dead social media theory"? The internet is not only social media services, though I understand a lot of people seem to think that without centralized social media services there is no reason to use the internet.
Have you been on the internet at large lately? With google you may get one authoritative site on something and 50 bot copies of the site on different domains. Sometimes the stolen site is the number one return. Also, if you ran sites years/decades ago, you realized way back then the any local user posting was getting overran by spammers/bots. Now is so much worse that it's not worth doing in most cases.
So, most posts on social media aren't real.
Most user posts on non-social media are spam/not real.
Most websites in searches are copies/ad spam.
So yea, dead internet reality.
I spend all day every day on the Internet and I don't share your perspective. I might dislike centralized social media and yearn for a bygone era, but just in the past two days I had a very positive interaction with multiple real humans in the Commodore 64 subreddit that helped solve a problem I was having that isn't documented anywhere else on the internet yet. So then I went on my personal blog and blogged about it, which will get it out there on Google and help others. In this way, I am helping to keep the internet alive, I guess. "Be the change you want to see in the world," and all that.
> So then I went on my personal blog and blogged about it, which will get it out there on Google and help others.
That's some of the boldest optimism I think I've seen in awhile. Maybe your blog is more popular than I assume, but still
Traffic stats for my primary blog are public (I only started using simple analytics in December so there's only two full months of data): https://dashboard.simpleanalytics.com/amiantos.net
If you think a site with only 209 visitors in the past 30 days is going to move the needle, then I've got news for you. Especially if bots are the main source of that visitors count. That's very very close to the number of people visiting your site being you, you, and maybe your mom type of numbers. After that, it'll be skiddies and bots. Anybody that's run their own site has been there, but let's not make it out to be some grandiose site that will determine Google page ranking.
Why are you putting words/desires in my mouth that I did not voice? No one said anything about moving the needle. I said that my blog will go into Google results and help people, you said that sounded optimistic, so then I provided you proof that my blog already shows in google results and receives traffic. I've received messages from real people who have been helped by my writing on my blog, so it's not just bots.
I do not know what "move the needle" means or why you think I am trying to do that. Your excessive negativity and pessimism is unwarranted and I dislike it. Honestly between you and that other guy replying to my comments with seemingly thinly veiled vitriol for my perspective, it's just further proof of my point that being able to communicate with large groups of anonymous people is typically a net negative. Most anonymous people seem to be quite nasty. I'd rather write on my blog where no one like you will see it, and if you do see it, you likely won't go out of your way to send me an email with your negative comments because it's likely you do this for public attention.
By dylan604 2026-03-125:12 Okay Freud, you're right. It's all about the attention. That's why you're the one publicly promoting their blog for what is it, right, attention.
"You can do everything right and still lose".
At the end of the day there is no real penalty for being a bad actor on the internet. They get unlimited retries on spamming and otherwise causing problems. In many ways this helps Google entrench itself as the search/ad company. No one else has the money or compute resources to continuously update the internet. Furthermore they have told us it's their job to shove unskippable ads in our faces. They'll gladly let the public internet die in the future if they can push out their own version of "SafeInternet by Google/now with more ads!".
Every single one of your comments in this thread is some slippery slope stuff where you think corporations and federal government are going to work together to kill off the (public?) internet. It's okay that you feel that way, even if it's just a big ol' fallacy, but you don't need to repeat it in six different places. You made your point, you think the internet is doomed no matter what happens, great, let's move on.
By pixl97 2026-03-1123:36 >even if it's just a big ol' fallacy
Really?
https://www.cnbc.com/2026/03/08/social-media-child-safety-in...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_media_age_verification_...
Please wake up, won't be long before someone fires off a lawsuit at HN and we'll have to give identification here.
By specialist 2026-03-122:43 Not a slippery slope. That's exactly what happened.
You've (unironically?) restated the crux of the Dead Internet Theory.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dead_Internet_theory
Authentic human activity has been completely overwhelmed by bots and slop. Discerning signal from noise becomes too burdensome to bother with.
Of course the physical medium continues to exist.
Of course there are still humans, such as yourself, producing free content, to be harvested and regurgitated by parasites.
But authentic human activity is increasingly going out of band, no longer discoverable. Whatsapp, discord, private groups. Exactly as the theory predicted.
By myvoiceismypass 2026-03-125:38 To be really blunt - why do you think your blog takes will 'get out there on google' and also 'help others'?
By nwhnwh 2026-03-121:28 You are a kind soul, but your mind is afraid to see reality. It doesn't matter if you share that perspective or not, and "Be the change you want to see in the world" doesn't really say anything here. See this for example https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9kWeAhMponc, and this https://arnon.dk/the-trust-collapse-infinite-ai-content-is-a...
And check these books "Superbloom: How Technologies of Connection Tear Us Apart" and "No Sense of Place", maybe it would help you to see the overall effects of the internet (and other communication mediums) and forget this simplistic view that a lot of programmers have. The nature of the communication medium doesn't just affect the message, it shapes everything in society. Ignoring that because you had a good experience here and there won't change anything.
By TitaRusell 2026-03-1121:561 reply It is inevitable that in a few years we can't even tell a real user from a bot without forensic analysis.
When AI can post a million times a day the internet is FUBAR.
The problem is that average people cannot tell even now. Heck, I'm quite sure that /r/all is completely bot driven, yet I still check it occasionally. I'm not even sure about HN, but I didn't find yet so obvious manipulation than on Reddit.
By TitaRusell 2026-03-121:081 reply It's funny when people start accusing eachother of being chatGPT.
By mysterydip 2026-03-121:23 That sounds exactly like the kind of thing chatGPT would say to hide the fact it’s chatGPT… :)
100% agree that this is what it should be called. To argue that big websites being big makes them equivalent to the whole Internet is absurd. Besides, I love the idea of the only recourse to be to go back to independently run information websites.
By dylan604 2026-03-1121:46 For the younger generation, social sites are the internet. They open an app on their device, they don't go to sites by searching the web. I've seen people perform a web search in an app store thinking it was the same thing.
By burnto 2026-03-1122:56 Yeah I agree. It’s an acute problem on social media platforms where there’s a market force incentivizing it. If you’re mostly engaging in specific niche interactions with known communities or people, it’s not nearly so prevalent. The internet still works fine as a whole.
By jareklupinski 2026-03-1122:47 commercial internet services would prefer that you forget the internet without them can in fact exist
By genpfault 2026-03-1121:58 > A social networking system simulates a user using a language model trained using training data generated from user interactions performed by that user
Google People[1]?
By coldtea 2026-03-1122:19 >Anyone can still run a blog/website, and/or their own discourse server.
And those will also get chocked with fake bot "members" and bot comments.
Plus, if "anyone can still run a blog/website", this includes bots. AI created and operated blogs/websites, luring in people who think they're reading actual human posts.
In some ways it might be positive. My girlfriend had a small addiction to Instagram reels. The flood of AI generated videos on there just killed the magic for her and she stopped using it
By esperent 2026-03-122:06 Happy for your girlfriend, and anyone else who escapes because of this.
But it's not about the current generation of addicts. It's a play to capture the next generation.
It remains to be seen whether they'll get caught or not but it's important to remember that even if all of us mature humans find this new AI social media weird and gross, children don't have our preconceptions.
Meta is going to do everything in their power to train the next generation of young, immature brains into finding AI social media normal and addictive.
They (along with TikTok) already managed to do that to the last two generations so they have a scary track record here.
By E-Reverance 2026-03-1122:37 Happy to hear of this anecdata, as it gives me hope something similar will happen to my family
No, the old internet wasn't that great. There were so many problems. Finding things was hard, buying things was hard, integrating things was hard, compatibility was hard, everything was super fractured. It felt great at the time because you discovered all these random things and it was all novel at the time. Centralized (Or decentralized collaborative services like IRC or Usenet) really unlocked the power of the internet.
usenet and irc are quite old. how are they examples of some mythical point at which the internet was unlocked by services?
centralized and decentralized would include almost any service. your comment is so vague and ambiguous as to be meaningless. (that's a hallmark of LLM output. are you a bot?)
it was easier to find authoritative answers 20-30 years ago. google and, before that, altavista and yahoo, were quite good at directing queries to things like university-run information sites or legitimate, curated commercial sites. for the last decade the first google page has been crammed with useless SEO optimized fluff.
as for shopping, that was the first dotcom boom. what really took it mainstream was covid. not centralized or decentralized collaborative nonsense.
By keithnz 2026-03-1123:24 no.... not a bot, and please see HN FAQ before making comments like this.... I'm talking about decentralized common services, like IRC, Usenet, email, same service and they all interact together. But the old internet was super fractured when we got websites, nearly everything did things completely different, was very hard to trust anything. It was not easier finding authoritive answer 20 to 30 years ago, I started in 91, and it was hard to find anything. Search engines were a great improvement, but kind of hard to find what you wanted, things drastically improved with google and page rank, but that brought in other problems
By orbital-decay 2026-03-1123:21 Reasonable fragmentation and friction is a feature, not a bug. Global-scale social networks with zero resistance have turned the information superhighway into the information superconductor carrying infinite current, otherwise known as a short circuit.
> buying things was hard
This one is not a problem anymore.
By ambicapter 2026-03-1121:233 reply Anyone can run a blog/website and be subject to AI bot crawlers using terabytes of your bandwidth for no reason, yeah.
By ahofmann 2026-03-1121:44 Bandwidth is only expensive in the US, somehow. Here in Germany I didn't bother about bots and their additional traffic since 1998 (there are other annoying things about bots though).
By dwedge 2026-03-1122:17 If this encourages those people to stop sending hundreds of megabytes of crap per page load of their text content, it might be a good thing
More than that, it's practically impossible to find good specialized, human-written websites. Search engines don't find them, all results are AI garbage. With no real ability to be discovered, there's no incentive to maintain such websites too, and so the cycle of slop continues.
By dwedge 2026-03-1122:18 Kagi small Web, though their rss only seems to show 5 updates a day across thousands of sites. Also search for indieweb
By xorvoid 2026-03-1122:03 I generally agree with this, but I think the small internet hasn't succeeded in building social replacements for the "centralized systems". The internet is a social technology. So for this to be viable, the small internet needs an answer.
Occasionally, someone mentions RSS as a solution. That's only a small component of the solution.
By robotswantdata 2026-03-1121:205 reply How would the small internet fight the bots?
Aggressive moderation? Disable UGC?
In an ideal/fantasy world under "small internet theory", every online friend group would have their own Discourse server set up (similar to how friend groups use Discord now), and traffic/usage of that Discourse server is so small that it would be a waste of resources to try to swamp it with bot traffic, and on top of that, everyone on the Discourse server are friends who can vouch for new members who join, so no bot could join the Discourse server because no one would know who they are.
I understand that some may feel we are losing something, by not being able to go onto a website and anonymously talk to 1000s of other anonymous people we do not know, but I do not think that has actually been a net positive and this bot issue demonstrates the issue quite well: if you do not know who you are talking to, you do not know if they are telling the truth, or if they are someone you should even listen to at all, and now they might not even be human. So why do it? I would rather talk to my friends, people I've met in meatspace or over voice chat in a game, people who I can vouch for and that I know I can respect and trust.
Let's build small communities of real friends who recognize each other and spend time with them on the internet, in that way the internet will never die.
>Let's build small communities of
And 10 minutes later Texas demands you identify all your users age when someone posts a porn image somewhere. Facebook will gleefully laugh all the way to the court saying we need such internet ID to entrench themselves.
>, in that way the internet will never die.
You mean in the exact way the internet used to be... then died?
I'm guessing your GenX or a Xennial, it's how we think. Relationships and friendships are hard things to acquire and keep and you have to work to do it otherwise friends disappear. The thing is the younger generations mostly don't think that way. They have mostly always lived in a world where connections are cheap and easy to maintain. Attempting to move to a system that is more difficult will be very difficult for them.
> Attempting to move to a system that is more difficult will be very difficult for them.
That doesn't make it wrong, it just might make the last 20 years a mistake.
By pixl97 2026-03-1122:21 Large scale mistakes are very difficult to fix and have entrenched groups to ensure they continue. See: Internal combustion engines, Cigarettes.
By senordevnyc 2026-03-122:44 So I’m a member of a group of about 70 middle-aged guys who have a discord server exactly like this. We live all over the country, but most of us have met in person, we travel the world together, and we do an annual retreat where usually about half of us meet up. In addition to discord, we have a bunch of groups on Marco Polo, and we have little sub-groups that do zoom calls regularly. Really wish some of them lived nearby, but in spite of that it’s been one of the best things in my life for years now.
By ahofmann 2026-03-1121:47 Small internet isn't very attractive for most bots. Also, I use websites that are invite-only. This is effectively a web of trust. This works pretty well, bots aren't a real problem there.
By jasondigitized 2026-03-1121:49 Run your site like an old school BBS. You only run into these problems when you invite the world to your site and want big numbers. You don't have to do that.
By thesz 2026-03-1121:29 HashCash.
It would be interesting if we had some sort of local verification in the real world. As in picking up some key from some physical place or having it sent to some physical place. Some services like nextdoor are set up like this and mail out account auth to make sure the user is local to their next door group. Obviously you can imagine how it might be abused but it is impossible to do so at the scale you can abuse digital only methods.
By robotswantdata 2026-03-1121:37 Pokémon go was ahead of its time
By Lerc 2026-03-1121:14 It reminds me of the cartoon of two people on an escalator that stops working and one says to the other "Last time this happened I was stuck for four hours"
I'm thinking there might have been a deeper message than the moment of ridiculousness.
By obsidianbases1 2026-03-1122:02 > what's really happening is that big centralized systems are being overrun with bots? The internet existed and was pretty great before these large centralized systems came into being.
This is a great point. Suddenly, I'm looking forward to this
By raincole 2026-03-1121:55 > Anyone can still run a blog/website, and/or their own discourse server
Including bots.
By jasondigitized 2026-03-1121:472 reply Bring back BBS. Getting into the good ones was a process back in the day.
By amiantos 2026-03-1121:50 It's funny you mention this, I got a Commodore 64 Ultimate the other day and one of the first things I did was load up the BBS client and browse some BBSes. Those are from before my time (my first PC was a Compaq Pentium 166) so I never got to experience them for real. But if the rest of the internet collapses under the weight of bot traffic, BBSes are quite nice.
By glimshe 2026-03-1122:11 BBSs have been in theory replaced, but in reality they haven't even been approached by modern social media. Small forums full of dedicated users, often local. So many great memories.
By danfunk 2026-03-123:01 I love "small internet theory." Beautiful view of the future.
We're talking right now on a centralized system that's slowly being overrun by bots. We can survive without, but I'll miss it.
By raw_anon_1111 2026-03-1122:143 reply And who is going to know your blog exists? If they search on Google they are going to get an answer from AI and stop
In my experience AI doesn't give the answer you want because it gives the most shallow and basic, many times so basic as to be worthless, response. Then I either scroll through 20 results hoping I see one that isn't an AI writeup of the exact same incomplete source, or I give up and search out a specific site I know exists that isn't AI written for that information.
By raw_anon_1111 2026-03-1123:19 Thats not exactly making an argument for the discovery of blogs
By amiantos 2026-03-1122:25 Who cares if anyone knows my blog exists? I'm not writing my blog to farm engagement as I do not run ads on my blog. I write on my blog because I want to write my thoughts down and project them into the world. Whether or not anyone sees them is pretty unimportant.
If my writing helps someone via them hitting my blog directly or them getting the answer via AI aggregation, mission accomplished.
By dwedge 2026-03-1122:16 Kagi small web, for one
By Krei-se 2026-03-1121:52 Your welcome to link your proven human page with mine.
Id even run a dedicated UT99 server lol
By nwhnwh 2026-03-121:21 You can create a blog, yeah. But you also can write the blog with AI. So, you still need to filter the content. Over time, people will find that "The signal-to-noise ratio has hit a breaking point where the cost of verification exceeds the expected value of engagement." https://arnon.dk/the-trust-collapse-infinite-ai-content-is-a...
By zedlasso 2026-03-1122:07 it was originally called zombie web but that didn't catch so it turned into this.
By tracerbulletx 2026-03-1122:31 Parasitic zombie internet.
> Let's celebrate "small internet theory", an internet where exploitation is effectively impossible because every company that tries it is overrun with AI bots.
But isn't it even harder for small forums to resist the robot onslaught without the trillion dollar valuations to fund it?
Although, part of the reason Facebook/Linkedin/Twitch/etc have bots is because those companies secretly want them, in order to inflate their usage numbers.
> Although, part of the reason Facebook/Linkedin/Twitch/etc have bots is because those companies secretly want them, in order to inflate their usage numbers.
Yes, they are disincentivized to get rid of bots.
By pixl97 2026-03-1121:40 The people that want to get rid of the bots get crushed because said botting technology is hyper advanced and cheap to use because of the massive scale of social media. This ends up with huge numbers of them getting put behind services like cloudflare further consolidating the internet.
By gpderetta 2026-03-1121:51 signal/noise
By Rapzid 2026-03-121:51 You know.. I keep thinking this might be a good thing in some ways. AI spam could save us from the worst of the current social media status quo, the toxicity of the attention "economy", but flooding it so thoroughly nobody wants to engage with it anymore. Maybe the world can collectively "wake up" and "go outside" by turning towards local and more intimate communities for social interactions..
It's a shame though that this is gonna kill so many sites and projects. Sure we have ChatGPT, but also with things like Google AI summary getting so much better traffic to sites is going to plummet. Without people visiting I think the incentive, heck even motivation, for a ton of the sites is gone. We've seen it with sites like Stack Overflow, but it's probably going to happen to just about everything..
Things are definitely going to change in significant ways. The internet of the past is definitely dead, it just doesn't know it yet.
