Comment by SunshineTheCat

I think some of this is caused by the non-obvious mechanisms of how interactions on these platforms work.

When you replied to a thread on a phpbb forum (or when you reply to this HN thread), your reply „lived” in that thread, on that forum, and that was that. The algorithm wouldn’t show that reply to your dad.

I remember liking a comment on Facebook years ago, and being horrified when some of my friends and family got a „John liked this comment, join the discussion!” notification served straight onto their timelines, completely out of context. I felt spied on. I thought I was interacting with a funny stranger, but it turned out that that tiny interaction would be recorded and rebroadcast to whomever, without my knowledge.

Similarly, commenting on a youtube video was a much different experience when your youtube account wasn’t linked to all your personal information.

If you comment on a social media post, what’s going to happen? How sure are you that that comment, however innocuous it may seem now, won’t be dredged up 8 years by a prospective employer? Even if not, your like or comment it’s still a valuable data point that you’re giving to Zuckerberg or similar. Every smallest interaction enriches some of the worst people in the industry, if not in the world.

The way I speak, the tone I use, the mannerisms I employ, they all change depending on the room I’m in and on the people I’m speaking to - but on modern social media, you can never be sure who your audience is. It’s safer to stay quiet and passive.

Most of her friends are probably women. Try making an account with an obvious female name and you will see a marked difference on most social platforms I am saying this as a guy we really don't understand the world women live in online or offline.

Thats just what the internet of the mid to late 90s was like. People rarely used their real name, there were hundreds of forums, some private. You could have different nicks on them.

Nobody knew you were a dog on the internet[1] until the rise of Facebook and linking your real identity with an online identity.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_the_Internet,_nobody_knows_...

But your friend is wrong. She does know at least one person who comments on online forums. I bet she knows more too.

Most of the internet users are passive content consumers, and it’s been the case since a long time ago. There's a post about it from 2019:

https://bewilderbeast.org/2019/08/16/most-of-what-you-read-o...

I never tell people I comment online. No one I know knows my Reddit username (as far as I know…). Few of my friends even know what HN is.

> No idea how to fix the internet, maybe it's time to move to gopher or another protocol :-/

Fido and Usenet are still around. Kind-of. IMO google virtually killed that, too, when they started peddling google groups and did the classic embrace-extend-extinguish on the Usenet.

To be fair, back in those "good old phpbb days", people trolled just as hard as anyone does now, and maybe worse, since the consequences of it were not as visible, and getting in trouble for things you said online was virtually nonexistent. Everyone used a fake name, and while it might be possible to dox someone, it wasn't an operational concern for anyone who just wanted to be a jerk...

Which Reddit thread was that, out of curiosity? And how do you know which commenters were bots?

> she said: "I know nobody that comments on online forums.

Yet she knows you and you and me are strangers talking to each other on this forum. I think we don't know even close friends what online communities people hang out - the reason she didn't know about you being on HN.

I don’t see any obvious evidence of bot activity on that thread (and all of my spot checks strongly leaned human). Were some comments removed or something?

They don't write on forums but they like or share a story. It's just more passive/consumer-minded.

I know I self-censor a LOT.

> how the thread was full of bots talking with other bots

I am sure there are some dead giveaways, but how can you be sure about that?

What I have experienced is both going into forums/discussions someone said was bots talking to bots, with no real clear indication by any of the many markers I am aware of that it was in fact bots; and also comments calling responses bots seemingly as a manipulative dismissal in response to something that was not the consensus or commonly approved position.

I say that because my impression is that what is happening is a full on breakdown of civic discussion and conversation as a whole. The internet destroyed IRL public forums (pubs/bars, clubs, etc) and the draconian COVID policies took the death knell to many more, and now bots and the seemingly bigger issue of immediate distrust of everything, seems to also be destroying online conversations of all sorts.

Yes, you’ll be able to have small group meetings and maybe even voice/video only conversations, but that brings a whole host of other systems changes with it, especially as mass surveillance long surpassed anything the worst tyrants of history could have ever even dreamed of implementing. It all seems a shift into unhealthy territory as a civilization in general, including since essentially all western governments cannot be trusted by their own people anymore.

I think the idea that nobody would talk to strangers online is a bit too general. We are all mostly doing it here. I do it on reddit all the time in the same recurring subreddits that I've grown to trust. IRC was also pretty hostile back in the 90s. But again it depended on the communities. Just think you can't generalize the internet this way.

most people just don't tell other people about what they do online. it's very private.

like, it's a running on joke on most social media websites that "i hope no one i know irl finds this account..."

i think your friend is just overestimating her knowledge of her friends' lives

And yet, here you are, posting ...

BTW, I don't explicitly disagree with what you're saying, but it would be good to look at actual data instead of anecdata to know for sure, and the people who have the data are not telling ...

For what its worth. I recently joined "Carpokes" which is a free members only Porsche forum being run by a man hell bent on keeping it a friendly, bot-free, community. Its been great engaging in a forum again where I look at it maybe once a week.

> Trust has eroded so much over the last two decades that most forums are either full of bots or full of annoyed and toxic people. It's very rare to find welcoming communities to newbies, and most of the ones I have discovered were offline connections.

Tumblr is still doing pretty well on that front. I'm there for a fandom, and it's a super positive atmosphere where everyone just wants to make and talk about cool art.

This thread is working pretty decently. No bots so far

I’m a man who had to do this because of stalkers. Literally serious, life damaging stalkers.

All my real HN friends are on https://news.ysimulator.run/news

Reputation management is what it will take to bring trust back to all forms of media. It means creating a trusted identity that can be verified, and that the identity is known to be a real human with a reputation to lose if exposed as being a bot or otherwise untrustworthy.

Unfortunately, for common people whose aim is not celebrity, this means handing over your privacy in order to have a voice.

We can do this in our IRL circles of trust, people know you because they have met or interacted with you personally.

Online, this means someone like Zuck creating a digital identity for us after we entrust them with our privacy, or some kind of open source complicated technology identifier like a cryptographically verified signature that is techno bro-free that will only be adopted or understood by tech literate.

It's a dark day for genuine human interaction and trust.

Everyone who was on Livejournal before G+ “invented” “Circles” had absolutely no problem with locking posts to “friends” (people they followed) or various “friends groups” that were subsets of their friends. It was fucking hilarious to see everyone say it was too hard on G+. Just two dropdowns right there on the new post page next to the main text field. Super simple. Creating and editing the groups was a pretty simple task with its own page.

Now that I look back at that I wonder what kind of theories suggest that abilities like that will result in reduced ad impressions, since I feel like every decision made by social sites makes much more sense when viewed through that lens.

One of the things I hope will come from the Trough of Disillusionment in cloud computing will be families running redundant file servers hosting the family photos instead of doing everything on IG.

Your three tech savvy family members should all have redundant copies of the photos of memaw’s wedding and Uncle Jim when he was 2 and looked exactly like your cousin’s second kid. I don’t need to see those. Your stalker ex boyfriend definitely doesn’t need to see those. It’s none of our goddamned business.

Someone, I think WD? Already made a play at this but I think it fell on deaf ears and will have to be tried again after the hype cycle calms tf down.

Yeah why put anything on social media. Your content is just a means to put ads alongside, and then trained to death by their AI.

I’ve been thinking about setting up a family domain and just hosting my family’s pictures to it as a way to share internally. But the risk exposure of running anything online is just so bad now, it feels risky and a pain in the ass to both give family access to see and post but also seal it off from spammers and scammers.

The way in which any open text box on the internet is guaranteed to turn into a malware vector is new now, and makes casual and marginally technical users trying their own thing much higher stakes and annoying.

Apple has photo sharing where you can share photos privately.

Discord is really where it is at these days. Discord servers with 50-100 people form the new social fabric of the internet where real community lies. In theory Reddit was supposed to be this but

1. Reddit communities tend to get too large

2. Subreddits overflow into each other too much through cross posting and brigading

3. Post history being public meant that you could get banned/brigaded for your comments on a totally different subreddit (i.e. bots autobanning you on one subreddit for posting on another subreddit).

The magic of discord is that everyone in the server I frequent I either know personally or they are known by someone I know personally. It creates a nice fabric of community and trust. Literally zero moderation over the past 10 years as everyone knows each other and behaves like normal adults and we also don’t get all up in arms when someone says something controversial.

If only Discord weren't so incredibly bloated and full of stupid features aimed at 14-year-old gamers.

Subreddits ultimately took over when Usenet moderation failed to keep up. I had chat groups before the Web was really even a thing and they lived on until things like Slashdot and Digg took the reins.

It's more of a bad IRC replacement than a reddit one.

One thing that's having a little comeback is the email newsletter (see Beehiiv). There's something nice about being able to get exactly what you signed up for and nothing more. No ads, no recommended content, no infinite scroll.

Discord is IRC, just with modern features.

I wonder if there are any old school protocols out there to create a huge business around by just centralizing them and offering features people have been asking for decades.

Probably not.

I think the platforms have changed. FB used to be 100% posts by people you know. I opened it today, and maybe 1 out of 50 posts were by someone i know, the rest was "trending" content.

Its essentially an entirely different website now.

Would it show up in the numbers on web usage, platform usage, etc? People who do this drop out of the sample - they don't show up in the numbers. As far as your stat gathering is concerned, they don't exist.

If you're actually doing a census of people and asking about their web usage and social habits, it'd show up. So maybe Google or Facebook has the data if they were to do say cohort analysis on Google Analytics or Chrome History or Facebook beacon logs, counting specifically the number of total unique Internet users that used to visit social media but no longer do. But such an analysis would require SVP-level privacy approval (because it joins together personal, non-anonymized data across multiple products), and why would an executive commission a study that potentially tells them that their job is in danger and their employer is making a mistake by employing them? And if they did, why would they ever publicize the results?

AFAIK, most of the major public-facing analytics platforms work by sampling their users. If their users are voluntarily choosing not to engage with the platform that their sampling runs on, they by definition cannot measure that change. They just become a biased sample that excludes specifically the population they're trying to measure.

How about distinct public posts per day per user?

My experience is that consumption is as high as ever, but the median person's non-private sharing is down.

Are bots included in those numbers?

I don't think the vibe shift they're describing has fully taken place yet, but I think the foundations have been laid and it's started. It's probably going to be a while and take further societal changes to fully come into fruition, though.

Many people are simultaneously sharing to the broader internet less (the claim you're responding to) AND more addicted to media shared by the ones who DO share stuff then ever (the claim you're making).

The alert checking is a thing.

But I’ve noticed with my 14 year old son and his friends that they are all about Snap and iMessage. Instagram and TikTok are their public fora.

Everyone should be simply posting algorithmic content to Facebook. Screenshots, etc not giving them your own life stuff imo. We need to push back on personalized feeds. Share a high percentage of what you see so that there is a digital commons and not just some island for each person.

Social media platform used to be less about passive consumption.

> The simple local lifestyle is that which was lived by all of humanity for all of history up until the last ~75 years (give or take).

A percentage of people still traveled, communicated, traded and migrated to other places in the past. Cities were a mix of lots of people, commerce, news. It was just slower and a smaller percentage. Look at the letters of Paul in the bible. He was writing to different communities around the Roman Empire, and traveled to them when he could.

Looking at the big picture, trade, communication and migration are the norm over human history. We colonized the world before the Industrial Revolution, some humans did it thousands of years prior.

Yeah that's absolutely true that it was a lifeline for people who were isolated and that's less true with how ephemeral everything is now.

> Why would it plunge instead of re-focusing on things that are intrinsically important?

Because a lot of the economy is focused on creating and maintaining a surplus[1]: make people buy things that they don't really need, make them discard and replace things that they've been convinced are no longer worth it.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Surplus%3A_Terrorized_into_Bei...

That doesn't really sound bad to me. I think we expanded our social reach too far and need to scale back to where we can feel like we have an impact and our voice matters.

Well, the current puck still has emitters inside of it.

> [1] Puck and Player Tracking became fully operational in 2021-22, with up to 20 cameras in each arena and infrared emitters in each puck and sweater.

The player tracking is fairly easy to see; there's often an airtag sized bump on a player's jersey.

The puck tracking can be a bit more difficult but sometimes the puck looks like it's melting the ice behind it. That's just them giving it a grey shadow instead of the neon shadow.

[1]: https://www.nhl.com/news/nhl-edge-launches-website-for-puck-...

It was not well received anywhere. However, in a bit of defense of the idea, TV at that time was still NTSC (~480p resolution at 24 frames/s) and it was pretty hard to see the puck even if you knew where it was.

As someone with low vision I loved when they added that and missed it when it was gone.

I can't see the puck at all at a game and have to be very close to a television to see whats going on.

As a result most sports are boring.

In far fewer than five seconds, one team can suddenly have the upper hand.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9O34BnFu8Kk

As a gamer this seems obvious to me. It's long been clear to me that our eyes are very adept at processing high-speed motion. Even the first 120Hz LCD gaming monitor, as sucky as it was, was miles bette than the 60 Hz on the market.

So while technically our eyes might not discern individual frames higher than 25 FPS or so, our brain can absolutely process data from a much higher effeice framerate. The motion blur fast thing naturally produce for example, provides critical context clues.

In gaming, sure 240 Hz won't help you see more as such, but it allows your eyes to do what they naturally do and give a much improved experience of fluidity and superior motion prediction.

I find this interesting - before we switched from 5/4 aspect ratio, it was hard to find the puck because the camera was always chasing - but if you know hockey (e.g., watch enough of it) there are a lot of cues about where the puck is or will be, now that we have a wider aspect ratio.

The leading theory for the etymology of the “foot” in “football” is because it’s played on foot unlike, say, jousting or polo.

Also:

basketball -> handball

hockey -> stickball

volleyball -> handball

rugby -> handegg

baseball -> stickball

cricket -> stickball

golf -> stickball

Hopefully this will finally appease the football literalists and make things simpler for you all to understand :)

That's the exception. not the rule.

So yes, in "trick" plays you can't see the ball. But neither can the defense.

Having watched hockey AND US football my entire life, you can't compare the two. Totally different styles of sports and thus comparing your ability to see the 2 doesn't make sense.

to add: There has never been a football in history that had the ball going from one end of the field to the other and back. And yet, this happpens in hockey regularly and within seconds.

I think you might be conflating knowing where the puck is with being able to fix your eyes on the puck at all times. The complaint is usually about the former. People are complaining that they don't know where the puck is.

Viber already does something similar, by catching on a keyword in your reply and splashing an ad.

E.g., around here, "happy holidays" would splash an ad for Jacobs coffee.

How would you know?

how is AI seo different from regular SEO? Behind the LLM is a search function, naturally the same queries and keywords would work for both search and LLMs, no?

Alexa never became a good shopping portal because voice interfaces regularly mishear you, so there was always a lot of doubt about what it might be ordering, and also has anyone except the obscenely rich ever gone "yes, the first result, that's always fine, no I will not bother looking at any of the prices on any of the results"? Hence the joke about the reason why Amazon bought Whole Foods being that Bezos said one day "Alexa, buy me something from Whole Foods" and Alexa mishearing it as "Buy Whole Foods".

LLMs are not limited to voice interfaces. You absolutely can use ChatGPT as a search engine if you want to: it does give you results you can compare, telling you about pros and cons of various options, and you can discuss with it what your end-goals are and have it turn a vague idea into a shopping list (that may or may not be complete for your project).

I don't have any reason to think these are the best, ChatGPT is not a storefront and OpenAI does not have a long history as a search engine, but it absolutely can be used this way.

Wow - than at least my behavior - and that of quite an impressive amount of non tech people in my circle of acquaintances - are "unnatural".

I know people who took a photo of their car's driver side mirror cap (the thing that is on the opposite of the drivers side mirror and often colored like the rest of the car) - and asked chatGPT to search for the part. Because they were not able to navigate the respective auto parts portals.

I myself had perplexity generate a comparison report for different electric cars in a specific price range to get a first rough understanding of the used eCar market. Including links to respective models in used car sites.

Using Kagi for the few regular searches I need to do nowadays, Claude Code on the commandline for any other extended research/searches, I actually only use Google nowadays when I use the Google song detection function. Like Shazam - I just find this thing to be on my phone, so no need for an additional app.

I could give you a lot of additional examples from acquaintances and family - esp. from the not so tech people. Google is catching up, though. So - I think, with habits being hard to break, most people find Google good enough for quite a long time to come.

> Show of hands for anyone using ChatGPT to shop. Be honest.

I recently used ChatGPT to compare headphones before buying them, although the workflow there was a bit manual; I took some headphones that I had in mind off a cursory search off Amazon, had ChatGPT produce a summary of the differences and then picked the "best" one.

I'd assume this happens a lot more, I can easily someone doing, produce a list of [product category X] under < $Y, then use follow-up queries, etc.

> As a new sales channel, young people are buying content off of TikTok and Instagram directly now.

I assume this would only work for the things that influencers can directly sell, e.g. selling makeup to women that way is apparently a thing; for other products that are not impulse-buys, ChatGPT is a perfectly reasonable way to shop.

Searching with llms is the single best use case for it. It is some form of natural language apropos. Ask it what is the best way to have a beautiful and modern website, Vercel will make money and tailwind will receive a visit and gain one more consuming application. Ask it how to be safe, rust will gain more power and influence no matter what originally was your intent. It doesn't need to be justified. Chatgpt said so therefore true (the audience vulnerable to this has established that generative technology==chatgpt)

I used ChatGPT to find a bike for me. It asked good questions, recommended good results, linked me to options and the websites I needed to further research things. I don't do a lot of shopping though so this is one tiny example. If I was looking to actually shop again though I'd use it again. Most of my shopping these days is the grocery store. I don't have a lot of needs.

I might be unusual, I only use LLMs to shop these days.

"What is still considered a highly regarded 35mm film camera for under $400 (used)?"

Of course then I go to eBay…

"Show of hands for anyone using ChatGPT to shop. Be honest."

I use Gemini to help with shopping decisions pretty frequently. It's been very effective and useful for that.

I used Chatgpt to compare product specs. Pretty good to get a rough idea but obviously not reliable.

>Show of hands for anyone using ChatGPT to shop. Be honest.

I used it for evaluating air filters. I used to for making shopping lists for food I want to cook.

LLMs are honestly rather amazing for product search and comparison.

Here's a use case for me last week: I'm re-organizing my bathroom sink/vanity, and I want a few counter top organizers to keep things neat and tidy. I have a low mirror, low medicine cabinets, and generally tight spaces to work with and want to maximize storage.

So, I have a 10" wide space and I can't have anything over 16". I want to find a drawer organizer as close to 16" tall without going over, and as close to 10" without going over. Given a choice between the two, I want to bias for more height.

Go to Google or Amazon and try finding that. You're going to be trying permutations of 10x16 and 9x16 and so on, and digging through pages looking for something approximate.

In theory maybe there's some filter options on Amazon that might work, but they're usually incomplete, wrong, or absent. It's a terrible experience even when it's supported.

ChatGPT (or even Amazon's kind of janky Rufus) immediately finds top near-perfect matches for me to choose from. 15-20 minutes of aggravating digging turned into 90s of letting ChatGPT think and search while I was off grabbing a coffee.

I have used LLMs to find dozens and dozens of products when I didn't know the proper name for the solution or what to look for.

> It's unnatural to search an LLM for a product. It's why Alexa never became a shopping portal.

There is plenty of evidence that people are increasingly turning to AI chatbots for that too. And it's entirely possible that ChatGPT and others are already being trained to mention some products first or to present them in a more positive light.

> Show of hands for anyone using ChatGPT to shop. Be honest.

Show of hands for anyone still compiling 500 Amazon reviews by hand…

This won’t necessarily work well in a year (month?),

but up through now?

Absolutely I’ve been using assistants for some shopping purposes.

Maybe because you have the personalization disabled. My complaint isn't the SEO stuff; that hits me when I search on a tech item I want to learn (I get slammed with crappy vendor blogs), or food recipes (long story about a Sicilian Grandma before the recipe at the end). My complaint with Google is it fights me on keywords, and I have to constantly add quotes, add minuses, and it seems to silently override it.

It's easier to add Reddit at the end to get a more accurate question repeated, and skip the sponsored SEO crap.

I don't want a list of links that I have to then click through in a kind of Russian roulette—hoping I don't get some kind of SEO crap.

“The game” is an emergent property of the human species at scale

Human society cannot exist at this scale without this nested social complexity structure given the biological constraints

So something has to give

Whoever said that lived with their parents and didn't pay rent

If ChatGPT told you to go to McDonald’s, would you?