Most egregious is the one copying the title from Snopes' "Video Genuinely Shows White 'Baby Peacock'?" (with the question mark cut off). A page all about how the picture isn't a real baby peacock.
But also, if you search the more accurate term, "peachick", you seem to get 100% real images, although half the pages call them "baby peacocks".
I'm a part time maker and purchase a lot of designs off of Etsy to make into physical goods. I have to weed through so many AI images when purchasing designs off of Etsy now. I wish they required users to indicate if AI was used to produce the image so I could then filter them out.
It's currently optional for sellers, Etsy says "This info won’t change what buyers see for now, but will be used to improve the shopping experience in the future."
Hear me out: is that Wikipedia? I am sure people are submitting all sorts of AI-generated information, but it's probably getting rejected? (If someone better informed than me has any data one way or the other, I'm super curious)
I sense Reddit is a lost cause. Even before the latest wave of generative AI you could tell things were heavily manipulated.
I dare say that I haven’t noticed that much of a change in things and that could either be because LLMs are just that good at Reddit content, or that because Reddit was already so botted and manipulated it didn’t really change much.
Reddit started to decline dramatically once they started to charge for API access last year. Mods on a politics subreddit I was talking to said all the free tools they used to keep on top of things stopped working, so they could no longer filter out the trolls and bots.
I sure hope the money that Reddit made makes up for the readers who are fleeing.
LLMs are reinforced through adversarial training - you would essentially be playing a keep-up game with AI generated garbage that would get exponentially more difficult to pull ahead in.
There was this image that was circling some 20 years ago around and later, with the Internet becoming a cable tv-like service where you'd be a subscriber to particular big companies sites and additional "free-range" pages
So the pessimist in me can see the Internet being affected by the free-vs-premium formula: "basic" Internet with ads, tracking, AI fillers, limited access to +18 content, in the worst form comes with these pre-defined sites and "premium" that's free of these limitations but it also in time tries to squeeze more money from users - like "premium but with ads"
I’ve had a mild amount of success asking some nature photographers if they would be willing to make a few of their photos freely licensed so that they can be used on Wikipedia articles.
I found the peachicks on Commons by searching "peacock" and then following categories up the tree. If people use the wrong search engine with naïve search terms, I don't know what to tell ya.
This is a parallel example of why reference librarians are still worth consulting, because they will guide you to the library's resources and databases, and demonstrate how to use search queries.
I stopped using Google search...why even bother now. Results are just some crappy page with ads. Aastroturfed wikpedia page is also suspect. Chatgpt can answer questions in seconds. Just not sure if correct, but most of the time more than good enough.
I feel like Google is destroying their credibility by day.
Just go to zoo to see peacocks and take pictures. At least it will be an real experience not some virtual manipulation
I suppose the logic could be: if you're going to consume AI generated content anyway, why not use a setup where you have control over the system prompt and other parameters? Not sure if ChatGPT qualifies there, though.
My solution is to use the computer as little as possible. Go see the world to know what a peacock looks lie. Last time I've seen Peacocks was in Lisbon in St. George's castle, 4 years ago. The kind of questions I ask ChatGPT, are mostly code questions. Or for it to help me with planning something. I ask it questions, and it can provide some sort of logic behind the answer which I can then reason about. Sure it can mislead me, but it's more like an ongoing conversation I'm having with it. So its more like an opinion I'm getting, and I discount it.
I'm generally a skeptical person. So I'm well aware of the manipulations that are happening online. Google is just a weaponized player in misinformation warefare at this point. It purposely will go out of its way to build consensus, for conflicts. Bunch of technocratic Billionaire overlords would get you to support genocide if it would benefit them. So I just don't trust google at this point for anything news related. And the rest of their content seems to be just a giant trap of spam pages.
Google is going to have to solve for this somehow if they want to remain relevant, right? If searching for an image and generating the image yield the same result, what's the point of image search any more?
Watermarking I think is supposed to be the goal, but I don’t think anyone can think that the web is in anything but managed decline. The AI feeding itself AI will just end it all. I think Platformer describes it best: https://www.platformer.news/google-io-ai-search-sundar-picha...
The question is what comes next, and I don’t think anyone has an answer to that.
Well, and once this kills the web then Google's AI no longer has a data source its AI can tap to answer questions about anything that happens afterward, so it kind of needs the web to at least limp along.
Google was for the Open Web since day 1 but their aggressive ad based business model kind of doomed the Open Web because a lot of people were also incentivized cause of Google to aggressively peruse ad revenue. I think the first degree of separation between websites should be which ones are commercial and which ones are non-commercial. Of course that doesn't mean that commercial websites are bad because essentially what you want is quality information and content but at least you know what you are getting into. E.g. if you are consuming content and information from non-commercial website you know that the owner of the website is not trying to sell you something via promoted content or via affiliate link or via something else. The main question is how do you support the Open Web? Is it ads, subscription, donations etc. Hobbyists are the champions of the Open Web because they produce quality information and content free of charge for the sake of helping people and because they love creating it.
I think what comes next is interest-based, influencer-moderated, semi-private chat rooms. For example a lot of hobby youtuber have moderated discord servers. My diy 3d printing communities have discord servers. I have a few invite-only discord servers for various circles of friends and family.
The same could be said for regular search. Pretty much anything I search for yields a page of ads followed by pages of content farmers followed by pages of "almost sounds like experts but is still just a content farmer."
Financing the Internet with advertising has really made it difficult to find good quality content. The incentives are completely misaligned, unless you are a 'content creator' or Google.
I assume this is one example of why big tech lobbies for stricter AI controls. They aren't afraid of AI takeover; they are afraid of AI destroying their businesses.
The problem is - how does Google get paid for providing this service. In a way, the better the service they offer, the less money they make. It really sucks.
Would you pay money to Google or some other company in exchange for a genuinely good search service that prioritizes well written content, and avoids AI (or human) generated crapticles?
Well, on the "bright" side, all but 2 of the striked ones are either explicitly AI generated art (the 3 Adobe Stock ones, 2 from freepik, and the 1 from Instagram) or about noting the images aren't real (the 2 Snopes and the 1 in the bottom left calling out the feet).
On the sad side the TikTok and YouTube ones that likely led to all of this aren't labeled and are present, not to mention the complete lack of "I want the AI things automatically filtered, I'm not interested in trends I'm searching for actual things right now" button. Without something like that it will become harder to use Google to find new content.
I mean people obviously like the content, it's cute enough to get shared around so much to make itself popular in these images and to trigger the post on X about it. Nothing wrong with that... but if it's not easily filterable for what the user is actually trying to find then Google has somewhat failed at its goal.
In the near future, a significant portion of YouTube videos and podcasts will likely be AI-generated (e.g., through tools like Notebook LM).
However, I'm uncertain whether audiences will truly enjoy this AI-generated content. Personally, I prefer content created by humans—it feels more authentic and engaging to me.
It’s crucial for AI tools to include robust detection mechanisms, such as reliable watermarks, to help other platforms identify AI-generated content. Unfortunately, current detection tools for AI-generated audio are still lacking - https://www.npr.org/2024/04/05/1241446778/deepfake-audio-det...
Consider whether you'd enjoy listening to AI-generated podcasts. I believe people might be okay with shows they create themselves, but are less likely to appreciate 'podcasts' ai-generated by others.
My FAANG working spouse thinks that AIs and Robocallers should be mandated to identify themselves. She thinks a audible "Beep-boop" at the end of a sentence for calls and video would be appropriate.
I support that idea. Along with properly implemented authentication so you can't just spoof your way to someone's phone, and painfully stiff fines for violators.
It's almost impossible now. NotebookLM really impressed me. I knew voice synthesis has gotten better than Stephen Hawking's "voice" but I really wasn't expecting having two realistic voices with emotions that even banter with each other. There is a bit of banality to them - they like to call something a "a game changer" practically every "podcast" and the insights into the material is pretty shallow, but they are probably better than the average podcaster already.
It's impressive at first until you realise they're practically ad libbing a script. They're filled with all the same annoying American clichés ("you know me, I like x", your aforementioned "a game changer", plenty of "wow"). It would be impossible to listen to two in a row without realising how repetitive it is.
At Listen Notes, we recently removed over 500 fake podcasts generated by Notebook LM in just the past weekend.
It's disappointing to see scammers and black-hat SEOs already leveraging Notebook LM to mass-produce fake podcasts and distribute them across various platforms.
>Personally, I prefer content created by humans—it feels more authentic and engaging to me.
I'd like to think that too, but I wonder how long - if at all - this will be true. I "want" to like human generated content more, but I suspect AI may be able to optimize for human engagement more, especially for simple dopamine inducing content (like tiktok videos). After all, we're less complicated than we like to think.
>It’s crucial for AI tools to include robust detection mechanisms, such as reliable watermarks, to help other platforms identify AI-generated content.
This will never work, unfortunately. There's no way to exclude rogue actors, and there's plenty of profit in AIs pretending to be human. If anything, we will have to watermark/sign human generated content.
> In the near future, a significant portion of YouTube videos and podcasts will likely be AI-generated
It's not helpful that you're making a binary distinction here.
As an example, as much as 10 years ago, I would find Youtube videos where the narration was entirely TTS. The creators didn't want to use their own voice, and so they wrote the script, and fed it into a TTS system. As you can expect from the state of the art at the time, it sounded terrible. Yet people enjoyed the videos and they had high view counts.
Are we calling this AI-generated?
We now have better TTS (without generative AI). Way better. I presume those types of videos are now better for me to watch. You may still be able to tell it's not a human because the tone doesn't have much variance. You'd probably have to listen for a minute or longer to discern that, though.
Are we calling this AI-generated?
Now with generative AI, we have voices that perhaps you won't be able to identify as AI. But it's all good as long as a human wrote the script, right?
Are we calling this AI-generated?
Finally, take the same video. The creator writes the script, but feels he's not a good writer (or English is not his native tongue, and he likely has lots of grammatical errors). So he passes his script to GPT and asks it to rewrite it - and not just fix grammatical errors but have it improve it, with some end goal in mind ("This will be the script for a popular video...") He then reviews that the essence he was trying to capture was conveyed, and goes ahead with the voice generation.
Is this AI-generated?
To me, all of these are fine, and not in any way inferior to one with a completely human workflow. As long as the creator is a human, and he feels it is conveying what he needed to convey.
I would love to take a first draft of a blog post, send it to GPT, and have it write it for me. The reason I don't is that so far, whatever it produces doesn't have my "voice". It may capture what I meant to say, but the writing style is completely different from mine. If I could get GPT/Claude to mimic my style more, I'd absolutely run with it. Almost no one likes endless editing - especially writers!
I think this is kind of key to the issue, the good content is there if you know how to find it.
But if you don't know the right terminology then you are going to search for baby peacock and get bad results.
Well, that makes me wonder if the search isn't flawed primarily because it is an image search. I try to stress to my children how important it is to prefer reading material over "watching material". And while these are stills (photographs seems inappropriate), the fact that because they are images the search can't possible help you to self-correct. Google has no opportunity to show you the correct terminology within the results, and you do not learn enough to then go out and find the images you were hoping for.
I know there are exceptions. There are answers I've wanted that can be found within the first few minutes of the first video on Youtube, which I've gone days without discovering because I'm video-averse. But I suspect that the habit is, on average, more benefit than detriment.
Wouldn't surprise me if in a few years Google, for certain keywords:
- autogenerates URLs (tha look legit)
- autogenerates content for such URLs (that look kinda legit)
All of this would be possible if one is using Chrome (otherwise the fake URLs wouldn't lead to anywhere). Of course, full of ads.
Think about it, some people are not really looking for some web site that talks about "baby peacocks". They are looking for baby peacocks: content, images, video. If Google can autogenerate good-enough content, then these kind of users would be satisfied (may not even notice the difference).
Maybe Google ditches the URL and all: type keywords, and get content (with ads)!
> would be possible if one is using Chrome (otherwise the fake URLs wouldn't lead to anywhere).
Didn't they do something like that with AMP. I recall that if you were using chrome and visited an AMP site from Google the address bar would say site.com even though the content was being served from google.com.
Creating a version of reality is significantly different from conjuring abject falsehoods. There is an objective reality for what (e.g.) a baby peacock should look like, and this AI slop is inherently misleading about that.
His comparison isn't totally off. At some point our global perception of a certain subject might be totally different from what it is in reality just because all images about X are the optimal, AI improved, photoshopped version. This is in fact what women mean when they say that beauty standards are becoming unrealistic: Quite literally the standard image of women is being altered. Kind of similar to how the standard image of a baby peacock is being altered.
Almost all of the "product X vs Y" results are AI ramblings now. This growth of the dead Internet is making me want to sign up for Kagi. We're going to need a certification for human generated content at some point.
A mesh network on top of IP with an enforcable license agreement that prohibits all commercial use would suffice to get the old net back. Bonus points if no html/css/js is involved but some sane display technology instead.
I'm not sure I like your parent's idea, but it isn't like the regular internet would go away... when you want useful, go there.
I wouldn't mind a modern take on geocities sorta system. Where: (1) You can make a webpage that could be about whatever the bleep you wanted it to be about. (2) Only allowed a reduced subset of web technologies. (3) That was free from any advertising or commerce/sales. (4) Was only available to individuals or businesses no larger than closely-held corporation. (5) had clear limitation on AI uses. (6) Had a complete index, categorized and tagged, of all the sites available.
But if I am being honest, that is just the nostalgia for the old internet talking.
I'm already treating the WWW and the commercial internet generally as "Babylon". You have to use it for a lot of stuff (doing commerce, interacting with the government), but why would you willingly use it on your own time?
No way. What you are describing is Gemini, but even more niche - a place which is explicitly walled-off from the "big net", which only nostalgic people with right technical skills and a desire to jump some hoops can get to.
This is not going to work - as time progresses, there will be less and less nostalgic people who are willing to put up with that complexity. And "non-commercial" part will ensure that there _never_ be an option to say: "I am tired of fixing my homeserver once again, I am going to put up my site to (github|sourceforge|$1 hosting) and forget about it".
Compare to early web. First thing that came to my mind was Bowden's Hobby Circuits site [0]. It's designed for advanced beginners - simple projects, nice explanations. And there are no hoops to jump through - I've personally sent the links to it to many people via forums, private emails, and so on. It apparently went down in 2023, but while it was still up, I remember regularly finding it from google searches and via links from other pages.
I'm a little sad for anyone who didn't get to experience the Internet of the twentieth century. It was a unique point in time.
I'm ready to pay for a walled garden where the incentives are aligned towards me, instead of against me. I know that puts me in a minority, but I'm tired of the advertising 'net.
I've said it before and say it again, I firmly think AOL was just ahead of its time.
Bring it back. Charge me 10 or 20 a month. Give me the walled off chatrooms, forums, IM, articles, keywords, search, etc. Revamp it, make it modern. And make a mobile app.
Everyone wanted a free and open Internet, until AI and the bots ruined it all.
Well... advertising as a business model ruined it all. They get paid for getting page views, so the business model optimizes for maximum page views at minimum cost of creation. This is the end result of what Google and Facebook have spent the last 20 years building.
But I'm sure the engineers who built all this have very nice yachts, so it's all fine.
With every passing day I basically think this is going to be the future of the internet. Many disparate private/semi-private groups while the "public" internet becomes overloaded with AI slop.
It's largely already happening in places like Discord.
I think the first company that can capture what Discord has but is not wrapped in that "gamer aesthetic" ui/ux is going to do really well.
Discord is becoming a bloated slop fest. It has literally been implicated at times for bad gaming performance [1]. Remember when it used to just be a chat app? And don't get me started on its "quests" system, which may burst your ideal internet bubble. [2]
i think the problem with revamping Q-Link/AOL into the be-all end-all for everyone (thats human) youre gonna hafta pump the prime with AI chatbots to give the appearance of lots of people to draw you in, kinda like how reddit admins pumped the prime by making tons of posts early on. just a little light treason.
I don't think it works today. You have walled communities in Discord and messaging apps, but if you are looking also for the degree of anarchy in those days, today we know that your everyday person can make money off the internet but you didn't know that then, and I think that colors a lot of the experience.
"The internet" isn't for or against anything, it's just a vast computer network. It's the humans with an agenda that exploit the internet (specifically the web) that are against you.
You're correct of course leptons, but do please give credence to
important shorthand. As I've put it before, the Internet is the
battleground. Ground is not necessarily "neutral". It favours certain
forces and tactics. See the "Nine Situations" [0] We used to occupy
type-5 (open ground) which was also mostly type-2 (dispersive). We are
now on "serious" and "difficult" ground. Therefore the environment
itself is hostile. Most of what people commonly think of as "The
Internet" - that's not your friend any more.
If you replace "the internet" with "web browsers", you would be correct. "The internet" doesn't care what bits and bytes travel through it, nor who uses it.
Maybe if you've time for a long but very interesting read have a look
at this [0]. R. Berjon gives a good explanation of why the internet
(and we mean IP routing, DNS, BGP and ISP governance etc) is far from
a level system and what needs to be done to restore it to public
service as a global tool for the good of humanity.
It still exists. Currently it looks like Patreons and their associated communities, long-running web forums, small chatrooms on platforms like Discord or Facebook or Instagram, and so on. Small communities, with relatively high barriers to entry.
Patreon, forums, Discord, Facebook, Instagram and so on are all centralized.
With the Internet of the 90s, discussion happened with decentralized Usenet (owned by nobody) with more-focused discussion happening on mailing lists (literally owned by whoever was smart enough to get Majordomo compiled and running).
Email was handled by individual ISPs or other orgs instead of funneled through a handful of blessed providers like Gmail.
Real-time chat was distributed on networks of IRC servers that were individually operated by people, not corporations.
Quickly publishing a thing on the web meant putting some files in ~/public_html, not selecting a WordPress host or using imgur.
Ports 80 and 25 were not blocked by default.
Multiplayer games were self-hosted without a central corpo authority.
One could construct an argument that supports either way being better than the other, but the the Internet of today is not the same thing as it was a quarter of a century ago.
(Anyone can make a "discord server," but all that means is that they've placed some data in some corpo database that they can never actually own or control.)
That's a pretty narrow view. My Internet in the 90s and early 2000s was on AOL Instant Messenger and MSN Network, Yahoo! Mail and phpBB web forums hosted by random people with pictures hosted on PhotoBucket. Plenty centralized.
The technology doesn't matter, it's changing all the time. The difference is the size of the community, and the barriers to entry. If these communities were easy to discover and join and hard to be booted out from, they wouldn't be protected from The Slop. It used to be just getting on the Internet was the barrier. Now we need new barriers: paywalls and word-of-mouth and moderation.
But AOL IM and MSN were centralized walled gardens that came rather late to the game, and neither PhotoBucket nor phpBB existed at all in the 20th century that is the context here.
> Multiplayer games were self-hosted without a central corpo authority.
Losing "dedicated servers" was a huge loss in my opinion. It was fun to play on the same handful of servers and get to know the same group of people. Dedicated servers were also free from profit-driven "matchmaking" schemes since you ended up playing with whoever was on at the time.
I also miss the chaotic multiplayer of the era, where the priority was having fun and not improving your rank on the leaderboard.
Edit: Dedicated servers also each had their own moderation. So if you wanted to play on a server that banned anyone nasty you could. But you could play with a bunch of folks dropping "gamer words" as well.
Then there were custom sprays - something no company would allow in their game today. It's sad how constrained and censored online gaming experiences are today. In many games even dropping the "f-bomb" can get you banned and typing assassin in the chat window yields "***in".
It's crazy to me that custom sprays existed at all in any capacity for so long. They were novel and sometimes funny but man, I really don't miss the days at all of playing a game and having your roommate/family ask why your computer screen is plastered with goatse or meatspin or the like. I remember more than a handful of awkward conversations trying to explain WHY that wasn't actually part of the game itself.
All of this still exists today though. It hasn't disappeared, it has only been drowned.
If you want to find it again, change your search engine. Use wiby.me, or search.marginalia.nu. Subscribe to RSS feeds of sites you find interesting, and go from there. Hop on gemini. Subscribe to some activitypub accounts (you don't even need an account for that). Communal IRC servers still exist, forums still exist, independent emails still exist.
Stop falling for the overall doomism HN is so quick to fall for, start doing and living what you want
the problem with that is not the payment, it's that you will only be sharing it with people similarly willing to pay for a walled garden. I'm guessing most of what we're nostalgic for was created by people who wouldn't be up for that
1. could afford a computer back then and saw the utility of owning one.
2. had access to the internet, so either in college, a 'tech' company, or ties to some local collective that provided access.
When people say 'the old internet' they are referring to a very self selective/elite group.
Would you pay a nominal amount (like 5 cents or 25 cents) to consume one piece of good, ad-free content, assuming that there was no login, no account, no friction, etc? You click, you read, and 5 cents is magically transferred from you to the writer?
I would. But I've asked a lot of people who say "no, I don't want to pay when I can read it for free. I don't mind the ads that much."
> I'm a little sad for anyone who didn't get to experience the Internet of the twentieth century. It was a unique point in time.
Sadly, they won't know what they were missing. It'll be the new normal
Some asshole tech apologist is probably getting ready to post that section from Plato where Socrates complains about writing any minute now.
Of course, that asshole is oblivious to the fact that most if not all of us probably just don't understand what Socrates was missing, so he's just showing his ignorance and stupidity.
> I'm ready to pay for a walled garden where the incentives are aligned towards me, instead of against me. I know that puts me in a minority, but I'm tired of the advertising 'net.
The problem is that, even if you try to do that, the incentives are probably still aligned against you, just maybe less blatantly.
Just look at how many formerly ad-free paid services are adding ads, and how hardware users literally own acts against their interests by pushing ads in their faces (e.g. smart TVs).
The guy who runs the walled garden will always be tempted to get some extra cash by adding ad revenue to your subscription feed, or cut costs by replacing human curated stuff with AI slop (maybe cleaned up a bit).
> I'm a little sad for anyone who didn't get to experience the Internet of the twentieth century. It was a unique point in time.
I did, and...well, let's be careful how we look back at it.
Punch the monkey? Ad supported 'free' internet that literally put an adbar at the top of your browser at all times? Dreadfully slow loads of someone's animated construction sign GIF? Waiting for dial up to connect after 20 tries? Tracking super pixels? Java web applets? Flash? Watching your favorite ISP implode or get bought up? To say nothing of the pre-Google search results (I miss the categories though).
I have plenty of good memories from those days, but it still had plenty of problems. And it wasn't exactly a bastion of research material either unless you really went digging or paid for access.
I only just put it together but Peter Watt's Rifters series is some epic earth grimdark hard-sci-fi, the first taking place as practically horror, confined deep under water.
But my point is, the latter books have this has amazing post-internet, just a ravaged chaotic Wildlands filled with rabid programs & wild viruses. Packets staggering half intact across the virtualscape, hit by digital storms. Our internet isn't quite so amazing, but I see the relationship more subtly with where we have gone, with so so so many generated sites happy to regurgitate information poorly at you or to sell you a slant quietly. Bereft of real sites, real traffic. Watts is a master writer. Maelstrom.
> It really is a werid feeling remembering the internet of my youth and even my 20s and knowing that it will never exist again.
User facing ability to whitelist and blacklist websites in search results, ability to set weights for websites you want to see higher in search results.
Spamlists for search results, so even if you don't have knowledge/experience to do it yourself, you can still protect them from spam.
It's recreation of e-mail situation, not because it's good, but because www is getting even worse than e-mail.
Most product reviews are simply pumping amazon comments into AI to generate a review. with a final "pros/cons" section that is basically the same summary amazon AI generates.
You don't find them easely. That is the point I guess. But I am not reffering to some obscure darkweb here.
Many of e.g. the old niche forums still exist. Like, FOSS sites. GNU project sites seemed not to have aged a day in 20 years, i.e. still party like its 2004.
Also, I think non English sites are better off since Reddit mainly ate English communities and sites.
Facebook is probably what killed most of the living internet. Small community sites. Like the local Kennel club or Boat marina.
A good example of the old internet would be Matthew's Volvo site:
Couldn't reproduce - in fact, the second hit is a threads version of the same post - but I get no AI suggestions for this query. Humorous Google queries (or AI queries more generally) are definitely a trope, so I can never really tell if they actually happened or if it's all for karma.
Google also routinely removes AI suggestions for searches that produce embarrassing results (you don't get them for searches about keeping cheese on your pizza anymore, for example), so it's even harder to validate once a result goes viral.
I still get the second one when I search "Difference between sauce and dressing" on Google. The Oven vs Ottoman empire one I don't get an AI overview.
Edit: Similar to the second one I just did Panda Bear vs Australia which informed me "Australians value authenticity, sincerity, and modesty. Giant pandas are solitary and peaceful, but will fight back if escape is impossible.
"
It's also not much use to anyone who doesn't use Google ever since Reddit started blocking all crawlers besides Googlebot. Old cached results might still show up in Bing/DDG/Kagi but they can't index any of the newer stuff.
Reddit serves a different robots.txt to Googlebot, you can see a snippet of it in Googles summary. If Kagi is getting recent Reddit results then they must be either ignoring robots.txt, using Google as a backend, or also paying Reddit for access like Google.
Bing and DuckDuckGo are certainly still locked out, I just tried searching for "reddit hurricane milton" on both and none of the results are actually from Reddit.
Reddit is already lost. I was talking to the mods in a large political subreddit and they said after Reddit started charging for API access, all the tools they used to keep on top of the trolls and bots stopped working, and the quality of the whole subreddit declined visibly and dramatically.
> Reddit is already lost. I was talking to the mods in a large political subreddit and they said after Reddit started charging for API access, all the tools they used to keep on top of the trolls and bots stopped working, and the quality of the whole subreddit declined visibly and dramatically.
The whole point of the API access change was to charge AI model-makers. I'd be ironic if the API change made destroyed their product and made their data unsellable.
I used to moderate a fairly large subreddit, used to, I decided to leave and never come back after the API debacle, it was a long time coming though.
I think if the business model had been thought in the sense of the communities and involving mods and users in, it would have been genius, a lot of smaller companies would kill to have people genuinely recommending their products/tools that are hidden behind the biggest wall of them all...
Alas they completely ignored this as a viable avenue and went for the quick buck.
But this won't last and at some point people are going to move on from mass scraping, either because they already got what they want or because garbage goes in garbage comes out or because most of the content will be bot generated and require too much filtering to be useful.
Of course this is the opinion and rambling of a moderately educated individual and I might be totally wrong.
Change can often be for the best, pretty sure it wasn't in this case...
Agreed. There still are resistant subs, but the main culture moved in a worse direction. That is subjective of course, but it isn't just reddit trying to "clean house" that makes everything a little more sterile and boring. It also become even more intolerant of "wrong" opinions. That has always been the case to a degree, but it got seriously worse.
If you know anyone who works in marketing/PR, ask them how they use Reddit. That has been gamified as much as SEO since about 2020. I’m assuming, anything except “why is there a fire in this street?” kind of posts are just ads at this point.
Fair. Exceptions definitely exist, but unless it's location based subreddit, I, personally, wouldn't trust it. There are fun methods that I've been told about. Like marketing companies maintain multiple very real life looking accounts, participating in discussions for months/years with no product affiliations, and very casually throwing in plugs which eventually generate revenues. Or giving a list of 10 items, and inserting their product in between, as a sale is better than no sale. Or marketing a competing product in a very obvious way, then replying from another account telling how it's an ad to eventually lead sales to themselves.
I have no idea how intensive these are, as I most of these over bar drinks when I was traveling. Could've just been someone making stuff up as well. But my marketing friends have confirmed that they use Reddit very heavily, as it's a great sales funnel if you play it right.
Kagi is not a panacea unfortunately. I pay for it and daily drive it to support a Google alternative, but I still have real trouble with my results being full of AI garbage (both image and text search).
As mentioned, product comparisons are a big one but another worrying area is anything medical related.
I was trying to find research about a medicine I'm taking this week and the already SEO infested results of 5 years ago have become immeasurably worse, with 100s of pages of GPT generated spam trying to attract your click.
I ended up ditching search alltogether and ended up finding a semi-relevant paper on the nih.gov and going through the citations manually to trying and find information.
The UK NHS website is usually pretty good for this so sticking "NHS" in the search terms might help, although I imagine they may not cover non-UK brand names.
That matches my experience. Kagi doesn't surface much content beyond what Google/Bing do. What it does better out of the box is guessing which content is low-quality and displaying so that it takes up less space, allowing you to see a few more pages worth of search results on the first page. And then it lets you permanently filter out sites you consider to be low quality so you don't see them at all. That would have been awesome 10 years ago when search spam was dominated by a few dozen sites per subject that mastered SEO (say expertsexchange), but it is less useful now that there are millions of AI content mills drowning out the real content.
For content that isn't time sensitive the best trick that I have found is to exclude the last 10-15 years from search results. I've setup a Firefox keyword searches[1] for this, and find myself using them for the majority of my searches, and only use normal search for subjects where the information must be from the last few years. It does penalize "evergreen" pages where sites continuously make minor changes to pages to bump their SEO, which sucks for some old articles at contemporary sites, but for the most part gives much better results.
> For content that isn't time sensitive the best trick that I have found is to exclude the last 10-15 years from search results. I've setup a Firefox keyword searches[1] for this, and find myself using them for the majority of my searches...
OMG. I'm so happy how much AI is improving our lives right now. It really is the future, and that future is bright.
I’m not affiliated with Kagi in any way and my results are not full of LLM generated content either.
Though there is an LLM generated baby peacock pretty high in the image search, and when I go to the website it literally says that it is an example of an AI generated image and not a real baby peacock.
Most of the times I do, but it gets tiring as I post on HN a lot, and here I am primarly a HN user and have been one long before I've become a Kagi CEO. I feel that saying 'we' in the message (as I did) and having a clear disclaimer in my bio is enough.
> I ended up ditching search alltogether and ended up finding a semi-relevant paper on the nih.gov and going through the citations manually to trying and find information.
I've been doing this for years now. The normienet as I call it is nigh worthless, and I don't even bother trying to find information on it.
I also use it daily. One of my favorite functions is being able to boost certain domains and block or downgrade results from other domains. So I boost results from domains I trust which significantly improves my results. They have a page with commonly boosted/blocked/downgraded sites which serves as a good starting point.
Any source of content can be controlled or manipulated in non-obvious ways. And we already have strong algorithms for manipulating human attention (resulting in the growth of non-falsifiable conspiracy theories, for one). There is no clear approach leading out of information dystopia.
> We're going to need a certification for human generated content at some point.
People keep saying this and I keep warning them to be careful what they wish for. The most likely outcome is that "certification of human generated content" arrives in the form of remote attestation where you can't get on the internet unless you're on a device with a cryptographically sealed boot chain that prevents any untrusted code from running and also has your camera on to make sure you're a human. It won't be required by law, but no real websites will let you sign in without it, and any sites that don't use it will be overrun with junk.
I hate this future but it's looking increasingly inevitable.
There's ways to do this without destroying anonymity. Ideally, you verify you're human by signing up for some centralized service in real-life, maybe at the post office or something. And then people can ask this service if you're real by providing your super-long rotating token. So, just like an existing IDP but big.
I'm glad that Kagi (and others) exist as an alternative for people who don't want generative AI in their searches.
Personally, I'm excited about more generative AI being added to my search results, and I'll probably switch to whichever search engine ends up with the best version of it.
Not sure if you’re being sarcastic, but they’re not talking about AI features of the search engine itself (Kagi has those too), but about nonsensical AI generated content on the web that exist solely for the purpose of getting you clicking on some ads. Kagi tries to make those sites stand out less on the search results.
AI tools on the search page: sure, cool. I use perplexity a lot, actually. I'm in favor of this.
Search results that are full of content mills serving pre-genned content: no thanks. It's in the same category as those fake stackoverflow scrape sites.
Perhaps you're thinking of the Wikimedia Foundation.
There is plenty of space there for more volunteer editors to verify content, and likewise, WMF operates its own cloud platform where developers are automating tools that do maintenance and transformation on the human-contributed content.
Then, there is Wikidata, a machine-readable Wiki. Many other projects draw data from here, so that it can be localized and presented appropriately. Yet, its UI and SPARQL language are accessible to ordinary users, so have fun verifying the content there, too!
I don't think you understand what I meant by human verified, but I used a very vague term to express what I meant, I meant proving that some input or data that comes from a user was generated by a human (whatever we define that to mean) rather than an LLM or multi-modal image/video/audio model output.
A web of trust or reputation based system can be built on top of the signature scheme - maybe an appearance of smaller invite-only forums that share reputation. Or maybe it will just become an integrated part of the moderation of existing platforms like Reddit, Mastodon and Bluesky
If you put your name on AI spam people will flag your post and no-one will bother to see your posts for at least a few years.
And if people don't like you what you're talking about then people will flag your post too. This is not going to work at any serious scale – certainly not across the internet – because abuse will be rampant.
You can fix this at a hardware level with Cameras. This will, at least, save the most harmful kind of lying. Where real-looking photos and videos are used to defame real people.
I'm not really sure if I follow your suggestion; what would be done with the camera? Authenticate that a picture is real? I'm not sure how that will be workable? For example, how would I (random internet person) verify a picture from you (also random internet person) is real?
You can verify that a particular camera produced a particular photograph. Essentially, the camera would sign the photograph. Random internet person to other random internet person it wouldn't matter, I imagine. But for, say, a news paper, they can verify that a particular image was produced by a particular camera at a particular time.
I'm not sure human-generated content is any better on the whole. BS-laden drivel has been pervasive for some time now, even before AI started taking over.
I'm talking about those 300-word, ad-ridden crap articles that are SEO'd right to the top, and if you're lucky you might get the 3-word answer you were looking for: "<300 words of shit>... and in conclusion, <1-step answer>.". Anyway, humans have been getting paid pennies to write those for a while.
AI just turns the throughput on that up to 11, where there's just no end in sight. I think this is like the primary failure mode of AI at this point. It's not going to kill us - we're going to use it to kill the internet. OTOH, maybe then we just go outside and play.
In the world of content moderation, we refer to this as constructive friction. if you make it too easy to do a thing, the quality of that thing goes down. Difficulty forces people to actually think about what they are writing, whether it is germaine and accurate. So generative AI, as you point out, removes all the friction, and you end up with bland soup.
Whether something is human generated is (mostly) beside the point. The problem is that spam is incentivized today. Any solution must directly attack the financial incentive to spam. Therefore what's needed for a start is for search engines to heavily downweight ads, trackers, and affiliate links (obviously search engines run by ad companies will not do this). Shilling (e.g. on reddit) should be handled as criminal fraud.
I noticed recently when searching for images of cities that they're nearly all over-the-top unrealistic HDR images, beyond what you used to find in an travel agent's catalogue.
I just bought a home and I have been googling the best way to tackle certain home improvement projects - like how to prepare trim for painting. Virtually every result is some kind of content farm of AI-generated bullshit with advertising between every paragraph, an autoplay video (completely unrelated) that scrolls with the page, a modal popup asking me to accept cookies, a second rapid-fire modal popup asking me to join the newsletter to "become a friend"
For better or worse, Reddit is really the only place to go find legitimate information anymore.
Yeah, I've had this experience as well. I'll have to go 4 or 5 pages deep in the results to get to a forum thread someone wrote in 2005 referencing a product that doesn't exist anymore plus a bunch of advice that's mostly still applicable.
> For better or worse, Reddit is really the only place to go find legitimate information anymore.
This is frightening and, I fear, true.
But I'd also add one odd little counterpoint: some of the most useful discussions and learning experiences I've had in the last four years have happened in private Facebook groups. As soon as the incentive to build a following using growth-hacking and AI -- which private groups mitigate to a greater extent -- is taken away, you get back to the helpful stuff.
The FreeCAD group on Facebook is great, for example. And there are private photography groups, 3D printing groups, music groups etc., where people have an incentive to be authentic.
Public Facebook feeds are drowning in AI slop. But people who manage their own groups are keeping the spirit alive. It's almost at the point where I think Facebook will ultimately morph into a paid groups platform.
For this kind of search, YouTube and TikTok (yes, TikTok) are your best bet. Videos are not (completely) flooded by AI (yet) and you can find pretty much anything about manual work.
I prefer text content to videos by a long shot, but genuine, human text content is almost dead. Reddit might be one of the rare exceptions for now. There are also random, still active, old school forums for lots of things but they tend to become extremely hard to find.
You are right that youtube is better but so much of that content is also biased towards sponsors. At least the good instructional content with high production value tends to be very heavy on sponsorships. The indie stuff can be great, but you are gonna have a 720p shaky camera with terrible lighting and lots of umms and backstories about why I am redoing my vintage farmhouse (a-la the recipe meme where every recipe page has a 32 paragraph preamble before the actual recipe)
For what it's worth, the last time I had a home improvement project I needed youtube help with, the one-and-a-half minute mumble-tronic video shot on a Nokia brick-phone was the most helpful one.
Would I have preferred a nice 1080p, shot in good lighting on a flat white table? Yes. But those also tend to be 30 minutes along, and as you said, with a sponsorship for HurfDurfVPN in the middle.
Well why do you expect people to teach you for free how to do home improvement? Those people who know how to do it well are working with it and you can pay them to improve your home.
AI-generated youtube videos are here too, although they're fairly easy to spot for now. The general formula seems to be a bunch of stock images / AI-generated images / stock footage relevant to the video title, with a LLM-generated script read out by an elevenlabs-style voice.
Gaining information from a video (often just someone talking into their phone) feels like sucking a milkshake through a coffee stirrer compared to reading a forum post written by a human. Worse, you can't see how deep that milkshake is at a glance, so you may end up with just a sip from a melted puddle vs. the big volume of content you wanted.
That depends. For anything that involves learning how to do a physical movement, video is an infinitely more information dense medium to learn it through.
I would disagree, I've done a number of diy home improvement projects with decent (for dyi) results using mostly youtube. My old school washer and dryer have been saved repeatedly by following step-by-step youtube videos for fixes and part replacements.
TikTok is where you go to find someone (if not synthetic voice) reading to you a 30 second summary of the manufacturer's press kit and pretending like they reviewed it.
Also your local library probably has a bunch of home improvement books. They're probably from the 80s, but trim painting techniques don't change that much.
What you can do in the library is sample a wide variety of the books in the topic you want, and soon you'll identify an author, or publisher, as your favorite, and then you can go purchase more in their series, and consider donating them back to the library when you're done with the project!
> Like its predecessor in book format, the CD-ROM version offers easy-to-follow, step-by-step instructions on more than 100 common household problems, from how to fix a leaky faucet to repairing hardwood floors. What's more, the CD-ROM version incorporates animation and narration to help make the repair project even easier to understand and complete. Instructions can be viewed one step at a time or all at once, and, if desired, can be printed out and taken directly to the repair site. Included with each repair project is the projected time needed to complete the work, estimated cost, and a list of materials and tools needed.
I have an older car and a newer car. I can find out how to do any repair on my old car because it existed during the old internet when people did all kinds of write ups.
The information on working on my new car is non-existent other than Youtube videos where the majority is just a random dude who knows nothing filming himself doing a horrible self repair.
The video sites are gonna be way better for this. Or reddit. I don’t know how much longer that will be true with AI video generation becoming cheaper over time though
Owner/builder here, of a 1939 home. I invested in a home reference library part way through my own improvements; I should have done it before even lifting a screwdriver. Renovations (https://www.bookfinder.com/search_s/?title=Renovation%205th%...), from Taunton Press, is the first source I consult when starting a home improvement project. Chapter 18 is all about painting. Many of the other titles from Taunton are excellent, but Renovations is unmatched in it's coverage.
All of the flat white MDF trim you buy is primed and ready for painting, too.
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[ 3.8 ms ] story [ 310 ms ] threadBut also, if you search the more accurate term, "peachick", you seem to get 100% real images, although half the pages call them "baby peacocks".
https://wikipedia.org/wiki/Low-background_steel
Whether they actually do this (and whether there's any incentive to do so), is obviously not a given
I dare say that I haven’t noticed that much of a change in things and that could either be because LLMs are just that good at Reddit content, or that because Reddit was already so botted and manipulated it didn’t really change much.
I sure hope the money that Reddit made makes up for the readers who are fleeing.
So the pessimist in me can see the Internet being affected by the free-vs-premium formula: "basic" Internet with ads, tracking, AI fillers, limited access to +18 content, in the worst form comes with these pre-defined sites and "premium" that's free of these limitations but it also in time tries to squeeze more money from users - like "premium but with ads"
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Pavo_cristatus_(...
Wikimedia is a fantastic resource.
It also includes Google Images and Flickr.
https://search.creativecommons.org/
I found the peachicks on Commons by searching "peacock" and then following categories up the tree. If people use the wrong search engine with naïve search terms, I don't know what to tell ya.
This is a parallel example of why reference librarians are still worth consulting, because they will guide you to the library's resources and databases, and demonstrate how to use search queries.
The question is what comes next, and I don’t think anyone has an answer to that.
Source: every other piece of news or social media on the planet.
The same could be said for regular search. Pretty much anything I search for yields a page of ads followed by pages of content farmers followed by pages of "almost sounds like experts but is still just a content farmer."
Financing the Internet with advertising has really made it difficult to find good quality content. The incentives are completely misaligned, unless you are a 'content creator' or Google.
Would you pay money to Google or some other company in exchange for a genuinely good search service that prioritizes well written content, and avoids AI (or human) generated crapticles?
On the sad side the TikTok and YouTube ones that likely led to all of this aren't labeled and are present, not to mention the complete lack of "I want the AI things automatically filtered, I'm not interested in trends I'm searching for actual things right now" button. Without something like that it will become harder to use Google to find new content.
I mean people obviously like the content, it's cute enough to get shared around so much to make itself popular in these images and to trigger the post on X about it. Nothing wrong with that... but if it's not easily filterable for what the user is actually trying to find then Google has somewhat failed at its goal.
However, I'm uncertain whether audiences will truly enjoy this AI-generated content. Personally, I prefer content created by humans—it feels more authentic and engaging to me.
It’s crucial for AI tools to include robust detection mechanisms, such as reliable watermarks, to help other platforms identify AI-generated content. Unfortunately, current detection tools for AI-generated audio are still lacking - https://www.npr.org/2024/04/05/1241446778/deepfake-audio-det...
[Edit] We just put together a list of notebooklm generated "podcasts": https://github.com/ListenNotes/notebooklm-generated-fake-pod...
Consider whether you'd enjoy listening to AI-generated podcasts. I believe people might be okay with shows they create themselves, but are less likely to appreciate 'podcasts' ai-generated by others.
It's disappointing to see scammers and black-hat SEOs already leveraging Notebook LM to mass-produce fake podcasts and distribute them across various platforms.
I'd like to think that too, but I wonder how long - if at all - this will be true. I "want" to like human generated content more, but I suspect AI may be able to optimize for human engagement more, especially for simple dopamine inducing content (like tiktok videos). After all, we're less complicated than we like to think.
>It’s crucial for AI tools to include robust detection mechanisms, such as reliable watermarks, to help other platforms identify AI-generated content.
This will never work, unfortunately. There's no way to exclude rogue actors, and there's plenty of profit in AIs pretending to be human. If anything, we will have to watermark/sign human generated content.
It's not helpful that you're making a binary distinction here.
As an example, as much as 10 years ago, I would find Youtube videos where the narration was entirely TTS. The creators didn't want to use their own voice, and so they wrote the script, and fed it into a TTS system. As you can expect from the state of the art at the time, it sounded terrible. Yet people enjoyed the videos and they had high view counts.
Are we calling this AI-generated?
We now have better TTS (without generative AI). Way better. I presume those types of videos are now better for me to watch. You may still be able to tell it's not a human because the tone doesn't have much variance. You'd probably have to listen for a minute or longer to discern that, though.
Are we calling this AI-generated?
Now with generative AI, we have voices that perhaps you won't be able to identify as AI. But it's all good as long as a human wrote the script, right?
Are we calling this AI-generated?
Finally, take the same video. The creator writes the script, but feels he's not a good writer (or English is not his native tongue, and he likely has lots of grammatical errors). So he passes his script to GPT and asks it to rewrite it - and not just fix grammatical errors but have it improve it, with some end goal in mind ("This will be the script for a popular video...") He then reviews that the essence he was trying to capture was conveyed, and goes ahead with the voice generation.
Is this AI-generated?
To me, all of these are fine, and not in any way inferior to one with a completely human workflow. As long as the creator is a human, and he feels it is conveying what he needed to convey.
I would love to take a first draft of a blog post, send it to GPT, and have it write it for me. The reason I don't is that so far, whatever it produces doesn't have my "voice". It may capture what I meant to say, but the writing style is completely different from mine. If I could get GPT/Claude to mimic my style more, I'd absolutely run with it. Almost no one likes endless editing - especially writers!
I know there are exceptions. There are answers I've wanted that can be found within the first few minutes of the first video on Youtube, which I've gone days without discovering because I'm video-averse. But I suspect that the habit is, on average, more benefit than detriment.
- autogenerates URLs (tha look legit)
- autogenerates content for such URLs (that look kinda legit)
All of this would be possible if one is using Chrome (otherwise the fake URLs wouldn't lead to anywhere). Of course, full of ads.
Think about it, some people are not really looking for some web site that talks about "baby peacocks". They are looking for baby peacocks: content, images, video. If Google can autogenerate good-enough content, then these kind of users would be satisfied (may not even notice the difference).
Maybe Google ditches the URL and all: type keywords, and get content (with ads)!
Didn't they do something like that with AMP. I recall that if you were using chrome and visited an AMP site from Google the address bar would say site.com even though the content was being served from google.com.
We have been creating our own reality even before AI.
Same, as far as I could tell all AI garbage with weird saturation and colors and uncanny valley .... they look weird / didn't work for me.
I wouldn't mind a modern take on geocities sorta system. Where: (1) You can make a webpage that could be about whatever the bleep you wanted it to be about. (2) Only allowed a reduced subset of web technologies. (3) That was free from any advertising or commerce/sales. (4) Was only available to individuals or businesses no larger than closely-held corporation. (5) had clear limitation on AI uses. (6) Had a complete index, categorized and tagged, of all the sites available.
But if I am being honest, that is just the nostalgia for the old internet talking.
This is not going to work - as time progresses, there will be less and less nostalgic people who are willing to put up with that complexity. And "non-commercial" part will ensure that there _never_ be an option to say: "I am tired of fixing my homeserver once again, I am going to put up my site to (github|sourceforge|$1 hosting) and forget about it".
Compare to early web. First thing that came to my mind was Bowden's Hobby Circuits site [0]. It's designed for advanced beginners - simple projects, nice explanations. And there are no hoops to jump through - I've personally sent the links to it to many people via forums, private emails, and so on. It apparently went down in 2023, but while it was still up, I remember regularly finding it from google searches and via links from other pages.
[0] https://web.archive.org/web/20220429084959/http://www.bowden...
I'm ready to pay for a walled garden where the incentives are aligned towards me, instead of against me. I know that puts me in a minority, but I'm tired of the advertising 'net.
Bring it back. Charge me 10 or 20 a month. Give me the walled off chatrooms, forums, IM, articles, keywords, search, etc. Revamp it, make it modern. And make a mobile app.
Everyone wanted a free and open Internet, until AI and the bots ruined it all.
Well... advertising as a business model ruined it all. They get paid for getting page views, so the business model optimizes for maximum page views at minimum cost of creation. This is the end result of what Google and Facebook have spent the last 20 years building.
But I'm sure the engineers who built all this have very nice yachts, so it's all fine.
It's largely already happening in places like Discord.
I think the first company that can capture what Discord has but is not wrapped in that "gamer aesthetic" ui/ux is going to do really well.
[1] https://www.tomshardware.com/news/discord-throttles-nvidia-g...
[2] https://www.thestreet.com/technology/discord-is-making-a-maj...
And eventually someone is going to come up with a search engine for Discord, and the cycle will start all over.
It's great to read these words. People are starting to get it. The Internet is not for you, it's against you.
[0] https://suntzusaid.com/book/11
[0] https://berjon.com/public-interest-internet/
Patreon, forums, Discord, Facebook, Instagram and so on are all centralized.
With the Internet of the 90s, discussion happened with decentralized Usenet (owned by nobody) with more-focused discussion happening on mailing lists (literally owned by whoever was smart enough to get Majordomo compiled and running).
Email was handled by individual ISPs or other orgs instead of funneled through a handful of blessed providers like Gmail.
Real-time chat was distributed on networks of IRC servers that were individually operated by people, not corporations.
Quickly publishing a thing on the web meant putting some files in ~/public_html, not selecting a WordPress host or using imgur.
Ports 80 and 25 were not blocked by default.
Multiplayer games were self-hosted without a central corpo authority.
One could construct an argument that supports either way being better than the other, but the the Internet of today is not the same thing as it was a quarter of a century ago.
(Anyone can make a "discord server," but all that means is that they've placed some data in some corpo database that they can never actually own or control.)
The technology doesn't matter, it's changing all the time. The difference is the size of the community, and the barriers to entry. If these communities were easy to discover and join and hard to be booted out from, they wouldn't be protected from The Slop. It used to be just getting on the Internet was the barrier. Now we need new barriers: paywalls and word-of-mouth and moderation.
But AOL IM and MSN were centralized walled gardens that came rather late to the game, and neither PhotoBucket nor phpBB existed at all in the 20th century that is the context here.
Losing "dedicated servers" was a huge loss in my opinion. It was fun to play on the same handful of servers and get to know the same group of people. Dedicated servers were also free from profit-driven "matchmaking" schemes since you ended up playing with whoever was on at the time.
I also miss the chaotic multiplayer of the era, where the priority was having fun and not improving your rank on the leaderboard.
Edit: Dedicated servers also each had their own moderation. So if you wanted to play on a server that banned anyone nasty you could. But you could play with a bunch of folks dropping "gamer words" as well.
Then there were custom sprays - something no company would allow in their game today. It's sad how constrained and censored online gaming experiences are today. In many games even dropping the "f-bomb" can get you banned and typing assassin in the chat window yields "***in".
If you want to find it again, change your search engine. Use wiby.me, or search.marginalia.nu. Subscribe to RSS feeds of sites you find interesting, and go from there. Hop on gemini. Subscribe to some activitypub accounts (you don't even need an account for that). Communal IRC servers still exist, forums still exist, independent emails still exist.
Stop falling for the overall doomism HN is so quick to fall for, start doing and living what you want
1. could afford a computer back then and saw the utility of owning one. 2. had access to the internet, so either in college, a 'tech' company, or ties to some local collective that provided access.
When people say 'the old internet' they are referring to a very self selective/elite group.
And that's what made it fun I guess
I'm a little sad for anyone who didn't get to experience of pre-Internet era.
Internet is lead of our time.
I would. But I've asked a lot of people who say "no, I don't want to pay when I can read it for free. I don't mind the ads that much."
Sadly, they won't know what they were missing. It'll be the new normal
Some asshole tech apologist is probably getting ready to post that section from Plato where Socrates complains about writing any minute now.
Of course, that asshole is oblivious to the fact that most if not all of us probably just don't understand what Socrates was missing, so he's just showing his ignorance and stupidity.
> I'm ready to pay for a walled garden where the incentives are aligned towards me, instead of against me. I know that puts me in a minority, but I'm tired of the advertising 'net.
The problem is that, even if you try to do that, the incentives are probably still aligned against you, just maybe less blatantly.
Just look at how many formerly ad-free paid services are adding ads, and how hardware users literally own acts against their interests by pushing ads in their faces (e.g. smart TVs).
The guy who runs the walled garden will always be tempted to get some extra cash by adding ad revenue to your subscription feed, or cut costs by replacing human curated stuff with AI slop (maybe cleaned up a bit).
I did, and...well, let's be careful how we look back at it.
Punch the monkey? Ad supported 'free' internet that literally put an adbar at the top of your browser at all times? Dreadfully slow loads of someone's animated construction sign GIF? Waiting for dial up to connect after 20 tries? Tracking super pixels? Java web applets? Flash? Watching your favorite ISP implode or get bought up? To say nothing of the pre-Google search results (I miss the categories though).
I have plenty of good memories from those days, but it still had plenty of problems. And it wasn't exactly a bastion of research material either unless you really went digging or paid for access.
But my point is, the latter books have this has amazing post-internet, just a ravaged chaotic Wildlands filled with rabid programs & wild viruses. Packets staggering half intact across the virtualscape, hit by digital storms. Our internet isn't quite so amazing, but I see the relationship more subtly with where we have gone, with so so so many generated sites happy to regurgitate information poorly at you or to sell you a slant quietly. Bereft of real sites, real traffic. Watts is a master writer. Maelstrom.
First book Starfish is free. https://www.rifters.com/real/STARFISH.htm
Another book on my reading list!
User facing ability to whitelist and blacklist websites in search results, ability to set weights for websites you want to see higher in search results.
Spamlists for search results, so even if you don't have knowledge/experience to do it yourself, you can still protect them from spam.
It's recreation of e-mail situation, not because it's good, but because www is getting even worse than e-mail.
It is quite surreal to witness. It is certainly fueled by the commercialization of internet due to ads and centralization to user hostile platforms.
The old internet seems to be doing much better. But it lost most of its users in the last 15 years...
What do you mean by this? How do you find the old internet?
Many of e.g. the old niche forums still exist. Like, FOSS sites. GNU project sites seemed not to have aged a day in 20 years, i.e. still party like its 2004.
Also, I think non English sites are better off since Reddit mainly ate English communities and sites.
Facebook is probably what killed most of the living internet. Small community sites. Like the local Kennel club or Boat marina.
A good example of the old internet would be Matthew's Volvo site:
https://www.matthewsvolvosite.com/forums/search.php?search_i...
https://x.com/samhenrigold/status/1843040235325964549
...or a sensical comparison where it just completely misses the point.
https://i.imgur.com/FotFZ3F.jpeg
Edit: Similar to the second one I just did Panda Bear vs Australia which informed me "Australians value authenticity, sincerity, and modesty. Giant pandas are solitary and peaceful, but will fight back if escape is impossible. "
https://www.reddit.com/robots.txt
Reddit serves a different robots.txt to Googlebot, you can see a snippet of it in Googles summary. If Kagi is getting recent Reddit results then they must be either ignoring robots.txt, using Google as a backend, or also paying Reddit for access like Google.
Bing and DuckDuckGo are certainly still locked out, I just tried searching for "reddit hurricane milton" on both and none of the results are actually from Reddit.
https://help.kagi.com/kagi/search-details/search-sources.htm...
The whole point of the API access change was to charge AI model-makers. I'd be ironic if the API change made destroyed their product and made their data unsellable.
Recently, they came around looking to recruit me. I told them fire Spez or fuck off. (17 year Reddit user here)
I think if the business model had been thought in the sense of the communities and involving mods and users in, it would have been genius, a lot of smaller companies would kill to have people genuinely recommending their products/tools that are hidden behind the biggest wall of them all...
Alas they completely ignored this as a viable avenue and went for the quick buck.
But this won't last and at some point people are going to move on from mass scraping, either because they already got what they want or because garbage goes in garbage comes out or because most of the content will be bot generated and require too much filtering to be useful.
Of course this is the opinion and rambling of a moderately educated individual and I might be totally wrong.
Change can often be for the best, pretty sure it wasn't in this case...
Aaron is probably turning once again in his grave...
I have no idea how intensive these are, as I most of these over bar drinks when I was traveling. Could've just been someone making stuff up as well. But my marketing friends have confirmed that they use Reddit very heavily, as it's a great sales funnel if you play it right.
[0] Gradually for several years already.
I guess using the correct terminology matters.
If people were actually searching up "peachick" that'd probably be SEO spammed to hell, too.
"Google sucks!"(50 upvotes)
"That's why I use Kagi!"(45 upvotes)
"Actually Kagi has the exact same problem and you have to pay for it."(2 upvotes)
As mentioned, product comparisons are a big one but another worrying area is anything medical related.
I was trying to find research about a medicine I'm taking this week and the already SEO infested results of 5 years ago have become immeasurably worse, with 100s of pages of GPT generated spam trying to attract your click.
I ended up ditching search alltogether and ended up finding a semi-relevant paper on the nih.gov and going through the citations manually to trying and find information.
For content that isn't time sensitive the best trick that I have found is to exclude the last 10-15 years from search results. I've setup a Firefox keyword searches[1] for this, and find myself using them for the majority of my searches, and only use normal search for subjects where the information must be from the last few years. It does penalize "evergreen" pages where sites continuously make minor changes to pages to bump their SEO, which sucks for some old articles at contemporary sites, but for the most part gives much better results.
[1] For example: https://www.google.com/search?q=%s&source=lnt&tbs=cdr%3A1%2C...
OMG. I'm so happy how much AI is improving our lives right now. It really is the future, and that future is bright.
Thanks guys!
Have you reported any of those issues to Kagi (support/discord/user forum)? We are pretty good at dealing with search quality issues.
I’m not affiliated with Kagi in any way and my results are not full of LLM generated content either.
Though there is an LLM generated baby peacock pretty high in the image search, and when I go to the website it literally says that it is an example of an AI generated image and not a real baby peacock.
I've been doing this for years now. The normienet as I call it is nigh worthless, and I don't even bother trying to find information on it.
I wrote some ideas up about this many years ago: https://github.com/pjlsergeant/multimedia-trust-and-certific...
People keep saying this and I keep warning them to be careful what they wish for. The most likely outcome is that "certification of human generated content" arrives in the form of remote attestation where you can't get on the internet unless you're on a device with a cryptographically sealed boot chain that prevents any untrusted code from running and also has your camera on to make sure you're a human. It won't be required by law, but no real websites will let you sign in without it, and any sites that don't use it will be overrun with junk.
I hate this future but it's looking increasingly inevitable.
Personally, I'm excited about more generative AI being added to my search results, and I'll probably switch to whichever search engine ends up with the best version of it.
And of course the first image for "baby peacock" is the same white chick thing… obviously because this story is making the rounds —_—
Search results that are full of content mills serving pre-genned content: no thanks. It's in the same category as those fake stackoverflow scrape sites.
There is plenty of space there for more volunteer editors to verify content, and likewise, WMF operates its own cloud platform where developers are automating tools that do maintenance and transformation on the human-contributed content.
Then, there is Wikidata, a machine-readable Wiki. Many other projects draw data from here, so that it can be localized and presented appropriately. Yet, its UI and SPARQL language are accessible to ordinary users, so have fun verifying the content there, too!
Not only that, we desperately need cryptographic prof that content X was produced by person Y.
Since most people don't write anything on the internet, I can pay people $5 to use their signature and operate a "sign farm".
Look at the effort these people go though to send their spam.
I’m hoping for a “this human being validated this message”. I think that alone could solve multiple problems.
If you put your name on AI spam people will flag your post and no-one will bother to see your posts for at least a few years.
And long before the Internet, people slapped random concoctions together and sold them as medicine, advertising them as cure-alls.
I'm talking about those 300-word, ad-ridden crap articles that are SEO'd right to the top, and if you're lucky you might get the 3-word answer you were looking for: "<300 words of shit>... and in conclusion, <1-step answer>.". Anyway, humans have been getting paid pennies to write those for a while.
AI just turns the throughput on that up to 11, where there's just no end in sight. I think this is like the primary failure mode of AI at this point. It's not going to kill us - we're going to use it to kill the internet. OTOH, maybe then we just go outside and play.
A really quick fix is to search with “-ai” and that Google doesn’t do this implicitly for images is really strange.
I just bought a home and I have been googling the best way to tackle certain home improvement projects - like how to prepare trim for painting. Virtually every result is some kind of content farm of AI-generated bullshit with advertising between every paragraph, an autoplay video (completely unrelated) that scrolls with the page, a modal popup asking me to accept cookies, a second rapid-fire modal popup asking me to join the newsletter to "become a friend"
For better or worse, Reddit is really the only place to go find legitimate information anymore.
This is frightening and, I fear, true.
But I'd also add one odd little counterpoint: some of the most useful discussions and learning experiences I've had in the last four years have happened in private Facebook groups. As soon as the incentive to build a following using growth-hacking and AI -- which private groups mitigate to a greater extent -- is taken away, you get back to the helpful stuff.
The FreeCAD group on Facebook is great, for example. And there are private photography groups, 3D printing groups, music groups etc., where people have an incentive to be authentic.
Public Facebook feeds are drowning in AI slop. But people who manage their own groups are keeping the spirit alive. It's almost at the point where I think Facebook will ultimately morph into a paid groups platform.
I prefer text content to videos by a long shot, but genuine, human text content is almost dead. Reddit might be one of the rare exceptions for now. There are also random, still active, old school forums for lots of things but they tend to become extremely hard to find.
Would I have preferred a nice 1080p, shot in good lighting on a flat white table? Yes. But those also tend to be 30 minutes along, and as you said, with a sponsorship for HurfDurfVPN in the middle.
For example, https://archive.org/details/stanleyhomerepai0000fine/page/14... links to the chapter "Painting Trim the Right Way" from the book Stanley Home Repairs, 2014.
Could also look at used book stores. Home repair hasn't changed much.
Edit: Could even fire up Wine and try the CD-ROM "Black & Decker Everyday Home Repairs" (published by Broderbund) at https://archive.org/details/BlackDeckerEverydayHomeRepairsBr... . https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/3424503-everyday-home-re... says;
> Like its predecessor in book format, the CD-ROM version offers easy-to-follow, step-by-step instructions on more than 100 common household problems, from how to fix a leaky faucet to repairing hardwood floors. What's more, the CD-ROM version incorporates animation and narration to help make the repair project even easier to understand and complete. Instructions can be viewed one step at a time or all at once, and, if desired, can be printed out and taken directly to the repair site. Included with each repair project is the projected time needed to complete the work, estimated cost, and a list of materials and tools needed.
That sounds pretty nifty, actually!
A trip to the bookstore to buy "x for dummies" can save dozens of hours of web searching.
The current iteration of the internet and AI is lacking depth, detail, and expertise.
You can find 1 million shallow answers on reddit, or echoed in AI, but anything more than the most cursory introduction is buried.
Not only is shallow information easier to generate, it is what most users want, and therefore most engines and services cater to it.
To find better content,you need to go to specialty outlets that don't cater to the lowest common denominator.
The information on working on my new car is non-existent other than Youtube videos where the majority is just a random dude who knows nothing filming himself doing a horrible self repair.
All of the flat white MDF trim you buy is primed and ready for painting, too.