Seriously

After recently falling into this despair about internet being dead, my suspicions were confirmed by this; quoting aphyr, which quotes Digg:

…Generating high-quality, highly-targeted spam is cheap. Humans and ML systems can no longer reliably distinguish organic from machine-generated text, and I suspect that problem is now intractable, short of some kind of Butlerian Jihad. This shifts the economic balance of spam. The dream of a useful product or business review has been dead for a while, but LLMs are nailing that coffin shut. Hacker News and Reddit comments appear to be increasingly machine-generated. Mastodon instances are seeing LLMs generate plausible signup requests. Just last week, Digg gave up entirely:

The internet is now populated, in meaningful part, by sophisticated AI agents and automated accounts. We knew bots were part of the landscape, but we didn’t appreciate the scale, sophistication, or speed at which they’d find us. We banned tens of thousands of accounts. We deployed internal tooling and industry-standard external vendors. None of it was enough. When you can’t trust that the votes, the comments, and the engagement you’re seeing are real, you’ve lost the foundation a community platform is built on.

Go read the full thing at https://aphyr.com/posts/411-the-future-of-everything-is-lies-i-guess
Shoutout to Drew DeVault https://drewdevault.com/blog/Future-of-everything-is-lies/, without it landing on my rss feed I wouldn’t even know this existed!