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- Hacker News
- I think the problem is less "AI agents are ruining the internet" and more that nobody wants to receive a thousand automated requests from other people's agents. The internet was already full of spam, this just makes it cheap to produce a lot more of itby 1saadcodes
- Asked what Internet 2 might look like here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49710648by JKCalhoun
- > People and their AI agents are making the act of being on the internet extremely annoying, and the problem is about to get much worse.
As much as I have a distaste for what passes as "AI agents" as a technology, I think it's a mistake to put any of the blame on the tech. People are the problem!
We've been making a societal mistake for a long time, accepting and even celebrating obnoxious people who do obnoxious things. Letting your AI agents loose on others is one such obnoxious thing.
- Alright - the internet is vast place, and there are many places I wouldn't want to visit.
The internet is growing with some ugly parts - but there are other people generating more interesting content precisely because their abilities are amplified with LLMs.
In other words, maybe we ought to focus on the positive possibilities instead of doom and gloom all day long, we will be all dead in 10 years or the internet will be dead, or I and you will be dead, or my dog will be dead or the universe will expand to cold death, or whatever..
by aogaili - I use AI to produce code. Outside of code, and getting information I need to complete tasks IRL, I'm moving more and more away from the internet.
The golden era of nerd filled internet is over. Now, even nerd parts of the internet are getting filled with AI slop and marketing.
I barely do social media, and mostly HN. I will probably just do some more nerd stuff IRL where I can meet people. I text and call people more.
I actually think AI will cause people to do more in real life because it degrades the value of the internet in general.
by avgDev - I stopped reading papers, journals, blog/internet posts, books, etc written after 2022 unless lots of people repost it as high quality (and even then i take caution because how do i know it is not agents just lauding random things in convergence?).
My time reading older (e-)books has skyrocketed.
I basically stopped using reddit, threads and hacker news.
I recently noticed I need to stop watching youtube videos made after 2024 too. This is especially a problem with shorts and reels on instagram. a few days ago I watched a short describing some random spiderman comic lore, and it was full of errors. The errors aren't even always about being referencing the lore correctly. Sometimes these AI videos will make a claim and then never explain it or even contradict it.
I cant even read some manga recently because I am pretty sure some mangaka are using AI a lot more than they claim they are. The recent one piece chapters since egghead have unreal pacing, and I am not even sure if the storyboarding is made entirely by oda anymore. By unreal pacing I mean this, some one piece arcs 15 years ago would be 24 chapters, but in recent arcs, just one fight or character talking takes 13 chapters! The pacing change is completely different. Togashi of HxH is very upfront about considering/using AI tools, and the quality of HxH has not dropped, so maybe I am being pessimistic.
by SpaceManNabs - If AI ruins social media, then that's a huge net good.by rozap
- I think it's quite possible for a reversal to happen, where nerds will start meeting IRL while everybody else flocks to web spaces.by xpct
- Honestly the golden era ended around 2010, once the normies showed up en-mass for social media. The late 90s and early 2000s were so much fun on the internet, and I'll always be sad that today's nerdy teenagers won't get to experience that.
I have a few ideas for my own retro internet projects but I'm making sure I can protect them from the AI scourge first, or at least do my best to.
by robotmay - Yeah, same. I realized for the most part, using the internet isn't worth it anymore. I was using it out of inertia and thinking it offered convenience. Realistically, that convenience isn't there anymore. As others mentioned, I also started reading a lot more books, I meet with people, I always phone call instead of messaging, I also attend talks (local universities are great) and go to museums, etc.by negura
- The existing models and higher layer protocols of the web will likely break down over the coming years.
I’m not exactly sure what will replace it yet but communication infrastructure built for humans isn’t going to scale with the volume of communication created by artificial intelligence.
There might be some solutions requiring proof of work to introduce friction but that comes with a real environmental cost.
I’ve personally spent the least amount of time over the past three decades on the Internet this recent year. There are some niche corners I frequent but I find the overall experience more draining than rewarding lately.
by almost_usual - The company I work for proudly provide a free and premium tier of service where we do strive to give great quality even for the free tier. The idea is that people over time will understand what we want to achieve and they will see the benefits of supporting a health business model.
I am disillusioned about it, because agents have been huge part of the traffic and all they do is to spend our money but generate absolute nothing positive.
people have been considering to simply close all doors but one person who has quite important hat and believes it would be very negative to people who needs the free tier the most. (And who is also the one with more to loose than everyone else...)
I guess that's the end of the collaboration era as we expected. "Those" people taking everything away and giving nothing back but crumbs that they will soon take from us too.
by motbus3 - It ruins the commons. The fiefs remain. When the vandals overrun the villages, you build castles to hide in. The commons are free, the castles cost energy to scrape, e.g. money.
It's not good news but the old open internet is rapidly filling with feces. The new one is built behind walls of 402 payment required. Visitors have to pay their freight else the servers get overwhelmed.
by delichon - You've made a good case for "giving up the internet entirely", thanks!by Henchman21
- > The new one is built behind walls of 402 payment required. Visitors have to pay their freight else the servers get overwhelmed.
This is similar faulty logic the Elon era X/Twitter used to try to "stop" bots - forcing them to pay $Y dollars a month to use the platform. To a botter, that is a dream - you mean I can just pay to get past your defenses, and once I'm in, it's assumed my traffic is good? Sign me up, instantly.
There is no dollar amount using this structure that genuine users are willing to pay that will also stop botting.
by JohnMakin - For sure, but it's more so the reaction to the existence of AI; I can't go a day without being blocked from a site because it thinks I'm a bot. They claim pay-per-crawl is about bots, but I'm convinced it's a way for the owners of internet infrastructure to nickel and dime their customers even more. They want to get paid separately for sending data, for receiving that same data, and now for handling that data too.
Often, when I search Google for information and find a promising web site, it won't let me view it, and I have to ask Gemini to summarize it for me. People have reacted so poorly to the presence of bots that can finally make useful summaries that it's making it difficult to view the original page, forcing humans to look at the bot summary.
by dlcarrier - A few weeks ago my dishwasher broke, flooded the kitchen, and refused to drain. I went to the manufacturer’s website to download the manual so I could drain the basin, except then Cloudflare flagged me as a bot for suspicious activity trying to download the right PDF (there’s the dimensions, spec sheet, installer manual, and user manual) and I couldn’t access the manufacturer’s website anymore.
Ironically, I could get the right manual through an aggregator that scraped appliance manuals and slapped ads on the page.
To me that perfectly encapsulated the issue. Clearly the manufacturer wants owners to have access to manuals, that’s why they have the portal. But due to bots, they pay an intermediary to hold their site ransom from users. And then the bots still clearly can access it anyways.
by data-ottawa - We were mad about bloated, unnecessarily large web pages taking 3 seconds to load. Now, it takes 8 seconds to first pass a "checking if you're a bot" page or worse - making you click on pictures of crosswalks.by ks2048
- Reddit blocks anonymous mobile web traffic behind a capcha now.
One way to look at this is that the internet is healing. Platforms are closing themselves off to growth and scabbing over.
by echelon - yesterday I visited a page with TWO! captchas side by side. When I got through the second one the first one had expired...by tomasphan
- This is the real hidden cost of the bots. I absolutely loathe the human verification hoops I have to jump through now, more than anything else mentioned in this thread.
- > crosswalks
And their a11y/internationalisation is horrid.
We have pedestrian crossings, not crosswalks. We don't have fire hydrants (instead a different solution). We don't have yellow schoolbuses. Our traffic lights look different (and have different names in different cultures). And those examples are just the obvious problems with some captchas. Usually there are more subtle problems with verification UIs.
by robocat - Yes, the bot detection wait IS starting to get out of hand. As for solving a puzzle, I just exit the page and move on with my day.by user00005
- meanwhile agents have been able to pass these captchas for a while now, so it's unclear what the point of them now is. It's like they want to keep out the dumb bots, but any agent with reasonable intelligence can come in.by bryan0
- We need a hard social stigma against allowing your AI agent to contact another human being on your behalf.by simonw
- What does "contacting another human" actually mean when all of these messages are being answered by agents first? If I'm texting my friends and family I expect that to be answered by a human, but beyond that I am partially expecting it to be answered by an agent, and possibly routed to a human eventually.by bryan0
- Are social stigmas as far as the internet goes doing any good?
I feel like they’re very much not.
by duxup - hard social stigmas just produce defiance and cheaters.
so, in other words, that seems like the way to breed more realistic acting agents rather than getting rid of them.
by serf - social stigmas work locally, AI agents contact globally, there are only two ways social stigma is going to really work:
1. If an AI agent contacting people becomes big enough news that everybody the operator know reads about it. So AI agents asking people to send it child porn seems an unlikely edge case, but sure if that happens the person whose agent it is will get the social stigma.
2. If the AI agent accesses the owner's contacts list and starts asking for people to send it money so it can complete its task.
- The rise in clearly agentic inbound spam hitting my inbox is insane.
It will mention some obscure internship fact from my LinkedIn, and then tie it to some perceived deficit with the product I'm working on.
I never thought I'd say this, but I miss the old automated spam.
by jumploops