Ask HN: How can we keep (part of) the web human?

Step back a few more steps. Maybe the web has run its course, and we need to engage with each other in other ways. Even aside from the obvious IRL options, maybe voice and real-time interaction should gain traction again. Maybe we need completely new inventions to help us share content and thoughts. Maybe the web can go the way of gopher and become the subject of future story-telling: "Man, remember back when that was how we interacted? Crazy, right?"

We should move forward, not sideways.

A lot of the web is human. You just can’t discover it. It doesn’t rank highly in search results. It doesn’t go viral on social networks. It doesn’t get wildly upvoted on aggregator sites like this one.

That’s the fundamental dilemma of not just the web, but the Internet, as a pull medium opposed to a push medium like television or radio. A human can not remember every URL. From your blank web browser you can only go to URLs you know. Then the only web pages you will ever see are ones that are linked, directly or indirectly, from the ones you know.

Most people only know Google, Facebook, etc. Anything that isn’t linked to from those sites effectively does not exist.

But it does exist. It’s a whole forest full of trees falling and not making a sound. It’s up to you to do what you can to find it.

Even before AI the human element was being drown out.

The neat internet thing was neat for a while because power hadn't worked out how to exploit it for their own ends. They have now, the genie doesn't go back in the bottle.

Going back to forums locked behind accounts would be a good first step.

We're missing a piece of middleware technology. Imagine a network like Reddit or IMDB that:

a) offers posting under anonymity, b) allows users to associate with exactly one physical passport, c) has no knowledge of who an account belongs to, d) allows for filtering on content by passport-authenticated users.

https://blogroll.org is a neat project that curates personal blogs. One of the curators (Manu) also has a weekly blogger interview series that I enjoy: https://peopleandblogs.com

Get a job at someone pushing AI. Sabotage. You're smart, you can do it subtly enough that it just looks like you're kind of incompetent.

Virtual networks (dn42, tor, etc) or Virtual Private Networks (Tailscale, Wireguard) would be my knee-jerk recommendation. Adding a core abstraction at the network layer immediately fouls up all but the most diligently-coded AI bots out there, as does an abstraction at the Transport layer that's different from the traditional internet. In the short-term, I expect more humans to retreat into these sorts of enclaves as scrapers and AI slop make the public internet untenable to use.

In the long run...I couldn't tell you. This feels like the sort of schism Cyberpunk stories are made of, when a utopia of data sharing is perverted into a swamp of automated bots and agents, blindly following obsolete programming and untethered from the controls of their creators, harming whatever infrastructure is connected to the public internet without adequate security. I'd like to think smarter people than myself (shoutout to Xe Iaso for Anubis) will create tools to protect humans and our online presence from the bots, but I'm not super hopeful of their success in the face of present profit-motives for AI Companies to defeat them.

Perhaps the answer is to simply devalue the internet as an entity, and thereby destroy incentive to scrape or pollute it at such a scale. Maybe it's yanking services offline and putting them back in the real world, or privacy laws and insurance companies making data hoarding untenable and unaffordable for companies to engage in. Maybe it's identity validation at the point of connectivity, verifying smart cards or identification before you're allowed online (incredibly dystopian and the stuff of Pal*ntir's wet dreams).

I honestly couldn't tell you right now what the long game looks like. Only to find your humans, build your digital fortresses, and help each other as best you can.

What if we shifted our focus entirely from the source of information to how useful and accurate it is?

I can't see how the prevalent value system could avoid being "sapio-supremacist" ? is "future proof" to include intelligences that are artificial but whose "sentience" is otherwise human equivalent or "greater"

Make friends in real life and only use the internet as a commerce/information exchange platform.

all the Gemini-verse feels more human than the web to me nowadays. My two cents.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gemini_(protocol)

Go back to Facebook's Real Names rule. Require Know Your Customer validation. No fake name postings. Maybe allow explicit anonymous posting, but readers can block.

"It feels like" -- the first step I would make is to try and better understand what you're seeing. How often does this happen, compared to what you assume is human? Is it increasing? At what rate? Are there papers that confirm your assessment?

if you can't think of a way to reliably distinguish AIs from humans, that observation alone should raise great concerns which eclipse "spam comments on forums" or "bad results on google"

I'd be interested in building a curated and moderated web. A special browser with an address whitelist. Some kind of democratic curation of content with a small paywall to reduce the noise.

Or alternatively, improve pagerank to exclude low quality content and pages that contain ads.