Hacker News

>The issue isn’t the actual network connection between people, it is the content.

Everyone serving a website is being ddos by AI agents right now.

A local mesh network is one way to make sure that no one with a terabit network can index you.

Even if it was a "network connection" issue creating an overlay network on top of the Internet (with VPN tunnels and mesh routing, for example) would yield wildly better bandwidth and latency characteristics.

You can still make that overlay network geofenced and vetted. Heck, running it over a local ISP's last mile would probably yield wonderful latency.

We need vetted webrings on the existing Internet, not a new Internet.

There's only so much you can do to detect and block content that's AI generated. At the end of the day, the content starts with the people creating it.

Jumping to an invite only network isn't the most ridiculous idea imo.

Perhaps, but it also, by default, excludes that entire class of authentication problems that are only manifested in a non-local network.

I love the idea.

It's also interesting in that a local mesh doesn't necessarily need to operate using the TCP/IP/HTTP stack that has been compromised at every layer by advertising and privacy intrusions.

I got a 300 baud modem right around the same time. There were a few local BBSs that ran meetups, scavenger hunts, warez parties and the like. I got to know a bunch of the regulars from the area. Pretty cool time.

I think before Friendster, Myspace, then Facebook, there was a period where there were discussion forums for local communities. I think it was useful for meeting people. I remember friends in the late '90s used them frequently for chatting and some made new friends in real life that way. It was a short period, though, as more established companies came along that had a wider reach.

Bbs. Downloaded first shareware version of doom. Was it 4mb or something? I remember I had like 5kb/s and paid 5 cents a minute. My parents weren't happy those days. Now they are :)

What about when you want to find hot singles in your area?

Jokes aside, probably 10-20% of my browsing is related to local things, up to the country scale. From finding local restaurants or businesses, to finding about relevant laws or regulations, news, etc. That's not negligible.

How would that look like in practice? I've just heard about the term and I like the description of it, especially the possibilities it gives

HAM & pirate radio vs corporate broadcasting.

There's plenty of "high effort" market information manipulation going on, even before LLMs. Spread (justified, researched) FUD about a company your fund is shorting.

It's the same as with crypto rug pulls, nobody is going to fall for that several times. Was still money to make in that before everyone and their grandma wisened up.

The use of the word Tragedy in the name I think makes it easier for people to excuse themselves when they monopolize the commons. “Oh it’s a tragedy humans are just selfish we can’t avoid it.” The tragedy is that people are comfortable excusing others selfish, greedy behavior by saying it’s innate.

There’s a lot of debate under your linked comment.

My understanding is that people tend to cooperate in smaller numbers or when reputation is persistent (the larger the group, the more reliable reputation has to be), otherwise the (uncommon) low-trust actors ruin everything.

Most humans are altruistic and trusting by default, but a large enough group will have a few sociopaths and misunderstood interactions; which creates distrust across the entire group, because people hate being taken advantage of.

I would argue that it can be circumvented, not that it won't help. If a human uses his/her signature for content farm, it can be flagged as such.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saudade

>SEO is a slippery slope on both sides because a little bit is good for everyone

I reject this emphatically. Google should never have been in the business of shaping internet content. Perhaps they should have even gone out of their way to avoid doing so. Without Google (or a better-performing competitor) acquiescing to the game, there is no SEO market.

70% of the GDP of Laos comes from scamming people in the first world.

"A report by the Global Initiative on Transnational Organised Crime (based on United States Institute of Peace findings) estimated that revenues from “pig-butchering” cyber scams in Laos were around US $10.9 billion, which would be *equivalent to more than two-thirds (≈67–70 %) of formal Lao GDP in a recent year."

https://globalinitiative.net/wp-content/uploads/2025/05/GI-T...

Russia has been among the top sources of spam since the early 2000s, it's not like anything changed lately. Mail-order bride scams and similar peaked in like 2005. It doesn't take a lot of people to send spam, I don't think it's correlated with the general population's online presence. I'd actually say it's quite the opposite: in 2026, Russia has never been more disconnected from the Western parts of the Internet than it is now (the Russian Internet watchdog blocks like 30% of foreign resources since a few years ago, while Russian IPs are routinely banned on Western sites after 2022, I can barely open anything without a VPN).

For that reason, and because of limited English proficiency, Russian netizens rarely visit foreign resources these days, except for a few platforms without a good Russian replacement like Instagram and YouTube (both banned btw, only via a VPN), where they usually stay mostly within their Russian-speaking communities. I'm not sure why any of them would be the reason the Internet as a whole has supposedly become low-trust. The OP in question is some SEO company using an LLM to churn out sites with "unique content." We already had this stuff 20 years ago, except the "unique content" was generated by scripts that replaced words with synonyms. Nothing really new here.

I agree. It's not that the web was high-trust. It was more that if you landed on a niche web page, you knew whoever put it together probably had at least a little expertise (and care) since it wouldn't be worth writing about something that very few people would find and read anyway. Now that it's super cheap to produce niche content, even if very few people find a page, it's "worth it" to produce said garbage as it gives you some easy SEO for very little time investment.

The motivation for content online has changed over the last 20 years from people wanting to share things they're interested in to one where the primary goal is to collect eyeballs to make a profit in some way.

> a specific strategy adopted by corporations using the internet for commercial purposes.

Isn't that what's driving the pollution of the Internet by LLMs?

Words change meaning as they are used. Especially negative words that may start rather specific tend to get used more generally until the specificity is lost.

>to be boring, the term "enshittification" was invented by one individual, recently, and has a specific meaning. it does not refer to "things just get worse"

It literally started meaning that hours after it was first posted to HN and being used. Sorry, that's just how language works. Enshittification got enshittified. Deal with it and move on.

I'm gonna guess that it's just popular enough that being in the top 5 results on search engines yields a small net gain in ad revenue. It's possible the decision to generate the fake article was itself made by a machine.

Great piece btw

There was no reason to lie about knowing the Scots language well enough to be the primary contributor by volume to Scots Wikipedia, and yet that's something that happened.

Lies are intentional. A liar cares about the truth and attempts to hide it.

What we have here is worse; LLMs give you bullshit. A bullshitter does not care if something is true or false, it just uses rhetoric to convince you of something.

I am far from being someone nostalgic about the old internet, or the world in general back then. Things in many ways sucked back then, we just tend to forget how exactly they sucked. But honestly, a LLM-driven internet is mostly pointless. If what I am to read online is AI generated crap, why bother reading it on websites and not just reading it straight from a chatbot already?