PhysicsForums and the Dead Internet Theory

This has been a constant back and forth for me. My personal project https://golfcourse.wiki was built on the idea that I wanted to make a wiki for golf nerds because nobody pays attention to 95% of fun golf courses because those courses don't have a marketing department in touch with social media.

I basically decided that using AI content would waste everyone's time. However, it's a real chicken-or-egg problem in content creation. Faking it to the point of project viability has been a real issue in the past (I remember the reddit founders talking about posting fake comments and posts from fake users to make it look like more people were using the product). AI is very tempting for something like this, especially when a lot of people just don't care.

So far I've stuck to my guns, and think that the key to a course wiki is absolutely having locals insight into these courses, because the nuance is massive. At the same time, I'm trying to find ways that I can reduced the friction for contributions, and AI may end up being one way to do that.

100%.

So far (thankfully) I've noticed this stuff get voted down on social media but it is blowing my mind people think pasting in a ChatGPT response is productive.

I've seen people on reddit say stuff like "I don't know but here's what ChatGPT said." Or worse, presenting ChatGPT copy-paste as their own. Its funny because you can tell, the text reads like an HR person wrote it.

The problem with "provide LLM output as a service," which is more or less the best case scenario for the ChatGPT listicles that clutter my feed, is that if I wanted an LLM result...I could have just asked the LLM. There's maybe a tiny proposition if I didn't have access to a good model, but a static page that takes ten paragraphs to badly answer one question isn't really the form factor anyone prefers; the actual chatbot interface can present the information in the way that works best for me, versus the least common denominator listicle slop that tries to appeal to the widest possible audience.

The other half of the problem is that rephrasing information doesn't actually introduce new information. If I'm looking for the kind of oil to use in my car or the recipe for blueberry muffins, I'm looking for something backed by actual data, to verify that the manufacturer said to use a particular grade of oil or for a recipe that someone has actually baked to verify that the results are as promised. I'm looking for more information than I can get from just reading the sources myself.

Regurgitating text from other data sources mostly doesn't add anything to my life.

> If I'm reading a blog or a discussion forum, it's because I want to see writing by humans. I don't want to read a wall of copy+pasted LLM slop posted under a human's name.

This reminds me of the time around ChatGPT 3's release where Hacker News's comments was filled with users saying "Here's what ChatGPT has to say about this"

Yup, I'm the same, and I love my LLMs. They're fun and interesting to talk to and use, but it's obvious to everyone that they're not very reliable. If I think an article is LLM-generated, then the signal I'm getting is that the author is just as clueless as I am, and there's no way I can trust that any of the information is correct.

> (I mean "nobody" in the sense of "nobody likes Nickelback". ie, not literally nobody.)

Reminds me of the old Yogi Berra quote: Nobody goes there anymore, its too crowded.

I can understand it for AI generated text, but I think there are a lot of people that like AI generated images. Image sites like get a ton of people that like AI generated images. Civitai gets a lot of engagement for AI generated images, but so do many other image sites.

Exactly. Why in the hell would I want someone to use ChatGPT for me? If I wanted that, I could go use that instead.

> Google slowly stopped ranking traditional forum posts and blogs as well around that time

IMO the true inflection point was 2014 when Google first hid (from the UI) and then fully removed (no longer accessible by magic URL) the “Blogs” and especially the “Discussions” filters. Some contemporary discussions on “Discussions”:

- https://techcrunch.com/2014/01/23/googles-search-filters-now...

- http://googlesystem.blogspot.com/2014/03/bring-back-forum-se... (details the briefly-working magic URLs)

- https://www.ghacks.net/2014/01/23/search-discussions-blogs-p...

- https://www.seroundtable.com/google-search-filters-gone-1799...

- https://www.webmasterworld.com/google/4687960.htm

- https://www.thecoli.com/threads/i-cant-google-search-by-disc...

- https://www.neogaf.com/threads/anyone-else-annoyed-google-re...

- https://webapps.stackexchange.com/questions/57249/has-the-op...

- https://www.bladeforums.com/threads/how-to-do-google-discuss...

- https://browsermedia.agency/blog/alternatives-discussion-sea...

I remember several traditional programming forums I frequented in the 00s getting hit hard by the Google Panda update around 2013. It ruined their SEO and they started to go into decline. Forums and blogs had a culture that isn't replicated by reddit, social media, etc. It's a shame to lose it.

I couldn’t find it. He was trying to seed the site ?

Ars Technica started with comms forums + this new idea to report tech news. The forums are still there but not nearly the camaraderie of the early days.

Oh, there are solutions. One is a kind of a socialized trust system. I know that Lyn Alden that I follow on Nostr is actually her not only because she says so, but also because a bunch of other people follow her too. There are bot accounts that impersonate her, but it’s easy to block those, a it’s pretty obvious from the follower count. And once you know a public key that Lyn posts under, I’m sure it’s her.

She could start posting LLM nonsense, but people will be quick to point it out, and start unfollowing. An important part is that there’s no algorithm deciding what I see in my feed (unless I choose so), so random LLM stuff can’t really get into my feed, unless I chose so.

Another option is zero knowledge identity proofs that can be used to attest that you’re a human without exposing PII, or relying on a some centralized server being up to “sign you in on your behalf”

https://zksync.mirror.xyz/kWRhD81C7il4YWGrkDplfhIZcmViisRe3l...

Well, the end of open, public UGC content anyway.

I have heard of Discord servers where admins won't assign you roles giving you access to all channels unless you've personally met them, someone in the group can vouch for you, or you have a video chat with them and "verify."

This is the future. We need something like Discord that also has a webpage-like mechanism built into it (a space for a whole collection of documents, not just posts) and is accessible via a browser.

Of course, depending on discovery mechanisms, this means this new "Internet" is no longer an easy escape from a given reality or place, and that was a major driver of its use in the 90's and 00's - curious people wanting to explore new things not available in their local communities. To be honest, the old, reliable Google was probably the major driver of that.

And it sucks for truly anti-social people who simply don't want to deal with other people for anything, but maybe those types will flourish with AI everywhere.

If the gated hubs of a possible new group-x-group human Internet maintain open lobbies, maybe the best of both worlds can be had.

For the tech discussions I'm interested in burning cpu/GPU cycles for proof of work is a good way to make replies expensive enough that only people who care will post then.

Another option is a web of trust.

It's finally the year of gpg!

I suspect that the honest outcome will be that platforms where AI content is allowed/encouraged will begin to appear like a video game. If everyone in school is ai-media famous - then no one is. There is most assuredly a market for a game where you are immediately influencer famous, but it's certainly much smaller than the market for social media.

Cool, does that mean we can go out more and talk to real humans again? Can't wait tbh.

Ironically, on Facebook itself I am only friends with people I actually know in real life. So, most of the stuff I see in my feed is from them.

Invite only forums or forums with actual identity checking of some sort. Google and Facebook are in prime position to actually provide real online identity services to other websites, which makes Facebook itself developing bots even funnier. Maybe we'll eventually get bank/government issued online identity verification.

If you think about historical parallels like advertising and the industrialisation of entertainment, where the communication is sufficiently human-like to function but deeply insincere and manipulative, I think you'll find that you absolutely can see such a future and how it might turn out.

A lot or most of people will adapt, accept these conditions because compared to the constant threat of misery and precarity of work, or whatever other way to sustenance and housing, it will be very tolerable. Similar to how so called talk shows flourished, where fake personas pretend to get to know other fake personas they are already very well acquainted with and so on, while selling slop, anxieties or something. Like Oprah, the billionaire.

Impersonating somebody to make it look like they said something they didn’t really ought to be considered defamation or something.

Also there’s something really uncomfortable about the phrasing of a lot of those answers. I mean, even as somebody with an engineering degree, I try not to ever answer a question “as a <field> engineer” because when screwing around online I haven’t done the correct amount of analysis to provide answers “as an engineer” ethically (acknowledging the irony of using the phrase here, but, clearly this is not a technical statement so I think it is fine). The bot doesn’t seem to have this compunction.

This ravenprp guy was an engineering student a couple years ago. I guess it’s less of a thing because he wasn’t commenting under his real name. But it seems like this site, given the type of content it hosts, could easily end up impersonating somebody “as an engineer” in the field they work and have a professional reputation in. And the site even has a historical record of them asking and answering questions through their education, so it does a really good job of misleading people into thinking an engineer is answering their questions.

I know the idea of an individual professional reputation has taken a beating in the modern hyper-corporate world. But the more I think of it, the more I think… this seems incredibly shitty and actually borderline dangerous, right?

It is sad. I have been putting a copyright notice on my resume at the bottom to prevent some nonsense.

I have always wondered if people could attach some sort of cryptographic marker to their posts, that could link to an archive somewhere. Mostly I was thinking of backups of posts to yelp that couldn't be taken down, but I wonder if it would work that posts someone never made.

I exchange public keys with close friends in person. A large scale solution would be very Orwellian. You would need a national ID that is a smart card to connect to an ISP and possible biometric verification.

Shouldn't we invent a protocol that keeps the content you produce under your control so that places like forums or facebook are only discovery devices and interaction facilitators, but not custodians of all communication? Being able to independantly reach the source of piece of information is increasingly important.

Don't sign your posts!

The last section mentions that the PhysicsForums admins are experimenting with LLM-generated responses, so I think the site owners are responsible.

> We reached out to Greg Bernhardt asking for comment on LLM usage in PhysicsForums, and he replied:

> "We have many AI tests in the works to add value to the community. I sent out a 2024 feedback form to members a few weeks ago and many members don’t want AI features. We’ll either work with members to dramatically improve them or end up removing them. We experimented with AI answers from test accounts last year but they were not meeting quality standards. If you find any test accounts we missed, please let me know. My documentation was not the best."

Why they would recycle old human accounts as AI "test accounts", I have no idea.

> How is this being done exactly?

Presumably it's being done by the site-owner, whether that means new-management or original management getting desperate/greedy.

Whoever runs the site/database is just inserting rows with fake datestamps under existing (presumably abandoned) account names.

Wondering the same. I couldn't make it through the article. Fascinating discovery, but poorly written and difficult to navigate the author's thoughts. The interstitial quotes were particularly disorienting.