Ask HN: How can we keep (part of) the web human?
61 comments
·June 20, 2025codingdave
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.
selfhoster11
Given that the old web was as much of a repository of information as a way to connect, the new thing shouldn't involve unsearchable, temporary comms that work only in real time. Forcing the new thing to be synchronous or near-synchronous would be a terrible waste of subject matter experts' time too.
onemoresoop
All these ways are very harvestable by AI companies. I think the only way is IRL and more people spaces where technology only exists on devices and everything is decentralized.
mbauman
A highly relevant must-watch here is Bret Victor's Computational Public Space:
pajamasam
I like your thinking! Thank you for taking the time to give your thoughts :)
Apreche
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.
pajamasam
For sure. I agree. Maybe I should rephrase to "how can we make the human stuff discoverable again?" Or, can we make tools to help people to find it? Because if people can't find it, less and less people will use it and then it will later become inactive. Or, should we tell people by word of mouth again?
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ge96
I wonder if registrars provide lists of bought domain names vs. trying to map IPV4 which has multiple domains pointing to same ip
would be interesting to do mapping yourself though probably pointless with how much effort/time it would take
does remind me of this fun video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JcJSW7Rprio
mathgeek
Perhaps some examples would help? The human-centric web I remember was centered on sharing things you found.
dogleash
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.
pajamasam
Does that mean we need to invent some new thing or rather go back to IRL? And what about news, media, etc. Do we create physical copies again?
lee-rhapsody
Going back to forums locked behind accounts would be a good first step.
ASalazarMX
Forums worked (and still do) because they're small niches, like the budding Internet. As soon as they become big, they lose their sense of community, and become profitable to spam.
So, maybe we have to choose between isolated human islands vs. an ad-and-SEO-infested world?
pajamasam
> isolated human islands Good point. But how does one find these? Through word-of-mouth, I guess?
onemoresoop
> Going back to forums locked behind accounts would be a good first step.
How do you ensure the accounts aren't AI bots or people who scrap and serve it all back to the AI soup pot? The identity seems to be quite a problem online.
selfhoster11
Invite-only, the way private torrent trackers still do it. Which has its own problems, but if you limit the number of invitees a given user can bring in and other such restrictions, it makes it practically impossible to for bots to make up a good chunk of the userbase.
pajamasam
Invite-only sounds like a good idea. Especially if you need multiple people to approve invites. However, one or a few people might get greedy and add bots.
JohnMakin
Yes, and account creation automation is quite trivial in the majority of cases.
pajamasam
Like Reddit, you mean? Or with some extra authentication mechanism?
egypturnash
hahaha god Reddit is fucking full of people who are clearly using AI to write or edit their posts, I get so many people trying to glaze me like ChatGPT does now and it's so fucking creepy.
pajamasam
Yeah, that's why I asked to get clarity on what exactly they meant with accounts.
burnt-resistor
Sounds about right. Prove you're a real human through some sort of identification verification process. Probably would lead to better conversations, especially if each person could have only one account.
tayo42
They typical Instagram and Facebook comment section proves this wrong lol
sunrunner
> Prove you're a real human
Ah, so Worldcoin then?
ASalazarMX
New AI service idea: this human doesn't exist, complete with plausible fictional ids.
uh... for security awareness.
ranger_danger
I am quite skeptical it would help. The majority of users on forums already aren't AI, and from my personal experience in the last couple decades on many different forums, there's already an abundance of egotistical, dogmatic god complexes around to make the experience insufferable enough already.
jay_kyburz
I imagine people will soon have AI post here and other logged in forums on behalf of them. Try and rack up Karma or build reputation.
onemoresoop
I think some are already doing this.
o-o-
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.
petemilly
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
pajamasam
Looks nice, thank you!
egypturnash
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.
onemoresoop
Too bad these jobs pay well and attract people who are quite myopic and drink all the koolaid.
egypturnash
Yeah, the first challenge is learning how to sound like someone who's drunk the koolaid without letting it actually affect you.
pajamasam
I think sometimes it's naivety, unfortunately, in young graduates especially. With a touch of greediness and ambition. I guess the greediness takes precedence once they're not so naive anymore.
stego-tech
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.
pajamasam
Great answer, thank you.
sim04ful
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"
pajamasam
I don't just want useful and accurate information. I want fun, creative, funny content that I can relate to.
pajamasam
Also, multiple perspectives.
bbarnett
Setup web forums, include ToS which indicates service is denied using automated tools.
People have been charged with telecommunication related crimes for hscking, and the tos csn indicate access denial.
This gated access won't stop AI, but will make account usage illegal.
People have been convicted for far less. May as well use such laws to our advantage for once.
That's the best path I can see.
zeroCalories
Is this an argument for AI? First, AI slop sucks. Second, even if it stopped sucking, it would need good input data, which it will need for a top 5 dish soap recommendation until it can do my dishes for me. Third, I want more than just useful information.
tolerance
Make friends in real life and only use the internet as a commerce/information exchange platform.
BaudouinVH
all the Gemini-verse feels more human than the web to me nowadays. My two cents.
Any ideas for how we can keep the web (or at least part of it) human?
It feels like every time I do a web search, more and more of the results are AI generated nonsense.
I'm worried that it's going to become much more difficult to find the human-generated content.
How can we keep a part of the web human? Any ideas? (I'm not keen on Sam Altman’s eyeball-scanning Orb being the "solution.")