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.

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negura 11 hours ago | parent | next [-]

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.

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robotmay a day ago | parent | prev | next [-]

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.

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compiler-guy a day ago | parent [-]

Many people believe the golden era ended in 1993 or early 1994.

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

	▲	robotmay a day ago \| parent \| next [-]
		Bit too early for me unfortunately, I was 6/7 then! I was still having a lot of fun up until about 2005, before I went off to university. The past week I've been trawling the Internet Archive to try and find things I vaguely remember - it's remarkably hard. So much of that era is missing, though thankfully one of my own sites was indexed and I'm able to fan out a bit from there. Albeit mostly to French anime fansites, but I'll take it.
	▲	antisthenes 2 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		1993 Was where the internet was still niche that barely any content existed outside of chats. Up to the social media era was a nice intersection between a good amount of content, good quality, and enough people to where you could legitimately find a community for almost any niche.

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xpct a day ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I think it's quite possible for a reversal to happen, where nerds will start meeting IRL while everybody else flocks to web spaces.

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rozap 19 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

If AI ruins social media, then that's a huge net good.

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SpaceManNabs a day ago | parent | prev [-]

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.

	▲	soupfordummies 21 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		I think the key is that AI is a spectrum. A writer using AI could mean anything from spelling/grammar fixes to full-on generating whole-cloth works. I'm hoping we kind of settle in on some sort of accepted standard or at least disclosure method. But who knows -- I've been hoping we settle on accepted social norms for smartphones and social media and we're still not quite there yet either. Hell, if anything that seems to have taken a turn for the WORSE in the past few years.
	▲	robotmay a day ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		I'm with you on the YouTube side - I stopped making my own videos earlier this year when I burnt out, and now I'm finding myself increasingly irritated just by the thumbnails when I visit the site. I'm definitely viewing less than I did last year. I hadn't considered the impact on manga. Machine translations are probably helping with fan translations for more niche projects. I haven't seen any obvious AI art myself yet but I do tend to read stuff from smaller creators on slower release cycles.