The AI That Broke the Internet's Back

The experiment is to connect everyone on the planet together and see what happens, the result —a thick crust, layers and layers of lies.

I remember the internet was a place people shared information just for the sake of sharing information… can you imagine? It was not their job to produce content, to get followers, to stir engagement, to bolster SEO they just wanted to share information… like when your getting your mail, and your over enthusiastic neighbor shows you all their woodworking project in a little more depth than you’d prefer… on the internet the woodworker could find others like them…

20 years ago I learned to code by following one php programmer dude on youtube, copy/pasting from tizag and fixing issues with stackoverflow… The PHP programmer on youtube was medium to ok at PHP, I didn't so much watch him to get the exact process of how to do things, but rather simply the confidence that what I wanted to build could actually be done… equipped with the knowledge “that it could be done” I’d hack away for days to just get the most simple little app working… I followed that dudes videos for a few months, he just kept putting stuff out… deep into one video he off handedly mentioned why he made this videos now… he had cancer, had to leave his job so now he could spend the time he had left making these videos. He thought he had a little knowledge that could be helpful to others, so why not share it… His videos eventually stopped…

I know, I know — Now in days, “having cancer” is just an overdone play that increases engagement.

This PHP YouTuber’s ethos of sincerely sharing what you know, just for the sake of sharing, has been almost totally scrubbed from the web… It’s fair that it has been scrubbed too…. it doesn't make sense to show your hand… why would you if does not benefit you… why would you share knowledge that you have when it will just be repackaged by marketing specialists so they can sell more product, or sucked into the AI training machine… now big boy GPT knows grandma secret sweet potato receipt — awesome, thanks grandma!

I’ve been generally annoyed at that layers of commercial crust growing on the web for a while, but after GPT launched its not just layers of crust its just all one big commercial (now largely written by AI)— almost all the sincere creators just fully retreaded, and we are seeing all the big communities/forums going full belly up.

Here are a few examples that I think are not working. Just to give sense of scale these 9 websites (That I’d argue kinda suck), make up a huge portion of all traffic on the internet (Pry like 20% of all internet traffic — a stat I almost left out because 20% is not shocking, but I promise 20% of all the traffic is a lot of traffic)

StackOverflow — where all the software engineers used to happily help each other out is a now a gost town.

Quora — Has been awful for sometime (after they decided to monetize for questions, its now just all attention seeking questions: “My wife has been banging my pastor for 2 years now and I just found out — should I confront her?”). It been fake questions for some time now just to grab attention, but it used to at least be humans writing the fake questions, now its just AI content farms doing the dirty work.

Reddit: I’m sure Aaron Swartz would love to see the ROI his company is making investors… Once the heart of the internet, Reddit has fully sold it sole. It’s now getting overwhelmed with AI attention seeking content, and the few humans now still on it, are only there to sell there own product.

Twitter, Snapchat, Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn: Optimistically you may be able to squeeze some small value out of them by carefully only following people who create real content, but they are all working very hard and using every trick in the book to “attention capture” — if you have a uniquely strong will — maybe your capable of never getting captured… but probalby not… The noise + the ads makes it nearly impossible to get quality/valuable information.

Google: First 100 search results are now fully commercially driven… Ie: the content is from a large company with the sole purpose of getting you to become a customer of that company. This doesn't mean the content is totally worthless, but it usually means its fairly thin value/lacks depth or expertise — and often if the content does have some real value/knowledge to gain it has been stolen from some poor sucker and repacked into an SEO friendly way on a more “authoritative” website : ie a company website . So ultimately the original creator sees nothing — perhaps they can find some solace in the knowledge that the “information got out there”…

Now I’m not all doom and gloom, there are at least 2 large website I still think function fairly well…

Youtube: Our last bastion of hope, this is actually still working pretty well to distribute valuable information and reward the original creators for that information.

Wikipedia: Things are not perfect here, and one could make a lost of complaints… but the spirit of the operation does seem to still be functioning —they do still seem to maintain decent articles and provide a fairly accurate summary/state of certain topic.

I’m happy to have youtube & wikipedia and hopefully their spirit of providing truth and rewarding original authors flourishes while those who only seek to increase revenue (at the expense of humanity — we all got to make a buck — I’m not new here…), will flicker out in the long term…

I’m hopeful this will be the case, but simply hoping is not good enough . I believe we should all put our shoulders into it, and push the world into the direction we want to see it go. So I’ve decided to try my best to do that, I’ve been working on a project called CommunityCurated, I’m calling it “The Internet’s Cleanup Project” — maybe sounds a little unrealistic or naive — I know, but none the less that really is the goal — so thats what I will say.

The idea behind “Community Curated” is to create a huge community (tens of millions) of likeminded, rational, passionate people and then rate every piece of content on the internet (ok maybe not every piece of content, but the pieces of content that could get read a decent amount and could be valuable or could be lies — the pareto distribution is our strong friend here and makes what seems like an impossible task actually fairly possible)

So my current vision (which is continually evolving) for this system is actually fairly simple. It’s a browser extension + website , the browser extension lets people quickly see how the community rated a piece of content, it shows a little icon with the ratings (basically more green the icon is the better … the more red and blue the more the noise/commercially driven the content). The extension is also how people can rate a piece of content, so everyone just does their rating as they browse the web… ie: they stumble upon a piece of content the love (or hate), they rate it.

The website acts a place where those who rated can see their own rating (they will have their rating forever, so it also works as a bookmarking system — so even people who don’t give a crap about helping others can still at least help themselves). The website also lets us reward curators, and lets everyone interact with each other, build community, see progress , see the top curated content, and other general fun things.

Both the browser extension and website are currently live (as of a few days ago) and slowly but surely the community is growing and people are starting to rate content.

If you! The person reading all my rambling up to this point want to help — you can. And that would be awesome!

Here is the link to the CommunityCurated website where you can get started: https://communitycurated.com/

And here is the link to the chrome extension (which you will need to see/rate content): https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/communitycurated/daakklmgdephbmickajdgaakjdpinafi

As things are starting out, I’m very aware that the value provided to the users of the chrome extension will be “not so amazing” simply because we don’t have a huge number of ratings yet, but I promise this will change fast — the community is growing and and the number of rating is growing with it. Once we get a large enough curation community, I’m certain the curations will be extremely helpful to users — in the meantime you can always use the extension as your own bookmarking system, then as it grows all “your bookmarks” will start to help others too…

Feedback is welcome/necessary for this damn thing to work — so bring it on. You can reach out to me directly via email: [email protected] or twitter (which I hate so much) @taylorhawkes . You can also give feedback on the CommunityCurated Reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/CommunityCurated/ — and all our AI bots will be sure to get back to you in a timely manor.