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1. Charles U. Farley (freakazoid@retro.social)'s status on Thursday, 19-Jan-2023 02:11:25 JST Charles U. Farley

   If you didn't go through the Web's first two cycles of being useful and then becoming useless, maybe refrain from having an opinion about what #ChatGPT is going to do to the Web.

   The Web was useful when there wasn't that much stuff on it and almost all the information came from people in universities. Then, as the commercial Internet grew, it became more and more useless. New search engines would help for a while, but it would rapidly sink back into uselessness.

   Then Google came along and made the Web useful again. Again, it was temporary. The Web is garbage *today*. ChatGPT will be beating a dead horse. Maybe it will be the trigger for something that makes the Web useful again.

   But honestly anytime someone frets over the ChatGPT-pocalypse, that means they think the garbage that exists today is actually useful. No. Today's Web needs to be burned to the ground.

   • Charles U. Farley (freakazoid@retro.social)'s status on Thursday, 19-Jan-2023 02:11:24 JST Charles U. Farley

     in reply to

     The reason ChatGPT is such a threat isn't because of how advanced it is. It's because of how advanced *we* are not. We're barely better than robots. We sit around sifting through garbage information on the Internet, like a treasure hunter on the beach with a metal detector. Meanwhile, at every click we get shown a bunch of ads, tracked, and monetized.

     Is that really something you want to protect?

   • Charles U. Farley (freakazoid@retro.social)'s status on Thursday, 19-Jan-2023 02:11:25 JST Charles U. Farley

     in reply to

     I was an early user of Quora. In fact, I became something of a minor celebrity in the early cryptocurrency space (I wrote Bitcoin's very first obituary according to 99bitcoins.com). As a result, I started getting anonymous requests to answer troll questions. I looked for a way to disable anonymous requests to answer questions, but I could only disable answer requests entirely. When I wrote to Quora support with a feature request, their reply was that they didn't want to allow that, because they wanted to maximize the amount of content. They were essentially admitting that they cared only about quantity, not quality.

     I manually deleted all my answers and then my account. Everything Quora has done since then has been along the same lines: all they care about is growth. They've ALWAYS been garbage. They're zombies, shuffling along sucking the life out of the Internet.

     So if ChatGPT kills Quora, I'll be celebrating. And you should be too.

     Adrian Cochrane repeated this.