> My only question is why the garbage factory hasn't gone into overdrive faster, and how long will it take until there's so much garbage online that the Internet and all forms of digital communication essentially break?
"Why" is filters and price. Spam filters, CAPCHAs, tarpits, shadow-banning — there's been inauthentic behaviour since "telegram" was a thing sent from an office and printed on paper, rather than an app, and this has led to an arms race from all the people who don't want that. When I was at university (early 2000s), I vaguely recall they claimed that for every real email on our systems, we had about 100 spam messages, most of which were silently deleted and didn't even get as far as our spam folder.
"How long until" depends on when the price of a fake that's good enough to fool your automatic filters, is low enough that the users are getting so much rubbish that they can't be bothered to use the thing any more — given how many ads most people seem willing to tolerate, this may be as high as 1 in 3 messages being fake.
It's an arms race, so the exact date is not predictable.
A lot of this current generative AI wave seems to be a repeat of the late 90s/early 2000s. So it'll be interesting to see if automatic filtering is able to separate out the wheat from the chaff.
At some point in the early 2010s we found an equilibrium, but I don't exactly recall when, why, or how.
It's a space I know nothing about, but likely a good one to be in.
"Why" is filters and price. Spam filters, CAPCHAs, tarpits, shadow-banning — there's been inauthentic behaviour since "telegram" was a thing sent from an office and printed on paper, rather than an app, and this has led to an arms race from all the people who don't want that. When I was at university (early 2000s), I vaguely recall they claimed that for every real email on our systems, we had about 100 spam messages, most of which were silently deleted and didn't even get as far as our spam folder.
"How long until" depends on when the price of a fake that's good enough to fool your automatic filters, is low enough that the users are getting so much rubbish that they can't be bothered to use the thing any more — given how many ads most people seem willing to tolerate, this may be as high as 1 in 3 messages being fake.
It's an arms race, so the exact date is not predictable.