Yet another Hacker News

PhysicsForums and the Dead Internet Theory (2025)

46 points bmacho 2 days ago 24 comments

bmacho 2 days ago | parent

Previous discussion:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42816284 - Jan 24, 2025 | 154 comments

bmacho 1 hour ago | parent

This comment above is date mangled due to HN second chance pool <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26998308>.

It's ironic because the article (and many comments in the previous submission) are about how one shouldn't mess with user data to show fake engagement!

Schlagbohrer 1 hour ago | parent

So, how did all these hacked accounts or backdated posts happen? The article never says that even though the author talks to the site founder and admin.

skew-aberration 1 hour ago | parent

It's heavily implied the owner had them generated by a bot, potentially as part of his day job in SEO

bmacho 1 hour ago | parent

PhysicsForum's admin admitted creating them shortly after: <https://www.physicsforums.com/threads/official-response-to-a...>

Aurornis 1 hour ago | parent

Using AI to fake posting activity is bad.

Using real member accounts to post the fake AI content is so much worse.

I can’t even imagine the thought process that led to thinking it was a good idea to generate fake posts but assign them to real users. If they were going to fake posts, why not fake the users, too? They turned one bad decision into a much worse decision.

It must be sad to see your proud little corner of the internet decline in popularity, but this move took whatever positive historical vibes it had and lit them on fire.

embedding-shape 49 minutes ago | parent

> the thought process that led to thinking it was a good idea

Seemingly that can be found here: physicsforums [dot] com/threads/official-response-to-allegations-of-ai-misuse-in-pf.1078532/

> During the past several months, to counter declining engagement, I experimented with generative AI, intending to add value to "thin threads", especially those with 0 replies.

> For experiment #3, I used real accounts that I considered to be decade-old spammers as best I could tell, but I can't be 100% certain. I categorically regret and reject such a shameful and unethical decision.

(that website also modifies your clipboard when you copy stuff, big fuck you to the site owner, seemingly lacking any sort of guiding compass, good riddance to them)

account42 35 minutes ago | parent

But what's the end game envisioned here? Turning the website into an LLM proxy and hoping enough suckers look at your ads instead of those from other sloperators?

dooglius 21 minutes ago | parent

Helping people who have questions about physics

win311fwg 32 minutes ago | parent

"Fake posting activity" is a weak framing. It is real activity. The risk in allowing AI-generated content is that users will be able to sniff out low-quality content produced by AI that they don't find engaging, but if they don't like it they can always leave. If users love it then AI-generated content is not bad at all.

misnome 14 minutes ago | parent

Why would anyone go to a forum for AI-generated content when they could just ask the AI themselves?

xp84 14 minutes ago | parent

Here’s the problem - it’s the same problem in many areas where AI is put to (ab)use:

I already have my own AI accounts. Several of them, really. Some of them paid. For work and for personal. If I want any kind of take from AI, which is in fact a very frequent occurrence, I can just prompt for one. For free even! And with my choice of model based on how important or complex the topic. There is zero value-add for me when some product decides to squirt an extra helping of AI somewhere it wasn’t needed. Summary of a long piece of text (while still giving access to the unabridged text)? Probably fine. An AI answer to a question someone else posted on a forum? Or injected above my web search results (looking right at you, Google)? No thanks!

win311fwg 7 minutes ago | parent

I'm not sure you have explained the problem. You have explained why PhysicsForum might not appeal to you, but it doesn't have to appeal to you.

joe_the_user 50 minutes ago | parent

The "Dead Internet Theory" is too sad and too easy. I'd propose the "Dead Society Theory", the history of the Internet from the late 2000s to the late 2010s left people socially scare, paranoid, angry and hopeless about the possibility of communicating online.

Which is to say the Internet can be "dead" without being filled with undetectable or detectable fake posts, not that fake posts help things.

alephnerd 48 minutes ago | parent

Completely forgot about PhysicsForums.

Also this is a good example of the trend that has already been ongoing on HN since 2022. I think one other long-lasting HNer is working on a similar analysis of HN at the moment.

Edit: can't reply

> Appreciate some more details...

It's their story to tell. Not mine.

throwayay58373 39 minutes ago | parent

Say more?

I've been reading HN since 2013 and the quality has gone down, kind of like eternal September.

alephnerd 36 minutes ago | parent

2022 was when the degradation really took hold.

HN essentially became mainstream after the New Yorker profile, Reddit's degradation due to the mod blackout and API changes, and Lemmy flopping.

I've gotten my HN back to the pre-2022 consensus but it takes severe filtering, with around 200 posts being hidden a day. And it's those posts that drive the majority of discourse on the platform now.

The fact that throwaways like you are so normalized is a huge reason.

HN has also gotten divorced from tech and water-cooler conversations in much of the tech industry, and a lot of that seems to be because HN no longer has the same plurality of Bay/NYC/Seattle/Austin techies that it used to, and the userbase is way older than much of tech now (I was always younger than average on HN, but the amount of 1980s to early 2000s references shows that the platform has frozen in time demographically).

Ignore Reddit - HN has functionally become Slashdot (the fact that I even know what slashdot is highlights how the age demographics are so skewed on HN).

Edit: can't reply

> 2022 is when tech funding dried up...

Tech funding didn't dry up then. It just coencided with the time period that most vintages that originated in early 2010s were closing out, and those that originated in 2016-18 were hitting their 5 year mark.

This meant a lot of dry-powder didn't get deployed until 2023-24.

> stands to reason that we ran out of hacker topics...

They are still being posted at the same rate based on my filtering. The difference is a massive deluge in non-"traditional HN" related content being posted, and the younger generation of techies and founders (those below 35) not using HN.

throwayay58373 33 minutes ago | parent

That's a good point. Fwiw, I use throwaways because I don't want certain types of users to know anything about me. I wouldn't have felt this way, say, 5 years back.

What tools do you use for filtering if I may ask?

alephnerd 22 minutes ago | parent

I built my own system using both sentiment polarity analysis, hard-coded logic, and some semi-active tuning, but I'd rather not divulge specifics. IMO anyone can spin up their own similar system.

> I don't want certain types of users to know anything about me. I wouldn't have felt this way, say, 5 years back...

Frankly, most people DGAF about random HNers and (a general or meta-comment targeted at the reader, not you OP) if someone needs to use throwaways to post negatively polarized statements on HN, then they shouldn't even be on HN in the first place.

win311fwg 23 minutes ago | parent

2022 is when tech funding dried up, so it stands to reason that we ran out of hacker topics. The odd person still doing something cool in their basement for fun does not supply a sufficient stream of curiosities to keep the feed full. That required the unique time (ZIRP, etc.) when people were paid handsomely to explore cool things day in, day out.

HN was a product of its time.

smt88 38 minutes ago | parent

I haven’t noticed a huge change since 2022, except perhaps that politics are discussed quite a bit less

alephnerd 34 minutes ago | parent

Politics is discussed significantly more on HN after 2022 than before. I'll wait on that HNer to finish their analysis and post it on here, but they've also noticed the same trend.

rramadass 28 minutes ago | parent

What is this "trend" and "similar analysis" you mention? Not clear from your comment.

Appreciate some more details.

xp84 22 minutes ago | parent

It’s especially disappointing to see this done in such an unnecessarily dishonest way. If the project truly wanted to add value, I can imagine interesting AI uses that don’t lie or trick people. You could post a correctly-dated AI Answer (and prompt it to use the web search tool and cite sources) to posts that apparently never got one, and credit the exact model used, which would help future readers decide how confident they might be (a GPT-3 answer vs a GPT-6 Astra answer, for instance, are very different).

Heck, you could even engagement-farm if you have to, by taking science stories in the news and say, generating a poll to try to spur discussion.

But what they actually chose to do is super gross, helps nobody, hurts the site’s reputation, and even devalues the site tremendously as possible training data for AI. (Which, some AI detractors might actually be happy about, but I think isn’t really a good thing.)