The unholy act of losing a lot of time watching things empty of meaning on a phone screen is called “Endless Scrolling”. You scroll past photos, videos, shorts, reels, or whatever the big-tech companies decided to call this small—but harmful—dose of easy dopamine they shoot at you. Now, you can also do some scrolling over “““articles”””. :D Sounds good, right? Right?
insert Padme “right” meme here
I’m talking about those cheap articles from LinkedIn, Medium, etc. The kind of article that tries to lecture you about something, but only shows you what you can find on the first page of Google. It lacks any reason to exist. Why? Because whoever wrote it doesn’t have—or doesn’t want—to give you anything. They only want to boost their social metrics (likes, silly duck).
I know you can find some hidden gems if you have the energy to filter through it a lot.
So when I was checking Hackernews the other day, I found this AI;DR post. I liked it and agreed with it, but I was a little surprised the author missed a very important point: people were already producing meaningless content before LLMs. I’ve attended to multiple tech events and read a lot of posts where the content were “introduction to xxx” or “xxx from zero to hero”, and the authors were basically regurgitating the first page of Google results. This was BEFORE LLMs.
Btw, unless we’re talking about complex stuff like rocket science or cold fusion, don’t bore the crowd with your “introduction to someshitty” talk. Just share the results from the first page of Google with them.
I think what really bothers me — and I’d say the author of that article too — is the lack of meaning; the lack of “intention behind it”; the lack of the pain to “articulate the chaos in their head and wrestle it into shape”. Because doesn’t matter if it was produced by a creature approved by the turing-test or not: it’s still dead content.
Now people want to filter out content produced by AI - again, i agree with that - but i would say that we should also filter out content produced by Humans. So let’s simplify the terminology and say: “avoid dead content” -> dead-content;dont-read -> dc;dr
AI;DR is the final acknowledgment of the Dead Internet fate. If the “Dead Internet” is the killer cancer, then “dead content” is the bad cells. Humans started this, so we can’t blame LLMs. This is our sin.