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AI slop is killing online communities

rmoff.net

21–30 of 781 posts

Re: AI slop is killing online communities

#21

I have largely written Reddit off and no longer visit it after an experiment I did where I had an agent karma farm for me and do some covert advertising. As I went through the posts it wrote I realized that as a reader I would have NO idea that these were just written by a computer. Many many people (or other bots) had full on conversations with it and it scared me a bit. I am not quite there with Hacker News but I d…

Unless you've discovered the secret sauce, LLM comments are very obvious. Even Altman revealed that they focused on coding at the expense of writing.

The obvious ones are the ones you notice

Re: AI slop is killing online communities

#22
HN is in peril and I don’t think it is a bad thing. Or rather, I’d like to bring back the old chestnut: it’s a good thing.

While the site has moved to using /showlim, the AI garbage just bypasses that and goes straight to the home page. Almost every project that’s being shown is vibe coded and looks exactly the same - generated by Claude or the like. This is an excellent test for the site: will it be able to adapt or do we simply end up with a husk of what HN was and it’s the AI posts driving majority of engagement, Overton window, and upvotes/downvotes?

I look forward to this, I think it is an exciting development.

Re: AI slop is killing online communities

#23

I made this point elsewhere, but people are learning a lot of what us had to learn the old way which is no one cares about your stuff for the most part and now the value provided has to go way up to get people to care. That is, as the author says, the novelty has worn off and since we know it's AI the perceived value is also way down. We're all recalibrating. I do really think this is just a quick period in time befo…

I don't know... I might have said the same thing about email/text/phone spam but it has only proliferated to the point where it's a constant stream of garbage. Email, text, and phone calls are almost completely useless at this point. Sifting the signal from the noise is a non-stop effort.

I think people who want to push a certain narrative might just set up a quick bot and tell that bot to start posting on Reddit or whatever and just let it run. Why not? Little effort on their part and they might actually have influence. The same reason why spammers apparently think sending me 10 text messages per day about a loan I've been approved for. It probably does work 0.0001% of the time, but that's okay if it's all automated.

Re: AI slop is killing online communities

#24

I have largely written Reddit off and no longer visit it after an experiment I did where I had an agent karma farm for me and do some covert advertising. As I went through the posts it wrote I realized that as a reader I would have NO idea that these were just written by a computer. Many many people (or other bots) had full on conversations with it and it scared me a bit. I am not quite there with Hacker News but I d…

I've been on the Internet for decades at this point and one thing I've noticed is that communities that, for example, ban political topics actually mean "positions I don't like" as "political". This is somewhat related to the Overton window but really a bunch of (mostly conservative) ideas get normalized so aren't deemed "political".

I see the same thing with "AI Slop". Yes, there is AI Slop but (IME) it's pretty easy to spot. But what's more annoying is how often people are willing to throw that accusation whenever someone takes a position they don't like, much like the "political" label. It's lazy and honestly just as bad as the slop itself because it unintentionally launders the slop in a "boy who cried wolf" kind of way.

I also have a theory that some AI slop isn't inherently successful. It's just heavily botted by people who are interested in promoting certain positions. I bet you could make a pro-administration LLM bot and another one promoting a communist revolution and no amount of model tuning would make the second as popular as the first because the first would hit third-party botting as well as platform content biases (eg Twitter).

I've personally been accused of being a bot. This is particularly true in recent time as I've tried to share facts and fact-based analysis of, say, what's going on with crude oil markets, the military operation in the Gulf and the politics and economics around it. I even saw one hilarious comment saying (paraphrased) "the bots are getting clever and posting about unrelated topics". This was funny because it never occurred to this person that no, it was just a real person posting something you disagreed with.

Re: AI slop is killing online communities

#25

I have largely written Reddit off and no longer visit it after an experiment I did where I had an agent karma farm for me and do some covert advertising. As I went through the posts it wrote I realized that as a reader I would have NO idea that these were just written by a computer. Many many people (or other bots) had full on conversations with it and it scared me a bit. I am not quite there with Hacker News but I d…

Unless you've discovered the secret sauce, LLM comments are very obvious. Even Altman revealed that they focused on coding at the expense of writing.

[deleted]

Re: AI slop is killing online communities

#26
post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

People are definitely trying to make HN bots because I have seen several get flagged. No idea to what end though.

Possibly to test reactions to a bot they plan to build a startup around.

I've seen some claim they do it to avoid stylometry or being fingerprinted, or because of social anxiety problems.

Some people just have a compulsive need to optimize everything, and HN's guidelines and tone policing are more easily followed by a bot than a human.

Re: AI slop is killing online communities

#27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

He's stating a fact. Turn on showed in your options and scroll to the bottom of the comments on any popular story. There are so many agentic users here.

I generally disagree, because the level of discourse here has always been very high, curious and intellectual.

Re: AI slop is killing online communities

#28

How would one build an online community free of LLM agents commenters and links to "slop" content? Strict invitation trees? Small signup fees? No SEO incentives?

My guess is that sooner or later we're going to one or the other of these:

* dead online communities

* highly-invasive, government-mandated "prove you are a human" requirements in order to participate in online communities

Re: AI slop is killing online communities

#29

I have largely written Reddit off and no longer visit it after an experiment I did where I had an agent karma farm for me and do some covert advertising. As I went through the posts it wrote I realized that as a reader I would have NO idea that these were just written by a computer. Many many people (or other bots) had full on conversations with it and it scared me a bit. I am not quite there with Hacker News but I d…

> where I had an agent karma

Was this a browser using agent? What did you use?

Re: AI slop is killing online communities

#30

I have largely written Reddit off and no longer visit it after an experiment I did where I had an agent karma farm for me and do some covert advertising. As I went through the posts it wrote I realized that as a reader I would have NO idea that these were just written by a computer. Many many people (or other bots) had full on conversations with it and it scared me a bit. I am not quite there with Hacker News but I d…

I think it's going to effectively kill public chat communities without either proof of identity or attestation through a web of trust. Or rather turn them into little better than comment sections on news sites; thriving but worthless.

I'm active in a number of online communities that are doing just fine but the difference is those all involve ongoing relationships, built over time and with engagement across multiple platforms. I've no doubt this clock is ticking too but it's still harder to fake a user across a mix of text chat, voice and video calls, playing an online game, etc and when much of the web of relationships extends back into real life activity.

But I agree the golden age of easy anonymous connections online has ended.

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