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AI slop is killing online communities

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Re: AI slop is killing online communities

#41

Post by noahgolmant »

There has to be room for an AI-driven project that expresses a unique idea, even if there's no community around it yet. Someone has to express it, and from now on that idea will largely be implemented with AI.

> A good use of AI is when it enables people to do something they couldn’t do before, to contribute to a community when they couldn’t before.

I agree 100% with the novel contribution aspect. But there's some nuance there.

For example a project might have no active contributors. It might not be something you can drop directly into your codebase. Neither of those is inherently bad.

As AI becomes more responsible for higher-level planning decisions, the value of an OSS project becomes less tied to visible community activity like PRs and issues.

I notice this in my own work a lot. I might not use that project's code directly. But I think about a problem differently as a result. I often point my agent to existing OSS projects as inspiration on how to solve a problem. The project provides indirect value by supporting architectural decisions, deployment approaches etc. Unfortunately OSS activity doesn't capture this.

Re: AI slop is killing online communities

#42

Post by ubermonkey »

vohk wrote: post #30
carlgreene wrote: post #4

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…

"I think it's going to effectively kill public chat communities without either proof of identity or attestation through a web of trust."

Those sorts of places were always the only places with reliably good communities.

Re: AI slop is killing online communities

#43

Post by 59qlkjah »

Sigh. First the article states that "coding by LLM is the way things are done right now" in 10 different ways but message boards and articles need to be protected.

We get it, the current narrative is that coding is the big thing, promoted by billionaires and scabs alike.

So, the coding narrative must be protected until the IPO of Juniper^H^H^H Anthropic happens and the whole thing implodes.

You already could have code for free and faster by using "git clone" without a company of thieves selling your own output back to you.

Re: AI slop is killing online communities

#44

Post by dwa3592 »

When LLMs were new on the scene, I thought trust would fade in the written(text) medium. I saw it happening on Substack, Medium, and Reddit. But then VCs pumped so much money and AI has gotten into every other modality (audio, video). The only thing I really interact these days are the human beings sitting in front me, phone calls with people I know and hackernews. Life seems sorted but something feels missing as well.

Edit - I am not anti AI but it is slowly killing the digital human interaction.

Re: AI slop is killing online communities

#45

Post by onlytue »

carlgreene wrote: post #4

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 find it amusing that this is the top comment. Reddit is so awful you finally wrote it off, but not before you used it to try to “karma farm and do some covert advertising”. It’s on-brand for HN hypocritical bullshit. But, since we are slamming on Reddit anyways without realizing how fucked HN is by the same petard, have an upboat fellow traveler.

Re: AI slop is killing online communities

#46

Post by isityettime »

krapp wrote: post #26
skupig wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> HN's guidelines and tone policing are more easily followed by a bot than a human.

HN's guidelines aren't that strict and the mod hammer is a plushie. It's not difficult to get by here. It's also kind of useful for critical reflection/self-regulation to hear the occasional "you came in too hot" or "don't be boring" from a moderator.

Seems better to me to just try to be sort of reasonable and let the mods nudge you if they need to and let your comments be downvoted from time to time. What is the goal of these people, to never experience correction in their lives? To never write an unpopular comment?

Re: AI slop is killing online communities

#47

Post by OgsyedIE »

It sucks that the narrative framing device of 'human slop' has vanished in the last year. Some subreddits, like all location subreddits, lifestyle subreddits like malefashionadvice and redscarepod and entry-level academic subreddits like math and criticaltheory were already just hives of human slop before AI came around because of a structural design to the site that had the side effect of normalising a total absence of quality control.

Upvotes are not a good mechanism for quality control in any way because they force good content to have the same metadata as the content that is technically well-constructed but is irrelevant, meaningless, just a platitude, too obvious to be obvious or pablum. Upvotes turn everything into a shock-value dominated 101 space.

Re: AI slop is killing online communities

#48

Post by [deleted] »

Forgeties79 wrote: post #5
carlgreene wrote: post #4

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…

[flagged]

[deleted]

Re: AI slop is killing online communities

#49

Post by foxfired »

For every argument against AI slop, you will get a variation of it's the future, or I'm 10x more productive now, I've shipped 3 applications in 2 days, etc.

They won't stop talking about it and defending it. But I can't get anyone to share their amazing work with me.

There is a reason the Show HN projects that are mostly vibecoded don't get much response. It's because they aren't any good. Comments that are AI generated are hollow. Videos that AI generated a shell of their sources.

Re: AI slop is killing online communities

#50

Post by carlgreene »

voicedYoda wrote: post #13
carlgreene wrote: post #4

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 feel you. Especially in the larger subreddita. i participate, and mod, a few small ones, and the community there is pretty strong and folks shut down ai slop pretty quickly. I'm not saying being a mod means it's bullet proof, but i do notice smaller communities tend to self police better and know what's real. That said, your experiment scares me as well.

I will say that I believe you probably have absolutely no idea because it's not "slop". It looks like every other reddit comment you see.

My experiment was focused on niche subreddits as well due to the nature of the product I was trying to market.

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