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AI slop is killing online communities

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Re: AI slop is killing online communities

#101

Post by bluefirebrand »

fidotron wrote: post #77
vohk wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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. This seems self evident to me too. It's another factor in why I think the tech community needs to get ahead of governments on the whole "prove your ID on the Internet" thing by having some sort of standard way to do it that doesn't necessarily involve madness in the loop.

I'd be interested in working on a problem like that.

I have a strong preference for remaining anonymous or at least making it a reasonably high bar to tying my online identity to my personal identity

I would love to be involved in helping to design a sort of "human verified" badge that doesn't necessarily make it possible or at least not easy for everyone to find your real identity

I've been thinking about it a bunch and it seems like a really interesting problem. Difficult though.

I suspect there is too much political and corporate will that wants to force everyone online to use their real identity in the open, though

Re: AI slop is killing online communities

#102

Post by RodgerTheGreat »

WolfeReader wrote: post #67
CrzyLngPwd wrote: post #55

I run a niche creative community, and we outlawed AI-generated content in 2022 as it was easy to see how corrosive it would be to the community. It hasn't been easy. We ban fake AI accounts daily and shrug off around 600 AI content creator accounts monthly. It's a lot of work, extra work that wasn't needed before AI content came around, and of course, that is an extra cost. I fear losing the battle.

Unlike a lot of communities, yours at least started on the correct side. Better to ban outright, than to slowly realize that you should have banned it.

Indeed. Take a soft approach, or "wait and see", and you'll just allow your community to get infested with slop enthusiast crybullies that loudly protest any pushback against "genai content". The communities that draw a firm line and hold it will be the only ones that endure.

Re: AI slop is killing online communities

#103

Post by carlgreene »

echelon wrote: post #29
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…

> where I had an agent karma Was this a browser using agent? What did you use?

It used the browser agent to grab user cookies after signing in, then made API calls iirc.

Using just a browser is way too token intensive and slow. It would look for 401 errors then run the browser automation to login with the credentials and grab the token.

Re: AI slop is killing online communities

#104

Post by bigyabai »

ubermonkey wrote: post #42
vohk wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

To the contrary, platforms like Facebook and X demonstrate that even personal verification won't save you from identity politics.

Re: AI slop is killing online communities

#105

Post by Keyframe »

echelon wrote: post #32
order-matters wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Public* online communities are dying. Discord is thriving

This. Everything important has moved to discord. Which is sad because of how undiscoverable and unsearchable it is.

I'm more sad about how the UI of it all is just clunky. Even though it resembles ye olde IRC clients like mIRC, nowhere near readable for some reason.

Re: AI slop is killing online communities

#106

Post by smcg »

geoffdouglas wrote: post #19

This is a good thing. social media was already slop before AI. If this gets more intellectuals off these same websites daily and instead spend their time to better things, then I love AI slop’s purpose. There’s more to the internet than Reddit, TikTok, and youtube. Really there is, if your circle of friends is small or non existent without going to the same dotcoms, you have an issue that is worse than any AI slop tb…

getting people off the internet is antithetical to the business goals of the AI companies. they won't let that happen without a fight

Re: AI slop is killing online communities

#107

Post by [deleted] »

foxfired wrote: post #49

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 genera…

[deleted]

Re: AI slop is killing online communities

#109

Post by carlgreene »

Keyframe wrote: post #100
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…

How do we know now that this comment wasn't written by LLM?

You don't and that's the problem :)
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