181–190 of 781 posts
Question for web devs - are captchas effective any more? If Reddit required a captcha on every comment, would it actually decrease bot comments?
There's a reason Google is switching to "scan this QR code on your phone with a Google-authorized TPM" kind of CAPTCHAs
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People are definitely trying to make HN bots because I have seen several get flagged. No idea to what end though.
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The threads that have the top comment saying "this is AI slop" are nearly always about an article that is obvious AI slop. Threads that aren't - like this one - don't.
If you need to tell yourself that in order to cope that's fine with me.
Human slop is realistically just as bad. In a strange twist, human commentary on the Internet is asymptotically approaching an older LLM. Trite cliches, repetitive tropes, and tribal affiliation signals dominate conversation. I have turned to blunt instruments: blocking individuals on their first cliche banner-wave. It has substantially improved comment quality but I still suffer from the problem that I don’t block s…
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So what is the comment frequency of these bots? There must be some signal in the activity even if the comments themselves pass the turing test.
If you find one account you can find a few dozen spam accounts by building a graph of what posts they reply to
I kind feel this might be good. Bot writen comments and AI media that can no longer be distinguish from real, will make us human leave the social networks, which helped to separate Us humans. Going back to the real world were you can trully believe on what you see, and enjoy the tone, look and scent of of our fellows humans beings.
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There's a reason Google is switching to "scan this QR code on your phone with a Google-authorized TPM" kind of CAPTCHAs
I've never seen a CAPTCHA like that. What's it used for? Google Cloud services?
https://www.androidauthority.com/google-recaptcha-play-servi...
Since the AI sloppification we lost considerable amount of traffic to bots. But worse than that, we lost users who tended to contribute back with others.
We can leverage multiple ways of exposing community data to members, so it is not that we are loss because of that, but more in the fact that we have 30y or so of good feedback on how the community around the platform was good for people and now everything is at risk...
Don't get me wrong, my work is work... There are premium features and else, but the amount of value one can get for free is what the platform is known for. And we know many people use it for free for years and when they need or can they subscribe and mostly stay for years and years.
The fact people are losing those connections is depressing to me
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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…
Note that "attestation through a web of trust" means something like needing an invite from an existing user. It doesn't have to mean mass surveillance.
Online communities that allow upvoting / downvoting have been effectively dead for a long time because it's easy to manipulate conversations by elevating and punishing comments to fit a narrative. This is especially true on HN.