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AI slop is killing online communities

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Re: AI slop is killing online communities

#201

Post by bmurphy1976 »

Jordan-117 wrote: post #169
nickff wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s a tragedy of the commons, many have done it, but no one user did it.

I'd argue that Reddit leadership, which insulted, hobbled, and wrote off its mods and power users (destroying projects like /r/BotDefense) while doing little to crack down on the proliferation of bot repost content, had a major role in encouraging this. They might even like it better this way -- lots of extra fake engagement boosting traffic stats without messy human drama, which they can then ironically sell back to…

Let's never forget the summer of 2023 when Reddit forceably removed mods from many major communities and replaced them with corporate shills. That was a major loss of dedicated people who cared more for their communities than Spez's pocket book.

Re: AI slop is killing online communities

#202

Post by 2ndorderthought »

motbus3 wrote: post #188

The company I work for has a deep rooted community side and despite what big techs do, I am 100% confident the only aspects we have in community features are for the user benefit. No gray area. Just that. 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 m…

I left multiple online communities because the slop and the slop users were unbearable.

I use ai okay. I think it's useful. But people who dove hard into this stuff treat all text on their screen like it's a chat bot and not a person.

"Rewrite this code using the new API" "excuse me?" "Can you do it I need it right now chatgpt won't compile!" "Show me your code please" provides the biggest pile of dookie ever "hey can I ask how you came to decide on any of this? Maybe we should rewrite what you have here because x y z is concerning" "the ai did it I am learning. There is no need to rewrite anything just write this section for me" " no thanks" someone else does . user leaves

Re: AI slop is killing online communities

#203

Post by bossyTeacher »

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 do know for a fact that many "users" here are LLMs.

Name and shame.

Re: AI slop is killing online communities

#204

Post by bossyTeacher »

tardedmeme wrote: post #163
NoMoreNicksLeft wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>I think it's going to effectively kill public chat communities without either proof of identity How? I have an identity. A state driver's license, birth certificate, social security number. I've even considered getting a federal license before, never bit the bullet. If I wanted to run a bot, what stops me from giving it my identity? How do I prove I'm really me (a "me" exists, that's provable), and not something I'm…

Digital totalitarianism would prevent it. The moment you were found to be running a bot, your identity would be blacklisted across the entire internet.

> The moment someone steals your identity, your identity would be blacklisted across the entire internet.

FTFY.

There isn't a clear solution. And if there is, this ain't it.

Re: AI slop is killing online communities

#205

Post by TulliusCicero »

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.

I'm happy to verify my identity as an honest-to-god sack of meat if it's done in a privacy-protecting way.

That probably is where things are gonna go, in the long run. Too hard to stop bots otherwise.

Re: AI slop is killing online communities

#206

Post by parliament32 »

01284a7e wrote: post #20

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?

Wait for the EU AI Act to require text watermarking in August. It will work, and it will be effective -- not because it'll be impossible to circumvent, but because all the big SaaSes will have to adopt it, and the hurdle of stripping it back out will filter out the vast majority of the sloppers.

Re: AI slop is killing online communities

#207

Post by Karrot_Kream »

bluefirebrand wrote: post #101
fidotron wrote: post #77

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. 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…

Verifiable credentials are all about this. You need some sort of credentialing body that generates the credential for you, but after that you'll just have an opaque identifier. Any caller that wants to verify whether you're human submits the id to a verifier and the verifier says yes or no. You can also do attestations like age, so gate a forum on 16+ or something. You never end up having to actually give away your name or any other details.

Re: AI slop is killing online communities

#208

Post by 2ndorderthought »

g3f32r wrote: post #189
tardedmeme wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Private torrent trackers have been doing this for a while. If some number of your downstreams act like shitheads - you get nipped and so do your other downstreams.

This seems like the best way to handle it. Also, smaller communities. It's cool to do the global thing, but once you have 10k active users you can't moderate it with a team of 5 volunteers.

I think the attestation approach works best if there are different reasons for the punishment. Eg someone inviting a turd doesn't ban the person who invited them. Someone going full ai spam should.

Re: AI slop is killing online communities

#209

Post by michaelt »

tardedmeme wrote: post #161
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…

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.

PGP’s web of trust was kinda bad privacy-wise in some regards, as it basically revealed your IRL social network.

If my PGP public key has 6 signatures and they’re all members of the East Manitoba Arch Linux User Group, you can probably work out pretty easily which Michael T I am.

Are there successful newer designs, which avoid this problem?

Re: AI slop is killing online communities

#210

Post by rahen »

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…

Obvious slop still makes it to the front page of HN, and sometimes farms GitHub stars.

These posts also usually get all these glowing comments from users who clearly haven't checked the code. It's even worse when authors get busted and claim "Okay, Claude wrote it, but the design is mine" despite clearly not understanding the output themselves.

Unfortunately, that makes high-effort projects less visible. The SNR will probably keep getting worse until slop can be flagged on HN.

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