AI slop is killing online communities • Hacker News Board

Re: AI slop is killing online communities

#231

Post by mr_toad » Thu, May 07, 2026, 9:37 PM UTC

cactusplant7374 wrote: post #144

dwringer wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is rather moving the goalposts from "plausibly human comment" to "meaningful literature", I think

No. I'm drawing it out to its logical conclusion.

It’s poor logic, a non sequitur. An absurd reduction. By your argument anyone who hasn’t written a great literary work is a poor writer, and would be bad at writing online comments.

LLMs aren’t lacking in the sort of writing skills that make for superficially good content. They know grammar, they know rhetoric, and they know their audience. You can’t tell them from a human on their writing skills. Where they tend to fall down is their logic and reasoning skills, and unfortunately it seems you can’t use that to distinguish them from the average online opinionator either.

Re: AI slop is killing online communities

#232

Post by pessimizer » Thu, May 07, 2026, 9:37 PM UTC

arjie wrote: post #94

transcriptase wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Reddit astroturfing firms and bot farms learned to buy/use “seasoned” accounts over a decade ago. I’d venture there have been countless bots just in a holding pattern harmlessly building up reputation and a human-like history of posts across different subs etc just to eventually be either activated or sold to someone else to “burn”

I recently spotted one unmistakable example of this[0]. It’s been a trick for many years now that duplicating a human post and its comments is a good way to appear human but this was quite the example. 0: https://wiki.roshangeorge.dev/w/Blog/2026-01-06/Is_The_Inter...

> duplicating a human post and its comments is a good way to appear human

Also just repeating something from the linked article, but often with different wording and in a tone that makes it seem like it was something that the article missed.

Re: AI slop is killing online communities

#233

Post by ge96 » Thu, May 07, 2026, 9:38 PM UTC

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…

Doesn't help there is that feature that hides the user's posts and comments

Re: AI slop is killing online communities

#234

Post by pjc50 » Thu, May 07, 2026, 9:38 PM UTC

michaelt wrote: post #209

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.

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?

The IRL social network is actually the important part of the trust structure.

The only one of these I've seen that really worked was the Debian developer version: you had to meet another Debian developer IRL, prove your identity, and only then could you get the key signed and join the club.

Re: AI slop is killing online communities

#235

Post by pjc50 » Thu, May 07, 2026, 9:40 PM UTC

bigyabai wrote: post #104

ubermonkey wrote: post #42

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." 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.

People will post appalling racism in newspapers under their own bylines and photos. Identity verification does not moderate.

Re: AI slop is killing online communities

#236

Post by Bjartr » Thu, May 07, 2026, 9:40 PM UTC

jredwards wrote: post #220

TulliusCicero wrote: post #205

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. 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.

In order to make this viable, wouldn't you have to verify identity repeatedly? What's to stop me from providing a valid identity and then handing my account over to an agent after I'm verified?

That's why a web of trust was suggested. You keep track of who vouched for who and down weight those who vouch for users that prove to be bots. In theory at least. It's certainly more complicated than only that in practice.

Re: AI slop is killing online communities

#237

Post by pjc50 » Thu, May 07, 2026, 9:42 PM UTC

cloverich wrote: post #56

echelon wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

are those attributes now assets?

Pretty much. It's the survivability onion. You can't be destroyed if you can't be discovered.

Re: AI slop is killing online communities

#238

Post by kogasa240p » Thu, May 07, 2026, 9:43 PM UTC

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?

Probably all three of those. Tildes and fediverse instances do the first, resurgence pending for the second, and lastly non-mainstream social media sites have no SEO garbage by default.

Re: AI slop is killing online communities

#239

Post by bsder » Thu, May 07, 2026, 9:44 PM UTC

order-matters wrote: post #15

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…

Public* online communities are dying. Discord is thriving

I really don't understand the folks fleeing to Discord. A mailing list does 99% of the same thing for most of the communities.

Sure, if you want to chat while gaming, that's the whole point of Discord. Ganbatte.

But, for everything else, Discord is such a horrible misfit that I don't understand why it's the default.

Re: AI slop is killing online communities

#240

Post by teraflop » Thu, May 07, 2026, 9:45 PM UTC

transcriptase wrote: post #38

10xDev wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unless their account is <1 year I wouldn't assume they are a bot.

Reddit astroturfing firms and bot farms learned to buy/use “seasoned” accounts over a decade ago. I’d venture there have been countless bots just in a holding pattern harmlessly building up reputation and a human-like history of posts across different subs etc just to eventually be either activated or sold to someone else to “burn”

It used to be super common that when you spotted a bot post and clicked through to the user's history, you'd see very average, human-looking activity from years ago, followed by a long gap of inactivity, and then a flurry of obvious bot comments.

It's very obvious that these accounts were abandoned and then either bought from their original owners, or more likely bought from someone who compromised them, because of their history and karma.

And I would bet money that Reddit is well aware of this phenomenon, because not long after it became so common as to be impossible to ignore, they papered over it by allowing users to hide their history from public view. (AFAIK subreddit moderators can still see it, but typical users now have much less ability to see whether they're interacting with actual humans.)