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AI slop is killing online communities

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Re: AI slop is killing online communities

#411

Post by lizknope »

I was on Usenet starting in 1991. Once the Internet got popular with the general public around 1995 things started going downhill. Spam overwhelmed Usenet in the late 1990's and made it almost unusable for general discussion.

Stuff started moving to web site forums which I still don't think are as good as a Usenet newsreader. slrn was my favorite.

Then reddit came along and a lot of online forums started dying as people moved to reddit.

Just this morning on reddit I reported 4 separate posts as AI slop to the moderators. They need to change the categories as I flag it as "disruptive use of bots"

For 2 of the posts the moderators agreed with me and about 5 hours later the posts were removed. For the other 2 the moderators haven't done anything.

It's a losing battle.

Some of the posts start by asking questions like "I was thinking about this and... [long rambling paragraphs] Your thoughts on this?"

I waste a minute reading then another minute skimming the rest of it and then realize I wasted 2 minutes of my life. Then another 30 seconds reporting it to the mods.

This has exploded in the last 6 months.

Then there are all the repost bots farming for karma. Some subs have a rule that you can't repost something in the last 30 days or 6 months. But it is really ridiculous when something get 500 upvotes and then literally the next day a bot reposts the same thing and it still gets 300 upvotes. I think it is just a bot farm upvoting stuff.

Re: AI slop is killing online communities

#412

Post by bluefirebrand »

AnthonyMouse wrote: post #385
bluefirebrand wrote: post #296

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But, real people can then create authenticated account, and use an LLM to post as an authenticated real person. They can, but ideally they wouldn't be able to make infinite accounts with that authenticated status. So it would still reduce the number of bot posters on the web

There is actually a different problem with this: Suppose there is a major vulnerability in some popular device. 50 million people get compromised; the attacker can now impersonate any of them at will. They go around and create 50 million accounts on various services, or take over the user's existing account on that service. What are you going to do with their identities at that point? These are real people. If you ba…

Maybe it would result in people taking Internet security seriously and holding companies accountable for data breaches if there were this sort of consequences for it

Re: AI slop is killing online communities

#414

Post by lizknope »

agustechbro wrote: post #18

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.

The problem is that many of us have niche interests and no one local to discuss things with or get made fun of for being a nerd.

I loved maps and geography as a child and still do. I've never met anyone in real life that likes it as much as me. But on the internet there are places were I can discuss it and other people share fascinating articles, pictures, etc.

Re: AI slop is killing online communities

#415

Post by eloisius »

coldtea wrote: post #356
chromacity wrote: post #332

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We do precisely the same thing here. Here's a relatively recent post that, to me, seems obviously LLM-written. It just rattles off some management platitudes: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47913650 It had 639 comments and 866 upvotes. And that's not a one-off.

I wish there was an internet-wide "don't show again" button for such slop pages

You can ban a domain from search results with Kagi

Re: AI slop is killing online communities

#416

Post by lizknope »

pupppet wrote: post #118

I want my future community apps and sites to build in bot a flagger. I don't care how hard it is, the community that gets this right is the one I'll jump ship to.

Unfortunately I think reddit themselves encourage and want the bots because it leads to more traffic and ad displays so they make more money.

Re: AI slop is killing online communities

#417

Post by j45 »

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…

Reddit users are definitely smartening up on many subreddits to the same kinds of engagement happening.

Re: AI slop is killing online communities

#418

Post by builtbystef »

The “slopification” of the internet has been happening for years now but I honestly don’t know what a real solution would look like.

Most people aren’t willing to go through a identity verification process, or pay to join a community, and invitation-only spaces would probably lose diversity of thought pretty quickly.

Even still, I guess one of the above is a lesser evil because the bot problem is only going to become more unbearable.

P.S. Props to the author. I really liked this writing style.

Re: AI slop is killing online communities

#419

Post by cloverich »

order-matters wrote: post #130
bluefirebrand wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sort of, except if no one can ever discover a community it is always dying by default Personally I'd love to find a decent online community these days, my social circle has shrunk considerably, but idk. It seems difficult to start fresh with new people nowadays

we were made to socialize in person. you can mimic it online and nourish existing connections over it but nothing helps build friendship more than being in the same place at the same time a few different times and talking to each other

Thats true but online content has always had its place. 25 years ago finding forums and irc was a god send, my lonely hobbies and interests became things i could regularly talk about. Its just modern social media abused the system, the algorithm, and us.

Which is all to say i agree about needing mostly irl, but there is also something of online community that irl could never replicate (for most people).

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