AI slop is killing online communities

Giant online communities, yes. Small ones seem totally unaffected afaict - some harder to spot scam/spam accounts, but they're outed as soon as they act. And any invitation-based thing should almost perfectly block those.

Smaller communities are generally a lot healthier anyway, so tbh I don't think this is all that bad of a thing. I don't think it's possible to be open to millions and also be healthy, unless you spend a lot of money paying moderators (and regularly rotating them, to prevent burn-out or mental harm from too much exposure, which ~0 do in an even slightly ethical way).

Settings->Accessibility

Set text size as preferred, underline links (or not), turn off display name styles (or not), ui density compact or default, chat message display to compact, space between message groups 0px, turn off all the animated emojis and gif animation stuff if you want.

In client use, there's a button to hide member list (or not).

You can definitely make discord look like a slightly less dense IRC client (mainly because of the channel picker) if you want. And if you want to go really crazy use it in a browser and userscript customize it or use betterdiscord.

I think a lot of the features like embeds and emoji reactions add a lot of value compared to IRC (which I think is also why the IRC world is trying to add those features).

1. human verification for auth.

2. only human generated input composer, no copy/paste, no file uploads ect. control the composer. control the camera sessions for photos videos.

3. no algorithmic feed that is designed for ad-spend and eyeballs.

4. moderate

> Would you enjoy the experience of telling your LLM “make a HN-style comment thread on $subject with 200 comments, no trolls please”

The reason I'm not simulating the experience with an LLM is because:

1. It costs more time to do so, because I have to prompt it to create a single comment. Multiply that by the typical number of an HN thread.

2. I suppose in a way you need bad takes to form your own view of a topic or an issue. LLMs would also be unable to provide truly unique experiences, such as some of the veterans who sometimes post here who were part of the living computing history as we know it.

> I’m surprised you’re here and not just simulating the experience with your LLM by yourself.

That's something you imagined that I claimed I want. If you read my comment again, you'll see there was no such thing.

> We're here to have conversations with people, not to prove fact beyond a reasonable doubt.

Maybe you are. I like getting to a reasonably correct model of a topic or issue. Bad human takes can still be useful here. I just get inevitably tired of the people crying about potential LLM comments all the time.

> Would you really rather just be talking to LLMs here?

Obviously we're not there yet, regardless of what I want. But there is a great number of HN threads posted here that touch on topics that have been discussed so many countless times, that an average LLM summary would do better than most comments.