511–520 of 781 posts
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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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People live in and depend on that waterway. Just because it's beneath your standards doesn't mean it isn't vital. You're giving "let them eat cake" energy.
I can assure you nobody in the world "lives in" nor "depends" on reddit to live.
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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.
but yes i also game and it gets a lot of use for that as well
i agree though that for collecting and organizing information longer term like forums do, it is not ideal
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Public* online communities are dying. Discord is thriving
Discord is terrible. Full of bots, creeps and ai slopped to the gills. Some communities are better than others but the sheer volume of stinky trash is immense despite discord and the poor volunteer moderators efforts to prevent it. Most mods are neutral on it too. There are chat communities that are still somewhat safe with zero user verification. But I will not mention them.
but yes the publicly accessible servers are going to face similar problems. the socially competent people tend not to run those servers, and have smaller private servers with people they know as they have no drive to try to create a space for strangers to gather.
I run a niche creative community, and we outlawed AI-generated content in 2022 as it was easy to see how corrosive it would be to the community. It hasn't been easy. We ban fake AI accounts daily and shrug off around 600 AI content creator accounts monthly. It's a lot of work, extra work that wasn't needed before AI content came around, and of course, that is an extra cost. I fear losing the battle.
What about charging $1 or $5 for an account? Seems like you could stem the tide pretty easily with something like that.
You add a barrier here. You think that your solution means that AI is reduced, but you also reduce real humans. I noticed this with other parts too, such as "you need to verify your identity before you can post to the ruby issue tracker". I can do so, but I need my tablet and this takes me more time than before, so I stopped using the ruby issue tracker altogether. (It's not the only reason, but adding barriers really makes me invest my time elsewhere - more likely to do so at the least.)
You always need to consider all trade-offs. Charging money means you will also offset real humans at the same time. And it's not solely about the cost; it is simply a hassle to want to do so. For similar reasons I also rarely register at a phpbb forum - I need to store the password to not forget it etc... so more hassle. Using a password manager is also more of a hassle.
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If you head to Twitter right now, the vast majority of bots are blue checks. It seems to actually encourage the opposite, where you trusting that someone paying $8 for an account makes you even more likely to fall for slop
I think twitter is an odd-one-out here, twitter as a whole has been heading down hill ever since the acquisition, and I wouldn't be surprised if many of those blue checks are officially sanctioned bots. Especially given the way so many of them push the same narratives that Musk does at the same time he does.
Bots are indeed killing twitter now. I noticed more and more were leaving permanently. Musk evidently accelerated the decay here. There is something wrong with his mindset here, it's almost as if it is pathological. His perception of things is genuinely distorted, and I am not even 100% certain he is completely aware of it; he must be partially aware, but it seems there is also something wrong with the brain. No wonder he gets along with Trump - that one now has clearly dementia narcissism in the final stage.
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I think twitter is an odd-one-out here, twitter as a whole has been heading down hill ever since the acquisition, and I wouldn't be surprised if many of those blue checks are officially sanctioned bots. Especially given the way so many of them push the same narratives that Musk does at the same time he does.
I don't think so. The people leaving LLM replies are paying minimum $20/month for LLM access, and probably more in practice. A one time $10 fee is not a deterrent.
1) the cost becomes even higher for AI slop factories since they will probably get multiple accounts banned.
2) It prevents influence to accrue to any specific account. This diminishes the incentive for slop, since sufficient success means a ban.
3) It reduces the moderation effort since creating accounts is no longer a sustainable strategy.