In real communities bots gets exposed
AI slop is killing online communities
691–700 of 781 posts
Re: AI slop is killing online communities
#692People complaining about Reddit selling AI corpos their training datasets seem to forget: everyone else (HN included) gave it for free.
Re: AI slop is killing online communities
#693In practice I agree with the author but I think the issue isn't AI or AI slop as much as people's judgement.
He himself says that some AI assisted projects are actually good while other's aren't so. Devil's advocate can say that it's a matter of quality and also a matter of interest. And quality in some manner is a matter of taste - for example there is a market for regular fast food and organic or more high quality fast food, while others never take part.
He says that "Does your offering contribute anything to the community?" is the bar that should be met in regards whether something made with AI should be shared or published. But let's me honest, a good number of things people made or commented or did even before LLMs didn't meet that bar, and second is that most people think their pet project or pet whatever they made or created does contribute to the community. I have a senior security leader in my organization that thinks his Claude Code security scanner he made is amazing while I think it's a piece of garbage.
Re: AI slop is killing online communities
#694Earlier quoted context omitted.
> whoever figures out how to give authentic online experiences is going to be successful The problem is, there is fundamentally no way to scale this. The only way to give authentic human interaction with like-minded individuals is to connect real humans to other real humans who share interests. And as we've already seen over the first few ages of the Internet, once such a community scales past a certain size, it a) c…
Scaling is a problem. But my mind keeps running in circles as to how you could do this. Maybe organically through a "web of trust" like gpg. Bob trusts Alice --> Alice trusts John, so Bob automatically trusts John. But then the complexity would kill it just like gpg and you would be sitting alone in your group chat. Maybe if Alice gets out of line and starts trusting obvious bot accounts you can untrust her and autom…
I think if there's a way to make it work, it would have to involve restricting the sizes of individual communities—probably with a "soft limit" and a "hard limit". Above the "soft limit", people can't join independently, but people can still be invited by friends; above the "hard limit," people can't join at all.
Based on my understanding of current research on the topic, I'd say to put the "hard limit" at about 150 members, and the "soft limit" at somewhere between 75 and 100 (because people will really want to bring in their friends; in fact, that's a major part of the point, and an unqualified positive for the community!).
I can also say from my own experience of running a small browser-based game that is almost 100% driven by player-to-player interaction, you need a critical mass of people interested in active discussion to keep such a group going, but if you have too many the volume of messages becomes offputting and it's hard for new members to feel comfortable speaking up. ...And that it's really, really easy for small, vocal, aggressive cliques of people within a given group to ruin things for the rest.
Re: AI slop is killing online communities
#695Earlier quoted context omitted.
I always find the most difficult is to deal with users who are not actively breaking any rules but are toxic and hurting the conversation. Given your experience, what's your take on handling this?
Ban them. I also recommend making it explicit: your last rule should be “moderators have final discretion”. The hard part is figuring out when to apply rules leniently or strictly. For example, I think users should always be warned, then given shorter bans, before a long or perma ban (unless they break an obvious egregious rule, or they’re a suspected alt of a banned user). At the same time, you do need to kick out p…
>Ban them. I also recommend making it explicit: your last rule should be “moderators have final discretion”.[...]
>[...] Many communities (especially on Reddit) have become echo chambers mainly because the mods are too happy to ban people for unspoken and/or vague rules
To me, it seems you're contradicting yourself here. In the first paragraph you suggest the solution to vague rules (mods having full authority), but then in the second paragraph you admit how that turns the platform into an echo chamber.
Re: AI slop is killing online communities
#696Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is entirely vibes based on reading research on similar campaigns so I cant pull a paper with hard evidence about this specifically. But I believe chinese/North Korean infowar campaigns are behind these seeded talking points. They seed in these far left activist communities and then once they find one that sticks the real people in these communities start carrying the message out to other communities and then the…
Yeah, that's not it. China is heavily invested in AI and LLMs. Also this sentiment is organic, most people I talk yo about AI are anti-AI. The exceptions to the anti-AI sentiment are management and people with a vested interest.
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Re: AI slop is killing online communities
#697Earlier quoted context omitted.
The AI companies aren't so deep in the red when you only look at inference though - they are investing loads in new models in an AI arms race. So I don't imagine AI is going to go away, especially given that now there are more open source models like Qwen that you can run locally. So even if those American behemoths go bankrupt it will persist.
> The AI companies aren't so deep in the red when you only look at inference though - they are investing loads in new models in an AI arms race. Depends on how you're looking at it (using speculated numbers for easy math): 1. Having operating costs of $100m on revenue of $10b is very deep in the red, regardless of training costs. 2. Having $90m training costs on $10m revenue means they're just breaking even. Problem…
$800b (last I checked) and a collective revenue of $20b (last I checked)
Promised investment is not the same thing is operating expenses. Only a small fraction of that $800b has actually been spent so far.
Re: AI slop is killing online communities
#698I think the only reason stackoverflow still has any activity is because the community choose to ban AI content [1] and so did most of its other networks [2]. Perhaps it will even see a (small) resurgence when AI providers start charging for the actual costs. [1] https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/421831 [2] https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/384922
I keep hearing that AI providers will eventually stop "subsidising inference", but I do not understand how this would make any sense economically. It is already profitable to host AI model inference for prices cheaper than the big labs are charging, as evident by the plethora of providers available to choose from on OpenRouter, for example. The only way prices could rise without competition is if you sidestepped supp…
You keep hearing it because AI haters won’t stop screeching about it, despite all the evidence that they’re wrong. Denial is a helluva drug.
Re: AI slop is killing online communities
#699Earlier quoted context omitted.
This seems naive. As long as people are "enjoying" the AI-infested social networks, or at least not annoyed enough to leave, they will stay on them, and become further disconnected from reality. We have half of EU teenagers talking to chatbots regularly. Alienated people flock to them.
Reminds me when reality TV came a long. Many folks were convinced that it would be a passing fad and that within 12-18 months TV would return to the way it had been before hand. That because the quality was so low people would eventually bore of it, still waiting for that moment...
But we have more high quality non-reality TV than ever?
Re: AI slop is killing online communities
#700Earlier quoted context omitted.
If it can no longer be distinguished from real, why would it make people leave?
It's a market for lemons [1]. The issue is that if AI slop can't be readily distinguished from real human content, the real human stuff will get less and less attention over time. With less attention, people lose interest in writing, and eventually abandon the community altogether. As genuine human writers leave the community, the concentration of AI slop increases, and readers begin to realize that there isn't anyth…
As genuine human writers leave the community, the concentration of AI slop increases, and readers begin to realize that there isn't anything of value left to read, so they depart as well.
How will they realize if AI content is indistinguishable?