211–220 of 497 posts
I would pay cash for access to a social site that bans all US politics, the astroturfing associated with it is simply unbearable.
Wouldn't that be almost impossible?. Politics affects our lives every day. Your comment suggests that you believe it doesn't affect yours. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Empathy
There strategy did not make any sense: only a few pre-approved broad-and-shallow forums about everything instead of trying to attract niche communities from Reddit or even FB Groups.
I am very curious where people who complain about the bots really get to see them. The only website which became totally useless for me after the general availability of LLMs is OkCupid. It's indeed dead. The rest are fine. What am I doing differently compared to everyone else? I'm regularly using: telegram, whatsapp, wechat, hackernews, lobsters, reddit, opennet.ru, vk.com, pornhub, youtube, odysee, libera.chat, arx…
YouTube comment sections are botted.
More evidence that "millions of people in the same room" isn't a sustainable model for online communities. I've been feeling for years that some kind of "chain of trust" and/or "X degrees of separation" reputation model is basically inevitable for broad-scale online social communities.
I wonder if the old forum model would work. Instead of these mega-forum-platfroms, there are just small communities with a niche focus at their own URL. I suppose bots could find forums that use the most popular software and still make accounts and spam, but it would be much more obvious and less fruitful for someone to spam deck builders in Vancouver (something I saw often on Digg) on a forum that is focused on aqua…
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As long as sub forums can be created easily, users may pick their sub forum and thus indirectly moderator. In this setup having users elect the moderator leads to cases where small groups create their special interest group and then some trolls challenge the moderator. Their may be some oversight on the large sub forum, but not all.
Necessary for this is that subforums can't have unique names. If a bad mod can squat all the words like "computers", "programming", "coding", newcomers aren't going to know the best subforum is called "RealProgNoBadMod"
The vast majority of sub forums however are more targeted and smaller to begin with.
Subreply.com is working just fine, no AI agents. Spam accounts get deleted.
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Yes. Subforums should elect mods democratically.
As long as sub forums can be created easily, users may pick their sub forum and thus indirectly moderator. In this setup having users elect the moderator leads to cases where small groups create their special interest group and then some trolls challenge the moderator. Their may be some oversight on the large sub forum, but not all.
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And even if it does, the mods don't have real control to moderate communities either, so you get the worst of both worlds. I don't go to most queer reddit communities anymore because a lot of them have bots that downvote trans-positive posts, even if the community is specifically meant to be inclusive. There's nothing to couple active participation to voting weight or anything of that kind and voting is not considere…
I still haven't been able to figure out how to make an account without it being immediately shadowbanned or normalbanned. Tried again the other day, it was something in between where logged-out users could see it was banned but I couldn't.
And yes, ditch them. Even well over a decade ago, Wikipedia of all places already employed IP address matching to link sockpuppet accounts. You must be extremely careful of never using any device that was associated with your old accounts on the same network as the devices associated with your new account. And that includes devices only seen by association.
Kinda seems like we’re rapidly headed for the complete collapse of the internet as we know it. Every site that is driven by user posting seems to be headed towards being overrun by AI bots chatting with each other, either for sake of promoting something or farming karma. And there’s really not much point in publishing good content anymore, since AI is just going slurp it up and regurgitate it without driving you any…
I know this is going to sound horrible, but : how about asking money to contribute, period ? Maybe have a free tier of a couple comments, etc... But if you want to build a troll factory, sure... Show us the cash ?
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The bot problem cannot be solved. Even if you strongly authenticate, people are letting bots act on their behalf (moltbook is a great example of this) and what's to stop people doing that in the future. Build your identity and reputation autonomously with the benefits that come with that. This happens now on Onlyfans too. Content creators hire agencies which in the best case outsource chatting to "customers" to armie…
"content creators" https://fgiesen.wordpress.com/2025/07/06/content-creator/
"Creator", on the other hand, is beautiful. It means you don't have to pick a lane. Anything can be creative. Documentary filmmaking, stop motion, dance, costume work, historical reenactment, indie animation, economics essays, game dev...
The problem is we don't have a nice word that holistically captures the output of creators. They're not all making films or illustrations. So what do you call it? "Art" is awkward.
"Content" works, but it sounds like slop. We need a better alternative word that elevates creative output.