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AI slop is killing online communities

rmoff.net

391–400 of 781 posts

Re: AI slop is killing online communities

#391

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What happens when someone agrees to sell or give away their id? The credentialing body could catch the very worst abusers who seem to be signing in to various sites and services multiple times an hour, but would fail to catch anything else.

I don't think you'll ever be fully free of spam, so you'll still need to filter bad content. If credentials get sold and used to spam, they'll get banned.

How do you ban credentials if they're anonymous? Notice that if you can tell two requests are from the same person then you can do it across services by both of them pretending to be the same service.

Also, what happens to someone whose credentials are compromised? Are you going to ban the credentials of the victim rather than the perpetrator?

Re: AI slop is killing online communities

#392
post #341

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The fact that reddit enabled hiding your posts is crazy to me. In a time where knowing who's engaging in a community is more important than ever (am I talking to a bot or a troll?) reddit removes even more options to validate.

I enabled hiding my posts because I kept getting harrassed and even doxxed.

[deleted]

Re: AI slop is killing online communities

#394

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…

> I do know for a fact that many "users" here are LLMs. HN autokills comments it detects as LLM. I think maybe you're not giving HN enough credit. :)

>HN autokills comments it detects as LLM

No it doesn't. Unless you have proof.... ???

Re: AI slop is killing online communities

#395

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…

More of a philosophical question but if you have no idea whether it's a human or robot, does it really matter? Personally I dislike AI slop only when I can tell it is...

Re: AI slop is killing online communities

#396

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have you considered sock puppets? It's not out of the question to handle with human mods but detecting them automatically is pretty bad if someone is supplying credentials to each one, and sometimes it does take months or years to notice that new user Y is banned user X.

I think sockpuppets are only useful in a community with non-text signals like upvotes and downvotes or likes. These kinds of signals are not necessary and often plain corrosive to small communities. In a larger community they're a great feedback mechanism, but large communities are fundamentally different spaces than small ones and need a fundamentally different moderation approach IMO.

I've seen them used to dogpile in arguments (harder to do since you need to keep writing styles distinct), game votes in forum games or quests, etc. And of course you don't need to use multiple at once if you just switch to a sock puppet every time you're suspended or banned.

Re: AI slop is killing online communities

#397

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For a while there were a lot of posts from people experimenting with ChatGPT to write anger bait posts on Reddit where they would later edit the post to say it was fake, written by ChatGPT. I assume they thought they'd be teaching people a lesson by making them feel foolish for responding to AI stories, most of which were too fake to be believable. However it did not matter. The posts remained popular and continued t…

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.

Even the title is in "x, not y" format.

Re: AI slop is killing online communities

#398

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…

More of a philosophical question but if you have no idea whether it's a human or robot, does it really matter? Personally I dislike AI slop only when I can tell it is...

Yes, for a number of reasons:

- I am trying to learn about the topic at hand and trust a human's comment more than an LLM's guess - I am trying to connect with other humans to fulfill my social needs - I am maybe spending time to help another human out with a response because I want to help someone else - I am interested in the perspective of other humans

Those are just a few reasons. For each of those if it's actually an AI I feel I'm losing out on something.

Re: AI slop is killing online communities

#399

Online communities that allow upvoting / downvoting have been effectively dead for a long time because it's easy to manipulate conversations by elevating and punishing comments to fit a narrative. This is especially true on HN.

Ironically, aggregator communities like reddit came about because forum communities were dying off. Memeing about the latest news injected "life" (if you want to call it that) into the internet. AI is just taking out the trash, in my eyes.

Re: AI slop is killing online communities

#400

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I generally disagree, because the level of discourse here has always been very high, curious and intellectual.

Maybe 1:100 comments match any one of those attributes. Most comments are just grammatically "correct". Not a high bar.

The comments that aren't grammatically correct get pedantically corrected by those HNers too, so that's nice.
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