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AI slop is killing online communities

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Re: AI slop is killing online communities

#441

Post by __MatrixMan__ »

deadbabe wrote: post #437

AI will be a forcing function that pushes people to go meet in real life to do stuff together. Even if everything online is fake, events are not. So if people say they’re going to show up somewhere, there must eventually be a moment of truth. And then you can form high trust private group chats to keep talking together. It may be hard for the current generation of chronically online people to adjust to that new reali…

Maybe, but the small groups that form out there in the real world will each be much smaller than the large group that stays and gets jerked around by the bots.

The large group will have to endure the manipulations that we've come to know and hate from the internet, but they'll also be better coordinated than the small ones. They'll vote together, buy the same sorts of things, have an outiszed influence on the global conversation... They'll define the de facto majority opinion whether or not they actually are a majority and whether or not it's authentically their opinion.

I don't think that's a good outcome. We need ways to get on the same page en-masse, if only to counteract the harms caused by whichever highest-bidder is currently using an AI horde to control the other group. Besides, we should save them from this abuse for their sake, if not for ours.

The internet is worth fighting for, if we abandon it entirely we'll be forever at a disadvantage against those who would use it to manipulate.

Re: AI slop is killing online communities

#442

Post by evilduck »

tardedmeme wrote: post #165
bigyabai wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To the contrary, platforms like Facebook and X demonstrate that even personal verification won't save you from identity politics.

What is identity politics, is that age verification?

Identity politics have nothing to do with your actual identification documents. Think: Black Americans being treated as a homogeneous voting bloc, or that all Hispanic voters would be pro-immigration, or "the Evangelical vote".

Re: AI slop is killing online communities

#443

Post by hn_acc1 »

laughing_man wrote: post #425
coldtea wrote: post #353

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> However it did not matter. The posts remained popular and continued to bring in comments even after the admission that they were fake That's 90% of current Facebook pages and groups.

The decline of Facebook is sad. I liked it early on. I used it primarily to follow family and casual friends from high school. When they posted, it would show up on my feed, I read all the posts, and that was that. After awhile I had to wade through all sorts of nonsense to get to the posts I actually wanted to see, and even later Facebook stopped putting posts from people I follow in my feed. It was 100% garbage. I…

It's sad, but car stuff (new aftermarket stuff) is now mainly on facebook for my car.. That, and messenger to chat with siblings is about it..

Re: AI slop is killing online communities

#444

Post by shimman »

coldtea wrote: post #356
chromacity wrote: post #332

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I wish there was an internet-wide "don't show again" button for such slop pages

Yeah, the trick is to do your own curation and go from there.

If you like some authors or journalists or bloggers, go see who they read (trust me they all say who they follow in their own niches) and build from there. You can develop quite a good RSS feed following this method in like an hours tops.

Re: AI slop is killing online communities

#445

Post by traderj0e »

bmurphy1976 wrote: post #201
Jordan-117 wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd argue that Reddit leadership, which insulted, hobbled, and wrote off its mods and power users (destroying projects like /r/BotDefense) while doing little to crack down on the proliferation of bot repost content, had a major role in encouraging this. They might even like it better this way -- lots of extra fake engagement boosting traffic stats without messy human drama, which they can then ironically sell back to…

Let's never forget the summer of 2023 when Reddit forceably removed mods from many major communities and replaced them with corporate shills. That was a major loss of dedicated people who cared more for their communities than Spez's pocket book.

The ones who got removed were shutting down their pages to protest API changes, right? Pride comes before the fall I guess

Re: AI slop is killing online communities

#446

Post by alaudet »

TFNA wrote: post #321
alaudet wrote: post #307

The balance is so far out of whack with LLM's now in online communities. People crave human interaction with like minded individuals, and whoever figures out how to give authentic online experiences is going to be successful. Maybe small communities need to come back, where you build credibility slowly. Why does every site have to be a monstrosity that wants to build a hundred million users to IPO. It just attracts t…

> People crave human interaction with like minded individuals I don’t think they crave it enough to make a difference. Even before AI slop, Reddit had made successive changes that led to much less of a feeling of interaction with real, authentic humans who could become your buddies. The UI de-emphasized usernames and hid the sidebars where subreddits could have their own distinct community atmosphere. I hear that now…

Some definitely enjoy the dopamine hits and get addicted to the doom scrolling. Maybe I am just too old to understand it and the internet is passing me by. Some of us still like conversations like this. Real conversation in a respectful manner even when we question each others viewpoints. The old internet is still there in some places and I'll continue hanging out there as long as it does. While I have great friends in real life, not that many of them are old tech nerds, so the internet is really the only place to talk to like minded people.

Re: AI slop is killing online communities

#449

Post by shimman »

irishcoffee wrote: post #211
g3f32r wrote: post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Private torrent trackers have been doing this for a while. If some number of your downstreams act like shitheads - you get nipped and so do your other downstreams.

Was it demonoid? That was like this way back in the day? Needed an invite and if you leeched you were cut.

what.cd was better. You either got an invite where if you tanked your reputation you'd get banned and risk the inviter getting banned too; or you had to take an interview where you got quizzed on how to properly rip music in a variety of methods and how to ascertain between different qualities of rips (like mp3 bitrates to flac cue files).

If you weren't a bellend on what.cd you got access to certain forums where there were even more and better private trackers. Once you built that trust there were social privileges, but if you abuse that trust you got rightfully banned.

Re: AI slop is killing online communities

#450

Post by walrus01 »

traderj0e wrote: post #445
bmurphy1976 wrote: post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Let's never forget the summer of 2023 when Reddit forceably removed mods from many major communities and replaced them with corporate shills. That was a major loss of dedicated people who cared more for their communities than Spez's pocket book.

The ones who got removed were shutting down their pages to protest API changes, right? Pride comes before the fall I guess

The API changes were put in place for the purpose of breaking, and did break, slmost all external moderation tool software which changed the task of moderating a forum with hundreds of thousands, or millions of users from an impossible Sisyphean task to something that was actually manageable by a dozen or so mods.

The protest came after that so the timeline is not quite correct.

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