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AI slop is killing online communities

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Re: AI slop is killing online communities

#731

Post by sanderjd »

AlienRobot wrote: post #730
sanderjd wrote: post #663

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yep, the first killer app for AI was, "hey, I'm having this problem and I'm not sure what's going on, can you help me figure it out?", and being told "sure!" instead of "this is a dupe, use the search function you idiot" or "this is not the right kind of thing to ask here". SO has always been incredibly useful and incredibly frustrating at the same time.

You have three options. 1. Ask a stupid question online and be called an idiot in your public record. 2. Go through the hassle of creating the nth throwaway account and get called an idiot in public, if you are allowed to post with a new account at all. 3. Ask ChatGPT and get told you are completely right.

My favorite thing with Claude lately is it tells me things like:

> I think this is a great thought, but I want to engage with it seriously rather than just agree, so for the sake of argument, ...

I keep telling it to be blunt, that I can take it, but it just can bring itself to offend me :)

Re: AI slop is killing online communities

#732

Post by joe_mamba »

armchairhacker wrote: post #716
joe_mamba wrote: post #695

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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…

The point is to have discretion but use it rarely. Reddit echo chambers use it way too often. It’s not contradictory but unfortunately impossible to fully explain, otherwise it would be explicit rules. When someone acts borderline, you must intuit when they’re acting in good or bad faith. Hence I think a first warning, then short ban, is necessary for anyone not obviously breaking a rule; because the former will be c…

>The point is to have discretion but use it rarely.

"Let's give the president dictatorial powers, but it's OK, he'll only use it rarely." Famous last words.

Please. Humans in positions of power are incredibly bad at exercising restraint. Humans are humans and make human mistakes, even judges in court give harsher sentences if they're hungry or ill or just having a bad day. Now imagine mods on a forum.

That discretion always leads to selective enforcement 100% of the time, like saying "X are below Y", that's just freedom of speech, but saying "Y are below X", that's hate speech, BAN, and other such double standards stuff like that, which turns the platform/board into an echo chamber mirroring the mod's political and emotional views.

>will keep acting borderline again and again

If someone managed to spot a pattern that can be repeat borderline, then your rules suck and you need to update them according to that pattern. He did you a favor for exposing a flaw in your rules.

Re: AI slop is killing online communities

#733

Post by miladyincontrol »

chao- wrote: post #680
ricardobayes wrote: post #638

Earlier 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?

Depends a lot on the community's topic, purpose, and size. However, a sign that someone needs to be removed is if you find that the community writ-large treats them as a Missing Stair [0]. If they have refused direct requests from community moderators/leaders to address their behavior, or regressed after a short period of improvement, and if most of the community is required to do work to actively manage their toxici…

By large I absolutely agree with te premise, but find too that sometimes you find someone akin to a hammer looking for nails, starts to label anyone a missing stair over the slightest incompatibility. Oft combines with a formation of a faultless in-group and a perpetual need for new villains.

Its a rare thing, I dont mean to suggest its common. But it is always awkward to see when some people learn such language just to turn it into a cudgel.

Re: AI slop is killing online communities

#734

Post by rexpop »

fl4regun wrote: post #688
sltkr wrote: post #348

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Explain how that's different from Hacker News?

I also don't "need" nor "depend" on hacker news to live. We're talking about websites like they are vital to living, that's not real. They are not. The closest thing to a website someone actually "needs" might be a government website (to report or file taxes maybe) or a bank website (assuming no brick and mortar locations near you). Let's not use words like "need" and "depend" to mean much lighter things like "is con…

People need and depend on social relations, and those relations need a medium.

Re: AI slop is killing online communities

#735

Post by matheusmoreira »

dspillett wrote: post #607
bayindirh wrote: post #589

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Considering StackOverflow is now providing a ground truth for AI training, I believe the ban is more about not poisoning the well rather than keeping the StackOverflow or StackExchange human-friendly. That ship has sailed long time ago with zealot admins and verbal harassment.

> That ship has sailed long time ago with zealot admins Where there are certainly strong examples of this, a lot of people mistake enforcing the rules as zealotry. Part of the point of SO was that if things don't change then there is a completed state for SO too - no need to ask duplicate questions like on platforms where a post is less long-lived. Unfortunately people take things like “this is a dup”, “provide more…

It's the deletionism that effectively ended my participation in stack exchange networks. Violated the rules with your question? Closed. Alright, I can deal with it. But they didn't stop, they just had to go and delete the goddamn post, along with all the useful comments and links that had built up on it, for literally no reason. There was actual content in there.

Seriously, fuck that. Went all in on my own website after that. Can't delete my stuff now.

Re: AI slop is killing online communities

#736

Post by matheusmoreira »

poly2it wrote: post #644
AdminAccount wrote: post #574

I 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…

I hope you're right. AI is world changing technology, I don't want to live without it anymore.

Re: AI slop is killing online communities

#738

Post by pocksuppet »

mghackerlady wrote: post #658
pocksuppet wrote: post #472

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's why we all love the MIT license.

I think permissive licenses are fine in some cases (particularly if you're trying to standardise something. X11, LLVM, and BSD are good examples), but generally at least weak (LGPL or MPL) copyleft are preferred. I'm still torn on what kind of license is best for operating systems, though (the GPL has forced companies to actually contribute to Linux but they also try and get around it in so many ways I have to wonder…

In some cases, yes. It has to be used judiciously. The free software pioneers understood this, and wrote a little essay about it (LGPL vs GPL): https://www.gnu.org/licenses/why-not-lgpl.html In short, it depends on the market situation: if you created something new and exciting, you should use GPL (nowadays that would be AGPL) to encourage lock-in. If you created something that is supposed to displace an existing proprietary product, you should use LGPL to encourage switching. These days it'd be MIT, but MIT is exactly the same as proprietary as far as user freedom is concerned.

Re: AI slop is killing online communities

#739

Post by chao- »

miladyincontrol wrote: post #733
chao- wrote: post #680

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Depends a lot on the community's topic, purpose, and size. However, a sign that someone needs to be removed is if you find that the community writ-large treats them as a Missing Stair [0]. If they have refused direct requests from community moderators/leaders to address their behavior, or regressed after a short period of improvement, and if most of the community is required to do work to actively manage their toxici…

By large I absolutely agree with te premise, but find too that sometimes you find someone akin to a hammer looking for nails, starts to label anyone a missing stair over the slightest incompatibility. Oft combines with a formation of a faultless in-group and a perpetual need for new villains. Its a rare thing, I dont mean to suggest its common. But it is always awkward to see when some people learn such language just…

>sometimes you find someone akin to a hammer looking for nails, starts to label anyone a missing stair over the slightest incompatibility.

I 100% agree. This is why it is important for leaders not to rely on the judgement of a single person, but on the behavior of perception of the community as a whole (which I tried to mention as a caveat in my comment).

On the other hand, if you have an overeager moderator with too much discretionary power... well that's a different community problem, and it is going to go wrong in multiple ways, not just this one :(

Re: AI slop is killing online communities

#740

Post by Atotalnoob »

goatlover wrote: post #672
mock-possum wrote: post #668

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah I’ve seen similar anti-AI-gen witch hunts crop up over the past few years - in artist and even non-creative communities, and it’s such a disappointment every time. My respect for people who engage in moral panic absolutely plummets, it’s cringe and I wish there was something I could do about it, but it take so much work to try to deprogram someone who’s been demagogued. As you say, unfortunately, sometimes the b…

I don't know why not wanting AI-generated content to swamp communities is a moral panic that people need to be deprogrammed from. Seems like a legitimate concern.

I think GP was more talking about using anti AI as a cloak to justify moral outrage and witch-hunting rather than actual AI generated content.
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