741–750 of 781 posts
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I usually type 5000 words researching for a 500 word output. It's not "write me an article on X", it's 99% my own ideas, but worded and structured and polished a bit. But I don't post them here. They are on my blog.
"It's not X, it's Y"
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Underrated take. Yeah, the “blast radius” for social media AI slop is 80%-99% of humanity. There’s many times even I cannot make out if something is slop. Hell, AI slop is going to be even better than reality for a portion of humanity, so it’s More likely they will stay online.
A sufficient number of people are satisfied with human slop. That the new slop comes from LLMs makes no difference. In the same direction, if you can't cell the AI slop from the low-quality human output, does the source matter? The problem is quantity. Has been for a while, the robots are only making it more obvious.
The direction matters. Yes Quantity is its own quality.
Communities are intended for human interaction - we encode far too much in the social affordances we use. Criticism, votes, lack of attention, all of it is feedback for people to learn and adapt from.
Bots are one way comms. Anyone trying to communicate with a bot is no longer having a conversation, they’re doing some interpretive dance.
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What is "it"? Putting the two halves together, the sort of people who want to be in a community where they aren't wanted are the sort of people you don't want in that community. I guess I can't argue with that.
They are talking about social norms. Inversely, "creepers". Most adults understand why men should not, generally, be hanging out in the women's clothing department. When accidental violations of those norms are pointed out, they apologize and correct. Creepers, OTOH, gonna creep. For their own well-being, online communities should police repeated violation of social norms. Otherwise the normals leave and creepers tak…
(I can't help thinking of the Father Ted Christmas special, where a group of priests have to organize a quasi-military operation in order to escape from Ireland's largest lingerie department without a scandal.)
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There is actually a different problem with this: Suppose there is a major vulnerability in some popular device. 50 million people get compromised; the attacker can now impersonate any of them at will. They go around and create 50 million accounts on various services, or take over the user's existing account on that service. What are you going to do with their identities at that point? These are real people. If you ba…
Maybe it would result in people taking Internet security seriously and holding companies accountable for data breaches if there were this sort of consequences for it
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There is actually a different problem with this: Suppose there is a major vulnerability in some popular device. 50 million people get compromised; the attacker can now impersonate any of them at will. They go around and create 50 million accounts on various services, or take over the user's existing account on that service. What are you going to do with their identities at that point? These are real people. If you ba…
Maybe it would result in people taking Internet security seriously and holding companies accountable for data breaches if there were this sort of consequences for it
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It does have the downside of requiring "trusted computing" (aka iOS and Android) on the client though.
Same as with NFC credit cards and similar auth mechanisms. You need hardware and OS-backed encryption that is tamper-proof.
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> I think it's going to effectively kill public chat communities without either proof of identity or attestation through a web of trust. This seems self evident to me too. It's another factor in why I think the tech community needs to get ahead of governments on the whole "prove your ID on the Internet" thing by having some sort of standard way to do it that doesn't necessarily involve madness in the loop.
EU's ZKP implementation provides complete anonymity and untrackability: https://eudi.dev/2.8.0/discussion-topics/g-zero-knowledge-pr...
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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…
Facebook is fine if you join groups based on your interests (hobbies etc) and then aggressively unfollow/block anything you don't want to see. It's not really conducive to discussions like Reddit, though. Mostly drive-by comments.
It keeps showing shit I didn't ask for and don't follow anyway
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This works if the goal is to create a funnel for making friends. I aim for something closer to Stack Overflow, where people gather to solve shared problems and help each other. The closest analog I can think of is community-run bike repair workshops. Some people are deeply involved in, and others just have a flat tire. The closest digital equivalent is the forums of old.
ok, but the same problem arises; how to weed out the people who are bad for the community. I've worked in community-run bike repair workshops. The leader worked really hard to keep the place drama-free. Some people really like drama ;) The forums of old were endlessly kicking and banning people, and that was before it was profitable to spam folks.
It's a lot harder to moderate bad actors if they can keep creating new accounts, too.