Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

AI slop is killing online communities

rmoff.net

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

771–780 of 781 posts

Re: AI slop is killing online communities

#771

Post by scotty79 »

> But respect the community, and only share what is truly relevant. Save the crayon pictures for your kitchen fridge.

Self-censorship won't work. Shaming won't work and probably isn't healthy. We need better mechanisms for recognizing valuable content. And it can't be human-good, AI-bad. Our ultimate solution for this now is popularity contest. But this will have diminishing effectiveness. Ultimately you'll have to put AI on your input stream to further filter out for you what you value.

Re: AI slop is killing online communities

#772

Post by fl4regun »

rexpop wrote: post #734
fl4regun wrote: post #688

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Social relations do not require internet access. Social relations can be make through it, but it is not pre-requisite.

Re: AI slop is killing online communities

#773

Post by rgblambda »

a96 wrote: post #767
rgblambda wrote: post #610

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Where I live a 2nd class stamp costs the equivalent of $1.24. That's $1240 for a thousand. Not including the cost of the letter itself, or the envelope, or the cost to write it if it's being farmed out to overseas labour, who then has to send it by international postage. And then you have evidence of where the letter originated, and that can be compared with how the user presents themselves online. Little bit more th…

The kind of place that will make and send letters by the thousand will probably have a better deal on postage.

I'm seeing business rates for stamps is the equivalent of $1.20 per stamp. Free delivery though.

Re: AI slop is killing online communities

#774

Post by tinyattackcat »

MSFT_Edging wrote: post #655
anvuong wrote: post #536

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I use Blind sometimes to check the TC of a company. Most of the posts/comments there are either stupid, sexist, racist, or all of them. But it does feel like most of them are real. Blind requires verification by company email for posting, which I guess eliminates most of the bots.

Blind is by far the most toxic social media site I've seen that wasn't an outright parody(truth social). It's a site that thrives on a few crabs being higher in the bucket and bullying the rest. God awful place.

I haven't been on Blind in years, but it was always hilarious to read posts like "Why do I have no friends or hobbies? TC 500K"

Re: AI slop is killing online communities

#775

Post by tinyattackcat »

Galanwe wrote: post #277
vohk wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it's going to effectively kill public chat communities without either proof of identity or attestation through a web of trust. Or rather turn them into little better than comment sections on news sites; thriving but worthless. I'm active in a number of online communities that are doing just fine but the difference is those all involve ongoing relationships, built over time and with engagement across multiple…

Im not sure proof of identity solves anything. People will still have LLMs with their real identity verified.

Yeah, there's nothing stopping someone getting verified and still spewing AI slop, but I think well-paid, highly incentivized moderation is still important for this to work(?)

Re: AI slop is killing online communities

#776

Post by tinyattackcat »

4ggr0 wrote: post #681
halyconWays wrote: post #447

What online communities? Ever since Reddit went all-in on censorship, actual conversation moved to the deep web, mainly on Discord and other places invisible to search engines.

i for one deleted discord a couple of months ago when news about age verification and palantir collaboration dropped. got too yucky for my taste. used it since 2016, now i just don't anymore. event went so far as to try to delete all of my messages with an extension, took like 2-3 days to delete my account. even then, i don't trust them enough to think that they don't keep copies of deleted messages. regret writing a…

I too (like many others) want a proper decentralized community/platform, with proper incentives and privacy-respecting mechanisms baked in. Hard to justify such an ambitious project while going against the existing network effects of Reddit/Discord though, and taking VC money probably warps incentives and hurts trust...

Re: AI slop is killing online communities

#777

Post by marcus_holmes »

nicbou wrote: post #750
marcus_holmes wrote: post #685

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I think it's an inherently hard problem. The one I fear the most is not the toxic dirtbag; they just get banned. I'm more afraid of those who follow the rules but reliably kill the vibe. The internet has no equivalent to the whole room going quiet. It's a lot harder to moderate bad actors if they can keep creating new accounts, too.

Agree, it is hard. I've built a few communities, and trust my gut; if something feels off about the vibe from someone, it probably is and I should be wary. But this becomes incredibly difficult (if not impossible) to put into rules, so if you're trying to build a community where you're not the beneficent dictator for life and there are published rules then you kinda have to accept that some people will play the rules and be dicks anyway.

Re: AI slop is killing online communities

#778

Post by throwaway2037 »

CrzyLngPwd wrote: post #754
throwaway2037 wrote: post #540

Earlier quoted context omitted.

High quality anecdata are exactly the reason why I love HN. Thanks for posting about it. > fake AI accounts First, how do you identify them? Is it strictly admins monitoring posts/server-side logs or do users report odd behaviour? Second, what is the purpose of these accounts? Are they basically running submarine adverts, or are they just trolling (to harm the community)?

We review all signups and their submitted content, and we have a fake account type "AI creator" which we record, so if they tried that first, it's a clue. We also integrate a third-party AI detection tool that checks their uploaded content before they get access to the community, and we use a second third-party tool as a double-check, and if we still doubt ourselves, we'll ask for their workings-outs in some way that…

    > we have a fake account type "AI creator" which we record
This is genius! The LLM is so dumb that it falls for the honeypot.

    > We also ask them to prove they are the author of their work through various time-tested mechanisms.
I would love to know more details, but it is not a good idea to share on a public platform. That said, if it is working for you, then hats off: You have found/developed a effective "defense in layers" strategy.

Re: AI slop is killing online communities

#779

Post by 4ggr0 »

tinyattackcat wrote: post #776
4ggr0 wrote: post #681

Earlier quoted context omitted.

i for one deleted discord a couple of months ago when news about age verification and palantir collaboration dropped. got too yucky for my taste. used it since 2016, now i just don't anymore. event went so far as to try to delete all of my messages with an extension, took like 2-3 days to delete my account. even then, i don't trust them enough to think that they don't keep copies of deleted messages. regret writing a…

I too (like many others) want a proper decentralized community/platform, with proper incentives and privacy-respecting mechanisms baked in. Hard to justify such an ambitious project while going against the existing network effects of Reddit/Discord though, and taking VC money probably warps incentives and hurts trust...

[dead]

Re: AI slop is killing online communities

#780

Post by tracker1 »

bluefirebrand wrote: post #410
tracker1 wrote: post #384

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which government? Will they interoperate with foreign governments? My point was to create something outside a specific government, with very limited information... that would require a fee or some kind of funding. I don't think I'd trust the US/China or other bodies to trust each other for such a use case.

> Will they interoperate with foreign governments? Ideally, yes But you're right, this isn't likely to happen in real life and I'm just being wishful. Instead we're going to get the much shittier capitalist version of this where every company and government spies on us and we have no expectation of privacy online at all

My fear is something like this WILL happen in some places and complicate the world as a result, or at worst isolate access to specific countries with similar laws on identification.
Post reply on HN