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 to bring in comments even after the admission that they were fake. In advice subreddits, commenters continue to give advice on the situation. Some comments would say they saw the notice that it was fake but continue arguing about it anyway.

This makes a feature of Reddit very clear: The truthiness of a post doesn't matter. The active commenter base on popular subreddits just wants something to discuss and, usually, be angry about.

In retrospect it's obvious given that misinfo posts were the easiest way to karma farm for years even before AI.

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 platforms. I've no doubt this clock is ticking too but it's still harder to fake a user across a mix of text chat, voice and video calls, playing an online game, etc and when much of the web of relationships extends back into real life activity.

But I agree the golden age of easy anonymous connections online has ended.

Would be super fascinating to watch play out. I grew up before the internet so, historically, I know how to seek out external communities, but by early high school I was deeply entrenched in online life - so I'm very rusty with finding new IRL clubs, cliques, etc. Fortunately my life is full of many friends and I go out frequently, regardless. For those younger people that never had life without the internet, I wish them luck on their search but at the same time I'm very curious to witness their journey.

Yesterday I was watching people on the street and on the tram. Every other person was staring at their phone and scrolling through something.

That might scare me more than the fact that someone is chatting with an LLM bot online.

(I am pro-ai, use it every day for coding that I couldn’t achieve pre-2022 as I am lame coder.)

HN autokills comments it detects as LLM. I think maybe you're not giving HN enough credit. :)

This is sad, because Reddit remained one of the final bastions of human content on the internet. For several years, appending "site:reddit.com" to a google search was a valid way to get something usable out of a google search. Doing that is still an improvement over raw-dogging Google's ranking algorithms with an unfettered search, but AI slop increasingly is the result.

This is one of my great disappointments in the current rise of AI. LLM's can give good search results when dealing with a topic they've been specifically trained on by human experts, but they're not good at separating human-produced signal from AI slop noise. We've done nothing to prevent a sea of AI slop from being dumped on top all the human signal that's out there. When AI companies enter their enshittification phase and stop investing in expert human trainers, the search results LLM's produce are going to fall off a cliff. Search is a bigger problem than ever.

_____

[1]https://9to5mac.com/2024/02/19/reddit-user-content-being-sol...

I don't suppose you could show some examples? How convincing is the state of the art now?

We may end up with things like that…

People using LLMs without being fed their own post history are still pretty easy to detect. There's just something very recognizable about the cadence and tone of LLMs.

What really stuns me is that if you call someone out for it, 9/10 times you get absolutely buried in downvotes. Even here on HN. Its like people are angry that you're lifting the curtain on the slop, that the writing they enjoyed is fake.

It’s an unpopular opinion but I am looking forward to ID and age verified social media. If done right we can have real people around again.

BTW, ironically the harsher communities like 4Chan doesn’t seem to suffer from the dead internet. I guess it’s either because the advertising value is too low to justify AI use there or maybe AI API providers refuse to work with such a content this reducing opportunities to infest with bots.

You can have both IRL and online-free-of-bots. I already wrote about it but one of the very best forum I'm a member of, where real people are posting, requires to be vetted in, web-of-trust (but IRL) style. It's a forum about cars from one fancy brand and you can only ever join the forum by having a member (I think it may be two, don't remember) who's already in confirm that he saw you driving a car of that brand. It's not 100% foolproof (someone could be renting the car for two hours and show up at a cars&coffee or take a friend's car etc.) but this place really feels like a forum of yore.

And people do eventually travel, so it's bound to happen that an owner shall go to another country, meet someone there, vet him in etc.

Now, sure, it may not be the "1 million users acquired in three days thanks to my vibe-coded app" scenario but that is the point.

You can imagine other domains where IRL communities have local groups, but where forums regroup different IRL communities all interested by the same hobby/topic/domain. And when people travel and meet, the vetted members do grow and connect.

Oh and on the forums a lot of the posts are pictures, where "Julian xxx" met "Black yyy Cyril" and you see both cars (and from more than two people): suddenly it becomes much harder to fake a persona... You now need to fake both Julian xxx and Black yyy Cyril and fake the pics. And explain why your car has never been posted by any carspotter on autogespot etc.

You can imagine the same for, say, model trains: "Met Jean at the zzz meetup, where he brought his wonderful 4-8-8-4 'big boy' locomotive, I confirm he's into the hobby, vet him in".

Naysayers and depressive people are going say it cannot work but I'm literally on one such forum and it just works.

P.S: if I'm not mistaken in the past in some nobility circles you had to be vetted by up to sixteen (!) other people from the nobility that'd confirm they knew you, your parents, etc. before you'd even meet the king/emperor/monarch to make sure that someone from far away couldn't come to, say, Versailles or Schonnbrun pretending to be a baroness or count or whatever. Quite the extensive check if you ask me.

Good. Tech has been artificially propped up to generate liquidity in markets. Never had organic demand or traction. Most output was trite and meaningless; just capitalism.

Zero cares if all the HNers rich on tech stocks go broke.

Happy to project as little concern for their well being as this forum has projected at other's fields tech eliminated.

Some wild Dark Triad shit peddled here where there is no obligation to humanity's problems, just HNers own personal preferences.

Yeah ok that can be projected back, terminally online script kiddie; fuck your stock portfolio and I hope you end up in public housing assistance.

I'm not saying being a mod means it's bullet proof, but i do notice smaller communities tend to self police better and know what's real.

That said, your experiment scares me as well.

Imagine an online community where you can only join on the recommendation of two other members, who you must have actually met in person, to participate. Meanwhile, you leave at least some of the activity publicly available to the general public so that interested parties can meet up IRL and join.

This could probably be implemented easily on top of existing online platforms like Discord, Reddit, etc. since it's really just a community building rule, not a community itself.

What factual basis do you have for that?

Whatever allegiances (with people, or allegiances to ideas) Steve Huffman has, or people like him - it's not enough. It's a site seemingly killed by greed

(Yes, I know moderating this stuff at scale is hard)

- A human. Beep boop.

Was this a browser using agent? What did you use?

Please don’t do this here.

Frankly, online communities have been doing for many years now, when the censorship, anti-free-speech, tone policing mods and mobs started dominating online and America really did not have the self-respect or confidence anymore to enforce the Constitution online.

Name and shame.

I see the same thing with "AI Slop". Yes, there is AI Slop but (IME) it's pretty easy to spot. But what's more annoying is how often people are willing to throw that accusation whenever someone takes a position they don't like, much like the "political" label. It's lazy and honestly just as bad as the slop itself because it unintentionally launders the slop in a "boy who cried wolf" kind of way.

I also have a theory that some AI slop isn't inherently successful. It's just heavily botted by people who are interested in promoting certain positions. I bet you could make a pro-administration LLM bot and another one promoting a communist revolution and no amount of model tuning would make the second as popular as the first because the first would hit third-party botting as well as platform content biases (eg Twitter).

I've personally been accused of being a bot. This is particularly true in recent time as I've tried to share facts and fact-based analysis of, say, what's going on with crude oil markets, the military operation in the Gulf and the politics and economics around it. I even saw one hilarious comment saying (paraphrased) "the bots are getting clever and posting about unrelated topics". This was funny because it never occurred to this person that no, it was just a real person posting something you disagreed with.

This just makes me wonder...so what?

Some of the oldest posters here with the most karma continue to post absolute garbage takes on topics ranging from US healthcare to history of USSR, that are trivially disproven by learning the very basics from a Wiki article (e.g. not a high bar).

To be fair, this opinion slop is also present for new users and LLM bots, but is one kind really worse than the other, if both of them contribute to killing the community?

We already know what kills communities. It's the eternal Septembers. Infighting within leadership also doesn't help, but time and time again it's the influx of too many new users that nosedive and drown out quality contributions.

I was in a small niche creative writing community for a while. Circa 2021\22. AI wasn't why I was there but I demo'd a few LLMs to a lot of the users in the Off Topic section because people were curious. Even with an explanation of how they operated, almost everyone was at least interested. One author told me how he operated similarly, rote learning how to write like his favorite authors by copying out their texts, hand written, word for word. Their concern was largely that they were too hard to use from a technical perspective.

These people knew I was there to learn, and that I was unlikely to ever try and publish LLM derived content. I said as much often.

Sometime in late 2022, a switch was flipped. And almost all of them started talking about how AI and those who used it were unambiguously evil. They didn't say my name, but they stopped engaging with me. Gradually, they started reposting twitter content from extremely anti AI people. Complained about AI submissions to various publications. Eventually, someone reposted a tweet calling for the death of anyone who used an LLM, with not even a single disagreement (and lots of encouragement)

I just bailed. I had only ever engaged positively, answered questions for the curious and tried to help people out. I posted one AI assisted story, and that was to demonstrate how my contributions were tracked vs AI contributions automatically in the editor to satisfy someones curiosity. Clearly highlighting the bits I had written. Just a technical demo. No one was asked to enjoy or positively engage with it as if it was human written.

A while later, most of their submission rules were updated with a new clause, if it was judged that AI written content was discovered, they would blacklist that person from all submissions across their entire community. Considering I had demo'd LLMs, and the uselessness of AI detectors, it was clear to me that these people would be able to justify blacklisting me if I poked my head up at all. I had been developing my own story for submission (myself, no LLM content), but I just dropped it. I just didn't feel like sticking my neck out for the witch hunt.

I also used to be quite engaged with blockchain. And it went through a similar process, most people ignored it until that paper about the power usage (Claiming it would spike to some level it never reached) and then suddenly being associated with it was an outrageous moral crime. But after a while, when it turned out that the power use claims were largely a nothing burger, people gave up on the hate parade.

I don't think you will "Lose the battle" (at least in terms of keeping AI users out). And its always ok for small communities to be selective about their membership. I just don't think its possible to maintain such artificial rage for more than a few years. The AI Datacenter water/power claims are a clear London Horse Manure problem that looks set to resolve itself, and the copyright issues will get sorted to some degree. Eventually I think you just wont care enough to ban anyone except low effort spammers (of which there are a huge amount, granted).

YMMV

I loved maps and geography as a child and still do. I've never met anyone in real life that likes it as much as me. But on the internet there are places were I can discuss it and other people share fascinating articles, pictures, etc.

I don't want to be limited to only the friends I can make who live near me

Maybe it's hard getting across what I mean so a more concrete example is there will be SO MUCH clickbait out there that serious outfits instead of being forced to do it will be able to successfully differentiate themselves by NOT doing it. (and many similar things in different arenas)

I'm trying to say that LLMs raising the noise floor will drown out a lot of the toxic noise that's been plaguing us.

I can hope.

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 on comment threads, Reddit will even hide a decent number of posts from other users, so that a poster may well be talking into the void.

It is on old-school fora that one can get a sense of actual interaction: with avatars and other personalized touches it’s easy to gradually learn who is who, and there is a culture of longform text where you can actually get a sense of other people’s personalities. But how many people under the age of 35 or 40 are joining those fora that survive? Give people a choice, and it turns out they prefer the dopamine hits of engagement-maximizing commercial platforms, and the smartphone as the default (or sole) interface to the internet with all the death of nuance that spells.

I use ai okay. I think it's useful. But people who dove hard into this stuff treat all text on their screen like it's a chat bot and not a person.

"Rewrite this code using the new API" "excuse me?" "Can you do it I need it right now chatgpt won't compile!" "Show me your code please" provides the biggest pile of dookie ever "hey can I ask how you came to decide on any of this? Maybe we should rewrite what you have here because x y z is concerning" "the ai did it I am learning. There is no need to rewrite anything just write this section for me" " no thanks" someone else does . user leaves

There are two separate things here that are getting silently conflated.

> A good use of AI is when it enables people to do something they couldn’t do before

This could be good on an individual level, if say, a doctor wants to vibe code an app of some sort for his individual practice.

>to contribute to a community when they couldn’t before.

This is where it goes off the rails. If they couldn't meaningfully contribute before, they aren't going to suddenly be able to discern that whatever slop they want to contribute is of value to the community. That's just another way of saying, if I wanted an AI opinion on something, why wouldn't I get it directly from the source, and write the prompt myself, instead of have some intermediate human prompt the AI for me?

They’re effective at annoying humans. Driving traffic away from your site. Reducing conversation rates.

The fediverse has been around for well over a decade in some form or another. It never caught on with society enough to make a difference. And unfortunately, the fediverse has now developed such a distinct culture of its own, Highly Online people with distinctive political and social shibboleths, that it even alienates many tech idealists around the world, let alone the general public.

It was also so much easier to make a dating app profile back when I was single, like one click. Recently was watching a friend set one up, and now they not only want like 3FA but also proof that you're a human. Assuming the old accounts are grandfathered in.

For me it was a wholesome response. It seemed genuinely kind/human.

Click on user profile...it's a bot just pumping out posts like that. Looked organic when seen in isolation, but when you see a wall of them you see that it's got to be an LLM (with a good prompt).

That was disheartening...I had kinda accepted that the sht-stirring rage posts might be bots but the kind comments too? Ouch

I think people who want to push a certain narrative might just set up a quick bot and tell that bot to start posting on Reddit or whatever and just let it run. Why not? Little effort on their part and they might actually have influence. The same reason why spammers apparently think sending me 10 text messages per day about a loan I've been approved for. It probably does work 0.0001% of the time, but that's okay if it's all automated.

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.

These posts also usually get all these glowing comments from users who clearly haven't checked the code. It's even worse when authors get busted and claim "Okay, Claude wrote it, but the design is mine" despite clearly not understanding the output themselves.

Unfortunately, that makes high-effort projects less visible. The SNR will probably keep getting worse until slop can be flagged on HN.

Since it creates a tree structure, you can wipe out entire armies of bot/spam/otherwise accounts by following the vouches up the tree.

* dead online communities

* highly-invasive, government-mandated "prove you are a human" requirements in order to participate in online communities

The intriguing part is that I think it works against scaling. The incremental cost for me to use the 500GB of free space on my disk is $0, but someone scaling a bot farm has to buy all their space.

Real people tend to have a lot more idle capacity than optimized, scaled businesses, so any kind of proof of idle capacity seems like it would disadvantage bot farms.

I’ve also thought that proof of collateral spending would be a good system. For example, you buy groceries and the store gives you a token saying you spent $X of real world money. Those tokens help show you're not a bot. Keeping that system honest and equitable would be extremely difficult though.

Maybe schools could give kids tokens for attendance. It sounds kind of dumb, but who knows.

It's frustrating because we're bundling this shitty AI with our product so we're just making more work for ourselves. Then there's the push from leadership to use more AI...

I don't think it's making people antisocial though, people just like easy solutions to their problems. We're giving them what seems like an easy solution. But it's easy for them, not easy for the reviewers.

This is by design btw.