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There are smaller, gated communities that are still very valuable. You're posting in one. But yes, the open Internet is basically useless now, thanks ultimately
by coldpie 2y ago
There are smaller, gated communities that are still very valuable. You're posting in one. But yes, the open Internet is basically useless now, thanks ultimately to advertising as a business model.
- nicholassmith 2y agoI've seen plenty of comments here that read like they've been generated by an LLM, if this is a gated community we need a better gate.
- coldpie 2y agoSure, there's bad actors everywhere, but there's really no incentive to do it here so I don't think it's a problem in the same way it is on the open internet, where slop is actively rewarded.
- globular-toast 2y agoIt's hard to tell, though. People have been saying my borderline autistic comments sound like GPT for years now.
- lobsterthief 2y agoAlso our collective unwillingness to pay for subscriptions for publications
- Drew_ 2y agoPublications need to charge a-la-carte instead of force feeding subscriptions.
- whimsicalism 2y agothis is not a gated community at all
- coldpie 2y agoTrue, that is maybe too strong a phrase, but I think it's close to accurate. I think the culture & medium provide kind of a self-selecting gate: it's just plain text and links to articles, with the discussion expected by culture to be fairly serious. I think that turns off enough people that it kind of forms its own gate shutting out the people that make "eternal Septembers" happen. But yeah, ultimately, you're right.
- whimsicalism 2y agoI think that HN eternal september'd at the beginning of the pandemic and the Reddit Apollo stuff was the nail in the coffin.
- krapp 2y agoThe people who make Eternal Septembers happen show up here all the time. They show up here from Reddit and 4chan and elsewhere expecting this forum to be a free-for-all because the word "hacker" is in the title, and are inevitably shocked and disappointed to learn how aggressively moderated and tone-policed this place is. They're the ones who post racist diatribes under green alt account and anti-vaxx conspiracy theories and complain about wokeness and talk out of their ass about subjects they have no actual expertise in. The ones who think flagging is just a super downvote. I mean, the premise that simply having a minimalist layout would filter for a better class of people has always been a bit silly. Eternal September is an inevitable result of having new people join a community. Every new person, every new comment, increases entropy. It doesn't matter how technically proficient they are, they will change the culture simply by virtue of their existence and participation at scale.