16 ms·

AI slop is killing online communities

• rootsudo 5mo ago
  > If you were born before around 1980 you’ll know that there was the Geocities era… It’s entirely possible to be born in the 90s and have the same experience.
• josefritzishere 5mo ago
  The writing here is good. Quote of the day "Any fool can feed coins into a fruit machine and pull the arm."
• phoronixrly 5mo ago
  > AI slop is driving up the noise, and making the signal more and more difficult to discern in communities. Thank you OP, this puts into words why I no longer look at Show HNs.
  • tomhow 5mo ago
    We filter out most Show HNs now (i.e., most of the ones that are submitted or attempted to be submitted by fresh accounts), and we look out for ones that have substance and authentic writing. Others have commented that the standard has been better in recent weeks. We'll keep working at it.
• carlgreene 5mo ago
  I have largely written Reddit off and no longer visit it after an experiment I did where I had an agent karma farm for me and do some covert advertising. As I went through the posts it wrote I realized that as a reader I would have NO idea that these were just written by a computer. Many many people (or other bots) had full on conversations with it and it scared me a bit. I am not quite there with Hacker News but I do know for a fact that many "users" here are LLMs. Online communities are definitely dying. I guess I hope that maybe IRL communities have a resurgence in this wake.
  • Forgeties79 5mo ago
    [flagged]
    • WolfeReader 5mo ago
      He's stating a fact. Turn on showed in your options and scroll to the bottom of the comments on any popular story. There are so many agentic users here.
      • Freedom2 5mo ago
        I generally disagree, because the level of discourse here has always been very high, curious and intellectual.
        • carlgreene 5mo ago
          It has, and the well prompted agents still give that. It's very weird.
          • Forgeties79 5mo ago
            I just don’t even understand the appeal of having a bot interact on forums for you unless you’re astroturfing for your company or personal brand or whatever
        • hackable_sand 5mo ago
          Maybe 1:100 comments match any one of those attributes. Most comments are just grammatically "correct". Not a high bar.
          • Freedom2 5mo ago
            The comments that aren't grammatically correct get pedantically corrected by those HNers too, so that's nice.
      • 5mo ago
• ianbutler 5mo ago
  I made this point elsewhere, but people are learning a lot of what us had to learn the old way which is no one cares about your stuff for the most part and now the value provided has to go way up to get people to care. That is, as the author says, the novelty has worn off and since we know it's AI the perceived value is also way down. We're all recalibrating. I do really think this is just a quick period in time before most people realize that the slop posting doesn't help them personally get anything and most give up and we go back to roughly the ratio of cool things with real value to see but like on a bigger scale because AI helps you do more as one person.
  • scottious 5mo ago
    I don't know... I might have said the same thing about email/text/phone spam but it has only proliferated to the point where it's a constant stream of garbage. Email, text, and phone calls are almost completely useless at this point. Sifting the signal from the noise is a non-stop effort. 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.
    • ianbutler 5mo ago
      I mean I think the dynamics are a bit different in online communities at least for actual communities and not drive by subs like r/technology or whatever. Especially say here on HN with Show HN and such the forcing factors are "i get no votes or community recognition" But I don't entirely disagree with you I think things won't totally go back I think it will settle way more than now though especially where things are a little more niche.
• WolfeReader 5mo ago
  [dead]
• Aeroi 5mo ago
  You're absolutely right!
  • graypegg 5mo ago
    I've found the smoking gun ⸻ it's not your work, it's your prompt.
    • dfxm12 5mo ago
      I've seen en dashes. I've seen em dashes. What kind of dash is that?!
      • graypegg 5mo ago
        It's been a personal favourite of mine to sprinkle into replies to clearly LLM generated textual diarrhea, it scores a laugh like, 1/10 times haha.
      • dantillberg 5mo ago
        A three-em dash. TIL.
        • whackernews 5mo ago
          Mmm dash.
      • EchoVoicy 5mo ago
        [dead]
      • archagon 5mo ago
        I believe it’s called the chungus.
      • AuthAuth 5mo ago
        Thats the new Copilot™ Dash from Microsoft
  • 5mo ago
• mrkramer 5mo ago
  The importance of good search engines and good discovery engines will grow even more.
  • smcg 5mo ago
    Can such a thing even exist now? Any search engine algorithm can be gamed by AI.
    • mrkramer 5mo ago
      I actually think the good old Page rank[0] is crucial because if the authoritative sources link to some website, webpage or content it means that particular item provides some kind of value to the entity that linked it. I'm also a big fan of metadata which can be used to describe web content and make the content more usable to the search engines and the Web users. [0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PageRank https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PageRank
  • Havoc 5mo ago
    Search engines got SEO'd to death decades ago
    • phendrenad2 5mo ago
      What good is SEO if people just read the Gemini summary at the top of Google and don't click the links? We have a chance at a real search engine again, now that there's no money in it.
• agustechbro 5mo ago
  I kind feel this might be good. Bot writen comments and AI media that can no longer be distinguish from real, will make us human leave the social networks, which helped to separate Us humans. Going back to the real world were you can trully believe on what you see, and enjoy the tone, look and scent of of our fellows humans beings.
  • colechristensen 5mo ago
    One of the paradoxical things that makes me hopeful is that there's going to be such an incredible amount of low effort AI slop content that it's going to drown out the low effort human-made content and generate a large amount of distaste for it. So much will be so bad that good taste and high quality will be rewarded more status as the people who will say and believe anything will be led astray and left behind. 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.
    • mrhottakes 5mo ago
      Have you considered that (further) lowering the signal-to-noise ratio will make it much more difficult to find and distinguish a signal?
      • colechristensen 5mo ago
        Yes, but I'm hopeful for a survival of the fittest instead of an extinction. Now there's more pressure to have a stronger signal and hopefully rewards to match.
        • mrhottakes 5mo ago
          What do you think happens to the least prolific organisms that lose the survival of the fittest?
• geoffdouglas 5mo ago
  This is a good thing. social media was already slop before AI. If this gets more intellectuals off these same websites daily and instead spend their time to better things, then I love AI slop’s purpose. There’s more to the internet than Reddit, TikTok, and youtube. Really there is, if your circle of friends is small or non existent without going to the same dotcoms, you have an issue that is worse than any AI slop tbh
  • smcg 5mo ago
    getting people off the internet is antithetical to the business goals of the AI companies. they won't let that happen without a fight
    • tardedmeme 5mo ago
      They're making it happen whether they like it or not.
• 01284a7e 5mo ago
  How would one build an online community free of LLM agents commenters and links to "slop" content? Strict invitation trees? Small signup fees? No SEO incentives?
  • hackyhacky 5mo ago
    My guess is that sooner or later we're going to one or the other of these: * dead online communities * highly-invasive, government-mandated "prove you are a human" requirements in order to participate in online communities
  • crooked-v 5mo ago
    Charge $10 for an account, like Something Awful.
  • ryan29 5mo ago
    Im not a crypto person, but I was intrigued by Chia. They generate their coins based on allocating disk space. So if you have a bit of free space, you can fill it with plots and play the lotto. 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.
    • tardedmeme 5mo ago
      The actual reality of Chia is that it drove up hard drive prices just like LLMs drove up GPU prices. People bought petabytes of space just to run Chia and if you wanted a computer you had to outbid them.
  • beej71 5mo ago
• onlytue 5mo ago
  HN is in peril and I don’t think it is a bad thing. Or rather, I’d like to bring back the old chestnut: it’s a good thing. While the site has moved to using /showlim, the AI garbage just bypasses that and goes straight to the home page. Almost every project that’s being shown is vibe coded and looks exactly the same - generated by Claude or the like. This is an excellent test for the site: will it be able to adapt or do we simply end up with a husk of what HN was and it’s the AI posts driving majority of engagement, Overton window, and upvotes/downvotes? I look forward to this, I think it is an exciting development.
  • phendrenad2 5mo ago
    Maybe "generated by claud" is a meaningless category because it encompasses both projects made via AI by people who have never used a computer before, and projects made by senior developers who used AI to do the actual coding.
• troupo 5mo ago
  Related, from a couple of days ago: Knitting Bullshit https://katedaviesdesigns.com/2026/04/29/knitting-bullshit/ https://katedaviesdesigns.com/2026/04/29/knitting-bullshit/
• dfxm12 5mo ago
  AI slop is hurting my community in a different way. We have an internal viva engage community for quick development how to type questions at work. More frequently, instead of asking "how to" questions to the crowd to crowdsource answers, people are reaching out to me directly to ask me why the solution AI suggested doesn't work. That people trust AI over an organizational knowledge is bad enough. I fear that AI is turning people generally antisocial.
  • GenericPoster 5mo ago
    This is happening at my workplace and it's incredibly annoying. We get support tickets asking us to troubleshoot AI written scripts. The funny thing is that most of the time, it would be faster for the customer to tell us what they want to do in plain english and have us make it for them. Hell, if they make an honest attempt, we can point them in the right direction and teach them. 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.
  • kogasa240p 5mo ago
    >I fear that AI is turning people generally antisocial. This is by design btw.
  • dalmo3 5mo ago
    Do they also say you're wrong, then proceed to "prove it" by pasting more AI slop that they don't understand? The first time that happened, I had the courtesy to point out why the slop was incorrect... I don't know what that did for my social capital. I fear/suspect people are getting attached to their pet AI to the point of taking personal offence when called out.
• noahgolmant 5mo ago
  There has to be room for an AI-driven project that expresses a unique idea, even if there's no community around it yet. Someone has to express it, and from now on that idea will largely be implemented with AI. > A good use of AI is when it enables people to do something they couldn’t do before, to contribute to a community when they couldn’t before. I agree 100% with the novel contribution aspect. But there's some nuance there. For example a project might have no active contributors. It might not be something you can drop directly into your codebase. Neither of those is inherently bad. As AI becomes more responsible for higher-level planning decisions, the value of an OSS project becomes less tied to visible community activity like PRs and issues. I notice this in my own work a lot. I might not use that project's code directly. But I think about a problem differently as a result. I often point my agent to existing OSS projects as inspiration on how to solve a problem. The project provides indirect value by supporting architectural decisions, deployment approaches etc. Unfortunately OSS activity doesn't capture this.
  • smcg 5mo ago
    Who is going to verify that an AI-driven project is a unique idea? How do you distinguish between a genuinely unique project, a grifter who is shilling their "unique" project, and a new enthusiast who is convinced their project is unique, but is not? This is an impossible moderation task. The only options I see for a community are to either totally ban AI-generated content, or be totally consumed by it.
    • noahgolmant 5mo ago
      I don't really know. Certainly we need a higher bar. The Kafka example in the post may be hyperbolic but I agree it pollutes the space. But we also can't swing the other way and rely completely on out of date proxies. If you ban AI code there will be very little code to see in a year. It'll take time but we'll arrive at new norms. We built semi successful ways to filter content farms in the earlier internet days. The signal has to shift to "did they think hard about this problem" which has some observable properties. Like how they articulate the problem, or why it became important to them.
• 59qlkjah 5mo ago
  Sigh. First the article states that "coding by LLM is the way things are done right now" in 10 different ways but message boards and articles need to be protected. We get it, the current narrative is that coding is the big thing, promoted by billionaires and scabs alike. So, the coding narrative must be protected until the IPO of Juniper^H^H^H Anthropic happens and the whole thing implodes. You already could have code for free and faster by using "git clone" without a company of thieves selling your own output back to you.
• dwa3592 5mo ago
  When LLMs were new on the scene, I thought trust would fade in the written(text) medium. I saw it happening on Substack, Medium, and Reddit. But then VCs pumped so much money and AI has gotten into every other modality (audio, video). The only thing I really interact these days are the human beings sitting in front me, phone calls with people I know and hackernews. Life seems sorted but something feels missing as well. Edit - I am not anti AI but it is slowly killing the digital human interaction.
• OgsyedIE 5mo ago
  It sucks that the narrative framing device of 'human slop' has vanished in the last year. Some subreddits, like all location subreddits, lifestyle subreddits like malefashionadvice and redscarepod and entry-level academic subreddits like math and criticaltheory were already just hives of human slop before AI came around because of a structural design to the site that had the side effect of normalising a total absence of quality control. Upvotes are not a good mechanism for quality control in any way because they force good content to have the same metadata as the content that is technically well-constructed but is irrelevant, meaningless, just a platitude, too obvious to be obvious or pablum. Upvotes turn everything into a shock-value dominated 101 space.
• foxfired 5mo ago
  For every argument against AI slop, you will get a variation of it's the future, or I'm 10x more productive now, I've shipped 3 applications in 2 days, etc. They won't stop talking about it and defending it. But I can't get anyone to share their amazing work with me. There is a reason the Show HN projects that are mostly vibecoded don't get much response. It's because they aren't any good. Comments that are AI generated are hollow. Videos that AI generated a shell of their sources.
  • deleted 5mo ago
    [deleted]
  • rahen 5mo ago
    Obvious slop still makes it to the front page of HN, and sometimes farms GitHub stars. 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.
• slopinthebag 5mo ago
  There are "nice", "polite" slop enthusiasts. The ones who insist they have taste and tact. They would never post bad slop, recklessly, only the very highest-quality human-refined, curated slop. Not really slop at all, they would argue, because they gave it a careful review before posting it. They insist there's a very important difference between this premium slop and the nasty kind, and that low-quality human-authored media is actually slop, too, when you think about it. They talk about how important it is for people to use slop thoughtfully, efficiently, correctly, and that we all need to learn about and discuss slop constantly because it's the inevitable future and highly relevant for everyone. They muddy the waters. They wheedle, rules-lawyer, carve out exceptions, and talk about how important it is to have nuance in separating virtuous applications for slop from bad ones, and that focusing on the bad ones is actually very tedious and rude. We should have polite discourse about the good things about slop and stop being so mean about bad slop, which isn't even really a problem. The bad kinds of slop will be solved soon, probably, and the harms are overstated. They colonize spaces. If moderators don't swiftly throw these slop enthusiasts out on their ass, slightly less polite ones will post slop slightly less politely. More and more of the people participating in the space will have favorable opinions toward slop, and shout down people who object to slop. In no time at all, your community is a slop bar. Who could have imagined?
  • mrhottakes 5mo ago
    gonna start calling this effect The Slop Vanguard
  • vehemenz 5mo ago
    I'm not the arbiter on all things Godwin's Law, but either way the analogy doesn't work.
  • visarga 5mo ago
    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.
    • 5mo ago
• CrzyLngPwd 5mo ago
  I run a niche creative community, and we outlawed AI-generated content in 2022 as it was easy to see how corrosive it would be to the community. It hasn't been easy. We ban fake AI accounts daily and shrug off around 600 AI content creator accounts monthly. It's a lot of work, extra work that wasn't needed before AI content came around, and of course, that is an extra cost. I fear losing the battle.
  • WolfeReader 5mo ago
    Unlike a lot of communities, yours at least started on the correct side. Better to ban outright, than to slowly realize that you should have banned it.
    • RodgerTheGreat 5mo ago
      Indeed. Take a soft approach, or "wait and see", and you'll just allow your community to get infested with slop enthusiast crybullies that loudly protest any pushback against "genai content". The communities that draw a firm line and hold it will be the only ones that endure.
      • CrzyLngPwd 5mo ago
        It was a surprise to us how vehemently some folk defended AI content and assumed it was their right to post it within our community. We had no problems with people using it and posting elsewhere, it was the demands that we must allow it that were problematic and made us question whether we were doing the right thing. No regrets now, though, as we see competitors being flooded with AI slop and they are too invested in it to change now. Now I see it as the perfect tool for impostors.
        • protocolture 5mo ago
          >It was a surprise to us how vehemently some folk defended AI content and assumed it was their right to post it within our community. People often confuse freedom of speech, with freedom to access a specific platform for speech. Its dead wrong, I dont know why people would want to be in a community where they arent wanted.
• tailscaler2026 5mo ago
  Online communities that allow upvoting / downvoting have been effectively dead for a long time because it's easy to manipulate conversations by elevating and punishing comments to fit a narrative. This is especially true on HN.
  • bluecalm 5mo ago
    On the other hand I think you need reputation mechanism. The biggest problem of online communities is that every moron (or a bot) has equal voice. Clearly democratic upvotes/downvotes don't work very well though. Someone who solves it is going to be the next billionaire.
  • phendrenad2 5mo ago
    Ironically, aggregator communities like reddit came about because forum communities were dying off. Memeing about the latest news injected "life" (if you want to call it that) into the internet. AI is just taking out the trash, in my eyes.
• CM30 5mo ago
  There's a lot of focus on tech projects here, but it's not just vibe written projects that are ruining communities now. No, it's a problem with art, text and videos too. Reddit was already becoming a creative writing exercise in many ways, with infamous subs like 'Am I the Asshole?' seemingly being about 80% fiction labelled as fact. But now you don't even need to know how to write to flood the site with useless 'content'. YouTube is arguably even worse, since AI led content farms are not just spamming the hell out of every topic under the sun, but giving outright dangerous advice and misinformation on top of that. I saw this video about medical misinformation by these 'creators' earlier, and it genuinely made me want to see them crack down on this junk: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UEfCTCBDKIU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UEfCTCBDKIU And there's just this feeling of distrust everywhere too. Is anyone on Hacker News human anymore? Is that Reddit poster I'm responding to human? Are the folks on Twitter, Threads or Bluesky human? The scary part is that you basically can't tell anymore. Any project you find could be AI generated slop, any account could be a bot using stolen images or deepfakes, any article or video could be blatant misinformation put together as a cash grab... If something doesn't improve, pretty much every platform under the sun is going to be completely useless, as is a lot of the internet as a whole.
  • smcg 5mo ago
    I think people like the blog author need to realize that this problem can't be dealt with content moderation or users trying their best to be honest. You just get a firehose with an on/off switch, you don't get free filtering or moderation with it.
• trash3 5mo ago
  [dead]
• arjie 5mo ago
  Human slop is realistically just as bad. In a strange twist, human commentary on the Internet is asymptotically approaching an older LLM. Trite cliches, repetitive tropes, and tribal affiliation signals dominate conversation. I have turned to blunt instruments: blocking individuals on their first cliche banner-wave. It has substantially improved comment quality but I still suffer from the problem that I don’t block stories entirely.
  • dvh 5mo ago
    Who's reading this comment in 2026?
    • seanw444 5mo ago
      First
  • Karrot_Kream 5mo ago
    You've written about this before so I'm curious how effective you find it? Did you try a blocklist on top of doing things like muting words? Btw I enjoy your content on this site quite a bit.
    • arjie 5mo ago
      Thank you. Those are kind words! I've mostly been pretty happy about the lists I've curated blocking users. I don't use words because I'm sure I'll clbuttic/scunthorpe my way into missing something and so on. The current problem I have is that on my iPhone, I use Chrome and it doesn't have extensions so I have to view everyone. I'd much rather view people I like, so I'm going to have to make an iOS app. Really enjoyed https://hackernews-insight.vercel.app/user-analysis https://hackernews-insight.vercel.app/user-analysis That spike in users near the end is really something!
  • BoneShard 5mo ago
    Quora became human-slop-infested trash before it was trendy.
• janice1999 5mo ago
  Question for web devs - are captchas effective any more? If Reddit required a captcha on every comment, would it actually decrease bot comments?
  • tardedmeme 5mo ago
    There's a reason Google is switching to "scan this QR code on your phone with a Google-authorized TPM" kind of CAPTCHAs
    • janice1999 5mo ago
      I've never seen a CAPTCHA like that. What's it used for? Google Cloud services?
      • Havoc 5mo ago
        It's a reference to this I think https://www.androidauthority.com/google-recaptcha-play-services-requirement-3664806/ https://www.androidauthority.com/google-recaptcha-play-servi...
        • janice1999 5mo ago
          Wow, that's bad. Looks like the warnings about TPM and remote attestation being a backdoor to total digital lockdown from the Stallman contingent were right.
          • seanw444 5mo ago
            The tin foil hatters are always told they're making slippery slope fallacies until they're proven right a few years later. Over and over again.
            • pocksuppet 5mo ago
              Sometimes. Other times they're just wrong.
• spookymutation 5mo ago
  I have been reading HN near-daily for years. This synthetic participation (LLM or otherwise) has catalyzed weakspots in HN's high-trust environment. The weight we give to the average HN comment is orders of magnitude higher than the average Reddit (& co.) comment, and this relationship probably goes both ways (much higher ROI on ads/propaganda). Due to the low volume & high trust, it seems to be a very different (easier) environment in which to achieve pervasive propaganda/advertising/etc with a disproportionate impact. I remember when some new LLM version came out (maybe from Meta?) I saw something like 3 of the top 10 posts on the front page were all variations of "Foobar 2.1 New Model". Perhaps not explicit, deliberate manipulation, but the result was the same, and apparently allowed. How many of those generic LLM websites (https://letsbuyspiritair.com/ https://letsbuyspiritair.com/ comes to mind) show up on the front page per day? Zero effort static front-ends for some unremarkable data. I'm not going to touch the politics minefield, but that is a weakspot too. All of this, and yet I think HN has handled it relatively well. I really appreciate not seeing comments of the form "I asked Clog/Gemini/etc. here's 5 paragraphs". Places like Reddit do not have the agility or control, and have degraded accordingly. It makes me sad to think that a short time ago, every forum was ~100% humans, and now it is some fraction of that. I wonder if I will ever see that again.
• pupppet 5mo ago
  I want my future community apps and sites to build in bot a flagger. I don't care how hard it is, the community that gets this right is the one I'll jump ship to.
  • lizknope 5mo ago
    Unfortunately I think reddit themselves encourage and want the bots because it leads to more traffic and ad displays so they make more money.
• liminis 5mo ago
  I'll remove the particulars to avoid anything partisan, but: I failed to truly appreciate how cooked reddit was with bots until I accidentally clicked Popular and stumbled upon a national subreddit post with a 'chad meme', starring a particular political leader, whose unpopularity is hard to adequately convey to foreigners. It was not just that this post had been so severely upvoted, but the comment section itself had a mantra more or less, with very little actual conversation, just echoing the same sentiment; and all those comments in turn upvoted to the point of drowning out the lone comments at the bottom (not downvoted, just not upvoted) expressing "???". I don't know if I'd ever even written the word 'astroturfing' before expressing my bafflement at a friend, so I don't think I'm very tinfoil hat about these things. It was just utterly bizarre to see someone who can barely get a single win in public discourse being heralded -- monotonously -- like he was the second coming.
  • Havoc 5mo ago
    >I failed to truly appreciate how cooked reddit was with bots until I accidentally clicked 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
    • liminis 5mo ago
      That's a bit miserable ... ; - ; I try to avoid the place where I can. The only places I check with any regularity are niche, like r/roguelikes, or r/ironscape; I think they escape the worst of it as a result. I'm sure the bot stats on twitter would be even scarier though, and there's no real escape from the noise there.
  • SL61 5mo ago
    [dead]
• olup 5mo ago
  I feel that a lot in my side projects: maybe one should keep the half-baked AI repo for oneself and rather share what the experiment, the thesis, and the learning from the building are. No one cares much about the (un)finished product, as it can be replicated better in most cases with a couple hours' work of claude coding. For instance, I really liked how Karpathy shared a high-level idea on the LLM-based wiki. It was sadly followed by a long tail of no-one-cares-about "Here is my LLM wiki product" posts pointing to the generic LLM-generated landing page.
• whatever120 5mo ago
  This post is slop.
• zby 5mo ago
  So no hope for https://xkcd.com/810/ https://xkcd.com/810/?
• throw7 5mo ago
  "Build with AI." No, I don't think I will.
• culebron21 5mo ago
  Sadly the imperative is, as often, a call to everyone to be good guy and make less noise. Unfortunately, it doesn't work, neither at personal level, nor at global. One may be quiet, but what if your friend/acquaintance/fellow got possessed by some AI slot machine, and is sharing his "products" enthusiastically? I had such case, and right from the very beginning was dismissive and rude, and it doesn't work -- he keeps sharing various artifacts. On a global level, yes communities die out. I think, global communication has reached the point when it's more a liability than a benefit. In late '90s and early '00s, maybe until early '10s, getting more connected could lead you to nice clients, getting hired etc. Nowadays, even before ChatGPT 3 in '22, every such area became overcrowded, underbidded, etc, and LLMs, surprisingly, added not much new -- just augmented this trend.
• RobRivera 5mo ago
  Welcome to the club
• motbus3 5mo ago
  The company I work for has a deep rooted community side and despite what big techs do, I am 100% confident the only aspects we have in community features are for the user benefit. No gray area. Just that. Since the AI sloppification we lost considerable amount of traffic to bots. But worse than that, we lost users who tended to contribute back with others. We can leverage multiple ways of exposing community data to members, so it is not that we are loss because of that, but more in the fact that we have 30y or so of good feedback on how the community around the platform was good for people and now everything is at risk... Don't get me wrong, my work is work... There are premium features and else, but the amount of value one can get for free is what the platform is known for. And we know many people use it for free for years and when they need or can they subscribe and mostly stay for years and years. The fact people are losing those connections is depressing to me
  • 2ndorderthought 5mo ago
    I left multiple online communities because the slop and the slop users were unbearable. 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
    • adrian17 5mo ago
      I've seen people like this 15+ years ago on #learnprogramming on Freenode, I'm guessing LLMs just tend to validate that behavior instead.
      • 2ndorderthought 5mo ago
        It adds a depth of nuisance that's for sure. I've seen users talk about how they can't wait until they don't need to ask for help anymore and can just use LLMs. Meanwhile I'm directly messaging with the person who made a package and asking why they designed it the way they did beyond greatful to learn 8 new things in 6 sentences.
• animanoir 5mo ago
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• deleted 5mo ago
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• originalvichy 5mo ago
  Re: "The Asymmetry of Bullshit" I'm gonna speak on behalf of language models' capability of making online communities better. In recent times, the frustrating forum phenomenon of "learned helplessness" is making me too annoyed to participate. Even in a fantastic subreddit as /r/LocalLLaMA, there are people posting replies in the vein of > user1: please help me understand this acronym the post title speaks of > user2: (explains in detail what it means) In the "good old days", a low effort, surface level question would result in someone either muting or banning the person to keep the discussion high quality. There I am, browsing a forum dedicated to LLM enthusiasts, and an unbeliavable number of people are asking LMGTFY/RTFM-level questions they could even find an answer to from a free Google Search AI summary, and people are rewarding them by actually responding to them with effort. Thanks to models being quite intelligent at answering basics, the ban-hammer should be used more swiftly if people keep polluting forums with low-quality posts. There's no need to feel bad for them not having the time or capabilities to read through years of forum posts to feel qualified to answer. Maybe even these sloppy posts authors can be outright muted or banned with a heavier hand for the sake of quality.
  • mezyt 5mo ago
    Turn out people like to ask low quality questions, as evidenced by the reputation of Stackoverflow moderators.
• AuthAuth 5mo ago
  AI Slop is killing the mainstream communities and the alternative communities are filled to the brim with tankies/nazi's (unironically).
• dwaltrip 5mo ago
  Like many modern woes, it’s a problem of trust. The baseline level of trust in an online interaction has been eroded significantly by LLMs. The question is, how can we reverse this trend and increase trust? I have a sneaking suspicion that it would help enormously if the stock prices of the largest companies in the world were not tied to how effective they are at hijacking as much of humanity’s time and attention as possible. Maybe the fediverse can (eventually) help? It’s been a while since I looked at it. Let’s empower people to effectively have more control over the content they interact with. Social dynamics can make this difficult. We all want to be in the loop. The recent striking successes of the movement to ban phones in schools gives me hope.
  • zeppelin101 5mo ago
    I think what could work is requiring users to prove their authenticity and uniqueness using a national ID of some sort. It would be bad for privacy, no doubt, but it surely would work. But the users' actual names should not be displayed.
    • dwaltrip 5mo ago
      I was thinking about that. It should be possible to do this in a way that mostly preserves privacy. Sites and apps don’t need your actual national ID, just to know that you have one. I think it could be possible to have 3rd party verification services that don’t know where the verification request is coming from, thus preserving privacy on both sides.
  • TFNA 5mo ago
    > Maybe the fediverse can (eventually) help? It’s been a while since I looked at it. 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.
    • 5mo ago
• retinaros 5mo ago
  AI is lifting the voices of the lazys and below average to average people. for those who would never have progressed it might seem like a god given gift. for the ones with the desire to grow and learn and go beyond average... this is a curse.
  • platevoltage 5mo ago
    Took the words right out of my mouth.
• rglover 5mo ago
  In a clip: https://youtu.be/WAZljmaRxE4?si=i1p4jn3zxgmQrKUk https://youtu.be/WAZljmaRxE4?si=i1p4jn3zxgmQrKUk
• muldvarp 5mo ago
  Wasn't that obvious the second ChatGPT 3.5 released?
• sixhobbits 5mo ago
  This kinda thing makes me sad that keybase sold out to zoom and wonder if it can be resurrected. It was such a simple web of trust that went viral enough that I still occasionally see it on HN or Twitter profiles even though it's been long dead. There are maybe 20 or so online handles I know, some of whom I've met in person, who I deeply trust. To the extent that I fully trust anyone they vouch for too. Even with just one degree, that's a large enough international semi anonymous online community that can provide value to each other through online text based communication. Doesn't need iris scans or credit card checks, just "patio11 on hn Twitter and whatever his domain is is one of the good uns" and a network effect from there. Already seeing some form of this reputation staking in eg Pi PRs, everyone is treated as clanker slop by default but the entry bar remains quite low to prove and build reputation. I don't think online communities will stay the same in the face of AI but I do think whatever comes next will strongly rhyme
• bamboozled 5mo ago
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• imadierich 5mo ago
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• deleted 5mo ago
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• kmfrk 5mo ago
  I wonder when things get so bad that we end up filtering content made by accounts created before the release of ChatGPT.
  • moffkalast 5mo ago
    Won't help much, botters can just buy old accounts.
    • traderj0e 5mo ago
      Gets harder with all the 2FA stuff involved
    • unethical_ban 5mo ago
      Infinite new accounts vs finite old accounts for sale. Low effort vs high effort. It would help.
  • traderj0e 5mo ago
    There are already some sites where you're much better off if you have an old account. Like I have a super old Twitter sitting there for random stuff that requires it. I tried making a new one a few years ago, didn't post anything, and it got banned within 2 days for "bot activity." The old one has never been banned. 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.
• ForgotMyUUID 5mo ago
  I do not feel sad about lost online communities. When i was at my early 20s (early 2010s) FIDO of my university was still running and i had amazing time with some oldschool hackers there. I was too young for that community and always had a feeling that I have lost or , rather, missed something great... you know, like i was born 20 years later than i would had liked to. Now this echo conference is dead. That 486 machine was probably disconnected and thrown away somewhere. Everything dies at some point. Ask yourself : do you need the tech that gives that community vibe or do you need the people behind. I try to stick to people. As for me, i would rather have an in blood-and-flesh nerd friend instead of a whole human-driven reddit. He probably knows the answer, he is happy to help. There was an article here at HN long ago, that in average we have around 150 close contacts at a time. Some drop in, some fall out and get unconciously replaced. Going beyond that number would imply exponential increase of management costs. Those oldschool guys from FIDO, they disappeared for me without a trace. Partially because quite soon I ended up in the community of radio-engineers. Honestly, i am grateful to all people that helped me online, those who were there, who actively participated and, for some reason, cared.
• erpellan 5mo ago
  Invert the economics. Right now there is value in posting LLM generated content that is more than the cost of using the model. If platforms had a subscription model that you had to pay for in order to do more than just read comments, there’d be a lot less LLM content. There would also be a lot less of all content. But maybe that’s the price you pay (literally) to get rid of AI slop.
  • intended 5mo ago
    Good idea, but models are only going to get cheaper. Unless governments add an information environment pollution tax. Oh hey, now thats an idea.
    • erpellan 5mo ago
      I meant the social media platforms. If HN charged a fee for posting and commenting it doesn’t matter how cheap the AI models are, it’d be punishingly expensive to sling slop.
• Halian 5mo ago
  > I am not an AI-hater. In fact, I think AI-haters are on the wrong side of history. Incorrect.
• alaudet 5mo ago
  The balance is so far out of whack with LLM's now in online communities. People crave human interaction with like minded individuals, and whoever figures out how to give authentic online experiences is going to be successful. Maybe small communities need to come back, where you build credibility slowly. Why does every site have to be a monstrosity that wants to build a hundred million users to IPO. It just attracts the worst. I was active on Reddit for years under the same username I have here. I have pretty much abandoned it.
  • TFNA 5mo ago
    > People crave human interaction with like minded individuals 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.
    • alaudet 5mo ago
      Some definitely enjoy the dopamine hits and get addicted to the doom scrolling. Maybe I am just too old to understand it and the internet is passing me by. Some of us still like conversations like this. Real conversation in a respectful manner even when we question each others viewpoints. The old internet is still there in some places and I'll continue hanging out there as long as it does. While I have great friends in real life, not that many of them are old tech nerds, so the internet is really the only place to talk to like minded people.
• deferredgrant 5mo ago
  [flagged]
• morpheos137 5mo ago
  Good. These communities were inauthentic echo chambers for most of the past decade anyway. advertising powers "online communities." slop must be selling. Reddit died long befor gpt 1.0.
• Galanwe 5mo ago
  At this point, I see no identity verification or proof of some kind of humanity working. I think what we need is the equivalent of what was done for CORS: client/server cooperation. That is, APIs should mark that they are human only, and harnesses should cooperate with such flags and prevent calling said APIs. It's not perfect, as it's client side enforcement, and one could still theorically build their own harnesses without, but that's the only way forward.
• ilia-a 5mo ago
  Original online communities (forums/chat rooms) got largely killed by social media, now social media is getting killed by AI slop.
• lizknope 5mo ago
  I was on Usenet starting in 1991. Once the Internet got popular with the general public around 1995 things started going downhill. Spam overwhelmed Usenet in the late 1990's and made it almost unusable for general discussion. Stuff started moving to web site forums which I still don't think are as good as a Usenet newsreader. slrn was my favorite. Then reddit came along and a lot of online forums started dying as people moved to reddit. Just this morning on reddit I reported 4 separate posts as AI slop to the moderators. They need to change the categories as I flag it as "disruptive use of bots" For 2 of the posts the moderators agreed with me and about 5 hours later the posts were removed. For the other 2 the moderators haven't done anything. It's a losing battle. Some of the posts start by asking questions like "I was thinking about this and... [long rambling paragraphs] Your thoughts on this?" I waste a minute reading then another minute skimming the rest of it and then realize I wasted 2 minutes of my life. Then another 30 seconds reporting it to the mods. This has exploded in the last 6 months. Then there are all the repost bots farming for karma. Some subs have a rule that you can't repost something in the last 30 days or 6 months. But it is really ridiculous when something get 500 upvotes and then literally the next day a bot reposts the same thing and it still gets 300 upvotes. I think it is just a bot farm upvoting stuff.
  • anthk 5mo ago
    The spam was fixed with killfiles and dropping out Google Groups altogether. Now it's like a second golden age for a lot of niche groups.
• builtbystef 5mo ago
  The “slopification” of the internet has been happening for years now but I honestly don’t know what a real solution would look like. Most people aren’t willing to go through a identity verification process, or pay to join a community, and invitation-only spaces would probably lose diversity of thought pretty quickly. Even still, I guess one of the above is a lesser evil because the bot problem is only going to become more unbearable. P.S. Props to the author. I really liked this writing style.
• dharmatech 5mo ago
  I've been messing around with a decentralized social network where you only see who you choose to follow. It's implemented for plan9, but clients could be made for any OS: https://youtube.com/watch?v=q6qVnlCjcAI https://youtube.com/watch?v=q6qVnlCjcAI
• deleted 5mo ago
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• teknover 5mo ago
  I have pondered the sensibility of using AI to support the initial birth of new communities. Given the needed social validation of seeing both 1. A populated community and 2. The tone of the community being grounded, non-toxic and useful. The alternative is having a community born that will be small, have early adopters who can be overly passionate or critical and gatekeep folks from discussion. That means high effort to curate initially.
• plumbline 5mo ago
  Do we need a new carbon-credit style market for companies that want to continue putting out such slop and paying for moderators to remove the waste after it's been made?
• deadbabe 5mo ago
  AI will be a forcing function that pushes people to go meet in real life to do stuff together. Even if everything online is fake, events are not. So if people say they’re going to show up somewhere, there must eventually be a moment of truth. And then you can form high trust private group chats to keep talking together. It may be hard for the current generation of chronically online people to adjust to that new reality, but the next generation of kids growing up can get used to this now, and eventually socializing in person will be natural again and the internet is for bots and weirdos LARPing as something they’re not.
  • __MatrixMan__ 5mo ago
    Maybe, but the small groups that form out there in the real world will each be much smaller than the large group that stays and gets jerked around by the bots. 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.
    • deadbabe 5mo ago
      I agree with the second part.
• halyconWays 5mo ago
  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.
  • watwut 5mo ago
    Only for open nazi and harassers.
    • halyconWays 5mo ago
      What?
  • 4ggr0 5mo ago
    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 lot of personal details and feelings in 1:1 chats, sometimes also in servers. i yearn for a new-age of decentralized communities and fora...
    • tinyattackcat 5mo ago
      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...
      • 4ggr0 5mo ago
        [dead]
• yamanakatakeshi 5mo ago
  [flagged]
• Groxx 5mo ago
  Giant online communities, yes. Small ones seem totally unaffected afaict - some harder to spot scam/spam accounts, but they're outed as soon as they act. And any invitation-based thing should almost perfectly block those. Smaller communities are generally a lot healthier anyway, so tbh I don't think this is all that bad of a thing. I don't think it's possible to be open to millions and also be healthy, unless you spend a lot of money paying moderators (and regularly rotating them, to prevent burn-out or mental harm from too much exposure, which ~0 do in an even slightly ethical way).
• Aeroi 5mo ago
  1. human verification for auth. 2. only human generated input composer, no copy/paste, no file uploads ect. control the composer. control the camera sessions for photos videos. 3. no algorithmic feed that is designed for ad-spend and eyeballs. 4. moderate
  • maltalex 5mo ago
    > 1. human verification for auth. How, at scale?
• gos9 5mo ago
  Online communities died when they were monetized and open
• bitvvip 5mo ago
  Entering the AI era, it's hard to tell the authenticity of things on the Internet. But sometimes, having a conversation with AI is not a big deal as long as we can gain something from it
• sunir 5mo ago
  A few things. A web of trust of some kind like vouching may come back, and general algorithmic silencing of low quality members. Also most governments are going towards the South Korean model of government-verified ID to post online to keep teenagers off social media. The same tool can be used to greatly reduce spam and slop, if that's what platforms want. Also people will get used to AI in online spaces as AI quality improves. If I'm online trying to get help for some task, I personally don't care who wrote what if it is correct; it's not like humans have great track records of accuracy or substantial contributions either on average. Correctness is expensive in general. If I'm online trying to relate to other humans emotionally, well I get what I'm paying for. It's been true forever that the better the gate, the better the community. I've tried to push the boundaries of openness, but as I've written extensively on MeatballWiki, soft security depends on there being more good than bad apples in a community. With machine intelligence, the economics of that are silly. Regardless, people love people, so we'll figure it out. I'm optimistic we can rise to this challenge.
• Hobadee 5mo ago
  > I built a homepage on Geocities, complete with...a web counter Yes, but how many decimal places did you optimistically give it, only to never use more than the "10s" place?
• doginasuit 5mo ago
  The important thing to recognize is that quality of content has never been the driver of online communities. As long as they provide an engaging break from real life, they will exist and thrive. I think the negative association with LLMs is a phenomenon that will die out in the 20s. Our understanding of authenticity will evolve and so will the tools and platforms. The internet has always been extremely artificial, that won't change very much.
• PrinzOfPeace 5mo ago
  I think one of the big differentiators of slop is critically reviewing the work as a human and continuing to refine before letting it see the electrons of public places. I think that the true benefit is harnessing AI to augment ourselves as an extension of us, rather than a replacement. I'd be curious if there is a way to effectively prove something is human first rather than AI first on the internet. I haven't figured out any particular way yet as even using AI to detect AI would require a sufficiently large sample to determine. Something that keeps me awake at night.
• cody_ellingham 5mo ago
  What if you charged people to post to change the incentives? Something like https://stacker.news/ https://stacker.news/
• fdvlol 5mo ago
  [flagged]
• RF_Enthusiast 5mo ago
  Maybe Friendster has the right idea.
• shevy-java 5mo ago
  [flagged]
• TeaVMFan 5mo ago
  This bothered me so much that in my tool for HTML-native authors, EPublish ( https://frequal.com/epublish/ https://frequal.com/epublish/ ), I automatically insert a no-AI-training clause on the copyright page. Not that it will stop the kind of executives who will authorize mass unauthorized downloading of books to train their LLMs, but we have to at least take a stand.
• wenbin 5mo ago
  dataset for ~40,000 ai slop podcasts - https://www.kaggle.com/datasets/listennotes/ai-generated-fake-podcasts-spams https://www.kaggle.com/datasets/listennotes/ai-generated-fak... And Listen Notes is removing 4000 to 8000 ai slop podcasts per month - https://www.listennotes.com/podcast-stats/#growth https://www.listennotes.com/podcast-stats/#growth
• vga1 5mo ago
  Online communities needed strong authentication also before AI slop. That people were too complacent to do it is of course a problem, but now you cannot ignore it anymore.
• spiderfarmer 5mo ago
  My communities hate all things AI. So AI content just doesn't survive.
• AdminAccount 5mo ago
  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 https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/421831 [2] https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/384922 https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/384922
  • bayindirh 5mo ago
    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.
    • dspillett 5mo ago
      > 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 information as we can't help”, “this isn't a complete answer”, and so forth, as deeply personal attacks… One of the good things about LLMs is that they've drawn off all the simple already-answered questions! Unfortunately the more complex ones, or the ones for new solutions, are also going there so SO and its family of sites is ceasing to grow even in the ways it wants to. > and verbal harassment. Again, that did/does happen, but a lot less than some people report it. The most abusive people I've seen on there are those who have been given one of the responses I listed above.
      • Semaphor 5mo ago
        People also always bring up the "fake XY problem" thing on SO as a sign of toxicity or whatever, but I’ve had many, many results where it was a XY problem, and the actual problem Y was solved, yet I landed there searching for a solution to X :/
• egorfine 5mo ago
  > agentic coding [...] It’s just how shit gets done now. I'm not sure about that.
• Revonex 5mo ago
  [dead]
• ramon156 5mo ago
  Instagram comments genuinely make me angry. It used to be because the comments lacked any critical thinking. This is probably due to the fact that most people on instagram are teenagers. That's fine, and for that reason I stopped reading comments. But now it's pretty obvious that the comments are LLMs talking. Whether a human initiated it, no idea, but the big walls of text done by bobbyfoo2012 seems highly unlikely.
  • puika 5mo ago
    I'd say LinkedIn is on a whole other level. Steer clear of it for your own health
• deleted 5mo ago
  [deleted]
• helsinkiandrew 5mo ago
  > But respect the community, and only share what is truly relevant. Save the crayon pictures for your kitchen fridge. That highlights the problem - its not AI - it's the oversharing thats the issue. Many people have moved from "Sharing whats unusual/interested/excited me" to "What can I share today". The constant stream of mediocrity drove me away from Facebook (years ago) and then Instagram.
• ionwake 5mo ago
  Also I’ve noted this odd behaviour imo where if I mention one of my comments is AI - as in “ this is what the AI says about the” because it’s a concise statement to aid the chat - I get severely downvoted. But if I just make my comment basically a human parsed version of the AI comment I get upvotes - with no concern for granularity of source integrity. Which is terrible in two ways.
• johnthescott 5mo ago
  consider the honeypot project to block ips.
• johnthescott 5mo ago
  consider participating in the honey pot project to block ips of proven bad guys.
• renyicircle 5mo ago
  > I am not an AI-hater. In fact, I think AI-haters are on the wrong side of history. > It’s just that I know when to keep my crayon-drawings to myself ;) And I am getting increasingly sad and frustrated seeing communities that I value slowly wilting under the onslaught of shit Disliking AI, even for reasons admitted by the author as valid, and on which they post rants, has become so low status that people now have to preface their articles with this. It's fine to be be happy with the good aspects of a thing and be mad at the bad ones. We don't need to split between sides of history (whatever that means) because of this. Eventually you might want to weigh the benefits against the damage though.
• gawkdev 5mo ago
  The actual damage comes from volume without accountability.. no attribution, no source no way to verify. The same problem existed with content farms pre AI it's just cheaper and rampant now. Communities that survived content farms did it with one rule.. cite your source or get removed. That still works. but again the irony is that the source could be some ai slop..
• noashavit 5mo ago
  In real communities bots gets exposed
• onlytue 5mo ago
  People complaining about Reddit selling AI corpos their training datasets seem to forget: everyone else (HN included) gave it for free.
• midas89 5mo ago
  In practice I agree with the author but I think the issue isn't AI or AI slop as much as people's judgement. He himself says that some AI assisted projects are actually good while other's aren't so. Devil's advocate can say that it's a matter of quality and also a matter of interest. And quality in some manner is a matter of taste - for example there is a market for regular fast food and organic or more high quality fast food, while others never take part. He says that "Does your offering contribute anything to the community?" is the bar that should be met in regards whether something made with AI should be shared or published. But let's me honest, a good number of things people made or commented or did even before LLMs didn't meet that bar, and second is that most people think their pet project or pet whatever they made or created does contribute to the community. I have a senior security leader in my organization that thinks his Claude Code security scanner he made is amazing while I think it's a piece of garbage.
• kazinator 5mo ago
  I'm not building by or with, or any preposition you can stick in front of it that indicates adjacency or towardness.
• PeterStuer 5mo ago
  For those people that have lost a 'loved one' to an online community, why should we not be dancing on those graves?
• chaosbolt 5mo ago
  Government censorship killed online communities a long time before AI slop, even on HN there are some things that are just facts, and obvious, and anyone with more than two neurons can see, but talking about them gets your message removed.
• dr_girlfriend 5mo ago
  it's really sad. the worst part for me is that many people i used to consider my friends now make AI generated posts which makes me not want to interact with them and it also makes me distrustful of new users in a way that never used to happen.
• Grimblewald 5mo ago
  Ironically, llm's are a decent way to combat. Even relativley small / simple llm's paired with a good slop rubric do a decent job. E.g. set up scoring so that time to answer is a factor, how directly relevant things are, how much exposition is offered etc.
• theuniverseson 5mo ago
  [flagged]
• scotty79 5mo ago
  > 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.