AI slop is killing online communities
rmoff.net258 points by thm 3 hours ago
258 points by thm 3 hours 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.
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 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.
> without either proof of identity or attestation through a web of trust.
Let's put aside the idea whether it will be the end of all privacy as we know it (I'm not sure if I personally think it's a good idea), but isn't Sam Altman's World eye ID thing supposed to do that? (https://world.org).
How does it work (like OpenId)? Do I have an orb on my desk, or some sort of phone app? I still want to use my desktop to login to HN.
Would it stop this sort of "get human id", past it into .env, so agents can use it?
Note that "attestation through a web of trust" means something like needing an invite from an existing user. It doesn't have to mean mass surveillance.
PGP’s web of trust was kinda bad privacy-wise in some regards, as it basically revealed your IRL social network.
If my PGP public key has 6 signatures and they’re all members of the East Manitoba Arch Linux User Group, you can probably work out pretty easily which Michael T I am.
Are there successful newer designs, which avoid this problem?
The IRL social network is actually the important part of the trust structure.
The only one of these I've seen that really worked was the Debian developer version: you had to meet another Debian developer IRL, prove your identity, and only then could you get the key signed and join the club.
Private torrent trackers have been doing this for a while. If some number of your downstreams act like shitheads - you get nipped and so do your other downstreams.
This seems like the best way to handle it. Also, smaller communities. It's cool to do the global thing, but once you have 10k active users you can't moderate it with a team of 5 volunteers.
I think the attestation approach works best if there are different reasons for the punishment. Eg someone inviting a turd doesn't ban the person who invited them. Someone going full ai spam should.
Was it demonoid? That was like this way back in the day? Needed an invite and if you leeched you were cut.
Which is, funnily (?) enough, how a lot of IRL organizations used to be. And basically don't be of the wrong ethnicity or religion.
It still happens more informally today, of course, but it used to be a pretty (if un-spoken) part of how a lot of WASPy organizations operated to a greater or lesser degree.
> I think it's going to effectively kill public chat communities without either proof of identity or attestation through a web of trust.
This seems self evident to me too.
It's another factor in why I think the tech community needs to get ahead of governments on the whole "prove your ID on the Internet" thing by having some sort of standard way to do it that doesn't necessarily involve madness in the loop.
I'd be interested in working on a problem like that.
I have a strong preference for remaining anonymous or at least making it a reasonably high bar to tying my online identity to my personal identity
I would love to be involved in helping to design a sort of "human verified" badge that doesn't necessarily make it possible or at least not easy for everyone to find your real identity
I've been thinking about it a bunch and it seems like a really interesting problem. Difficult though.
I suspect there is too much political and corporate will that wants to force everyone online to use their real identity in the open, though
I'm not sure that it would be too hard technically... basically, auth+social-network. Basically Facebook auth without the rest of facebook, adding attestation.
IE: you use this network as your auth provider, you get the user's real name, handle, network id as well as the id's (only id's not extra info) of first-third level connections.
The user is incentivized to connect (only) people that they know in person, and this forms a layer of trust. Downstream reports can break a branch or have network effect upstream. By connecting an account to another account, you attest that "this is a real person, that I have met in real life." Using a bot for anything associate with the account is forbidden, with exception to explicit API access to downstream services defined by those services.
I think it could work, but you'd have to charge a modest, but not overbearing fee to use the auth provider... say $100/site/year for an app to use this for user authentication.
Verifiable credentials are all about this. You need some sort of credentialing body that generates the credential for you, but after that you'll just have an opaque identifier. Any caller that wants to verify whether you're human submits the id to a verifier and the verifier says yes or no. You can also do attestations like age, so gate a forum on 16+ or something. You never end up having to actually give away your name or any other details.
I agree its a very, very interesting problem. Maybe one of the biggest problems of the coming decade.
I suspect it will be a long process: first there will be goverments that force people to use ID, but that will be abused, hacked and considerably restrict freedom of speech, so after that phase people will start to create better ids.
The problem is really pretty simple: You need an authoratitive source to say "This person is real" - and a way for that source to actually verify you're a person - but that source can be corrupted and hacked. Some people will say "Crypto!" but money != people, so I don't see how that works. Perhaps the creation of some neutral non-goverment-non-profit entity is the way, but I can see lots of problems there too, and it will probably cost money to verify someone is real - where does that come from?
Anyway, good luck on your work!
*You need an authoratitive source to say "This person is real"*
Does that even accomplish much? It may cut down on mass fake account creation. But, real people can then create authenticated account, and use an LLM to post as an authenticated real person.
If there's only 1 or just a handful of verifiers, then a human can at most go through a few of those credentials before they run out. The risk is of course getting someone else's credential but that isn't as big an issue, especially for smaller online communities.
> I think it's going to effectively kill public chat communities without either proof of identity or attestation through a web of trust.
I'm happy to verify my identity as an honest-to-god sack of meat if it's done in a privacy-protecting way.
That probably is where things are gonna go, in the long run. Too hard to stop bots otherwise.
In order to make this viable, wouldn't you have to verify identity repeatedly? What's to stop me from providing a valid identity and then handing my account over to an agent after I'm verified?
That's why a web of trust was suggested. You keep track of who vouched for who and down weight those who vouch for users that prove to be bots. In theory at least. It's certainly more complicated than only that in practice.
I guess it would have to be something like a service which confirms whether a person already has an account on the site but doesn’t have to track which particular account it is.
I’m not sure if that would work for account deletions though.
That is effectively impossible though. There's data centers of stripped down phones, so "it's actually a phone" doesn't do it.
>I think it's going to effectively kill public chat communities without either proof of identity
How? I have an identity. A state driver's license, birth certificate, social security number. I've even considered getting a federal license before, never bit the bullet. If I wanted to run a bot, what stops me from giving it my identity? How do I prove I'm really me (a "me" exists, that's provable), and not something I'm letting pretend to be me? You can't even demand that I do that, because it's essentially impossible.
Is there even some totalitarian scheme that, if brutal and homicidal enough, could manage to prevent this from happening (even partially)?
I'm limited to a single identity only as a resource constraint. Others more wealthy than I (corporations or ad hoc criminal enterprises) could harvest thousands of real identities and use those. Consensually, through identity theft. The only thing slowing it down at the moment are quickly eroding social norms (and, as you point out, maybe they're not doing that and it's not even slow at the moment).
Digital totalitarianism would prevent it. The moment you were found to be running a bot, your identity would be blacklisted across the entire internet.
> The moment someone steals your identity, your identity would be blacklisted across the entire internet.
FTFY.
There isn't a clear solution. And if there is, this ain't it.
"I think it's going to effectively kill public chat communities without either proof of identity or attestation through a web of trust."
Those sorts of places were always the only places with reliably good communities.
To the contrary, platforms like Facebook and X demonstrate that even personal verification won't save you from identity politics.
People will post appalling racism in newspapers under their own bylines and photos. Identity verification does not moderate.
It's easy to botspam Reddit because even the real users always acted like bots. The big subreddits were the worst, but contrary to how the users keep saying "it's good if you find the right subs," no it's not. Wrote that place off like 10 years ago.
> 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.
I don't suppose you could show some examples? How convincing is the state of the art now?
Reddit is more or less dead to me, as the popular subs are botfests and the niche subs are empty. I'm lucky to get a single reply on gaming subs.
There's also a third category where the sub looks organic because the moderator deletes and bans anyone who doesn't post exactly what the moderator wants.
> Online communities are definitely dying. I guess I hope that maybe IRL communities have a resurgence in this wake.
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.
Did you ever introspect about who ruined Reddit?
It’s a tragedy of the commons, many have done it, but no one user did it.
I'd argue that Reddit leadership, which insulted, hobbled, and wrote off its mods and power users (destroying projects like /r/BotDefense) while doing little to crack down on the proliferation of bot repost content, had a major role in encouraging this. They might even like it better this way -- lots of extra fake engagement boosting traffic stats without messy human drama, which they can then ironically sell back to AI labs as training data.
It was bogus even before that. I heard complaints at some point that API changes broke bots, which actually sounds good.
Let's never forget the summer of 2023 when Reddit forceably removed mods from many major communities and replaced them with corporate shills. That was a major loss of dedicated people who cared more for their communities than Spez's pocket book.
Yeah, if carlgreene specifically stopped doing that Reddit would be saved. They are the one savior.
Serious question: If there are so many LLMs on online forums, who is doing it? Is it just 1000s of research students or something more nefarious? Is it AI businesses building up evidence that their output is as highly scored as humans therefore "buy our software"?
We're in the middle of an active cold war where countries are trying to manipulate the citizens of rival countries to destroy their civilization without having to fire a single bullet. Anonymous, over the internet mass manipulation, all for some minimal electricity cost.
That's definitely the most insidious use, but I think the larger portion is advertisers and karma farmers (who later sell to advertisers).
https://www.npr.org/2024/09/05/nx-s1-5100829/russia-election...
If Russia is willing to spend cash like that, then of course they're willing to run massive bot farms to pollute any forums they can. I'd be shocked if the US was not doing the same in any way they can. You have to ask why Trump killed Radio Free America as well when it was clearly not an big expense.
> Trump killed Radio Free America as well
Not sure how this relates to the subject in a direct way. Radio Free America was a outlet explicitly created and utilized to spread US propaganda, but kinda sorta barely disguised as a journalistic enterprise (not really, if you were listening to RFA you knew what you were listening to.) Shutting it down seems to be a counterpoint to all of the covert participation of US intelligence on the web which has done nothing but escalate.
It's very common for folks to search Reddit to find reviews of products etc. these days. If you can have a bot account post a fake review of how awesome your product us, and have that upvoted, it can pay huge dividends.
Established accounts are worth money, often for scamming/propaganda.
Not too dissimilar to people bot-leveling in MMOs to the sell the accounts.
Lots of marketing. Not even AI business, just regular consumer crap. They realized that blatantly spamming their product looks bad, so they orchestrate multiple accounts to look more organic. And people actually engage with it.
People like the above poster who are "just running an experiment" or "trying something for fun" who then wonder why online communities are full of AI now.
HN has historically been gamed for visibility. The stakes for doing this can be quite high if you can pull it off.
My impression is that they're sometimes unemployed people or students hoping to create a popular open source project, and use it to find a job.
They aren't going to care about any of the advice in the article about not posting slop -- finding a job is (of course?) more important to them.
Can't really say they are doing anything wrong, maybe I too would have? ... Just that large scale, doesn't work
If you farm a fleet of good accounts, you control the discourse. On HN, you could boost whatever you're trying to push, and downvote or flagkill whoever objects.
There are obvious benefits to controlling public discourse, right? Even if it's just to support some project you're working on.
There are certain topics that seem to get instantly flag-killed unusually often. IPv6 is one.
I've been more disturbed by comments that were flagkilled just for being wrongthink, not because they were rude or not well argued. I've also seen a lot less of those flagkills over the last 6 months, which makes me feel like there were some fake accounts that got caught and culled.
Public* online communities are dying. Discord is thriving
Discord is terrible. Full of bots, creeps and ai slopped to the gills.
Some communities are better than others but the sheer volume of stinky trash is immense despite discord and the poor volunteer moderators efforts to prevent it. Most mods are neutral on it too.
There are chat communities that are still somewhat safe with zero user verification. But I will not mention them.
I really don't understand the folks fleeing to Discord. A mailing list does 99% of the same thing for most of the communities.
Sure, if you want to chat while gaming, that's the whole point of Discord. Ganbatte.
But, for everything else, Discord is such a horrible misfit that I don't understand why it's the default.
> I don't understand why it's the default.
Because it equally well supports real-time communication.
And it looks shiny.
And some people use it to e.g. watch a video together, or other social purposes.
This. Everything important has moved to discord. Which is sad because of how undiscoverable and unsearchable it is.
I'm more sad about how the UI of it all is just clunky. Even though it resembles ye olde IRC clients like mIRC, nowhere near readable for some reason.
are those attributes now assets?
Pretty much. It's the survivability onion. You can't be destroyed if you can't be discovered.
Sort of, except if no one can ever discover a community it is always dying by default
Personally I'd love to find a decent online community these days, my social circle has shrunk considerably, but idk. It seems difficult to start fresh with new people nowadays
we were made to socialize in person. you can mimic it online and nourish existing connections over it but nothing helps build friendship more than being in the same place at the same time a few different times and talking to each other
This shit will come to Discord too.
on the public servers yeah. but the ones im in with real people who know each other will be fine.
I think the problem is not keeping agents out of private real people spaces, but for people who dont have any pre-existing or 'real world' connections to these communities to find a way to prove they are a real person over the internet alone and get an invite
On a related note, I think this is going to be the biggest challenge to most folks when it comes in resisting using government ID online. it will be the apple offered for easy proof youre not a bot to normal circles.
There's this old meme where someone asks what will happen when AI bots posts helpful, curious and thoughtful messages!? That's mission accomplish :D They can't be better then the average human though because of training data, so I don't worry about AI comments getting up-voted by real humans, I am however worried about fake upvotes.
> They can't be better then the average human though because of training data
Is this based on the belief that an LLM can only represent an "average" human being?
> Online communities are definitely dying. I guess I hope that maybe IRL communities have a resurgence in this wake.
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.
Unless their account is <1 year I wouldn't assume they are a bot.
Reddit astroturfing firms and bot farms learned to buy/use “seasoned” accounts over a decade ago. I’d venture there have been countless bots just in a holding pattern harmlessly building up reputation and a human-like history of posts across different subs etc just to eventually be either activated or sold to someone else to “burn”
It used to be super common that when you spotted a bot post and clicked through to the user's history, you'd see very average, human-looking activity from years ago, followed by a long gap of inactivity, and then a flurry of obvious bot comments.
It's very obvious that these accounts were abandoned and then either bought from their original owners, or more likely bought from someone who compromised them, because of their history and karma.
And I would bet money that Reddit is well aware of this phenomenon, because not long after it became so common as to be impossible to ignore, they papered over it by allowing users to hide their history from public view. (AFAIK subreddit moderators can still see it, but typical users now have much less ability to see whether they're interacting with actual humans.)
That and locking down the API meant no more sites offering readily available visualizations of this type of thing
I recently spotted one unmistakable example of this[0]. It’s been a trick for many years now that duplicating a human post and its comments is a good way to appear human but this was quite the example.
0: https://wiki.roshangeorge.dev/w/Blog/2026-01-06/Is_The_Inter...
> duplicating a human post and its comments is a good way to appear human
Also just repeating something from the linked article, but often with different wording and in a tone that makes it seem like it was something that the article missed.
So what is the comment frequency of these bots? There must be some signal in the activity even if the comments themselves pass the turing test.
Even if there was, I doubt Reddit cares enough to go after them when it’s boosting their valuation
If you find one account you can find a few dozen spam accounts by building a graph of what posts they reply to
So easy to purchase online accounts nowadays, neither karma nor age of the account matters anything anymore.
Reddit was already on its way way before this LLM craze, hopefully the recent tech-related changes will only accelerate that process.
I feel you. Especially in the larger subreddita. i participate, and mod, a few small ones, and the community there is pretty strong and folks shut down ai slop pretty quickly.
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.
I will say that I believe you probably have absolutely no idea because it's not "slop". It looks like every other reddit comment you see.
My experiment was focused on niche subreddits as well due to the nature of the product I was trying to market.
I find it amusing that this is the top comment. Reddit is so awful you finally wrote it off, but not before you used it to try to “karma farm and do some covert advertising”. It’s on-brand for HN hypocritical bullshit. But, since we are slamming on Reddit anyways without realizing how fucked HN is by the same petard, have an upboat fellow traveler.
I wonder, how much of the discussions on the results of agentic coding is just LLM slop.
> where I had an agent karma
Was this a browser using agent? What did you use?
It used the browser agent to grab user cookies after signing in, then made API calls iirc.
Using just a browser is way too token intensive and slow. It would look for 401 errors then run the browser automation to login with the credentials and grab the token.
I'm surprised these platforms don't have advanced heuristics to detect API calls and inauthentic traffic.
Did you clone the Reddit API from browser traffic and then turn it into a 100% API driven thing?
I'd imagine they'd be sniffing browser agents, plugins, cookies, etc. to fingerprint. Using JavaScript scroll position, browsing rate and patterns, etc.
Maybe their protections just aren't that sophisticated.
Reddit is known to fingerprint TLS and quickly shadowban accounts that don't have the fingerprints of browsers.
TLS fingerprinting and Cloudflare are easy to bypass. There are lots of libraries that do so.
The application-layer stuff is harder. Each application can develop its own heuristics, and that's difficult to automate in a cross-cutting fashion.
> I am not quite there with Hacker News but I do know for a fact that many here are LLM's.
Please don’t do this here.
Don't do it anywhere. He's a jerk for doing it on reddit.
Reddit is the sewer of the internet. Good place for LLMs.
People live in and depend on that waterway. Just because it's beneath your standards doesn't mean it isn't vital.
You're giving "let them eat cake" energy.
I can assure you nobody in the world "lives in" nor "depends" on reddit to live.
People are definitely trying to make HN bots because I have seen several get flagged. No idea to what end though.
the suits or suit minded people have realised that HN is good for advertising to the kind of demographic that'll give them free labour and is easily swayed by whatever the latest trend is
The ones you see flagged are the very obvious bots. What about the more sophisticated ones? How do I know skupig isn't a bot?
I didn’t say that people weren’t doing it. I was asking this person not to do that here since it sort of sounds like they have plans to
Possibly to test reactions to a bot they plan to build a startup around.
I've seen some claim they do it to avoid stylometry or being fingerprinted, or because of social anxiety problems.
Some people just have a compulsive need to optimize everything, and HN's guidelines and tone policing are more easily followed by a bot than a human.
> HN's guidelines and tone policing are more easily followed by a bot than a human.
HN's guidelines aren't that strict and the mod hammer is a plushie. It's not difficult to get by here. It's also kind of useful for critical reflection/self-regulation to hear the occasional "you came in too hot" or "don't be boring" from a moderator.
Seems better to me to just try to be sort of reasonable and let the mods nudge you if they need to and let your comments be downvoted from time to time. What is the goal of these people, to never experience correction in their lives? To never write an unpopular comment?
> What is the goal of these people, to never experience correction in their lives?
Look at all the people who complain about cancel culture. There's a huge swath of people who don't ever want to hear "that was mean/bad/shitty".
>What is the goal of these people, to never experience correction in their lives? To never write an unpopular comment?
Yes?
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.
Having to turn on showdead (which I have turned on by default) demonstrates that’s it’s not much of a problem in practice.
I generally disagree, because the level of discourse here has always been very high, curious and intellectual.
Maybe 1:100 comments match any one of those attributes.
Most comments are just grammatically "correct". Not a high bar.
This site is CLEARLY astroturfed to hell and back and infested with bots. Any attempted discussion of this fact gets killed REALLY fast.
This part of the guidelines is a 15 year out-of-date bad joke:
> Please don't post insinuations about astroturfing, shilling, brigading, > foreign agents, and the like. It degrades discussion and is usually > mistaken. If you're worried about abuse, email hn@ycombinator.com and > we'll look at the data.
"We'll look at the data". Sure buddy. You'll do what you always do, which is apply to banhammer to anyone that's not following your talking points, and tone police the actual humans.
Enjoy "conversing curiously" with bots while the mods tone-police non-bots out of existence.
For what it's worth the admins here have let the tone of conversation slip a little when it comes to AI, as in there are many people who now openly mock (and worse) the AI zealots and there's no admin coming in and "saving" the metaphorical day anymore. In the not so distant past that kind of behaviour was almost instantly reprimanded, kindergarten-style.
On the other hand, I’ve been accused of being AI/bot and if I say things the mod doesn’t like and is not their favorite thing to hear I’m “flamebaiting” or engaging in personal attacks when pointing out specific things.
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.
> America really did not have the self-respect or confidence anymore to enforce the Constitution online.
“Mods are Unconstitutional” lmao
> I do know for a fact that many "users" here are LLMs.
Name and shame.
> I am not quite there with Hacker News but I do know for a fact that many "users" here are LLMs.
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've been on the Internet for decades at this point and one thing I've noticed is that communities that, for example, ban political topics actually mean "positions I don't like" as "political". This is somewhat related to the Overton window but really a bunch of (mostly conservative) ideas get normalized so aren't deemed "political".
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.
> I've been on the Internet for decades at this point and one thing I've noticed is that communities that, for example, ban political topics actually mean "positions I don't like" as "political".
This happens on HN all the time. For a lot of downvoters and flaggers, there are two kinds of opinions: "Things I agree with" and "Too political for HN."
Unless you've discovered the secret sauce, LLM comments are very obvious. Even Altman revealed that they focused on coding at the expense of writing.
With the current batch of SOTA models, it is not hard to prompt a model to pass the sniff test on social media forums. If you don't believe me, try it.
All you really need to do is give it some guidelines of a style to follow and styles to avoid. There's also a bunch of skills people have already written to accomplish this.
The obvious ones are the ones you notice
LLMs are not good at writing. If they were we would have entire libraries of new, amazing literature.
Exactly, they aren't good at creating new material. But many discussions in comment section are simply regurgitations of existing material, which they are good at rearranging. New novel discussions in places like this are actually a very rare thing, as many comment sections are simply people who already know informing those who don't. I'm doing that right now, funnily enough.
This is rather moving the goalposts from "plausibly human comment" to "meaningful literature", I think
No. I'm drawing it out to its logical conclusion.
It’s poor logic, a non sequitur. An absurd reduction. By your argument anyone who hasn’t written a great literary work is a poor writer, and would be bad at writing online comments.
LLMs aren’t lacking in the sort of writing skills that make for superficially good content. They know grammar, they know rhetoric, and they know their audience. You can’t tell them from a human on their writing skills. Where they tend to fall down is their logic and reasoning skills, and unfortunately it seems you can’t use that to distinguish them from the average online opinionator either.
No, that is a mischaracterization of what I wrote. They are great writers if you enjoy formulaic writing.
I have worked with LLMs for a couple years at a very non-technical level and it was not that difficult to give it proper prompting and reference material.
If you are reading LLM content just about everywhere and have no idea. Obviously there are easy to spot things, but the stuff you don't spot is the stuff you don't spot
People that like to fancy themselves as good llm content detectors just end up accusing everything they don't like as llm content.
The only thing worst than a slop comment are the people that bitch about it incessantly. I'm convinced it's become a new expression of a mental illness.
The main thing I suspect of being LLM written is the sort of LinkedIn style: very short sentences, overly focused on sort of… making an impact on the user. But that’s also how a certain type of bad human writer writes. So in the end, I’m not sure I know if anything in particular was written by an LLM.
I guess… “that’s not just an AI red flag, it’s generally shit prose” would be how ChatGPT would describe most things nowadays.
It’s the distilled mediocrity of the statements. Never venturing beyond a 10% margin of what you would get if you sampled the opinions of 1,000 people who underwent jury selection by west coast liberals.
A mere opinion is not mental illness.
I wasn't suggesting you have a mental illness for having an opinion.
More, commenting that just as bad as generated content if not worse is every thread where the top comment is an accusation and ensuing witch hunt.
So, no, having an opinion is not a mental illness. Feeling compelled to call it out and discuss it on everything one reads may just be.
The threads that have the top comment saying "this is AI slop" are nearly always about an article that is obvious AI slop.
Threads that aren't - like this one - don't.
If you need to tell yourself that in order to cope that's fine with me.
I’m thinking that I may actually prefer undetectable AI slop to human comments like that. I do agree with your upthread comments.
So you ran an "experiment" where you deliberately made someone else's community worse to see what would happen? Cool project.
I have long thinked about the problem of identifying yourself, there is a 6000 lines protocol to change the way identify is verified.
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.
This seems naive. As long as people are "enjoying" the AI-infested social networks, or at least not annoyed enough to leave, they will stay on them, and become further disconnected from reality. We have half of EU teenagers talking to chatbots regularly. Alienated people flock to them.
A few tech companies managed to get massive numbers of people addicted to toxic social media content that was terrible for mental health but made a small group very wealthy. I don't think those same businesses and execs are just going to pack up and go home with an even more powerful content tool available now. LLMs are going to be used to create skinner boxes that make Facebook and Twitter seem like wholesome communities.
But I have a lot of friends online, both ones I made online and ones that have moved away from me and vice versa.
I don't want to be limited to only the friends I can make who live near me
If it can no longer be distinguished from real, why would it make people leave?
It might be hard to recognize an individual user or post as AI, but it's not hard to recognize the negative effect in aggregate
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.
> 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.
I really want to believe this will be true. However, I also suspect there's some external driving force, that I cannot readily name, which is making people incapable of consuming anything except this low-effort content. I mean, obviously it's working to some extent. Perhaps AI will be the thing that accelerates its death, but part of me thinks something else needs to happen beyond just an increase in useless content.
In my opinion there isn't an external _nefarious_ force causing all of this. Certainly those forces exist but without them much the same would be happening.
It's the economy of everything being free but supported with advertising. That mechanic is what leads to the race to the bottom lowest common denominator human motivation hacking attention toxicity. (yes that's a bit of a ramble).
If people weren't getting paid for the smallest increment of attention they could grab, it wouldn't be promoted the way it is. I don't have a high opinion of the things which grab my attention, but they still manage to do it sometimes. I think many people are in that boat. If there were other mechanisms with which we rewarded people for doing things, something different would be optimized.
And people just wouldn't reward the 10-second-gratification in anywhere near the same way if it weren't for the advertising.
Have you considered that (further) lowering the signal-to-noise ratio will make it much more difficult to find and distinguish a signal?
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.
What do you think happens to the least prolific organisms that lose the survival of the fittest?
To be clear I'm talking metaphorical survival of the fittest that takes the form of prestige/popularity/status/etc. of people and organizations.
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.
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.
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.
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.
What about charging $1 or $5 for an account? Seems like you could stem the tide pretty easily with something like that.
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.
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.
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
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
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.
> 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.
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?
The human has unique context. They may work in a niche domain or they talked to people and observed an unsolved problem. Then they express a potential solution via OSS. It's like product sense. Then they share that with others who find it interesting. The code is a great way to encapsulate the idea. It is usually the result of research and back and forth not a single prompt. It would be way harder to think through or build a solution without AI even if they had context.
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.
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.
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
You're absolutely right!
I've found the smoking gun ⸻ it's not your work, it's your prompt.
I've seen en dashes. I've seen em dashes. What kind of dash is that?!
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.
Wasn't that obvious the second ChatGPT 3.5 released?
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.
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.
Question for web devs - are captchas effective any more? If Reddit required a captcha on every comment, would it actually decrease bot comments?
> Question for web devs - are captchas effective any more?
They’re effective at annoying humans. Driving traffic away from your site. Reducing conversation rates.
There's a reason Google is switching to "scan this QR code on your phone with a Google-authorized TPM" kind of CAPTCHAs
I've never seen a CAPTCHA like that. What's it used for? Google Cloud services?
It's a reference to this I think
https://www.androidauthority.com/google-recaptcha-play-servi...
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.
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.
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.
"Build with AI."
No, I don't think I will.
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.
>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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
The importance of good search engines and good discovery engines will grow even more.
Can such a thing even exist now? Any search engine algorithm can be gamed by AI.
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.
AI Slop is killing the mainstream communities and the alternative communities are filled to the brim with tankies/nazi's (unironically).
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
getting people off the internet is antithetical to the business goals of the AI companies. they won't let that happen without a fight
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/ 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.
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.
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.
It's not a bad thing though. "Online communities" really, really suck nowadays. It's honestly for the best that they suffocate under their own pile of slop. HN is at least bearable since AI-generated comments are forbidden here -- but I wish we'd also ban AI-related submissions.
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?
I've always thought the "strict invitation trees" or vouch trees would be an interesting way to moderate a community, even before the LLM era. A user can vouch for an unlimited number of new accounts, but if more than 10% of the vouched accounts are banned or flagged down the line, the parent voucher acct is also banned/flagged.
Since it creates a tree structure, you can wipe out entire armies of bot/spam/otherwise accounts by following the vouches up the tree.
Wait for the EU AI Act to require text watermarking in August. It will work, and it will be effective -- not because it'll be impossible to circumvent, but because all the big SaaSes will have to adopt it, and the hurdle of stripping it back out will filter out the vast majority of the sloppers.
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.
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.
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
Probably all three of those. Tildes and fediverse instances do the first, resurgence pending for the second, and lastly non-mainstream social media sites have no SEO garbage by default.
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.
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.
The writing here is good. Quote of the day "Any fool can feed coins into a fruit machine and pull the arm."
Welcome to the club
This post is slop.
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.
>I fear that AI is turning people generally antisocial.
This is by design btw.
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.
Related, from a couple of days ago: Knitting Bullshit https://katedaviesdesigns.com/2026/04/29/knitting-bullshit/
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?
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.
I'm not the arbiter on all things Godwin's Law, but either way the analogy doesn't work.
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.
> 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.
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