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.

Perhaps it will even see a (small) resurgence when AI providers start charging for the actual costs.

[1] https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/421831

[2] https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/384922

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.

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

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.

Edit - I am not anti AI but it is slowly killing the digital human interaction.

> 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.

No, I don't think I will.

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).

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.

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.

It’s entirely possible to be born in the 90s and have the same experience.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

That people trust AI over an organizational knowledge is bad enough. I fear that AI is turning people generally antisocial.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Yes, but how many decimal places did you optimistically give it, only to never use more than the "10s" place?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

It's implemented for plan9, but clients could be made for any OS:

https://youtube.com/watch?v=q6qVnlCjcAI

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'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.

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.

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

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

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.

Thank you OP, this puts into words why I no longer look at Show HNs.

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.

And Listen Notes is removing 4000 to 8000 ai slop podcasts per month - https://www.listennotes.com/podcast-stats/#growth

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.

Strict invitation trees? Small signup fees? No SEO incentives?

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.

I'm not sure about that.

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.