Really just function of mobility? Move a lot? 15-16 is combersome. Stationary often, maybe just roaming from your desk to your couch/bed? 16 is totally fine.
I'm in the 14-15 camp w/ lighter form factors being worth the premium.
I tried below 13 after the trend of smaller laptops from a couple years back - I now don't believe anyone who tells me they're regularly productive on these smaller form factors lol.
I recently made a change because I felt the same way. I think it was primarily my phone. I had my full agent setup accessible via my phone and was able to be as productive as being on my machine wherever I was. This made it so any thought, or tickle of the mind resulted in me whipping out my phone, firing off a prompt, and iterating until it got it right.
I switched to a dumb flip phone as my primary device and now my work mostly only gets done on my computer during work hours. I obviously still have my iPhone and I sometimes take it on walks during the day if I want to have a productive walk, but it mostly stays plugged in in my drawer.
I always thought I wanted to be constantly connected to my dev environment and be able to work from anywhere, but it turns out that adds way too much noise to my life and is a net negative. I was constantly thinking about work and then able to act on those thoughts so the cycle just continued until I fell asleep.
> I obviously still have my iPhone and I sometimes take it on walks during the day if I want to have a productive walk, but it mostly stays plugged in in my drawer.
You and I have different definitions of a productive walk. To me a walk is productive if I get my heart beating fast. Bonus points if I see an unusual bird or insect.
I’m getting to that point of switching to a dumb phone. One thing I’ve done this week is completely not allow myself to respond to people/do any work even 1 minute after my scheduled end time. It’s wayyy too easy to do that these days.
Hm thats great insight. My phone contributes a loit to my phychosis and bursts. I check what my sessions are doing, i spin up new ones etc. If i distance my phone at least i ll stick more to the trad 9-5 schedule.
This reminds me that I absolutely love having a voice phone conversations in other words the old way. No video no battery drain simple high bandwidth voice to voice
Hedonic adaptation really is something. I have been deeply trying to appreciate these modern marvels more and more, but it's hard.
A hot shower, air almost 50 degrees cooler than the outside air coming out of my vents, communicating instantly thousands of miles away, it's all so easy to just forget and take for granted
We need a Netflix Chaos Monkey tool for modern life. Each week one modern convenience stops working for a day: indoor plumbing, air conditioning, electricity, wifi, automobile, air travel etc. after one day without, you will again appreciate those things for the next few years
Can confirm. As someone living on well water in an area with semi-frequent power outages in winter I have periodically been given renewed appreciation for the value of power, central heat and running water.
Now I have a great standby generator, though, so I'm sure I'll start taking it all for granted again soon.
I live in an 1850s farm house with a spring up the hill and a backup well with a pump for those Augusts where the trees pull all the water out of the ground (not quite this one!) Our main heating system is two wood stoves with a small propane heater as a backup.
The power goes out a lot in the winter but at least we are cozy, particularly with today's LED/Lithium lights.
Back when I had ADSL from the central office my internet would stay up when I lost power so I had enough power to run a cordless phone and one (of two) DSL modems off a small UPS -- so I could keep 21st century comms. Once I got fiber-to-the-node most outages would affect the node so I gave up on the UPS. They're supposed to get FTTH to my house soon but I have no idea how that is going to be affected by outages.
I also used to be affected by node outages on a cable network, but now I have Starlink and as long as I can generate some power, I can be online. I wouldn't go back; you might consider it.
> They're supposed to get FTTH to my house soon but I have no idea how that is going to be affected by outages.
That would depend on the source of the outage and if your power has single points of failure in common with the comms infrastructure. One would hope the exchange has generator backups to cover short complete outages, but I'm not so sure about equipment between there and your residence (does the local cabinet have a power source, perhaps a battery or its power feed being provided by the exchange and its backups, that would survive at least a short area-wide outage?).
I've certainly had full internet access when power has dropped for my (very urban) home and the rest of the local area, so at least in cases like me the exchange and infrastructure between kept running (and my laptop battery & the small UPS protecting the ONT, router, switch, and AP, kept my infrastructure going even though the desktop PC dropped as it isn't on the UPS).
> As someone living on well water in an area with semi-frequent power outages in winter
After a few of these outages and typically two to three nines of utility power availability, I got a portable generator for my well (we have an automatic generator for the house, but the well is on a separate meter); but we've also had a well pump fail. That was "fun", I think the well company came out the next day to troubleshoot, and then the 3rd day to replace the pump, which took pretty much all day because of the depth of the well. At least it happened during good weather.
I was in the same boat. When I bought this house it had a standby generator, but not on the same meter as the well and not enough power to run my central heating. I recently upgraded the generator to be able to power everything and switched the well onto the house panel. Such a huge improvement.
My well is pretty far from the house. Would have to trench a lot of large electrical cabling to get it connected to the generator. Too much hassle and expense for now.
I've been seeing aliexpress battery + hybrid charger deals that could probably support my pump, at least for a little while, will probably do one of those eventually, especially if we build a pumphouse.
I don’t know if I’m just weird, but my reaction is usually the opposite.
When the power goes out, and you’re forced to sit and talk to people or just enjoy the quiet of the night. I think about how much we’ve lost in the modern rat race.
One of the things that sits with me is that for all we’ve been given, most of us have lost the ability to just sit out in a field and enjoy the stars (light pollution, starlink, etc)
Yeah, OK but this is clearly romanticizing away the fact that you are deeply dependent on these services. See how long you can just sit and enjoy the stars when your indoor plumbing and refrigeration goes away, and more importantly when your neighbors go away, not to mention the billions of little moving parts that must operate flawlessly for something like the global supply chain that brings you those shorts you wear and that tea you drink sitting in the grass and staring at the sky.
I'm not trying to single you out but I am intensely annoyed by the light and airy disregard of an intensely complex graph of interconnected services that make life possible at the density and quality that we enjoy.
We've lost a great deal less than we've gained, and anyone who doesn't think so has not had the joy of involuntarily going without them for a significant length of time.
Fair enough, but I do think there are diminishing returns beyond the basics, and there’s a hierarchy.
We are very fortunate to have clean water and sewage. There are terrible stories in Victorian England of like workers popping in water systems and killing hundreds of people.
Electricity powers a ton of basics and maybe you think you could do without heating and air conditioning until a heat wave passes over Europe and kills hundreds of people. I do think beyond that you start to deal in a lot of tradeoffs. I hate they seemed to have systematically replaced wood burning fireplaces with gas. I moved out of a house with a wood burning fireplace and what a mistake,
Except automated bill pay. I swear I could go back and live in the 70’s if it wasn’t for automated bill pay.
Wood burning fireplaces are, in general, very dirty. There are pellet stoves that are cleaner but it's not a suitable heating method for high population densities. It's fine for rural areas. Many people have them in rural areas, myself included
That's the crux, isn't it? You aren't just dependent, you are dependent on a system that relentlessly stalks you with increased demands. You are tasked with keeping ahead of a pack of hunters who want to take you down -- and not only will your companions leave you for dead the moment that happens, the group will punish any suggestion that we might want to do something about this on a systemic level because they strive to join the hunters themselves.
It's grim and people are correct to behave like it's grim.
Today’s ways of living - no matter how challenging or disillusioning or alienating they may be - are largely preferable to literally being hunted and having your livelihood threatened by predators, compared to the figurative hunters and predators you’re describing.
It ain’t perfect - and we’ll work to improve it - but it’s way better than the way it used to be for so many people. Civilization aint all bad.
I do prefer modern living, but when people describe the horrors of the past, they go for movie horror version rather then anything actually resembling what historians describe as past.
The Hobbes argument can be used to justify tyranny far worse than what we see. It does not prevent me from believing that substantial improvement is possible.
Or his companions need to get better. I interpreted...
>> You are tasked with keeping ahead of a pack of hunters who want to take you down -- and not only will your companions leave you for dead the moment that happens, the group will punish any suggestion that we might want to do something about this on a systemic level because they strive to join the hunters themselves.
...as referring to software engineers as a whole, because it fits.
We're laborers, but a significant fraction of us has misinterpreted having a comfortable salary now as being capitalists themselves, so bought into libertarian propaganda and behave like they're temporarily embarrassed billionaires (for instance, by strongly resisting things like unionization).
Unfortunately, too many of us who are actually interested in "[doing] something about this on a systemic level," are too pampered to have the focus to actually be effective, and get distracted and put all kinds of divisive stuff front-and-center (basically playing into the divide-and-conquer game of the bosses).
If you want to be a capitalist instead of a laborer then you can just go do that. There's never been a better time to start a company and be your own boss.
Yeah, just become an Uber driver and you can be your own boss... oh wait, suddenly your only customer - Uber - can dictate exactly how you do your job.
We've had that game before. Ask yourself why a the capitalists are so eager to make everyone else a "capitalist" too: Because the relationship between companies is even more adversarial and bent on domination than a formalized employer-employee relationship.
Every CEO would love to have "independent contractors" instead of employees.
Being an Uber driver has nothing to do with starting your own business.
You don’t even need to start a business to be a capitalist, just buy capital that can earn you money. That can be as simple as putting a portion of your savings in stocks or as proletarian as buying a lawnmower and a trailer and mowing people’s lawns for extra cash.
> You don’t even need to start a business to be a capitalist, just buy capital that can earn you money.
Step 1: be rich.
> That can be as simple as putting a portion of your savings in stocks or as proletarian as buying a lawnmower and a trailer and mowing people’s lawns for extra cash.
No, that's not being a capitalist. You're not living of the proceeds of your capital, you're living off the proceeds of your labor. The proof: if you stop pushing that mower, your business (or your profits) collapse. "Being your own boss" != being a capitalist.
Now if you can buy 100 mowers and 100 trailers and hire 100 people to push them (plus a couple managers), you might be able to become a bottom-rung capitalist.
A trip to the third world or even easier to a ghetto/favela/poor rural area in your own country is realistically achievable and may lead to an even more profound appreciation. A real life Chaos Monkey is easy to interpret as gamified or temporarily slowed down modern life, so may even be fun sometimes.
I think it’s quite healthy to do that yourself now and then. Probably the most eye opening for me was fasting for a day.
Even small things are enlightening, when my slippers disintegrated I didn’t replace them for a month. It gave me a whole new appreciation for something I otherwise considered insignificant.
I just attended a 9,000-person medieval camping event, where most camps are lit with individual solar power. The only power grid usage by most of us was that site water was pumped by electricity. Due to high mineral content, few of us drink straight from the tap, and every camp has stored water, soft drinks, and so on.
The entire county lost power for about 8 hours. From the social media posts, you would have thought people were undergoing severe hardship, because they had to wait 1/3 of a day for their propane-heated showers. Also, some were angry that the county hadn't done more to plan for these situations... which happen maybe once every decade or so.
If our education system, hiring processes, onboarding/skill transfer support, career development pipelines and similar systems continue to degrade, we should have something like what you're asking for before too much longer.
Good idea. We did have one a few years ago: the Covid pandemic. Societies around the world did not handle it well, or worse, many of those that did spawned smaller chaos monkeys.
Indeed that was a major disruption. If anything good came out of the shakeup, one of the thing has to be that supply chains are even more rapidly adaptable (even if they still aren't natively resilient).
We've dealt with a broken water heater, a city wide wifi outage, incredibly hot temps (thats the current thing), and loss of power for 30+ hours in the winter storm that hit the US Southeast earlier this year. It has really made me come to appreciate each of these things more than I did.
I don't know about others...but thats just home ownership or life in general ha ha
Life is a series of maintenance tasks + a few moments of rest and happiness followed by death.
I think millenials like minimalism for many reasons but some may be the trauma of having clutter in their boomer parents home as well as the idea that each item is a liability. Each item needs a place to rest, possibly time spent maintaining and repairing it, and possibly energy in the form of electricity/fuel etc. Less items = less potential chaos.
I guess the very wealthy don't feel any of these issues since while they are still there money can handle dealing with the entropy. How I envy them sometimes.
The living experience you're describing might be annoying but it's not actual trauma. I think some younger people are too quick to use that word and it trivializes real trauma.
Maybe 'negative lived experience' is a better word? Im trying to describe an uncomfortable situation during their upbringing that has imprinted an aversion to that style in their minds.
Hedonic adaptation is a very good thing. Culture or technological stasis is a death sentence for civilization. Open-ended progress is the only chance civilization has to survive (and even that's not a guarantee).
There is an infinite sequence of future problems to be solved. Each time you solve a problem, you don't reduce the total number of future problems, but you are left with one or more better problems than you had before. It's a very good thing that, as soon as you get accustomed to having air conditioning, you start looking for the next problem to fix.
I've never thought about hedonic adaptation as a positive, but that's a good point that it has some real value in the case of societal adaptations and driving further innovation. We usually view it through the lens of an individual over-adapting to niceties that end up being a drain on their lives long term somehow.
Stasis leads to increasing entropy and a sclerotic inability to adapt to changing circumstances. You're either growing or dying: there is no middle ground.
“Visiting,” says a French writer, “forms the cord which binds society together, and it is so firmly tied, that were the knot severed, society would perish.”
We are solving problems, but we're also creating more problems with those solutions. Greenhouse gases, global warming, oil spills, wars over resources, straining power grids, species extinction, worsening mental health, worsening social cohesion, widening inequality. All are the result of technological progress within our systems of government.
Hedonic adaptation prevents us from asking "is this worth the downsides, or should we go back to how it was?"
It's possible to mistakenly think you've solved a problem when you've actually made the situation worse, of course, and that's just plainly a bad thing. It's important to be able to identify specific things which we thought were solutions but were actually new worse problems, and roll them back if possible. [0]
But that's not really what the hedonic treadmill refers to! The hedonic treadmill is referring to the fact that, when a problem is solved, the level of pleasure or happiness individuals experience reportedly quickly returns to the pre-solution baseline.
[0] Crucially, this must not be conflated with advocating a general slowdown or pause on attempts at progress. That's the civilizational death sentence.
> The hedonic treadmill is referring to the fact that, when a problem is solved, the level of pleasure or happiness individuals experience reportedly quickly returns to the pre-solution baseline.
That is not a fact or objective truth or even historical, that is a hypothesis and a theory.
And the distinction matters. It is not in fact true that all people in all setups and classes and historical periods and periods of their lives were equally happy. In fact, you can be unhappy, solve the problem and be more happy/content for the rest of your life. Overall peoples happiness go up and down.
Hedonistic treadmill is a theory. It is also a slight of hand argumentative trick to shoo away valid complains people have. It was worst in the past, but you are not completely happy accepting bullshit today, therefore you just dont know how good you have it, basically.
Global warming make quite a lot of people (like hundred thousands) miserable as they had to evacuate and then return back to non-existent houses. They literally lost everything except bank account and whatever fit into the car. The areas with high drug and alcohol use, high violence rates are in fact not full of people who have it too good. I could go on ... the inequality and accumulation of power is threatening to make most of us all worst off and it is not because we got spoiled by hedonistic treadmill.
Not by much. I seem to remember some research that compared lottery winners to double amputees. Within a short period both groups had reverted to similar levels of happiness.
>I could go on ... the inequality and accumulation of power is threatening to make most of us all worst off and it is not because we got spoiled by hedonistic treadmill.
There isn't much individuals can do about that outside of polling day. What they can do though is start comparing their lives to their grandparents rather than the Kardashians.
I feel that oftentimes our biggest problems come with the irresponsible scaling up of certain solutions, at which point it is usually too late to roll back because we have come to depend on them. There has to be some time between the moment we invent something great and the moment we make trillions of the thing and realize, oh, maybe that's a problem. But we don't pace ourselves. And if we keep plowing ahead heedlessly, we may very well end up burning everything and collapsing our entire civilization. It's a dangerous game to keep betting on the future without actually ever properly planning anything at all.
I don't think anything like a "general speed limit applied to experimentation" makes sense. In general we should move as fast as possible.
When there's a specific explanation why a specific experiment should move slowly (or even be prohibited), I respect that, but the explanation can't just be "we don't know all the bad things that might happen as a result of this experiment." That's the precautionary principle, which I staunchly oppose.
I'm describing a speed limit applied to production, not experimentation.
We can progress science, knowledge and technology all we want without necessarily committing every resource we can find to producing ten times more stuff than we need. Moving too quickly in terms of production can be detrimental to progress: first movers can and often do take over entire markets, leaving no room for the often better-designed second or third movers to shine. Moving more slowly allows for better maneuvering and making sure the best systems and technology can prevail. And it allows us to see problems coming before they hit us.
I think we could have made a utopia purely from fossil fuels if we had been more careful and restrained using them. In my view, the fact that we couldn't do that is a major indictment of our process.
Nah. Rapid, unconstrained growth in the early production and use of fossil fuels was one of the greatest factors ever in saving lives and improving quality of life worldwide. Stopping that would have condemned millions to poverty, darkness, and death.
And it's a moot point anyway because there was no way to slow down even if some people wanted to.
There is such a thing as borrowing against the future. If we fail to keep climate change in check and millions of people die as a consequence, that may just wipe out all the gains you mention.
And let's not mix everything up. Every innovation is different. Penicillin and the Green Revolution aren't in the same category as bottled water and fast fashion. We can certainly fast track technologies that have large, immediate positive effects while throttling frivolous crap.
Or maybe we can't. Maybe humanity can't plan ahead -- being made from thinking agents doesn't necessarily grant a system a capacity to think. But I find it's a strange act of faith to believe barreling ahead thoughtlessly is somehow always going to be fine.
I often say that everyone should be on a misery week once a year, where you live like our "ancestors".
I.e. like my grandparents, who grew up in the 1920s on a farm, only 1 heated room, privy outside, no running water, limited food options, hard work each day. As my granny used to say to anyone with nostalgia: no, things were definitely not better back then.
Misery week would greatly increase happiness for the rest of the year, add humility, and empathy with the less privileged.
Even just going backpacking for a few days highlights it. Despite access to some modern amenities (maybe a lighter, or a camp stove, and some food you bought and took with you) it's humbling.
Looking for water in the wilderness - even with access to maps - can be quite a challenge in and of itself!
lol a friend would go "camping" with his family and a few other families. They would all reserve the same group campsite every year.
When it would get near to the "camping" time my friend would be preparing giant battery banks, hotspots, and other tech with the right usb/hdmi cables and more...
its a fun adventure because your already know that your comforts and old life are just a flight away.
but regardless it not going to bring any meaningful humbleness because you will forget all about it.
i grew up in povery for first 20 yrs of my life in a desert but i have never think of that life and experience humbless in any different way than ppl who have never experienced it.
Misery week might greatly increase happiness during the week itself. An unheated room with an outdoor toilet, no running water, limited food options, and hard work is basically going camping.
N months ago I was like, "OMG, claude code can work on this code base with me and like, understand it, and do high level things that I tell it, this is magic, how can this possibly even exist?"
Now I'm like, "OMG, I can't believe claude code still needs me to explain XYZ, why is it so incredibly limited..."
I feel like in discussions about nostalgia, there can be this default presentish reaction which talks about all of the things that are better
But in the hedonic adaptation sense like - and comparisons are complicated - people aren’t by and large happier now (because of the hedonism this is sidestepping the argument of how well distributed it is, and I’m talking the past 50-100 years not compared to subsistence farming and the like early Industrial Revolution etc et al)
I do think a lot of the senses that things are better now are based on this adaptation, not thinking about would you be less happy if you didn’t know about some of the small things you were missing.
> people aren’t by and large happier now (because of the hedonism this is sidestepping the argument of how well distributed it is, and I’m talking the past 50-100 years not compared to subsistence farming and the like early Industrial Revolution etc et al
Funnily, this range contains WWII, great depression, run up to them and falldown from them. It all involved a lot of royally unhappy desperate people. It is also shortly after WWI and ex soldiers were in fact unhappy, traumatized and causing further traumatization to others around.
Also, at least in rural areas I know more history about, it involved society with high alcoholism rates, high domestic violence rates, prostitution by young teenagers (14-17) as a genuine social problem. A lot of us are happier then them. Trully. Not a wife of violent gambler and alcoholic today, but we have less wife's of violent gamblers and alcoholics today.
I mean it also includes 2008, COVID and the Ukrainian war. I’m talking about material hedonic adaptation, not have things ever sucked in the past 100 years.
Suicide rates are also up and s/alcoholism/fentanyl addiction/. Funny you bring up gambling because gambling is also up. Rural areas famously peaked in the like mid 20th century and haven’t recovered.
My argument isn’t the typical “gosh the good old days”. It’s more just like the iPhone didn’t make us happier. I might also predict many of the trends you identified are more correlated with economic success than technological evolution.
If we keep on the trend we’re on and America has lost its post war economic domination, those numbers are going to keep looking worse, cute cat videos be damned.
Gadgets are not making us happier, but technological evolution is not just gadgets. It allows us to be less in pain, because we can cure diseases and injuries the way we could not before. Ability to avoid domestic abuse is also related to technological evolution - because it allows you to control the number of kids and it allows women to live independently.
My point is that hedonistic treadmill is a theory that holds only for the less important things. Yes, I get used to new better headphones and they do not fundamentally change my situation. But, when the evolution allows me to live with less pain or without disability, gives me more agency, then yes, I will be more happier and it will be durable result.
> Suicide rates are also up and s/alcoholism/fentanyl addiction/
I did not said it goes up all the time, I said it goes up and down. Despite growth of alcoholism it was much worst in some past periods.
> If we keep on the trend we’re on and America has lost its post war economic domination, those numbers are going to keep looking worse, cute cat videos be damned.
America does not need economic domination over the whole world to be happy. The unhappy people have nothing to do with overall world economic dominance. America could have happier people, if that was its political goal.
> I mean it also includes 2008, COVID and the Ukrainian war.
2008 does not compare to great depression, COVID and the Ukrainian war do not compare to WWII and Holocaust. Not even when we judge by what is going on in the Ukraine itself (as bad as it is, WWII was worst there). And specifically Americans did fought in WWII, bud did not in Ukraine.
Maybe happiness is a different kind of thing from the pleasure/pain axis. Maybe it’s a different thing that’s tragically easy to mistake for the same thing.
I notice a lot of resistance and discomfort whenever someone says anything like this (“are you suggesting my pain doesn’t matter? How about the starving kids in xyz?”), and I get that. But it feels like there might be something to it.
It's true. The negative takeaway is that is no matter what miracles come in the far future (free energy, perfect health care, infinite resources, infinite intelligence), people will eternally be wanting, take things for granted, focused mainly on the things they don't have and can't do. It's the human condition.
That is interesting and I didn't know that, though the commenter said air coming out of their vents almost 50 degrees below the outdoor air temp, so I'm tempted to think they weren't referring to the outlet temperature.
If a comment gets flagged enough, it gets marked as "dead". There's a show dead option you can enable in your HN profile settings to still be able to see such comments though.
I've found that camping and hiking have the amazing benefit of restarting many of the daily pleasures like a good bed, a hot shower, a nice hot elaborated meal, a set of fresh clean clothes, etc.
Everyone reaches the hedonistic plateau, and fast at that. Except for people who sound like they just read a book from some neoliberal think smithy. They will have a euphoric fainting spell over the wonders of the convenience store.
Think about all those elated anecdotes about how someone used an inferior tool for a decade, was fine with it, then tried a better one and now “can’t imagine how I lived without it...” well it’s a bittersweet memory distortion innit.
I mean it is pretty clear if you look at the data around purchasing power of the median earner (~$44K/yr in US) the US is significantly higher than most EU countries.
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.
For a while there were a lot of posts from people experimenting with ChatGPT to write anger bait posts on Reddit where they would later edit the post to say it was fake, written by ChatGPT.
I assume they thought they'd be teaching people a lesson by making them feel foolish for responding to AI stories, most of which were too fake to be believable.
However it did not matter. The posts remained popular and continued to bring in comments even after the admission that they were fake. In advice subreddits, commenters continue to give advice on the situation. Some comments would say they saw the notice that it was fake but continue arguing about it anyway.
This makes a feature of Reddit very clear: The truthiness of a post doesn't matter. The active commenter base on popular subreddits just wants something to discuss and, usually, be angry about.
In retrospect it's obvious given that misinfo posts were the easiest way to karma farm for years even before AI.
We do precisely the same thing here. Here's a relatively recent post that, to me, seems obviously LLM-written. It just rattles off some management platitudes:
Yeah, the trick is to do your own curation and go from there.
If you like some authors or journalists or bloggers, go see who they read (trust me they all say who they follow in their own niches) and build from there. You can develop quite a good RSS feed following this method in like an hours tops.
The decline of Facebook is sad. I liked it early on. I used it primarily to follow family and casual friends from high school. When they posted, it would show up on my feed, I read all the posts, and that was that.
After awhile I had to wade through all sorts of nonsense to get to the posts I actually wanted to see, and even later Facebook stopped putting posts from people I follow in my feed. It was 100% garbage. I can't imagine why anyone uses Facebook for anything other than the marketplace.
Facebook is fine if you join groups based on your interests (hobbies etc) and then aggressively unfollow/block anything you don't want to see. It's not really conducive to discussions like Reddit, though. Mostly drive-by comments.
> then aggressively unfollow/block anything you don't want to see
That is hard work. I have a few friends in the trans world and occasionally interact with relevant groups on FB. The attention algorithm thinks that this means I might want to see random posts from pricks who literally want to see people like my friends herded up into concentration camps. Most of it is far less extreme than that, but the system is definitely optimised in favour of rage-bait because that ticks up the engagement metrics.
I often hear that about Facebook, but at least it has a "feeds" button that you can press to get the sources you actually subscribe to. The default "home" feed is useless.
Even without AI slop I've noticed this happen on Reddit.
I once made a rather boisterously-argued comment on a political issue I'm passionate about, and I realised that I'd made a serious error of reading comprehension when it came to my opponent's argument. I apologised to them for being an abrasive arse over my own mistake, then edited my comment to say that I was mistaken.
My incorrect comment which literally said at the bottom it was incorrect continued to be upvoted while my opponent who had made the stronger argument continued to be downvoted.
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.
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.
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.
This takes it a step further than what you describe. They keep track of who you’ve invited, who they’ve invited and so on and if there’s enough bad leaves on the tree they just cull the entire tree. It’s a somewhat common practice with private trackers
what.cd was better. You either got an invite where if you tanked your reputation you'd get banned and risk the inviter getting banned too; or you had to take an interview where you got quizzed on how to properly rip music in a variety of methods and how to ascertain between different qualities of rips (like mp3 bitrates to flac cue files).
If you weren't a bellend on what.cd you got access to certain forums where there were even more and better private trackers. Once you built that trust there were social privileges, but if you abuse that trust you got rightfully banned.
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.
> The IRL social network is actually the important part of the trust structure.
For Debian-style applications that are 100% about openness and 0% about secrecy, sure.
But if you want to secure communications between pro-democracy activists in China, or you're a Snowden-like whistleblower wanting to securely communicate with journalists - y'all probably don't want to be vouching for one another's keys.
I participate in developing anti-censorship tools. Chinese are a significant population, and it has some overlap with activists there. In practice, identity settles at "who controls this email address".
Self-signed PGP is very occasionally used to prove continuity across channels or addresses. Cross-signed basically never.
> Note that "attestation through a web of trust" means something like needing an invite from an existing user.
It's probably better to call this something like vouching and leave "attestation" as the contemptible power grab by megacorps delenda est. The advantage in using the same word for a useful thing as a completely unrelated vile thing only goes to the villain.
>Then how can you have a community that is welcoming to people who are not part of the ingroup?
Being welcoming to every random person is by definition not a community, it's a free-for-all mess.
A community means communal interests and values, it's in the name. And to guard those you can't just be accepting everyone without vetoing them. That's how it turns to a shit of spammers and trolls and people who want to hijack it and don't share the original cause/spirit. Has happened to forum after forum...
We were talking about online communities, but still, the same principle applies. If you just let anyone in, there eventually would be less there to feel "at home" about, and more of a disjointed and low trust number of individuals loosely held together by virtue of just being in the same place.
I agree with you. It’s the problem I can’t crack and it’s why I am letting the idea simmer for so long.
In the end, you need to filter people at the door. You need to keep unpleasant people out and shut down bad behaviour.
I figured that a paid, motivated moderator could be better than a web of trust for this demographic. Maybe enforce a stricter moderation standard on unvetted members. At my scale it might work.
You'd have to be brutal about culling, uninviting and removing anyone who doesn't look like a good fit.
Or have a two-stage process: run very public, very open events that anyone can sign up to an attend. And then invite specific people that you meet at those events that look like a good fit for your community to your private, community-only event.
This works if the goal is to create a funnel for making friends. I aim for something closer to Stack Overflow, where people gather to solve shared problems and help each other.
The closest analog I can think of is community-run bike repair workshops. Some people are deeply involved in, and others just have a flat tire.
The closest digital equivalent is the forums of old.
I think it's an inherently hard problem. The one I fear the most is not the toxic dirtbag; they just get banned. I'm more afraid of those who follow the rules but reliably kill the vibe. The internet has no equivalent to the whole room going quiet.
It's a lot harder to moderate bad actors if they can keep creating new accounts, too.
Agree, it is hard. I've built a few communities, and trust my gut; if something feels off about the vibe from someone, it probably is and I should be wary. But this becomes incredibly difficult (if not impossible) to put into rules, so if you're trying to build a community where you're not the beneficent dictator for life and there are published rules then you kinda have to accept that some people will play the rules and be dicks anyway.
Some will be fine providing their ID, others can be vouched by members who are fine providing their ID.
This preserves anonymity because for the latter because they’re only known to be “related” to the former, which is a vague hint at their real identity (e.g. they could’ve met in another online community). And the former don’t care, if they want they can vouch an anonymous alt.
I'm suggesting that if you build an online community of immigrants to the US and you allow accounts for whom no one can vouch, at some point this mechanism will bring you an ICE agent.
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'm sure there are still cohesive groupings of WASPs, if not large ones or effective at gatekeeping major institutions. --Still a meaningful trope, of course. But to bring it up to date you'd have to diversify, and include, for example, Indian social and professional-recruitment patterns.
Also, I do feel that GP's take is hyperbolic even in the twentieth century. My own background is mostly German immigrants, of various religions and non-religion, and the way I've been told the story none of them faced significant resistance as they moved upward in the various academic and corporate institutions of their choices. These included NASA executives, department heads, etc.
Note that in balancing GP's accusation against WASPs I'm not attempting to address the related, but not precisely complementary, phenomenon of perpetually marginalized groupings.
> 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.
I don't think the main challenge is building this system, the main challenge is getting enough people using it to make it worthwhile.
Personally I think it should be a government provided service, not something with a sign up fee. There's actually no point at all in building this if people have to pay to use it, because they won't
> Will they interoperate with foreign governments?
Ideally, yes
But you're right, this isn't likely to happen in real life and I'm just being wishful. Instead we're going to get the much shittier capitalist version of this where every company and government spies on us and we have no expectation of privacy online at all
My fear is something like this WILL happen in some places and complicate the world as a result, or at worst isolate access to specific countries with similar laws on identification.
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?
*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.
Yeah, that's a problem, you're right. There are some ways to migitate it, but they introduce their own issues. Like say you give someone only 1 ID for their lifetime, they start to spam AI crap, you ban their ID - sounds ok except who is available to police all 8 billion IDs and determine if they're spamming? Who polices the police? What if these IDs become critical for conducting commerce and banning someone is massively detrimental to their finances? Etc. These problems aren't necessarily unsolvable though - but they are super difficult.
> But, real people can then create authenticated account, and use an LLM to post as an authenticated real person.
They can, but ideally they wouldn't be able to make infinite accounts with that authenticated status. So it would still reduce the number of bot posters on the web
There is actually a different problem with this: Suppose there is a major vulnerability in some popular device. 50 million people get compromised; the attacker can now impersonate any of them at will. They go around and create 50 million accounts on various services, or take over the user's existing account on that service.
What are you going to do with their identities at that point? These are real people. If you ban them, you're banning the innocent victim rather than the attacker who still has 49,999,999 more accounts. But if you let them recover their accounts or create new ones, well, the attacker is going to do that too, with all 50 million accounts, as many times as they can. You don't know if this is the attacker coming back for the tenth time to create another spam account or if it's the real victim trying to reclaim their stolen identity.
So are you going to retaliate against the innocent victims by banning them permanently, or are you going to let the attackers keep recycling the same identities because a lot of people can go years without realizing their device is compromised and being used to create accounts on services they don't use?
Yeah that's a big problem. Pretty sure you can see it in real life where lots of old dead accounts with weak passwords on facebook or twitter eventually get hacked. It must be pretty weird to see your dead grampa suddenly start trying to get people to buy some weird scammy crypto.
I guess you could have an eyeball scanner at your computer that only sends out a binary "yes this person is human" to the system every time the log in. That sounds expensive and hackable and just janky though.
Maybe it would result in people taking Internet security seriously and holding companies accountable for data breaches if there were this sort of consequences for it
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 just don't see a world where a small community ends up having to deal with a dedicated set of potentially spoofed identities. There are already tools like slow-downs and post limits for new members that can protect against this. HN is the biggest community I'm in by an order of magnitude and it's the only community I know that can't just use a slow mode type mechanic to halt this kind of attack.
Have you considered sock puppets? It's not out of the question to handle with human mods but detecting them automatically is pretty bad if someone is supplying credentials to each one, and sometimes it does take months or years to notice that new user Y is banned user X.
I think sockpuppets are only useful in a community with non-text signals like upvotes and downvotes or likes. These kinds of signals are not necessary and often plain corrosive to small communities. In a larger community they're a great feedback mechanism, but large communities are fundamentally different spaces than small ones and need a fundamentally different moderation approach IMO.
I've seen them used to dogpile in arguments (harder to do since you need to keep writing styles distinct), game votes in forum games or quests, etc. And of course you don't need to use multiple at once if you just switch to a sock puppet every time you're suspended or banned.
Money is great at thwarting spam/Sybil attacks. You don't have to raise the price very much to make them fail.
Honestly I think "this person is real" is the wrong goal. You'll never accomplish it without a centralized state or some biometric monstrosity like that thing Sam Altman created.
Yeah, I think "pay to enter" or maybe "pay to be able to post" is ultimately going to be the solution. Then we'll have the paid "gated" social networks, filled with mostly humans, and the free ones will all be bot-swarmed wastelands.
Crypto could be a part of it. Like you need to sign with an adress that has held some non-trivial amount for some minimum amount of time. As a component of such a system it could cut down on mass or low-effort impersonation.
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.
What happens when someone agrees to sell or give away their id? The credentialing body could catch the very worst abusers who seem to be signing in to various sites and services multiple times an hour, but would fail to catch anything else.
I don't think you'll ever be fully free of spam, so you'll still need to filter bad content. If credentials get sold and used to spam, they'll get banned.
How do you ban credentials if they're anonymous? Notice that if you can tell two requests are from the same person then you can do it across services by both of them pretending to be the same service.
Also, what happens to someone whose credentials are compromised? Are you going to ban the credentials of the victim rather than the perpetrator?
world.org is doing exactly that including the privacy aspect.
the iris scan aspect is scary but the alternatives don't seem to solve the problem either.
> 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.
The problem here is that the premise is the error. "Prove your ID" is the thing to be prevented. It's the privacy invasion. What people actually want are a disjoint set of only marginally related things:
1) They want a way to rate limit something. IDs do this poorly anyway; everyone has one so anyone so criminal organizations with a botnet just compromise the IDs of innocent people -- and then the innocent are the ones who get banned. The best way to do this one would be to have an anonymous way for ordinary people to pay a nominal fee. A $5 one-time fee to create an account is nothing to most ordinary people but a major expense to spammers who have 10,000 of their accounts banned every day. The ugly hack for not having this is proof of work, which kinda sorta works but not as well, and then you're back to botnets being useful because $50,000/day in losses is cash money to the attacker that in turn funds the service's anti-spam team, but burning up some compromised victim's electricity is at best the opportunity cost of not mining cryptocurrency or similar, which isn't nearly as much. It would be great to solve this one (properly anonymous easy to use small payments) but the state of the law is a significant impediment so you either need to get some reform through there or come up with a creative way to do it under the existing rules.
2) You want to know if someone is e.g. over 18. This is the one where people keep pointing back to government IDs, but you only need one piece of information for this. You don't need their name, their picture, you don't even need their exact birthdate. Since people get older over time rather than younger, all you need to know is whether they've ever been over 18, since in that case they always will be. Which means you can just issue an "over 18" digital signature -- the same signature, so it's provably impossible to tie it to a specific person -- and give a copy to anyone who is over 18. Maybe you change the signature e.g. once a day and unconditionally (whether they require it that day or not) email all the adults a new copy, but again they all get the same indistinguishable current signature. Then there are no timing attacks because the new signature comes to everyone as an unconditional push and is waiting for them in their inbox rather than something where the request coincides with the time you want to use it for something, but kids only have it if an adult is giving it to them every day. The latter is true for basically any age verification system -- if an adult with an ID wants to lend it to you then you can get in.
3) You want to know if the person accessing some account is the same person who created it or is otherwise authorized to use it. This is the traditional use of IDs, e.g. you go to the bank and want to withdraw some cash so you need a bank card or government ID to prove you're the account holder. But this is the problem which is already long-solved on the internet. The user has a username and password, TOTP, etc. and then the service can tell if they're authorized to use the account. It's why you don't need government ID on the internet -- user accounts do the thing it used to do only they don't force you to tie all your accounts together against a single name, which is a feature. The only people who want to prevent this are the surveillance apparatchiks who are trying to take that feature away.
Exactly, "ID" is a solution masquerading as a requirement, the real requirements are far more granular, and the more we can narrow it down then the better our chances are for a solution that isn't evil/abusable.
To recycle parts of an old comment [0]:
> If I had my 'druthers, there would be a kind of physical vending machine installed at local city hall or whatever, which leverages physical controls and (dis-)economies of scale.
> The trusted machine would test your ID (or sometimes accept cash) and dispense single-use tokens to help prove stuff. For example, to prove (A) you are a Real Human, or (B) Real and Over Age X, or (C) you Donated $Y On Some Charity To Show Skin In The Game.
> [...] The black-market in resold tokens would be impaired (not wholly prevented, that's impossible) by factors like: [...] scaling the physical portion of the work [...and...] There's no way to test if a token has already been used, except to spend 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.
You claim this, but you've not presented any evidence. Who would be the enforcement agency for that? Where and how would you train them? Can the money be scrounged up to do it properly? As you blacklist people from the internet, you lose their tax revenue (they're locked out of the economy), but you also make it impossible for them to tell people how bad it was... most of the deterrent effect is gone. But the incentives are only ever growing higher, as people surmise that running their own little bot farm is a way to get ahead when hustling. Any you do hunt down and disconnect are now highly radicalized and desperate, but you've just turned off the feeb's ability to monitor them and intervene.
China gets away with this shit because they've been conditioning their population for 60 years... everyone's eased into it. Elsewhere, not even slightly so.
There's some work on using phone accelerometer data as a "proof of human," e.g. "move your phone in a figure eight," which I guess machines can't quite do in a human enough way yet.
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.
If the web of trust only extends to the people who I actually know to be real, then that works -- but it's a very small web.
And by small, I mean: This whole trusted group could fit into one quiet discord channel. This doesn't seem to be big enough to be useful.
However,if it extends beyond that, then things get dicier: Suppose Bill trusts me, as well as those that I myself trust. Bill does this in order to make his web-of-trust something big enough to be useful.
Now, suppose I start trusting bots -- maybe incidentally, or maybe maliciously. However I do that, this means that Bill now has bots in his web of trust as well.
And remember: The whole premise here is that bots can be indistinguishable from people, so Bill has no idea that this has happened and that I have infected his web with bots.
---
It all seems kind of self-defeating, to me. The web is either too small to be useful, or it includes bots.
Critically, it doesn't have to be binary trusted/untrusted, and it doesn't have to be statically determined. If Bill vouched for you yesterday and today you are trusting a bunch of discovered bots, that would down weight the amount of trust the network has in Bill a lot more than if he vouched for you did months ago.
The question is whether we can arrive at a set of rules and heuristics and applications of the system that sufficiently incentivizes being a trustworthy member of the network.
The web of trust doesn't know that they're bots, though. It knows only that I've introduced new members. They didn't show up with tattoos across their digital foreheads that say "BOT" -- they instead came in acting just as people do.
If the bots behave themselves, then they have as much capacity to rise in rank/trust as any new well-behaved bonafide human members do.
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.
Yeah, there's nothing stopping someone getting verified and still spewing AI slop, but I think well-paid, highly incentivized moderation is still important for this to work(?)
Identity politics have nothing to do with your actual identification documents. Think: Black Americans being treated as a homogeneous voting bloc, or that all Hispanic voters would be pro-immigration, or "the Evangelical vote".
> 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?
this eye thing will never work. people in general are realizing the last people we should trust with our personal stuff are tech bro billionaires. they’ve broken trust too many times.
even worse many of them are just plain vocal about their disdain for people in general.
at least from what i’m seeing, people are starting to walk away from online at an increasing rate so i definitely don’t see widespread adoption of his creepy eye thing.
“If McDonald’s offered three free Big Macs for a DNA sample, there would be lines around the block.” - Bruce
I have no idea about the eye thing taking off. But I think your comment is very HN and a bit out-of-touch with regular people. What "you're seeing" is a bubble and not representative of the general population. The eye thing is a slow frog boil and it will be commonplace before you can blink.
I'm in many public chat communities as well and the issue whether someone is an AI or not is not really coming up, I've not seen any actual AI chatters and the only AI spam that exists is the one that humans regurgitate. The more real impact AI has on chat communities in my opinion is that people are shifting some of their chatting to AI bots via voice or text on other platforms, resulting in fewer chatters.
Personally I think we need to start utilising the safety features built into AI, to ensure that who we're talking to is a human. We'll start to have to only reply to people who talk in nsfw cursewords (like cocks), or profess their love of capybaras
The web could become a way to indicate identity if public institutions publish for example www.university-country/professors/John. And that implies that John is a professor. I designed a 6000 lines protocol, but anyone could construct that web using hmac(salt+ url).
The fact that reddit enabled hiding your posts is crazy to me. In a time where knowing who's engaging in a community is more important than ever (am I talking to a bot or a troll?) reddit removes even more options to validate.
I interpreted that as an attempt to mask the number of bots on the site so as to not scare paying advertisers into thinking their ads won't be seen by real humans.
They also now hide the number of subscribers. Before you could see if a subreddit was popular or not. Now you really don't know. I think reddit does this so they can promote stuff to the front page for clicks even if it isn't popular.
The problem is that it has become very popular to ban people from a sub based on what other subs they post to. It was turning Reddit into a two-party universe.
The better fix would be to make the support for multiple accounts in the reddit app not so incredibly-shitty, where you're basically logging out and logging back in. Instead, just tell it "posts to this sub use this account, posts to that sub use that account", etc.
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.
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.
Isn't the ceo a pdfile and compromised and forced to work at reddit (or go to jail)? Reddit is now just a propaganda machine for the intelligence agencies and their dirty ceo is there to make sure the machine keeps pumping honey...wrecking teenagers brains in the process too, and gathering kompromat on young people which will bear its fruit in the next 20 years. I feel a good chunk of US politicians are being blackmailed because of their past online activities. Same shit on 4chan, how can it possibly be allowed to exist except for being a honeypot, all of these site dodgy sites being guarded by cloudflare no-less, which is the ultimate man-in-middle machine used by "them".
I think the real explanation is simpler - it's just not particularly interesting to the authorities. No need for conspiracy theories.
As to compromising material for bribery, that can be collected in so many different ways, and things like email or messaging or tiktok videos are probably far more interesting, reddit is not particularly useful for that.
Both reddit and 4chan has hosted csam in the past 25 years or so... yet they continue exist. Their operators don't go to jail (specifically the ceo of reddit was supposedly a moderaton of csam a group). If I want to host anything semi dodgy, I'd be in jail in no time. Everything online (domain rental, dns, hosting, carriers & bgp peering, email, any kind of cloud usage, certificate authorities) can be traced back to real people and real bank accounts. Thus I think these things are allowed to exist as and act as honeypots, and my strong suspicion is that intelligence agencies must be involved somehow. The amount of blackmail material (even something as simple as starting an OF account and submitting your ID and then deleting again = easy blackmail on a young woman who changed her mind) generated daily is worthwhile for all these dark ops. I'm about 30% sure the entire chain of trust (from secureboot to certificate auths to ssl to disk encryption) has been compromised a long time ago and they just don't reveal that they know certain information and always find an indirect way to act on 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.
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.
The replacement happened somewhere around time Ellen Pao became interim CEO and site started sanitizing the controversial subreddits. It wasn't apparent at the first but around 2017 you could notice that some subs - especially ones set around large companies or media franchises, are having aggressive rules against controversial and "negative" topics. This hasn't changed much as for today.
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One of subs I was visiting had some drama happening in ~2020 around supposed negative community behavior: people were criticizing creative works uploaded which personally I agree, weren't the best. Mods team decided that's a big no-no and this place has to be inclusive, welcoming and filled with positivity - so they started banning those who dared to criticize. Fast forward till now, there are only screenshots uploaded by bots, comments done by bots who also include screenshots along with 2 sentences in every thread.
The internet is rather trending in that direction, isn't it? Youtube got rid of downvotes and apparently upload dates, which seems like an easier way to trick people into ads. And Reddit, like you said
If these platforms had to listen to "their customers" (here comes the inevitable comment about how users aren't customers; yes, I know)? They'd all be fired. They'd have to find a new job. They all act in incredibly insulting ways with a too big to fail attitude
You say that but many specialty subreddits never returned to their pre-protest engagements. Quality has definitely taken a nose dive in these subreddits as those people moved to other platforms like youtube, tiktok, patreon, or just posting on their own sites.
Mods were rightfully upset because they were losing control of their communities when reddit preferred only caring about their upcoming IPO.
I honestly don't think you could remake reddit if you did everything exactly the same starting in 2016. Corporate social media has definitely ruined the individual aspect of social media that is unlikely to return.
No one wants to share on a place with a bunch spammers.
The API changes were put in place for the purpose of breaking, and did break, slmost all external moderation tool software which changed the task of moderating a forum with hundreds of thousands, or millions of users from an impossible Sisyphean task to something that was actually manageable by a dozen or so mods.
The protest came after that so the timeline is not quite correct.
That sounds pretty great. If we could just flip 1 switch to accomplish things in absolutes, then that'd be awesome.
I'd like to flip the switches that absolutely end poverty globally, absolutely eliminate guns from the US, and absolutely remove bots from Reddit,
If you can show me where these switches are located, I'll cheerfully go flip them and accept full responsibility for the results.
(Over here where things don't work in absolutes: Some of those bots that got killed were countermeasures to help keep the bad, well-funded bots at bay.)
"Congratulations, sir! Your directive to eliminate all guns has been a roaring success! We've had 100% compliance amongst good, law-abiding people! All of the remaining guns are owned by outlaws! Violent crime has tripled, exactly as predicted! Everything is going according to plan!"
I'm sure Reddit moderators think they're good guys with guns. In reality the bots they pat themselves on the back for were just annoyances. Bye clankers!
Reddit itself by virtue of being a venture capital backed startup.
It was a midpoint between Facebook and Geocities, it got people to build communities within its walled garden, but it was always going to betray them for cash.
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.
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.
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 was a head scratching decision that few believe was for the stated reason. Other countries are ramping up their propaganda arms while Trump shut down part of the US'. The reasoning was cost, but that doesn't make a lot of sense in the grand scheme of things. Foil hat types would easily believe it was the puppet doing the bidding of the one that pulls the strings. RFA has been a thorn in despots' side for a long time.
> You have to ask why Trump killed Radio Free America as well when it was clearly not an big expense.
The obvious answer to that question is "because he's a Russian asset". But that doesn't mean the obvious answer is also the correct one.
IMHO, we're seeing another and much more concerning trend at play here... the utter and complete rejection of anything but violence by the far-right. Diplomacy? Development aid? Cultural exchange? All sorts of soft power have been under attack for decades now, and not just by the far-right but (especially when it comes to development aid) also by mainstream centrist parties across the Western world. And it's always pseudo-masculine / "strongman" BS backing the sentiment - Bernd Höcke, German AfD mastermind, comes to my mind with "we have to rediscover our masculinity" [1], so do Hungary's Viktor Orban and his denouncement of LGBT or Trump's entire Œuvre.
I'm not saying that violence or at least being prepared, ready and willing to use it is automatically bad. Far from it. But all the various forms of "soft power"? They have a lot of value, value that the far-right is all too willing to just burn for entertainment.
wouldnt it be more productive to talk about the systemic framework leading to this inflamed state of affairs, and ways that we can tackle the issue on the ground level? perhaps inhabitants of the west would prefer pseudo masculinity to another few decades of migrant influx without corresponding upgrades to social infrastructure. this sort of internal struggle would provide a ripe substrate for foreign agents to perform subterfuge, especially in a screen based world where the narrative can be remotely influenced. conclusively, the population has been convinced that voting far right is the correct decision in their favor, but the question remains, who is it really in favor of? call me a centrist all you like but members of my family were executed under communist regimes so i find it pointless focusing on one side of yin/yang here (in other words, extremists are violent regardless as to their political persuasions).
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.
I've noticed 4 categories of inauthentic users. Ranked by my perceived prevalence:
Account farmers: these can be people in 3rd world countries automated/not automated. Can be using hundreds of mobile phones to create accounts and do daily activity to make the account look legitimate. While they're building an activity history they are also being paid to like/follow/interact with content.
Advertisers: these are brought accounts that are used to pose inauthentic reviews of their service and inject it into discussion and to do PR
Sloppers: people who build AI pipelines and then just pump the most dogshit content directly into a platform trying to make any amount of money.
Nation State propaganda arms: These accounts build a narrative character and then join discussion pushing a certain narrative, boost real content creators who share their message and bog down discussion.
There are many reasons for influence campaigns, that isn't new. Influencing the public is incredible valuable; that's why so many invest so much in it. LLMs automate it like never before.
Plain advertising, governments' propaganda, political propaganda for one group or another to shift public opinion (it's done on TV networks, why would they not do online campaigns?), astroturfing by corporations promoting acceptance or fighting negative news (e.g. rideshare, AI, whatever certain wealthy personalities are doing) ... the list goes on.
HN has always been relatively influential in the tech industry and therefore worth influencing, and now the cost is very cheap - you don't even need to hire many people, so less-resourced operators will find it worthwhile (and they will also attack lower-value forums).
I think some of it is account farming, but some is just people buying wholesale into the idea that if you're not using AI for everything, you're gonna be left behind. On the Kagi Small Web list, there's plenty of hobby blogs that used to be normal pre-2023 and are now obviously LLM-written and AI-illustrated. There's also plenty of people on LinkedIn who post AI slop because they think it helps them build a "professional brand". I even have some distant friends who are using AI for responding to friend & family posts on Facebook just because it makes you seem... smart? engaged? I don't know.
It's actively encouraged by some of the platforms too. In Gmail and Google Docs, you have incessant AI prompts along the lines of "help me write this". I think LinkedIn does the same.
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.
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.
In the recent thread about life in a class war, a lot of comments in different places saying that if we don't fix this inequality problem, g-tines might come back, and every single one of them was flagkilled, no matter whether it framed as "we have to get out the g-tines" or "we have to fix this, otherwise psychopaths will get out the g-tines" or "thank god we've become civilized enough that we don't get the g-tines out"
In the case of Reddit and HN a lot of it is done by businesses either blatantly advertising themselves or building up the karma they need to effectively do so. I recall reading obviously AI generated replies to news articles written by accounts associated with businesses related to the events in the news. This isn't new in the LLM era. Hobby subreddits are well known to be always full of businesses selling hobby gears and items doing self promotion. It's just that now it is a lot more obvious because of the AI text smell.
That, and probably political astroturfing. Before every election my local subreddit sees a surge of crime stories. Go figure.
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.
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.
> 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.
This is actually my hope for AI-gen content as well. That after it gets so 'good' that people genuinely can't distinguish it from reality anymore that they'll retreat (or return triumphantly rather) to the physical world to gather truthful fulfilling experiences and dopamine.
I also believe it is used by AI companies to train their models: Post something semi correct (even grammar issues..), wait for humans to correct it in the comments and used upvotes as a confidence indicator, and then retrain models on this free refined data. Meanwhile people think they read a legit post, feel certain emotions and influence their behaviour, just so a bot can be trained.
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.
If posting good messages is automated then the AI will post a good question and another AI will answer it and the humans will look and see nothing extra to contribute.
Reddit sold it's data to AI companies for training[1]. They could have refused, but companies like OpenAI likely would have harvested that data anyways. As such, it should not be surprising that AI models are pretty good at generating reddit posts. They were specifically trained to do that.
This is sad, because Reddit remained one of the final bastions of human content on the internet. For several years, appending "site:reddit.com" to a google search was a valid way to get something usable out of a google search. Doing that is still an improvement over raw-dogging Google's ranking algorithms with an unfettered search, but AI slop increasingly is the result.
This is one of my great disappointments in the current rise of AI. LLM's can give good search results when dealing with a topic they've been specifically trained on by human experts, but they're not good at separating human-produced signal from AI slop noise. We've done nothing to prevent a sea of AI slop from being dumped on top all the human signal that's out there. When AI companies enter their enshittification phase and stop investing in expert human trainers, the search results LLM's produce are going to fall off a cliff. Search is a bigger problem than ever.
i predominantly use it for real time chatting, its a big group text chat and a place to hop in a voice channel and shoot the shit while doing whatever we want on the computer a la ventrilo/mumble/teamspeak
but yes i also game and it gets a lot of use for that as well
i agree though that for collecting and organizing information longer term like forums do, it is not ideal
Set text size as preferred, underline links (or not), turn off display name styles (or not), ui density compact or default, chat message display to compact, space between message groups 0px, turn off all the animated emojis and gif animation stuff if you want.
In client use, there's a button to hide member list (or not).
You can definitely make discord look like a slightly less dense IRC client (mainly because of the channel picker) if you want. And if you want to go really crazy use it in a browser and userscript customize it or use betterdiscord.
I think a lot of the features like embeds and emoji reactions add a lot of value compared to IRC (which I think is also why the IRC world is trying to add those features).
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
Thats true but online content has always had its place. 25 years ago finding forums and irc was a god send, my lonely hobbies and interests became things i could regularly talk about. Its just modern social media abused the system, the algorithm, and us.
Which is all to say i agree about needing mostly irl, but there is also something of online community that irl could never replicate (for most people).
i know what you mean, and i think online communities can still be successful. but i think in the early internet you already had some common ground with anyone you met online because spending time on the internet was kind of a irl choice to make. It was like a magic room anyone could enter and find others. Now its so ubiquitous that simply being online or on a forum is not the same kind of specialness to it
I got banned the other day from the Stellaris Discord server because someone accused me of hacking Roblox accounts. I’ve never played Roblox in my life. So that’s nice.
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.
Discord is far better for discussion than IRC. You can be much more expressive on discord, instantly jump into a call and screenshare, easily link people to other rooms, tag, import bots etc. IRC kinda sucks compared to modern chat and they refuse to implement features that are considered basic.
> You can be much more expressive on discord, instantly jump into a call and screenshare, easily link people to other rooms, tag, import bots etc.
Some would see those as negatives.
> IRC kinda sucks compared to modern chat and they refuse to implement features that are considered basic.
Just because a protocol doesn't change purposes as time goes on that doesn't mean it "sucks". Who is this "they" you're talking about? Do you think IRC is a centralized service like Discord?
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.
discord is a tool for hosting private chat servers. it's pretty neutral. the UI is not great for building a shared knowledge base, although people do that anyway
but yes the publicly accessible servers are going to face similar problems. the socially competent people tend not to run those servers, and have smaller private servers with people they know as they have no drive to try to create a space for strangers to gather.
Yes when I interact on reddit, I normally do so solely with the intention 'this is for an LLM'. I feel like a majority of the posts/comments I reply to are AI, a majority of the responses to my posts are AI, but have to keep telling myself to keep posting so it becomes training data.
(I'm normally posting in the context of my startup - although I try to keep the self promotion to a minimum and always contribute to the "conversation," if LLMs replying to one another can be called such).
For what it's worth, I created a community for paying users of Phrasing that has been going really well. I think free online communities may be going away, but there may be a future in exclusive/paid communities.
Reddit has had a bot problem for well over a decade now but the sheer volume of it has exploded. It is also much more difficult to tell nowadays as the "quality" if you will is now at the good enough stage.
Alas, Reddit is basically dead to me because of this.
This kind of thing made me imagine the creation of "digital towns" the other day.
Imagine an online community where you can only join on the recommendation of two other members, who you must have actually met in person, to participate. Meanwhile, you leave at least some of the activity publicly available to the general public so that interested parties can meet up IRL and join.
This could probably be implemented easily on top of existing online platforms like Discord, Reddit, etc. since it's really just a community building rule, not a community itself.
It might come down to shareholder/IPO stuff but you can tell Reddit doesn't actually care to put the effort in to crack down on bots (however you'd do that) because they already don't give communities proper moderation tools/third party tools and the site does censor
Whatever allegiances (with people, or allegiances to ideas) Steve Huffman has, or people like him - it's not enough. It's a site seemingly killed by greed
(Yes, I know moderating this stuff at scale is hard)
Badly-written articles are still unwelcome on HN, wether AI-assisted or not, and obvious LLM smell definitely lowers the quality of an article. But it's true, we don't ban every article with any evidence of AI-assistance.
HN kills lots of posts. I try to be careful about my online footprint (since HN posts are forever), and try to switch to new accounts every so often. It's no use anymore, HN just kills any post I make from a new account, even when I spend 20 minutes researching a response and trying to get useful information.
It doesn't even show you the post is killed, it looks to you like it posted fine, and you have to logout to see it's actually dead. It's an approach that's extremely hostile to the user.
It's specifically against the guidelines to keep registering new accounts, and this is a good reason why. We have to have ways of determining credibility and authenticity, now more than ever, and a track record of good posting is one of the best ways to do that. We are drowning with spam and low-quality posts/projects posted from brand new accounts. If it's a well-researched, high-quality post, of course we want to give it exposure. We just have to be realistic about what we're up against.
Why do you think those comments are accurate? Maybe those comments are by LLMs? If you believe crowd wisdom on its face, you will have big problems with LLMs.
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.)
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.
> 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.
There are alternate sources that index reddit comments, but it's really frustrating how easy it would be for Reddit to shut the most prolific bots down if they were so inclined
IRL communities have to have some guides because a lot of people forgot how to gather. It can be seen among kids - try to give them soccer ball and see what they do with it :)
Yesterday I was watching people on the street and on the tram. Every other person was staring at their phone and scrolling through something.
That might scare me more than the fact that someone is chatting with an LLM bot online.
(I am pro-ai, use it every day for coding that I couldn’t achieve pre-2022 as I am lame coder.)
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.
> 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.
Mod powertripping nonsense happens, but banning people is a very easy way to kick up a small shit storm so most of us generally avoid it unless somebody has repeatedly been an issue or just flagrantly breaks the rules.
I’m not saying you aren’t telling the truth, but I’ve seen and heard this exact story a thousand times and the few that actually end up sharing proof (most refuse to) of what happened had a very skewed idea of how things went down.
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.
> TLS fingerprinting and Cloudflare are easy to bypass. There are lots of libraries that do so.
Easy for you does not mean easy for everyone. My experience is that TLS fingerprinting paired with blocking specific user agents gets a variety of majority of bot traffic.
It's the same a basic online security: You can protect against script kiddies with basic hygiene. If the threat analysis is Mossad, then yeah, you're fucked.
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.
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.
Communities in FB, WhatsApp, Telegram etc are actually flourishing. As it appears real time gated communities are doing fine.
It’s an unpopular opinion but I am looking forward to ID and age verified social media. If done right we can have real people around again.
BTW, ironically the harsher communities like 4Chan doesn’t seem to suffer from the dead internet. I guess it’s either because the advertising value is too low to justify AI use there or maybe AI API providers refuse to work with such a content this reducing opportunities to infest with bots.
> I am not quite there with Hacker News but I do know for a fact that many "users" here are LLMs
People using LLMs without being fed their own post history are still pretty easy to detect. There's just something very recognizable about the cadence and tone of LLMs.
What really stuns me is that if you call someone out for it, 9/10 times you get absolutely buried in downvotes. Even here on HN. Its like people are angry that you're lifting the curtain on the slop, that the writing they enjoyed is fake.
More of a philosophical question but if you have no idea whether it's a human or robot, does it really matter? Personally I dislike AI slop only when I can tell it is...
- I am trying to learn about the topic at hand and trust a human's comment more than an LLM's guess
- I am trying to connect with other humans to fulfill my social needs
- I am maybe spending time to help another human out with a response because I want to help someone else
- I am interested in the perspective of other humans
Those are just a few reasons. For each of those if it's actually an AI I feel I'm losing out on something.
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."
And yet if that was entirely the case, HN wouldn't be such an interesting place.
This sounds very much like someone making fun of the attempts of rationalism/effective altruism "because humans are not rational but emotional beings".
Yes, it is mostly true but not entirely true and that's what makes a difference.
I am certainly guilty of downvoting (not flag) people I disagree with but I also read the guidelines and will downvote or flag a comment that seems to originate from one of my ingroups that would violate those norms because I value this place.
And I have also been able to nuance my own opinions by reading a well-behaved (respecting HN norms) comment even though I don't like its vibe.
I didn't see the flag system being abused. The flagged comments I have seen were most egregious norm violations. Whereas posts are generally flagged when they inherently highly flammable. It's generally a edge case and some of those make it through with a little moderation warning as top comment.
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.
Can’t make it worse than Huffman already has. After the API nonsense most mods who are still there should’ve left. I don’t know how most continue to do Reddit’s work for free after the way Huffman talked about us all. He made it clear how much he despises the community and the complete lack of respect he has for the people who run all the subs
I also don't "need" nor "depend" on hacker news to live. We're talking about websites like they are vital to living, that's not real. They are not. The closest thing to a website someone actually "needs" might be a government website (to report or file taxes maybe) or a bank website (assuming no brick and mortar locations near you). Let's not use words like "need" and "depend" to mean much lighter things like "is convenient" and "frictionless".
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
I think permissive licenses are fine in some cases (particularly if you're trying to standardise something. X11, LLVM, and BSD are good examples), but generally at least weak (LGPL or MPL) copyleft are preferred.
I'm still torn on what kind of license is best for operating systems, though (the GPL has forced companies to actually contribute to Linux but they also try and get around it in so many ways I have to wonder if a weaker license would be better)
In some cases, yes. It has to be used judiciously. The free software pioneers understood this, and wrote a little essay about it (LGPL vs GPL): https://www.gnu.org/licenses/why-not-lgpl.html In short, it depends on the market situation: if you created something new and exciting, you should use GPL (nowadays that would be AGPL) to encourage lock-in. If you created something that is supposed to displace an existing proprietary product, you should use LGPL to encourage switching. These days it'd be MIT, but MIT is exactly the same as proprietary as far as user freedom is concerned.
People still see HN as a valuable place for promoting their businesses. Usually some poorly thought out SaaS.
If you look at what people outside HN talk about HN, it's not uncommon to see wannabe tech entrepreneurs talking about how to promote their products via Show HNs and how to stay HN front page. It's honestly a little sad considering that HN has a tendency to rip these projects apart.
People (and bots) who think HN is the place to “promote their products” don't understand HN (though, as you note, that belief is is widespread and is having an acute effect on our inbox!)
Show HN is for showing a cool project you've built. To warrant front page placement, it has to “gratify intellectual curiosity”, just like everything else. There needs to be some kind of novel breakthrough or something for others to learn from. Or, sure, some way it can help others with their work or life.
And yes, a byproduct of all this may be that some people buy a license or subscription. But submitters who are just trying to get attention and sales for a commercial product don't belong in Show HN.
> 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?
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.
I just don’t even understand the appeal of having a bot interact on forums for you unless you’re astroturfing for your company or personal brand or whatever
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.
> 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.
An irascible human being with "wrong" opinions is still better than a polite and factually correct bot because there's no fucking point in having a conversation with a bot. We're here to have conversations with people, not to prove fact beyond a reasonable doubt.
Do you really not care one way or the other? Would you really rather just be talking to LLMs here? Or would you just script yourself as well and call it a day? Then what?
> We're here to have conversations with people, not to prove fact beyond a reasonable doubt.
Maybe you are. I like getting to a reasonably correct model of a topic or issue. Bad human takes can still be useful here. I just get inevitably tired of the people crying about potential LLM comments all the time.
> Would you really rather just be talking to LLMs here?
Obviously we're not there yet, regardless of what I want. But there is a great number of HN threads posted here that touch on topics that have been discussed so many countless times, that an average LLM summary would do better than most comments.
Would you enjoy the experience of telling your LLM “make a HN-style comment thread on $subject with 200 comments, no trolls please”, and then actually spend time reading them?
No? I’m imagining not at least. Because there would be no point to it.
If you would enjoy it, then I’m surprised you’re here and not just simulating the experience with your LLM by yourself.
> Would you enjoy the experience of telling your LLM “make a HN-style comment thread on $subject with 200 comments, no trolls please”
The reason I'm not simulating the experience with an LLM is because:
1. It costs more time to do so, because I have to prompt it to create a single comment. Multiply that by the typical number of an HN thread.
2. I suppose in a way you need bad takes to form your own view of a topic or an issue. LLMs would also be unable to provide truly unique experiences, such as some of the veterans who sometimes post here who were part of the living computing history as we know it.
> I’m surprised you’re here and not just simulating the experience with your LLM by yourself.
That's something you imagined that I claimed I want. If you read my comment again, you'll see there was no such thing.
> That's something you imagined that I claimed I want
This is a thought exercise. I phrased it as "If you would enjoy it", and you clearly have stated reasons why it would be insufficient, so, it doesn't apply to you. If I say "if X then Y, else Z" and you say !X, then of course, !Z applies.
But your original post says "so what" if the people posting here are actually LLM's. And you just answered that question above: "LLMs would also be unable to provide truly unique experiences." So that's what.
To continue the argument I'm making: We're all here because we want unique experiences talking to other humans. None of us would ever think it's ok if this site was just LLM's instead. If we did, we would open up our favorite LLM, not open hacker news. Right? Right. Seems like you agree.
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.
No, they aren't even good at rearranging existing material. They produce bad writing that only superficially looks good in a lowest-common-denominator sense, and falls apart under any close examination. Everything is wrong with it, from the sentence structure to the rhetorical forms to the substance. AI 'writing' is a loose collection of cheap tricks that score well on A/B.
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.
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.
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.
Was that written by an LLM? It isn't that it's a mere opinion, it's that when every word out there has to be scrutinized for the possibility that an AI output it instead of a human intelligence that it gets pathological. Am I an LLM with the right prompts set up to respond this way? I mean, I know I'm not, but everyone else out there is just going to have to trust me that I'm not.
I didn't notice until you mentioned it; fixed. Like others have pointed out, one issue has little to do with the other.
Cars were made for 100 years without an internet connection. Even for an EV there is no need for network connectivity or constant software updates. The first time a prominent figure is assasinated with a remote take-over of their vehicle people may start to see this issue a bit differently.
I "subconsciously" moved to codex back in mid Feb from CC and it's been so freaking awesome. I don't think it's as good at UI, but man is it thorough and able to gather the right context to find solutions.
I use "subconsciously" in quotes because I don't remember exactly why I did it, but it aligns with the degradation of their service so it feels like that probably has something to do with it even though I didn't realize it at the time.
Anthropic definitely takes the cake when it comes to UI related activities (pulling in and properly applying Figma elements, understanding UI related prompts and properly executing on it, etc), and I say this as a designer with a personal Codex subscription.
it's been frustrating how bad it is at UI. I'm starting to test out using their image2 for UI and then handing it to codex to build out the images into code and I'm impressed and relieved so far
Codex does better if you ask it to take screenshots and critique its own UI work and iterate. It rarely one-shots something I like but it can get there in steps.
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