> fake AI accounts

Second, what is the purpose of these accounts? Are they basically running submarine adverts, or are they just trolling (to harm the community)?

Or ... how small can a community be and still be drowned in AI slop?

Is it a community inside one of the major platforms, or it has its custom thing?

The only solution is in person meetups, bringing back the 3rd places, joining a club. Maybe it's not such a bad outcome.

I was in a small niche creative writing community for a while. Circa 2021\22. AI wasn't why I was there but I demo'd a few LLMs to a lot of the users in the Off Topic section because people were curious. Even with an explanation of how they operated, almost everyone was at least interested. One author told me how he operated similarly, rote learning how to write like his favorite authors by copying out their texts, hand written, word for word. Their concern was largely that they were too hard to use from a technical perspective.

These people knew I was there to learn, and that I was unlikely to ever try and publish LLM derived content. I said as much often.

Sometime in late 2022, a switch was flipped. And almost all of them started talking about how AI and those who used it were unambiguously evil. They didn't say my name, but they stopped engaging with me. Gradually, they started reposting twitter content from extremely anti AI people. Complained about AI submissions to various publications. Eventually, someone reposted a tweet calling for the death of anyone who used an LLM, with not even a single disagreement (and lots of encouragement)

I just bailed. I had only ever engaged positively, answered questions for the curious and tried to help people out. I posted one AI assisted story, and that was to demonstrate how my contributions were tracked vs AI contributions automatically in the editor to satisfy someones curiosity. Clearly highlighting the bits I had written. Just a technical demo. No one was asked to enjoy or positively engage with it as if it was human written.

A while later, most of their submission rules were updated with a new clause, if it was judged that AI written content was discovered, they would blacklist that person from all submissions across their entire community. Considering I had demo'd LLMs, and the uselessness of AI detectors, it was clear to me that these people would be able to justify blacklisting me if I poked my head up at all. I had been developing my own story for submission (myself, no LLM content), but I just dropped it. I just didn't feel like sticking my neck out for the witch hunt.

I also used to be quite engaged with blockchain. And it went through a similar process, most people ignored it until that paper about the power usage (Claiming it would spike to some level it never reached) and then suddenly being associated with it was an outrageous moral crime. But after a while, when it turned out that the power use claims were largely a nothing burger, people gave up on the hate parade.

I don't think you will "Lose the battle" (at least in terms of keeping AI users out). And its always ok for small communities to be selective about their membership. I just don't think its possible to maintain such artificial rage for more than a few years. The AI Datacenter water/power claims are a clear London Horse Manure problem that looks set to resolve itself, and the copyright issues will get sorted to some degree. Eventually I think you just wont care enough to ban anyone except low effort spammers (of which there are a huge amount, granted).

YMMV

AI Deception: A Survey of Examples, Risks, and Potential Solutions - https://arxiv.org/abs/2308.14752

Deception Analysis with Artificial Intelligence: An Interdisciplinary Perspective - https://arxiv.org/abs/2406.05724

(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.

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.

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.

There are two separate things here that are getting silently conflated.

> A good use of AI is when it enables people to do something they couldn’t do before

This could be good on an individual level, if say, a doctor wants to vibe code an app of some sort for his individual practice.

>to contribute to a community when they couldn’t before.

This is where it goes off the rails. If they couldn't meaningfully contribute before, they aren't going to suddenly be able to discern that whatever slop they want to contribute is of value to the community. That's just another way of saying, if I wanted an AI opinion on something, why wouldn't I get it directly from the source, and write the prompt myself, instead of have some intermediate human prompt the AI for me?

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.

I use ai okay. I think it's useful. But people who dove hard into this stuff treat all text on their screen like it's a chat bot and not a person.

"Rewrite this code using the new API" "excuse me?" "Can you do it I need it right now chatgpt won't compile!" "Show me your code please" provides the biggest pile of dookie ever "hey can I ask how you came to decide on any of this? Maybe we should rewrite what you have here because x y z is concerning" "the ai did it I am learning. There is no need to rewrite anything just write this section for me" " no thanks" someone else does . user leaves

It was also so much easier to make a dating app profile back when I was single, like one click. Recently was watching a friend set one up, and now they not only want like 3FA but also proof that you're a human. Assuming the old accounts are grandfathered in.

These posts also usually get all these glowing comments from users who clearly haven't checked the code. It's even worse when authors get busted and claim "Okay, Claude wrote it, but the design is mine" despite clearly not understanding the output themselves.

Unfortunately, that makes high-effort projects less visible. The SNR will probably keep getting worse until slop can be flagged on HN.

Now, like all good SciFi, it seems fairly prescient ....

Encouraging a culture of not using AI works to an extent, but I also tire of threads claiming the parent post is AI. There isn't a sure-fire way to know one way or another.

Sure, it might stop 10% of the bad actors and lower the numbers, but it'll stop 80% of the good users who aren't experts at getting around the cost or don't have an income from using the service to just pay it as a cost of business.

What makes you think the rage is artificial?

Online Deception in Social Media - https://cacm.acm.org/research/online-deception-in-social-med...

I don't want to be limited to only the friends I can make who live near me

The problem is, there is fundamentally no way to scale this.

The only way to give authentic human interaction with like-minded individuals is to connect real humans to other real humans who share interests. And as we've already seen over the first few ages of the Internet, once such a community scales past a certain size, it a) ceases to be a place where people can come to chat, discuss, and hang out with their interest-sharing friends, because there are just too many people for one person to know, and b) becomes a target for profit-minded interests who will cheerfully eviscerate any authenticity and connection the community brought if it will make them a small profit before the community crumbles and collapses.

So anyone trying to "give authentic online experiences" as a business model is going to have to accept that they are going to be, at best, a small, modestly profitable company. And given the state of things today, I very much doubt that this is in the cards.

How, at scale?

For me it was a wholesome response. It seemed genuinely kind/human.

Click on user profile...it's a bot just pumping out posts like that. Looked organic when seen in isolation, but when you see a wall of them you see that it's got to be an LLM (with a good prompt).

That was disheartening...I had kinda accepted that the sht-stirring rage posts might be bots but the kind comments too? Ouch

I 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.

They’re effective at annoying humans. Driving traffic away from your site. Reducing conversation rates.

I think people who want to push a certain narrative might just set up a quick bot and tell that bot to start posting on Reddit or whatever and just let it run. Why not? Little effort on their part and they might actually have influence. The same reason why spammers apparently think sending me 10 text messages per day about a loan I've been approved for. It probably does work 0.0001% of the time, but that's okay if it's all automated.

It'll stop the ones doing it for the lols, but I imagine they're a minority anyway.

You add a barrier here. You think that your solution means that AI is reduced, but you also reduce real humans. I noticed this with other parts too, such as "you need to verify your identity before you can post to the ruby issue tracker". I can do so, but I need my tablet and this takes me more time than before, so I stopped using the ruby issue tracker altogether. (It's not the only reason, but adding barriers really makes me invest my time elsewhere - more likely to do so at the least.)

You always need to consider all trade-offs. Charging money means you will also offset real humans at the same time. And it's not solely about the cost; it is simply a hassle to want to do so. For similar reasons I also rarely register at a phpbb forum - I need to store the password to not forget it etc... so more hassle. Using a password manager is also more of a hassle.

Blockchain turned out to be an absolutely awful payment method, so most people only know it as 1) a way to do crimes like ransomware, 2) a get-rich-quick scam, 3) some buzzword companies threw in everything, 4) the thing that made GPUs unaffordable.

AI is now the thing that 1) is drowning the internet in slop, 2) companies throw into everything - to the point of making apps unusable, 3) makes most computer parts unaffordable. And what they get in return is... a kinda okay-ish Google? A homework plagiarism machine?

Their opinion about AI or blockchain most likely has absolutely nothing to do with you. They are just seeing the world noticeably get worse, and are desperately trying to protect their communities from it in any way they can.

No, it isn't anywhere near good. One doesn't throw out the baby to get rid of fouled-up bathwater. Online communities are just as valid as offline ones; it's just that many people a) don't want to be deceived, and b) don't want fakery (slop) all that entails. Easy.

I loved maps and geography as a child and still do. I've never met anyone in real life that likes it as much as me. But on the internet there are places were I can discuss it and other people share fascinating articles, pictures, etc.

Maybe it's hard getting across what I mean so a more concrete example is there will be SO MUCH clickbait out there that serious outfits instead of being forced to do it will be able to successfully differentiate themselves by NOT doing it. (and many similar things in different arenas)

I'm trying to say that LLMs raising the noise floor will drown out a lot of the toxic noise that's been plaguing us.

I can hope.

That ship has sailed long time ago with zealot admins and verbal harassment.

So I don't imagine AI is going to go away, especially given that now there are more open source models like Qwen that you can run locally. So even if those American behemoths go bankrupt it will persist.

I don’t think they crave it enough to make a difference. Even before AI slop, Reddit had made successive changes that led to much less of a feeling of interaction with real, authentic humans who could become your buddies. The UI de-emphasized usernames and hid the sidebars where subreddits could have their own distinct community atmosphere. I hear that now on comment threads, Reddit will even hide a decent number of posts from other users, so that a poster may well be talking into the void.

It is on old-school fora that one can get a sense of actual interaction: with avatars and other personalized touches it’s easy to gradually learn who is who, and there is a culture of longform text where you can actually get a sense of other people’s personalities. But how many people under the age of 35 or 40 are joining those fora that survive? Give people a choice, and it turns out they prefer the dopamine hits of engagement-maximizing commercial platforms, and the smartphone as the default (or sole) interface to the internet with all the death of nuance that spells.

The fediverse has been around for well over a decade in some form or another. It never caught on with society enough to make a difference. And unfortunately, the fediverse has now developed such a distinct culture of its own, Highly Online people with distinctive political and social shibboleths, that it even alienates many tech idealists around the world, let alone the general public.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47913650

It had 639 comments and 866 upvotes. And that's not a one-off.

That's 90% of current Facebook pages and groups.

Especially say here on HN with Show HN and such the forcing factors are "i get no votes or community recognition"

But I don't entirely disagree with you I think things won't totally go back I think it will settle way more than now though especially where things are a little more niche.

Sorry, they did an interview about 20 years back were they kept correcting the host to 'Something is awful' I have just called it that ever since.

https://eudi.dev/2.8.0/discussion-topics/g-zero-knowledge-pr...

I personally can't wait for a mechanism to kill 99% of bot traffic.

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.

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.

That, and probably political astroturfing. Before every election my local subreddit sees a surge of crime stories. Go figure.

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.

At some point an instagram/tiktok/etc user could see nothing by real people and not even know what is promoted vs ad vs post.

"Popular" reddit posts and subreddits are a good example of this.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Market_for_Lemons

Yeah, the “blast radius” for social media AI slop is 80%-99% of humanity. There’s many times even I cannot make out if something is slop.

Hell, AI slop is going to be even better than reality for a portion of humanity, so it’s More likely they will stay online.

Depends on how you're looking at it (using speculated numbers for easy math):

1. Having operating costs of $100m on revenue of $10b is very deep in the red, regardless of training costs.

2. Having $90m training costs on $10m revenue means they're just breaking even.

Problem is, we don't know their financials and how it is broken down (they could, of course, clear up the confusion and release some numbers, ut they aren't doing that now); all we know is when they need a new raise to continue operating.

From the raises we can determine what their operating costs are (For example, raised $30m in 2024, then $300m in 2025 is a 10x increase in operating costs because they aren't spending on capex. The training is done on opex).

From their subscriptions (which are all only estimated), we can sorta tell what the revenue is, but that's for subscriptions only which are almost guaranteed to be running at a loss (until recently, anyway). We don't even have estimates on revenue from the PAYG API users. Common sentiment is you'd be a fool to use the PAYG options for anything but trialing the service, but the world is filled with fools, so you never know!

What is interesting is comparing the prices for PAYG on the providers supplying open models vs the PAYG on the closed models - the suppliers providing open models aren't spending on training cost, so the cost to supply tokens on open source models is pretty close to the actual price of running models. This is partially confounded by the fact that many of these will have VC money backing them (they are not bootstrapped), and so will also try to perform landgrabs via subsidised tokens, because their goal is an exit with a buyout, and without an eventual acquisition they will simply fail.

I can't think of many open source model suppliers providing subscriptions, not ones that subsidise the subscription, at any rate.

The first IPO of these SOTA providers is going to be the eye-opener; we'll finally see their financials and we'll see just how much the PAYG was subsidised, and how much the subscriptions were subsidised.

Until then, with a collective industry investment of $800b (last I checked) and a collective revenue of $20b (last I checked), they are most definitely operating in the red for the most common definitions of operating in the red.

We had no problems with people using it and posting elsewhere, it was the demands that we must allow it that were problematic and made us question whether we were doing the right thing.

No regrets now, though, as we see competitors being flooded with AI slop and they are too invested in it to change now.

Now I see it as the perfect tool for impostors.

On completely different scales. Even if it not perfect, it is strong enough of a filter to turn a bot infestation into a mild annoyance.

Both sites have survived and continue to work well for their users.

A small cost does definitely work for some sites.

I'm happy to verify my identity as an honest-to-god sack of meat if it's done in a privacy-protecting way.

That probably is where things are gonna go, in the long run. Too hard to stop bots otherwise.

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 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.

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).

So I downvoted.

Which is why I left before I was banned. I no longer felt comfortable and they probably likewise. They wanted a safe space to hate on people involved in AI art and my leaving contributed to that. That said, I doubt I could have posted content calling for the death of authors or honestly any other group in that space without being ostracised.

Its a bit like saying "A witch might have burned down their house, so their reaction against witches is understandable" maybe in abstract. But that doesn't mean the subsequent actions are acceptable.

> Have you considered the possibility that most non-programmer people mostly experienced the negative effects?

Yeah absolutely. These people in particular, at the time, really on experienced it through 2 factors:

1. They (like many people) posted a lot of their midjourney creations for a few months. (21/22 was like that)

2. They saw an increase in low quality submissions.

So gripes about AI art and low quality submissions seem perfectly valid.

>Blockchain turned out to be an absolutely awful payment method >AI is now the thing that 1) is drowning the internet in slop, 2) companies throw into everything - to the point of making apps unusable, 3) makes most computer parts unaffordable. And what they get in return is... a kinda okay-ish Google? A homework plagiarism machine?

Yeah so I am not complaining about people having negative opinions, I was sort of talking about the over meme, the zeitgeist switch where suddenly the entire conversation goes from pros/cons to what appears to be a standard, negative message that everyone absorbed in a short time. Basically used like a thought terminating cliche. I have problems with crypto, and I like things about crypto. I can have a great conversation with most people, but for 12 months or so, you couldn't have a conversation without people loudly shouting about how the power use was going to destroy the environment and that it was going to use X% of the power by Y date. They didn't want to talk about it, they had been given evidence that the discussion was over and everything was solved in favor of their beliefs. The AI debate has now roughly arrived in the same place, there's no longer really a discussion, but the zeitgeist has this one single mode that's constantly debated. To the point where you could be running a local LLM trained only on data from the 1800s and you can still be considered to be responsible for some data centre single handedly draining a lake.

My point is, like crypto, this fixed idea will eventually erode and the hate train will move on. People with well thought out negative opinions are still going to exist past that time, they just wont have people screaming at fever pitch about it constantly.

I really want to believe this will be true. However, I also suspect there's some external driving force, that I cannot readily name, which is making people incapable of consuming anything except this low-effort content. I mean, obviously it's working to some extent. Perhaps AI will be the thing that accelerates its death, but part of me thinks something else needs to happen beyond just an increase in useless content.

Plenty of people have a reason why they can’t do it, but plenty do it and are happier for finding their community IRL.

Where there are certainly strong examples of this, a lot of people mistake enforcing the rules as zealotry. Part of the point of SO was that if things don't change then there is a completed state for SO too - no need to ask duplicate questions like on platforms where a post is less long-lived. Unfortunately people take things like “this is a dup”, “provide more information as we can't help”, “this isn't a complete answer”, and so forth, as deeply personal attacks…

One of the good things about LLMs is that they've drawn off all the simple already-answered questions! Unfortunately the more complex ones, or the ones for new solutions, are also going there so SO and its family of sites is ceasing to grow even in the ways it wants to.

> and verbal harassment.

Again, that did/does happen, but a lot less than some people report it. The most abusive people I've seen on there are those who have been given one of the responses I listed above.

People were finding each other online when they couldn’t in person.

This isn’t to say I disagree with you. Just expressing sorrow over the loss of such a grand moment in our shared history.

Not too dissimilar to people bot-leveling in MMOs to the sell the accounts.

As far as the "tech idealists," a lot of them seem to want every space to be 4chan where they can be racist trolling assholes without consequence. And those folks have Nostr.

Sites and apps don’t need your actual national ID, just to know that you have one. I think it could be possible to have 3rd party verification services that don’t know where the verification request is coming from, thus preserving privacy on both sides.

The exceptions to the anti-AI sentiment are management and people with a vested interest.

[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PageRank

They aren't going to care about any of the advice in the article about not posting slop -- finding a job is (of course?) more important to them.

Can't really say they are doing anything wrong, maybe I too would have? ... Just that large scale, doesn't work

https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/identity-security/int...

Yep. Was.

This isn’t the internet you grow up on. This is an internet scoped for bots and organizations.

Not including the cost of the letter itself, or the envelope, or the cost to write it if it's being farmed out to overseas labour, who then has to send it by international postage. And then you have evidence of where the letter originated, and that can be compared with how the user presents themselves online.

Little bit more than 2 hours minimum wage I think.

Was.

Maybe you are to young to remember the (pre-spam) days when it was polite to leave your SMTP server open for others to use?

Though it's possible that this approach could become normalised if it's proven to work at a small scale.

Also, I imagine it's not impossible to reliably distinguish between an autopen and genuine handwriting. The company who's site you linked say their machine can't perform complex pen movements so calligraphy is impossible.

The real advantage of posting a letter is that you have to pay for postage, and the stamps on the envelope will indicate which country the letter is really coming from.

Bots are indeed killing twitter now. I noticed more and more were leaving permanently. Musk evidently accelerated the decay here. There is something wrong with his mindset here, it's almost as if it is pathological. His perception of things is genuinely distorted, and I am not even 100% certain he is completely aware of it; he must be partially aware, but it seems there is also something wrong with the brain. No wonder he gets along with Trump - that one now has clearly dementia narcissism in the final stage.

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.

Those sorts of places were always the only places with reliably good communities.

https://www.androidauthority.com/google-recaptcha-play-servi...

People often confuse freedom of speech, with freedom to access a specific platform for speech.

Its dead wrong, I dont know why people would want to be in a community where they arent wanted.

The people leaving LLM replies are paying minimum $20/month for LLM access, and probably more in practice.

A one time $10 fee is not a deterrent.

Feudalism had norms.

AI is ending an era of large public communities which will likely never come again.

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.

I’m not sure if that would work for account deletions though.

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.

Leave them on the device, authorize the device to validate before age inappropriate content appears.

Website wants to know your age? Your face and fingerprint support your attestation signed by a trusted party.

Can it be tricked potentially? Sure, but then you’re probably a super genius kid and not the reason that these laws were created (as if).

Don’t let anyone tell you anonymity must die for safety to exist.

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.

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.

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?

I want to create a community for immigrants. How would I make it welcoming to recent immigrants for whom no one can vouch?

A web of trust is a wonderful tool, but it's exclusive by design. This is a problem for some communities, even though it makes others much better.

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 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.

1) the cost becomes even higher for AI slop factories since they will probably get multiple accounts banned.

2) It prevents influence to accrue to any specific account. This diminishes the incentive for slop, since sufficient success means a ban.

3) It reduces the moderation effort since creating accounts is no longer a sustainable strategy.

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.

If AI is being used in these areas it is less as an attempt to manipulate as it is to just create noise and engender distrust in what they hear.

AIs have changed the feedback loop here such that these approaches are rewarded and even lauded.

The only thing I really took personally was the call for death, and that was me making a decision to leave in favor of my mental health.

Once again, I have to ask, why do you think that that is what they want? Maybe they want human generated content?

> the zeitgeist switch where suddenly the entire conversation goes from pros/cons to what appears to be a standard, negative message that everyone absorbed in a short time.

Understandable, though. Why discuss the pros and cons of $FOO when you're drowning in it? All you want it to stop the drowning.

A lot of them aren't actively seeking them out. They are pushed at them and they just try it.

Go on, just this once, you can stop if you don't like it…

> than wanting to talk to humans.

The disaffected just want to talk. I'm sure they'd prefer humans but once the chatbots seem to be good enough in their absence they get a bit trapped there because the bots are too sycophantic and they get conditioned to want that from humans too which will not happen.

No, it evidently isn't. Online communities connect people, and other communities, in ways that are impossible or undesirable to realize in meatspace. Bizarre to treat this as a zero-sum game.

> "Nothing, nothing substitutes for real human contact in the real world."

It all depends on your smell™. Et cetera.

It's the economy of everything being free but supported with advertising. That mechanic is what leads to the race to the bottom lowest common denominator human motivation hacking attention toxicity. (yes that's a bit of a ramble).

If people weren't getting paid for the smallest increment of attention they could grab, it wouldn't be promoted the way it is. I don't have a high opinion of the things which grab my attention, but they still manage to do it sometimes. I think many people are in that boat. If there were other mechanisms with which we rewarded people for doing things, something different would be optimized.

And people just wouldn't reward the 10-second-gratification in anywhere near the same way if it weren't for the advertising.

I now live in an area with about 2.5 million people and there is far more to do and the people are more educated and open minded. I will never move back to a small town again.

Even after that, I still feel sour about the site. Talk about burnt bridges.

Moreover, in 2025, 46% of the survey participants told that they don't feel like part of the community. That number was 44% in 2024 [1], too. Also, 2023 doesn't look better: 45.63% of participants said no [2].

Maybe the survey is rigged. Who knows?

[0]: https://survey.stackoverflow.co/2025/stack-overflow#2-feel-l...

[1]: https://survey.stackoverflow.co/2024/community#2-feel-like-a...

[2]: https://survey.stackoverflow.co/2023/#section-stack-overflow...

Now there's more pressure to have a stronger signal and hopefully rewards to match.

This is standard predatory behavior. Child abusers hanging out with kids, weirdos hanging out near the women's clothing department, etc.

It's usually a clear indication of the sort of people you don't want to associate with in your online community. They bring a net negative to the table.

https://eudi.dev/2.8.0/discussion-topics/g-zero-knowledge-pr...

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 "log in with Instagram", where "I log in with Facebook". Guess how well data recovery works when there is literally no password set. I'm surprised these systems work at all.

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 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 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.

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.

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...

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.

Spot the fed

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.

No algorithmic platform can sustain or even encourage genuine human interaction, so FB isn't even on the table here.

FTFY.

There isn't a clear solution. And if there is, this ain't it.

I suspect it will be a long process: first there will be goverments that force people to use ID, but that will be abused, hacked and considerably restrict freedom of speech, so after that phase people will start to create better ids.

The problem is really pretty simple: You need an authoratitive source to say "This person is real" - and a way for that source to actually verify you're a person - but that source can be corrupted and hacked. Some people will say "Crypto!" but money != people, so I don't see how that works. Perhaps the creation of some neutral non-goverment-non-profit entity is the way, but I can see lots of problems there too, and it will probably cost money to verify someone is real - where does that come from?

Anyway, good luck on your work!

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Except eventually it will also weigh down those users who supported <XYZ political stance>

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.

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.

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.

Just settle for stopping spam.

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

https://github.com/Exocija/ZetaLib/blob/main/The%20Gay%20Jai...

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

---

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.

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.

That's antiproductive, in that it promotes survival of only the worst bots.

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.

[1] https://blogs.taz.de/zeitlupe/2019/03/24/die-auferstehung-de...

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.

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.

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

My point was to create something outside a specific government, with very limited information... that would require a fee or some kind of funding.

I don't think I'd trust the US/China or other bodies to trust each other for such a use case.

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 protest came after that so the timeline is not quite correct.

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.

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.

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?

Also, what happens to someone whose credentials are compromised? Are you going to ban the credentials of the victim rather than the perpetrator?

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

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.)

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.

No matter where you look, the far-right kills and maims substantially much more people than the far-left does.

However, I might be not typical in that I don't look at vote scores very often.