I have largely written Reddit off and no longer visit it
after an experiment I did where I had an agent karma farm for me and do some covert advertising. As I went through the posts it wrote I realized that as a reader I would have NO idea that these were just written by a computer. Many many people (or other bots) had full on conversations with it and it scared me a bit.
I am not quite there with Hacker News but I do know for a fact that many "users" here are LLMs.
Online communities are definitely dying. I guess I hope that maybe IRL communities have a resurgence in this wake.
I made this point elsewhere, but people are learning a lot of what us had to learn the old way which is no one cares about your stuff for the most part and now the value provided has to go way up to get people to care. That is, as the author says, the novelty has worn off and since we know it's AI the perceived value is also way down.
We're all recalibrating.
I do really think this is just a quick period in time before most people realize that the slop posting doesn't help them personally get anything and most give up and we go back to roughly the ratio of cool things with real value to see but like on a bigger scale because AI helps you do more as one person.
I kind feel this might be good.
Bot writen comments and AI media that can no longer be distinguish from real, will make us human leave the social networks, which helped to separate Us humans.
Going back to the real world were you can trully believe on what you see, and enjoy the tone, look and scent of of our fellows humans beings.
The problem of course, is what about folks who have very specific interests/hobbies?
It's a long drive for me to get to a local shop and things which I am actually interested in working on rarely show up in the classes and so forth which they offer, and scheduling is awkward --- when my second favourite author came up on rotation for the book discussion at the local Barnes & Noble, I wasn't able to attend due to a prior commitment w/ my kids.
Those of us who can distinguish the bots are sick of them and are leaving - the ones who can’t tell the difference and appreciate being pandered to stay. Instead of driving them away, bot posts drive them to engage.
This is a good thing. social media was already slop before AI. If this gets more intellectuals off these same websites daily and instead spend their time to better things, then I love AI slop’s purpose. There’s more to the internet than Reddit, TikTok, and youtube. Really there is, if your circle of friends is small or non existent without going to the same dotcoms, you have an issue that is worse than any AI slop tbh
HN is in peril and I don’t think it is a bad thing. Or rather, I’d like to bring back the old chestnut: it’s a good thing.
While the site has moved to using /showlim, the AI garbage just bypasses that and goes straight to the home page. Almost every project that’s being shown is vibe coded and looks exactly the same - generated by Claude or the like. This is an excellent test for the site: will it be able to adapt or do we simply end up with a husk of what HN was and it’s the AI posts driving majority of engagement, Overton window, and upvotes/downvotes?
I look forward to this, I think it is an exciting development.
AI slop is hurting my community in a different way. We have an internal viva engage community for quick development how to type questions at work. More frequently, instead of asking "how to" questions to the crowd to crowdsource answers, people are reaching out to me directly to ask me why the solution AI suggested doesn't work.
That people trust AI over an organizational knowledge is bad enough. I fear that AI is turning people generally antisocial.
Do they also say you're wrong, then proceed to "prove it" by pasting more AI slop that they don't understand?
The first time that happened, I had the courtesy to point out why the slop was incorrect... I don't know what that did for my social capital. I fear/suspect people are getting attached to their pet AI to the point of taking personal offence when called out.
There has to be room for an AI-driven project that expresses a unique idea, even if there's no community around it yet. Someone has to express it, and from now on that idea will largely be implemented with AI.
> A good use of AI is when it enables people to do something they couldn’t do before, to contribute to a community when they couldn’t before.
I agree 100% with the novel contribution aspect. But there's some nuance there.
For example a project might have no active contributors. It might not be something you can drop directly into your codebase. Neither of those is inherently bad.
As AI becomes more responsible for higher-level planning decisions, the value of an OSS project becomes less tied to visible community activity like PRs and issues.
I notice this in my own work a lot. I might not use that project's code directly. But I think about a problem differently as a result. I often point my agent to existing OSS projects as inspiration on how to solve a problem. The project provides indirect value by supporting architectural decisions, deployment approaches etc. Unfortunately OSS activity doesn't capture this.
Sigh. First the article states that "coding by LLM is the way things are done right now" in 10 different ways but message boards and articles need to be protected.
We get it, the current narrative is that coding is the big thing, promoted by billionaires and scabs alike.
So, the coding narrative must be protected until the IPO of Juniper^H^H^H Anthropic happens and the whole thing implodes.
You already could have code for free and faster by using "git clone" without a company of thieves selling your own output back to you.
When LLMs were new on the scene, I thought trust would fade in the written(text) medium. I saw it happening on Substack, Medium, and Reddit. But then VCs pumped so much money and AI has gotten into every other modality (audio, video). The only thing I really interact these days are the human beings sitting in front me, phone calls with people I know and hackernews. Life seems sorted but something feels missing as well.
Edit - I am not anti AI but it is slowly killing the digital human interaction.
It sucks that the narrative framing device of 'human slop' has vanished in the last year. Some subreddits, like all location subreddits, lifestyle subreddits like malefashionadvice and redscarepod and entry-level academic subreddits like math and criticaltheory were already just hives of human slop before AI came around because of a structural design to the site that had the side effect of normalising a total absence of quality control.
Upvotes are not a good mechanism for quality control in any way because they force good content to have the same metadata as the content that is technically well-constructed but is irrelevant, meaningless, just a platitude, too obvious to be obvious or pablum. Upvotes turn everything into a shock-value dominated 101 space.
For every argument against AI slop, you will get a variation of it's the future, or I'm 10x more productive now, I've shipped 3 applications in 2 days, etc.
They won't stop talking about it and defending it. But I can't get anyone to share their amazing work with me.
There is a reason the Show HN projects that are mostly vibecoded don't get much response. It's because they aren't any good. Comments that are AI generated are hollow. Videos that AI generated a shell of their sources.
There are "nice", "polite" slop enthusiasts. The ones who insist they have taste and tact. They would never post bad slop, recklessly, only the very highest-quality human-refined, curated slop. Not really slop at all, they would argue, because they gave it a careful review before posting it. They insist there's a very important difference between this premium slop and the nasty kind, and that low-quality human-authored media is actually slop, too, when you think about it. They talk about how important it is for people to use slop thoughtfully, efficiently, correctly, and that we all need to learn about and discuss slop constantly because it's the inevitable future and highly relevant for everyone.
They muddy the waters. They wheedle, rules-lawyer, carve out exceptions, and talk about how important it is to have nuance in separating virtuous applications for slop from bad ones, and that focusing on the bad ones is actually very tedious and rude. We should have polite discourse about the good things about slop and stop being so mean about bad slop, which isn't even really a problem. The bad kinds of slop will be solved soon, probably, and the harms are overstated. They colonize spaces.
If moderators don't swiftly throw these slop enthusiasts out on their ass, slightly less polite ones will post slop slightly less politely. More and more of the people participating in the space will have favorable opinions toward slop, and shout down people who object to slop. In no time at all, your community is a slop bar. Who could have imagined?
I always find the most difficult is to deal with users who are not actively breaking any rules but are toxic and hurting the conversation. Given your experience, what's your take on handling this?
Online communities that allow upvoting / downvoting have been effectively dead for a long time because it's easy to manipulate conversations by elevating and punishing comments to fit a narrative. This is especially true on HN.
There's a lot of focus on tech projects here, but it's not just vibe written projects that are ruining communities now.
No, it's a problem with art, text and videos too. Reddit was already becoming a creative writing exercise in many ways, with infamous subs like 'Am I the Asshole?' seemingly being about 80% fiction labelled as fact. But now you don't even need to know how to write to flood the site with useless 'content'.
YouTube is arguably even worse, since AI led content farms are not just spamming the hell out of every topic under the sun, but giving outright dangerous advice and misinformation on top of that. I saw this video about medical misinformation by these 'creators' earlier, and it genuinely made me want to see them crack down on this junk:
And there's just this feeling of distrust everywhere too. Is anyone on Hacker News human anymore? Is that Reddit poster I'm responding to human? Are the folks on Twitter, Threads or Bluesky human?
The scary part is that you basically can't tell anymore. Any project you find could be AI generated slop, any account could be a bot using stolen images or deepfakes, any article or video could be blatant misinformation put together as a cash grab...
If something doesn't improve, pretty much every platform under the sun is going to be completely useless, as is a lot of the internet as a whole.
Human slop is realistically just as bad. In a strange twist, human commentary on the Internet is asymptotically approaching an older LLM. Trite cliches, repetitive tropes, and tribal affiliation signals dominate conversation.
I have turned to blunt instruments: blocking individuals on their first cliche banner-wave. It has substantially improved comment quality but I still suffer from the problem that I don’t block stories entirely.
Speaking from experience hosting a MediaWiki with a ReCaptcha: Those were never effective, they didn't stop any bots. Switching to a personalized captcha with questions that have to be answered (that can mostly be answered from the Wiki itself) was more effective and stopped 100% of bots (of course it can be trivially bypassed when a site-specific bot is coded but no one does it and same is true for ReCaptcha).
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[ 2.6 ms ] story [ 89.9 ms ] threadThank you OP, this puts into words why I no longer look at Show HNs.
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.
We're all recalibrating.
I do really think this is just a quick period in time before most people realize that the slop posting doesn't help them personally get anything and most give up and we go back to roughly the ratio of cool things with real value to see but like on a bigger scale because AI helps you do more as one person.
These are professional skinner box designers; real people will remain on, even if the site themselves have to use chatbots to keep them there.
It's a long drive for me to get to a local shop and things which I am actually interested in working on rarely show up in the classes and so forth which they offer, and scheduling is awkward --- when my second favourite author came up on rotation for the book discussion at the local Barnes & Noble, I wasn't able to attend due to a prior commitment w/ my kids.
Those of us who can distinguish the bots are sick of them and are leaving - the ones who can’t tell the difference and appreciate being pandered to stay. Instead of driving them away, bot posts drive them to engage.
Strict invitation trees? Small signup fees? No SEO incentives?
While the site has moved to using /showlim, the AI garbage just bypasses that and goes straight to the home page. Almost every project that’s being shown is vibe coded and looks exactly the same - generated by Claude or the like. This is an excellent test for the site: will it be able to adapt or do we simply end up with a husk of what HN was and it’s the AI posts driving majority of engagement, Overton window, and upvotes/downvotes?
I look forward to this, I think it is an exciting development.
That people trust AI over an organizational knowledge is bad enough. I fear that AI is turning people generally antisocial.
The first time that happened, I had the courtesy to point out why the slop was incorrect... I don't know what that did for my social capital. I fear/suspect people are getting attached to their pet AI to the point of taking personal offence when called out.
> A good use of AI is when it enables people to do something they couldn’t do before, to contribute to a community when they couldn’t before.
I agree 100% with the novel contribution aspect. But there's some nuance there.
For example a project might have no active contributors. It might not be something you can drop directly into your codebase. Neither of those is inherently bad.
As AI becomes more responsible for higher-level planning decisions, the value of an OSS project becomes less tied to visible community activity like PRs and issues.
I notice this in my own work a lot. I might not use that project's code directly. But I think about a problem differently as a result. I often point my agent to existing OSS projects as inspiration on how to solve a problem. The project provides indirect value by supporting architectural decisions, deployment approaches etc. Unfortunately OSS activity doesn't capture this.
We get it, the current narrative is that coding is the big thing, promoted by billionaires and scabs alike.
So, the coding narrative must be protected until the IPO of Juniper^H^H^H Anthropic happens and the whole thing implodes.
You already could have code for free and faster by using "git clone" without a company of thieves selling your own output back to you.
Edit - I am not anti AI but it is slowly killing the digital human interaction.
Upvotes are not a good mechanism for quality control in any way because they force good content to have the same metadata as the content that is technically well-constructed but is irrelevant, meaningless, just a platitude, too obvious to be obvious or pablum. Upvotes turn everything into a shock-value dominated 101 space.
They won't stop talking about it and defending it. But I can't get anyone to share their amazing work with me.
There is a reason the Show HN projects that are mostly vibecoded don't get much response. It's because they aren't any good. Comments that are AI generated are hollow. Videos that AI generated a shell of their sources.
They muddy the waters. They wheedle, rules-lawyer, carve out exceptions, and talk about how important it is to have nuance in separating virtuous applications for slop from bad ones, and that focusing on the bad ones is actually very tedious and rude. We should have polite discourse about the good things about slop and stop being so mean about bad slop, which isn't even really a problem. The bad kinds of slop will be solved soon, probably, and the harms are overstated. They colonize spaces.
If moderators don't swiftly throw these slop enthusiasts out on their ass, slightly less polite ones will post slop slightly less politely. More and more of the people participating in the space will have favorable opinions toward slop, and shout down people who object to slop. In no time at all, your community is a slop bar. Who could have imagined?
It hasn't been easy. We ban fake AI accounts daily and shrug off around 600 AI content creator accounts monthly.
It's a lot of work, extra work that wasn't needed before AI content came around, and of course, that is an extra cost.
I fear losing the battle.
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?
No, it's a problem with art, text and videos too. Reddit was already becoming a creative writing exercise in many ways, with infamous subs like 'Am I the Asshole?' seemingly being about 80% fiction labelled as fact. But now you don't even need to know how to write to flood the site with useless 'content'.
YouTube is arguably even worse, since AI led content farms are not just spamming the hell out of every topic under the sun, but giving outright dangerous advice and misinformation on top of that. I saw this video about medical misinformation by these 'creators' earlier, and it genuinely made me want to see them crack down on this junk:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UEfCTCBDKIU
And there's just this feeling of distrust everywhere too. Is anyone on Hacker News human anymore? Is that Reddit poster I'm responding to human? Are the folks on Twitter, Threads or Bluesky human?
The scary part is that you basically can't tell anymore. Any project you find could be AI generated slop, any account could be a bot using stolen images or deepfakes, any article or video could be blatant misinformation put together as a cash grab...
If something doesn't improve, pretty much every platform under the sun is going to be completely useless, as is a lot of the internet as a whole.
I have turned to blunt instruments: blocking individuals on their first cliche banner-wave. It has substantially improved comment quality but I still suffer from the problem that I don’t block stories entirely.