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> how great was a community to begin with if as the only thing keeping it from becoming a hotbed of fake content is that the users didn't have the tools to fake it.

Do online communities need to be great by some HN metric in order to be deemed worthy of survival?

Some knitters had fun sharing their work online. Now that's ruined by ML. If it was ruined by cryptocurrency mining instead, would we be posting similar "they had it coming" defenses of this destruction? There is a heavy bias on HN toward excusing the externalities of generative AI.

My hypothesis is that the community is not the community the earnest users thought it was. There is no metric I'm proposing apart from whether the people complaining would actually value the community in the first place if they had an accurate understanding of the type of people the community was made up of.

Lets say you go to the local comedy club and do your act. You aren't a professional comedian, but you want to do comedy for fun, and it's a social experience where you get to interact with people. You work from home and social outlets are very important!

You do this for years, getting feedback from other comedians and enjoying yourself. Later you decide to buckle down and watch the great comedians at work. You watch the top performances by the top comedians, and to your horror you notice something disturbing. The other 'comedians' at your social club are just reading lines they copied down from famous comedy acts they watched on Youtube, verbatim. In fact, out of hundreds of other amateur comedians you had been having drinks with, and being proud when they praised your act or gave feedback, maybe one or two of them were actually writing their own material. They are all faking it to get social credit in this club.

At what point was the club ruined, all along or when you found out?

> honestly how great was a community to begin with if as the only thing keeping it from becoming a hotbed of fake content is that the users didn't have the tools to fake it

It only takes a few users willing to post fake stuff to drown out a much larger number of real ones.

> I'm sure very few people would agree when I say that nothing of value has been lost, but honestly I think this is more about people's illusions about the online communities they engage in becoming harder to maintain than those communities becoming worse somehow.

You could easily do the same thing with HN.

Note that real contributions and moderation don't scale whereas fake stuff does scale. So nothing is proof against an avalanche of fakes.

How do adapt?

Everything can be faked.

You can't fake doing crochet with me at the crochet club, can you?

However, this reduces the number of potential members quite a bit. In some areas, there would probably only be one.

That's not adapting but retreating.

It's a good thing.

Everyone will have a chance to be the big fish in a small pond again, rather than being a drop in a global ocean. Everyone's self-esteem will improve as a result. Nobody will feel inadequate compared to everyone else on the planet. Nothing is more demotivating than seeing leaderboards dominated by random Japanese kids that you'll never have a chance of ever beating.

Yeah, there may be a knitting goddess in Ohio you can't reach out to but you'll foster a deeper relationship with the hobbyist down the street, which would arguably benefit you more anyway.

> honestly how great was a community to begin with if as the only thing keeping it from becoming a hotbed of fake content is that the users didn't have the tools to fake it.

That's like saying, "how great was your house to begin with if the only thing keeping it from becoming smouldering embers was someone with a can of gasoline and matches?"

This is not a good analogy.

It is more like you hire someone to repair a pipe and when they open the wall they find mold everywhere. You had been happy living in the house for the last 15 years, but now you know about the mold and you feel grossed out being in the house.

I feel like that's not a good analogy either; it's not like there was a flood of AI-generated garbage on these forums for the past fifteen years; it's not like a person discovering that they've been chatting exclusively with bots, not humans, for the past decade.

I think these forums are going to discover that a different, more stringent kind of moderation is needed now that doing this kind of shit is cheap. I guess maybe it's more like you've been living your house happily for 15 years, but with the change in climate, suddenly your house is full of a kind of rodent that hasn't been able to survive in your region, and you're just shoveling out buckets of rodent poop every day, and trying to figure out what kind of traps to set out to stop them from coming in.

(Except the rodents aren't just appearing naturally; your neighbor started a rodent breeding farm, and is releasing them into your house so they don't have to pay for extra food or space, and is selling them for a profit while your house gets slowly filled up with rat shit.)

Again you are assuming the people using ai here are barbarians invading this forum. I suggest they may be the same people that were there anyway, and have been frauds all along. Before they posted other people's work (taking pictures of other peoples work irl, buying things at thrift shops to post about, stealing pictures off other forums), now they are using ai to fabricate it. The use of AI did not lead to any new fraud in my scenario, it actually made the fraud obvious for the actual experts who were previously fooled.