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Comment by gosub100 | Hacker News Reader

Online comments are about to die. First, we won't be able to tell who is real anymore. People will profit by running huge botnets for advertising and political manipulation. (Inb4 someone says this already happens: AI will keep lowering the bar to enter and evade detection). But a knock on effect is there will be a market for farming fake accounts for later sale to said manipulators.

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> But a knock on effect is there will be a market for farming fake accounts for later sale to said manipulators.

We'll lift millions in the "global south" out of poverty by providing the tools to criminals and foreign adversaries that drive demand for cheaply-staffed high-rep social media account farms.

What a time to be alive. What frontiers we are exploring.

It'll be sad but the brain rot from pervasive social media is getting severe, especially in older generations. If this pushes more people to touch grass, it's a net positive.

I totally agree that many online comments are toxic and many people should go touch grass. However I also see this as the next step in a series of humans getting their communications cut off by computers.

Talking to people online is in fact a way that some people get socialization and develop writing skills. If my prognostication is correct and people give up even trying to interact on most websites because "it's not worth starting a conversation only to find out 10 minutes later that they're a bot" or "no one listens to my opinion because that's what all the bots say so they don't think I'm real", the effect is to make the web even more "read-only" where people are discouraged from sharing themselves.

Whether the "sharing themselves" age was a peak or a low is still up for debate.

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