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Comment by lee-rhapsody | Hacker News Reader

Going back to forums locked behind accounts would be a good first step.

Forums worked (and still do) because they're small niches, like the budding Internet. As soon as they become big, they lose their sense of community, and become profitable to spam.

So, maybe we have to choose between isolated human islands vs. an ad-and-SEO-infested world?

> isolated human islands Good point. But how does one find these? Through word-of-mouth, I guess?

Yes, or exploration in the case of USENET or pre-enshittified social networks.

> Forums worked (and still do)

They worked and they often worked quite well. Unfortunately, many of those “working” forums I frequented are now inactive. It’s tough to visit some and see it’s been many years since the last post on some - and those are just the ones that are still online.

> Going back to forums locked behind accounts would be a good first step.

How do you ensure the accounts aren't AI bots or people who scrap and serve it all back to the AI soup pot? The identity seems to be quite a problem online.

Yes, and account creation automation is quite trivial in the majority of cases.

Invite-only, the way private torrent trackers still do it. Which has its own problems, but if you limit the number of invitees a given user can bring in and other such restrictions, it makes it practically impossible to for bots to make up a good chunk of the userbase.

Invite-only sounds like a good idea. Especially if you need multiple people to approve invites. However, one or a few people might get greedy and add bots.

A lot of invite-only trackers solve that with a reputation system: if your invitees get banned, you also get warned or banned.

The bots can avoid this by staying low impact. Farming data for AI training is rather simple. Vote brigading is also hard to track.

In the same way advertising is money spent hoping for revenue, shaping the visibility of posts by your actually human coworkers and customers work similarly.

Bot presence isn't the problem, the issues caused to the community by a high volume of scraping and spam is. Bots staying low impact and not being annoying enough to get banned is almost as good as eliminating them entirely, unless you're a perfectionist.

Not if they are shifting the narrative through subtler means.

Charge an entry fee like Something Awful does.

The entry fee let them be a lot more chaotic too - people who go too far and piss someone off would get kicked out and forced to pay money to rejoin again. But it put a price tag on trolling, unlike platforms like Instagram. So people could do it and somehow get better at it until it turns into comedy.

I imagine people will soon have AI post here and other logged in forums on behalf of them. Try and rack up Karma or build reputation.

I think some are already doing this.

I am unaware of any ways in which my stupid pile of karma has changed my life for the better.

None of you see it, and doesn’t even change how dang behaves toward me when I’m hangry.

Like Reddit, you mean? Or with some extra authentication mechanism?

Sounds about right. Prove you're a real human through some sort of identification verification process. Probably would lead to better conversations, especially if each person could have only one account.

I am quite skeptical it would help. The majority of users on forums already aren't AI, and from my personal experience in the last couple decades on many different forums, there's already an abundance of egotistical, dogmatic god complexes around to make the experience insufferable enough already.

And there also adversaries who are paid to post. Proper reputation system is needed to fight that.

> an abundance of egotistical, dogmatic god complexes around to make the experience insufferable enough already.

And you can find a curated list of these people on r/LinkedInLunatics, though I'm not sure the curation is necessary as it seems like pretty much the _entirety_ of LinkedIn posts are the kind that make you question whether the poster is human.

There's marketing and building a personal brand, and then there's whatever the heck LinkedIn in 2025 is...

Please help translate the memes today for my gray hairs. I wound down my LI account around 2016 because it was 2-3 degrees to everyone with zero human-to-human I knew messaging. What has MS turned it into, a substack for business consultants and e-book merchants or something else?

They turned it into Facebook for self congratulating executives and wanna be temporarily embarrassed millionaire “thought leaders”. It’s insufferable and fuels capitalist cynicism like nothing else.

They typical Instagram and Facebook comment section proves this wrong lol

> Prove you're a real human

Ah, so Worldcoin then?

New AI service idea: this human doesn't exist, complete with plausible fictional ids.

uh... for security awareness.

hahaha god Reddit is fucking full of people who are clearly using AI to write or edit their posts, I get so many people trying to glaze me like ChatGPT does now and it's so fucking creepy.

Yeah, that's why I asked to get clarity on what exactly they meant with accounts.

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