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Comment by CGMthrowaway | Hacker News Reader

A practical formula:

1) Identify coordination failures that lock us into bad equilibria, e.g. it's impossible to defect from the online ads model without losing access to a valuable social graph

2) Look for leverage that rewrites the payoffs for a coalition rather than for one individual: right-to-repair laws, open protocols, interoperable standards, fiduciary duty, reputation systems, etc.

3) Accept that heroic non-participation is not enough. You must engineer a new Schelling point[1] that makes a better alternative the obvious move for a self-interested majority

TLDR, think in terms of the algebra of incentives, not in terms of squeaky wheelism and moral exhortation

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Focal_point_(game_theory)

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As a recent example, Jon Haidt seems to have used this kind of tactic to pull off a coup with the whole kids/smartphones/social media thing [0]. Everybody knew social media tech was corrosive and soul-rotting, but nobody could move individually to stand up against its “inevitability.”

Individual families felt like, if they took away or postponed their kids’ phones, their kid would be left out and ostracized—which was probably true as long as all the other kids had them. And if a group of families or a school wanted to coordinate on something different, they’d have to 1) be ok with seeming “backwards,” and 2) squabble about how specifically to operationalize the idea.

Haidt framed it as “four simple norms,” which offered specific new Schelling points for families to use as concrete alternatives to “it’s inevitable.” And in shockingly little time, it’s at the point where 26 states have enshrined the ideas into legislation [1].

[0] https://www.cnbc.com/2025/02/19/jonathan-haidt-on-smartphone...

[1] https://apnews.com/article/cellphones-phones-school-ban-stat...

He didn't cause that, he is just riding the wave. The call to ban them has been going on for years, it was just put on pause during the pandemic.

Great.

Now let's do the same to AI slop, what many (including Haidt and co., Australia, etc) have done to lessen kids social media usage.

FWIW, I gave up on FB/Twttr crap a while ago... Unfortunately, I'm still stuck with WhatsApp and LI (both big blights) for now.

YMMV

AI slop is self-limiting. The new game-theoretic equilibrium is that nobody trusts anything they read online, at which point it will no longer be profitable to put AI slop out there because nobody will read it.

Unfortunately, it's going to destroy the Internet (and possibly society) in the process.

That’s my sense too. I wonder where the new foca are starting to form, as far as where people will look to serve the purposes that this slop’s infiltrating. What the inevitable alternatives to the New Inevitable start to look like.

At the risk of dorm-room philosophizing: My instincts are all situated in the past, and I don’t know whether that’s my failure of imagination or whether it’s where everybody else is ending up too.

Do the new information-gathering Schelling points look like the past—trust in specific individual thinkers, words’ age as a signal of their reliability, private-first discussions, web of trust, known-human-edited corpora, apprenticeship, personal practice and experience?

Is there instead no meaningful replacement, and the future looks like people’s “real” lives shrinking back to human scale? Does our Tower of Babel just collapse for a while with no real replacement in sight? Was it all much more illusory than it felt all along, and the slop is just forcing us to see that more clearly?

Did the Cronkite-era-television—>cable transition feel this way to people before us?

> AI slop is self-limiting. The new game-theoretic equilibrium is that nobody trusts anything they read online, at which point it will no longer be profitable to put AI slop out there because nobody will read it.

AI slop, unfortunately, is just starting.

It is true that nobody trusts anything online... esp the Big Media and the backlash against it in the last decade+ or so. But that's exactly where AI slop is coming in. Note the crazier and crazier conspiracy theories that are taking hold all around, and not just in the MAGA-verse. And there's plenty of takers for AI slop - both consumers of it, and producers of it.

And there's plenty of profit all around. (see crypto, NFTs, and all manners of grifting)

So no, I dont think "nobody will read it". It's more like "everybody's reading it"

But I do agree on the denouement... it's destroying the internet and society along with it

'defect' only applies to prisoners dilemma type problems. that is just one, very limited class of problem, and I would argue not very relevant to discussing AI inevitability.

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