wow, is there more on this?

Also, honestly, with AI/LLMs now, do we even need human moderators anywhere anymore

Same here. The power-tripping of mods ruins reddit. Most don't care about the community as much as they care about exercising their absolute power over users.

And even if it does, the mods don't have real control to moderate communities either, so you get the worst of both worlds. I don't go to most queer reddit communities anymore because a lot of them have bots that downvote trans-positive posts, even if the community is specifically meant to be inclusive. There's nothing to couple active participation to voting weight or anything of that kind and voting is not considered "brigading" by reddit if the coordination happens off-site (at least not in a way that'd lead to any enforcement action).

It's makes a great propaganda machine though, given humans have a tendency to measure their own opinions on social clues.

[flagged]

An outstanding summary of the most important trends on the web, yes, it's being turned into a one-way propaganda-pushing machine much like the mass media before it. AI and bot-farms made that transformation cheap and ubiquitous, the profit motive, aka bribery, takes care of the rest.

I don't think it's an unsolvable problem although new legislation is continuously being considered in order to make the solution harder. Still, not impossible.

> users could then propose changes to the policy and democratically vote on those changes.

Which, in fact, would open up the same rat race with determining which accounts are real and so forth.

Not disagreeing with you, just circling around this same problem. Feels like the world still isn't ready yet.

Try criticizing Apple or China or other sacred cows and see how quickly your post gets flagged.

Honestly the most cohesive experience I've found online are forums with strict, sometimes overly strong, moderation where it's allowed to also complain about the mods openly. They can have the power but at least let me bitch when they fuck up.

Kind of?

On Google+, it was possible to individually block specific profiles.

This meant that the blocker wouldn't see the blockee's posts and the blockee wouldn't see the blockers, which is pretty much expected behaviour.

But on third-party threads, if a blocker/blockee were both commenting, others could see their comments but they'd be mutually invisible. As the platform matured and the number of such blocks increased, this reached a point where that platform behaviour became common enough that it was frequently commented on. If the thread host isn't sufficiently diligent in their own moderation (effectively each post author is moderator of that thread), it's also possible for such discussions to devolve quickly.

I guess Usenet would be another case where individual killfiles were often applied.

This isn't quite the same as your proposal, but it does raise the challenge that if there are multiple moderation regimes occurring, there is no canonical view of a discussion, leading both the potential confusion over what has or hasn't been said, and potential derailment (or similar behaviours) if a sufficiently disruptive participant is not universally blocked. The canonical flamefest after all is often just two profiles / participants responding endlessly.

Diaspora* is similar to G+, except that on third-party threads the blocks don't work, so that if A blocks B but C does not block B, then A and B will see one anothers' comments on C's posts / threads. This ... can be frustrating.

Oh, and the post-author-as-moderator model also somewhat resembles what you'd suggested, in that you could choose to participate on a particular profile's posts given that profile's moderation practices. I found that there were several people who did an excellent job of this, and who were quite affective, in effect, salon hosts, which was how I saw the G+ moderation model over time. This differs from what you suggest in that every participant on those threads had the same moderation experience, but it was possible to choose moderation practices based on which profiles' threads you chose to participate on. And I'd definitely avoid poorly-moderated hosts.

How do you make sure each human gets only one vote?

sadly, a nice idea that is painfully naive with how computers are used in reality.

One need only remember how easy it was to take over IRC channels with a few hundred bots to see the endgame of this rationale… it cannot be patched out, it’s inherent to the internet.

That which would make a vote valid; can (and will) be gamed.

As long as sub forums can be created easily, users may pick their sub forum and thus indirectly moderator.

In this setup having users elect the moderator leads to cases where small groups create their special interest group and then some trolls challenge the moderator.

Their may be some oversight on the large sub forum, but not all.

A democratic election requires that the elected be your employee, where you work with him on a regular basis to direct him in his job. That works (ish) in government where people doing the hiring have heavily invested life interests in it succeeding.

Does a subforum offer the same? Once the mod is elected, are you going to sit down with him each day to make sure he is doing the job to your wishes and expectations? I say (ish) in government because it often doesn't even work there, even where people have heavily invested life interests, with a lot (maybe even the vast majority!) of people never getting involved in democracy. A subforum? Who cares?

If there were to be elections, it is unlikely they could be anything other than authoritarianly, with the chosen one becoming the ultimate power.

Stack Overflow does this and it works far better than arbitrary tyrant style moderation.

Why? Genuinely curious.

I am a big proponent of (direct) democracy in general.

I always thought it would be interesting to separate the post-side and the read-side in such a manner. You'd post to #programming, and then the reader would subscribe to #programming/user_xyz to pick up the moderation feed with xyz as the god-mod. This solves the bootstrapping problem where new subs have nothing to read. Unfortunately it's hard to do persistent standards keeping that way. If xyz has a no-memes policy do you ban all posts from everyone who ever posts one to the global tag, or do you individually inspect every post?

100%. I'm building a discussion system with this approach, so that no one forum/community can claim a topic exclusively.

On Reddit? It's horribly intransparent but there seems to be a special class of people to whom the normal rules don't apply.

That limit wouldn't stop you creating more communities with more accounts anyway.

Indeed - the future is RL meet-ups and small, intimate online communities.

Perhaps not the worst thing in the world?

The bot problem can easily be solved. It’s just that no one likes the cure. Think about this for a minute: what would happen if you had a country where all its citizens could act anonymously with no consequences, no reputation, no repercussions, and no trace? Would you want to go there? Live there? No, because it would be a lawless wasteland dominated by the worst of the worst.

Yet people act like the internet is somehow different. The internet is a massive society. Social networks are very much like virtual countries, or even continents. We’ve all enjoyed the benefits of living in this society of zero consequence, but it’s now been overrun by the very worst people, just like the imaginary country above.

You claim we can’t solve this problem, but we already have solved it here in the physical world with identities, laws, and consequences. The real problem is that most people don’t want to let go of the very thing that is the problem: anonymity. Unfortunately, there won’t be a choice for much longer. The internet will certainly be dead without a system that ties IP addresses and online identities to real people.

No, it’s not the internet we all wanted, but humanity has ruined the one we have.

"content creators" https://fgiesen.wordpress.com/2025/07/06/content-creator/

> people are letting bots act on their behalf (moltbook is a great example of this) and what's to stop people doing that in the future.

Verifiable credentials; services can get persistent pseudonymous identifiers that are linked to a real-world identity. Ban them once and they stay banned. It doesn’t matter if a person lets a bot post inauthentic content using their identity if, when they are caught, that person cannot simply register a new account. This solves a bunch of problems – online abuse, spam, bots, etc. – without telling websites who you are or governments what you do.

The bot problem can be solved.

Anubis is one such answer [0]. Cryptocurrency and micro transactions are another.

In the last few decades, spam was a problem because the marginal transaction costs of information exchange were orders of magnitude lower than they had been. Note that physical mail spam was, and still, is an issue. Focusing on perceptual or fuzzy computation as the limiting factor, through captchas and other 'human tests', allowed for most spam to be effectively mitigated.

Now that intelligence is becoming orders of magnitude cheaper, perceptual computation challenges no longer work, but we can still do computation challenges in the form of proof of work or proxies thereof. Spam will never wholly go away but we can at least cause more friction by charging bot networks to execute in the form of energy or money.

[0] https://github.com/TecharoHQ/anubis

HN may not be “mainstream” but it is certainly _very_ vulnerable to bot spam given the topics discussed and the make-up of the audience.

You can already see it happening now - at least the bots that write like vanilla Claude/ChatGPT. Presumably there is a much larger hidden cohort of bots that are instructed to talk more naturally and thus are better adept at flying under the radar…

Dang told me in 2019 that HN gets 150M page views a month, so it's not that obscure actually:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21201120

I've asked ChatGPT a question about something I read in a thread here and it responded with a comment from that thread, even though the thread was less than an hour old. HN is well known in the tech community and there are certain subjects, especially anything involving Israel or India, that nearly instantly result in a flood of comments from bad actors. HN isn't Reddit but it's also a shadow of what it once was, which is driving away more of the productive participation in favor of agenda-based posting.

> After that, I guess it'll be a rise of invite-only forums like we had in the early 2000s all over again.

Which would be totally fine with me TBH.

Rather amusingly, invite-only torrent sites might be the only semi-public authentically human hangouts left on the internet!

Eternal AI september.

Yes, precisely.

This means that only sites which verify identity will have any value in the future. And by verified, that means against government ID and verified as real.

No amount of sign up fee works as an alternative.

Note that a site can verify identity, prevent sock puppets, ban bad actors and prevent re-registration, all while keeping that ID private.

You still get a handle and publicly facing nick if you want it.

The company which handles this correctly will have a big B after it. Digg actually has a chance at this.

It has no users, so the outrage won't exist in the same capacity. Existing platforms will be pummeled in the market if they try to convert to this type of site, as their DAU will likely drop a thousandfold, just due to the eliminated bots.

But Digg could relaunch this way. And as exhibited, this is now the only way.

The age of the anonymous internet is over, it's done. People not realizing this are living in the past.

Note, I don't like this, but acknowledging reality is vital. Issues with leaked databases, users, hacking of Pii are all technical and legislative issues, and not relevant to whether or not this happens.

Because it will happen, and is happening.

It should be noted that falsifying ID is a crime. Fake ID coupled with computer fraud laws will eventually result in hefty jail time. This is sensible, if people want a world where ecommerce, and discourse is online... and the general public does.

And has exhibited a complete lack of care about privacy regardless.

The future is meeting in person and watching performers actually perform live.

It’s what I’m trying to accomplish with my website(link is in my profile). Just trying to crank up the signal to noise ratio.

AI is sucking up that content and denying traffic to its creators. This model is becoming obsolete.

A curator with a great taste and judgement is king.

How did Yahoo work out compared to Google?

human curated -> human moderated. I, for one, don't care if it's ai, or human-written. I care if it's interesting/useful.

This should be seperate from marking bots because what this really wil do is embed people into hearing only what they want, making discussion worse.

On /. I would only mark obnoxious people as friends so I could see the friend-of-a-friend indicator and be cautious of anyone aligned with them.

It's two different problems. People who run review sites and blogs and such care about traffic, and not getting attribution will kill their desire to participate. People who post here and on Reddit etc. care about talking with other human beings, and feeling ignored in a sea of botspam will kill *their* desire to participate.

Yes and no.

In the most simple sense - Yes, it is the content that matters.

In the more practical sense - cognitive and emotional resources are limited and our brains are not content agnostic.

We have different behaviors, expectations and capacities for talking to machines and talking to humans.

For example, if I am engaging with a human I can expect to potentially change their minds.

For a machine? Why bother even responding. It’s of no utility to me to respond.

Furthermore, all human communication comes with a human emotional context. There are vast amounts of information implied through tone, through what we choose not to say. Sometimes people say things in one emotional state that is not what they would say on another occasion.

To move the conversation forward, addressing the emotional payload behind the words used, matters more than the words used themselves.

There are a myriad reasons why humans are practically poorer for these tools.

That's a little bit apples to oranges, because I'm not monetizing this content, or paying to host it, or trying to make a personal brand, etc.

Web of trust weakens anonymity, but doesn’t eliminate it.

- You know who your online invitees are, but not your invitees-of-invitees-of-…

- You can create an account, get it invited, then create an alt account and invite it. Now the alt account is still linked to you, but others don’t know whether it’s your friend or yourself. (Importantly, you can’t evade bans with alts; if your invited users keep getting banned, you’ll be prevented from inviting more if not banned yourself)

What would you say are the major applications of the internet? It's used for business and academia in ways that aren't going away, yes. M2M communication will stay. Social media is the largest user-facing segment and it might not. I don't have a sense of how big these sectors are relative to each other. If the largest sectors of the internet disappear, the internet shrinks a lot.

I do believe that charging for it is one way to create some friction, but it's not enough.

Twitter is full of blue checks that are just bots and automated reply guys.

I'm treating now all these bots as a stressor on our defense systems, and we will end up having to learn how to build a real Web of Trust, and really up our game on the PKI side. We also need some good Zero Knowledge proof of humanity that people can tie to their Keyoxide profile, so that we can just filter out any message that is not provably associated with a human.

Ha yeah, I quite like the 2003 vintage.

4chan has bots too.

Curious how you came to that conclusion. Anecdotally, places where you can slur to your heart's content like /r/conservative seem far more inundated with bots than other areas of Reddit. I feel like that's really saying something too, because Reddit has a really bad bot problem overall.

If someone wants to read the AMA, it is here: https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/1qhf27j/alexis_ohania...

Well, it's like two major LLM models ago?

They say trust is their product, well,I guess they're sold out

> Digg's founder who started the company back in 2004

Their plan is to make the internet what is was 22 years ago.

I do have a lemmy account, but have not really returned to it in a while. Maybe I haven't found the right communities yet, but it had nothing about it that felt engaging. People upvoted, but nobody talked. No interaction. Digg felt more alive from day one. I replied to a post in a niche community with ~100 members and only afterwards realized it was @justin.

My experience with lemmy has not been nice. A majority of people there are just downright awful, and the mods are often power-hungry and overzealous in their actions. Many times entire servers are defederated from many others due to how a large percentage of their users behave.

Example: https://0x0.st/8RmU.png

You're right, and that is one of the lessons to be reminded of here.

My main point wasn't that, though. It's simply a bad and low-effort way to handle the situation, and like one of the other replies points out, there are better options. They could have just as well disabled posting and maybe even viewing of submissions and communities for the time being. Just shutting it all down immediately without notice leaves a bad taste in my mouth, and I will not be among the people returning for their next relaunch. I am sure others feel the same way, and I don't think it is a wise decision to needlessly put off your early adopters if you're hoping for them to come back "next time".

Yeah. Sadly the default communities were flooded with blog spam, and that's just the part I noticed. A couple days ago a bunch of smaller communities also got a noticeable bump in members. That didn't change anything in my own community, but others apparently weren't so lucky.

I can see why the team got overwhelmed. I wouldn't want to have to deal with that.

Not. Until. Federated. Services. Don't. Suck.

:)

Fail Fast I guess!

Eh - it IS what most users want.

In the same way people want to be fit.

There are 3 horsemen of Internet forums, one of them is topics with a low barrier to entry.

At that point anyone can speak up, and their opinion takes up as much screen real estate and reading time (often less reading time) than a truly informed take.

By putting effort barriers in place, it forces a fitness test that most users (and bots) fail.

Another subreddit which has strong rules is r/badeconomics. I didn’t know about neutralnews, so thank you for giving me another example to add to the list.

Paying users for their posts is what killed YouTube, Twitter Facebook, Instagram... You will only get shitty ragebait comments. Not to mention that you have to link some bank account with your full name, etc.

This sounds like a platform that has no appeal to the average person, and an incredible appeal to people wishing to launder money or use money to run an influence campaign. Deliberately determining popularity proportionally to the amount of money spent is little different than advertising, but this would be under the false premise of "someone thought this was important/valuable enough to pay money to suggest I see it".

If this were to exist today, I know I would be incredibly critical of it.

I’m missing something. What’s the incentive for people to pay to upvote or comment?

It seems like that would lead to a proliferation of ragebait, deliberately controversial posts, and overly simplistic articles to attract the greatest amount of comments. I frequently see deeply technical high-value posts on HN with very few comments but each thread about politics ends up getting hundreds of comments.

What's stopping you from building it yourself?

You could build this on ATProto.

+1 let's make this

I had an idea a while back where one could have a balance where the site by default doesn't show politics and also doesn't show it to logged out users. One needs to sign up, then switch on a setting to see politics. Users can be required to mark posts as politics, similar to nsfw, nsfl and users can report posts which aren't marked correctly.

Banning discussion of politics is an endorsement of the politics that are already happening. People think it's apolitical but it's not.

I've nver seen discussion of politics on forums do anything but turn into hate-filled, dogmatic posts which aren't productive at all. Every political thread here turns into the same takes and HN imagines itself as intellectually better than others. It's not interesting or productive. If talking about politics fixed things, why are politics worse today than they've ever been? There's no costs and no solutions to ranting about politics online.

The vast majority of people do not want to get on a forum to escape their life to see every more or worse content about their daily lives.

You're right, there needs to be some outlet but when people propose this it's because they are sick and tired of politics and the injection of them into everthing is not helping those politics, it just makes it worse.

Tons of people aren't political creatures and want nothing to do with politicians. This notion that more politics will fix thing isn't born out by Reddit, X, the US Congress, Brexit, etc. It's too easy to divide and manipulate people.

> Wouldn't that be almost impossible?. Politics affects our lives every day.

No it wouldn't be. And if your definition of "politics" includes "literally every time a thing happens" then your definition is so broad as to be useless.

When people say that they want politics banned, they are talking about the extremely controversial arguments that are almost completely unrelated to whatever the community is about. IE, if you run a group about Cheese making, and someone comes in and starts arguing about if an ice shooting on the other side of the country was justified or not, that is... off topic. And everyone with a brain can understand that.

It really isn't that hard to figure out which topics are related to cheese making and which other topics have almost nothing to do with it, even if someone could make a bad faith argument that it is related (EX:, your response would probably go something like "Well what if someone knows a cheese maker who is here illegally, therefore thats why ice enforcement on the other side of the country is relevant!". You could say that but we all would know that you are being bad faith or have some sort of issue with determining what words mean to regular people)

Partial credit in this example could go to political issues that are very obviously and directly related to cheese making. A new tax on cheese that goes into effect in your local town, and very directly is related to the group topic. Stuff like that might be OK.

And your response to this example would go something like "Oh, so are you saying that politics should be allowed!?!? how do you tell the difference between a cheese tax and an ice shooting on the other side of the country? Hypocrit!"

And the answer to that is that we can use our brain. We all know that a cheese tax is more related to the local cheese making group than national politics. And we don't have to argue with clearly bad faith arguments that pretend otherwise.

To summarize, when people say that they want to ban politics, what they actually mean is that they want to ban completely off topic controversial issues that others are trying to shoe horn into a group that isn't related to that issue.

And people are saying that it is OK to compartmentalize things. Every group in the world doesn't have to talk about your pet issue. The cheese making group can just be mostly about cheese making and they don't have to argue every day about national immigration policies.

It's an LLM pattern but it was learned from training on these kinds of posts. People actually wrote that way, a lot, on the internet.

It is not an LLM style and you may want to reconsider your choice of allowing LLMs to live free in your head.

I used to love HN. Lots of interesting stuff, great articles, novel projects. Now it feels like the frontpage is always around 70% LLM-related stuff. And not breakthrough research or projects, just "new Claude version X" and shit like that. Eternal September I guess?

I think anyone with tens of millions of dollars would find it hard to compete in the business world - they should stay in their garden with their rare plants

Wasn’t part of the Reddit story was that they bootstrapped it with fake content?

Spammers don't care if it's fruitful - they just run software that finds every forum and spams it. That's why you can block so many by asking "is an elephant big or small?" on the sign-up form.

Old forums still exist and work just fine without any CEOs pontificating about "community".

I'm on plenty of niche interest boards built on PHPbb, Xenforo and Discourse. Chronologically ordered discussions, RSS support, no algorithmic "For You" bullshit.

Build it and they will come.

Actions speak louder than words. They’ve added features that help spammers hide their behaviour, they are rejecting API keys when people apply for access to deal with the bot problem, they ignore subreddits with spam-friendly moderators, and they ignore reports on vote manipulation. There’s a tonne of low-hanging fruit for tackling the bot problem on Reddit that they aren’t doing anything about, and often it seems like people outside of Reddit do a better job without access to the raw data than people inside Reddit do with the raw data.

I know they claim to care about the bot problem, but they appear at absolute best incredibly complacent about it, if not complicit. All those OnlyFans spammers, AI spam bots, etc. are engagement. They are ruining the platform for people, but engagement figures don’t distinguish between fake engagement and real people. The outcome of their current behaviour is for engagement to steadily rise while the value to real people steadily falls. It’s like they want to be the poster child for Dead Internet Theory.

I don't think this is helpful to bots tbh. For over a decade every time I come across a clear bot account their comment history seems very human. I assume they're either buying real accounts for one-off astroturfing hit and runs in combination with deleting older astroturfing comments after the submission stops getting traffic to hide their footprints. Or more likely there's a giant ring of bots that submit innocent things and then comment preplanned innocent things in a giant bot circle and then make pointed comments on r/politics or whatever after establishing an innocent baseline. This is the obvious approach I'd take if it were me.

I'd also be really surprised if there wasn't coordination with Reddit employees/execs themselves for big advertisers.

The Reddit CEO mentioned that the community thrives when humans talk to humans - and not with AI slop. He also said they are working on efforts to identify automated accounts.

https://www.businessinsider.com/reddit-ceo-platform-most-hum...

But is there still any credit to mine there?

I think apps that want assurance of your identity should pay for your kya. They want valuable people after all, and this should go into their CAC. Users still pay nothing, the identity service does not care about their info, after verification, it drops any details, like uploaded documents, whatever, keeps a certificate.

The cost for this service is likely keeping up with ID systems for multiple countries, infra and support.

Potentially, if this is made into a protocol, it can be decentralized kind of like the SSL system, so each country manages it's own rules.

I am less concerned here. If you plug in AI into your identity, I guess your identity is revoked. I see the problem though, that once a service notices you're an AI, there is no way to block you because we don't really know who you are, only that you're human.

So we need a mechanism that makes this identity verifiable, maybe you get a unique identifier from the identity service, so you can block the account. There is no mechanism to report you to say, the identity service (this is a bot), so you manage your own block list.

The risk here is fingerprinting, your id can be cross referenced across apps. Maybe here is where you implement a zk proof that you're who you say you are.

I don’t love the original idea because uploading identification is risky. You could just plug AI into a verified account but at least the vector is a single account instead of unbounded.

But then if the AI is detected that person can be permanently banned. No more AI. No new accounts.

They want ad supported so they can block all the ads and let the suckers pay. Then complain relentlessly when the content caters to suckers.

Because there's no real discussion in such broad communities. Only jokes, generic replies, and silly fights. They're equivalent to comment sections on news sites.

There are more tells. Rule of three, short cliche sentences.

> We know how frustrating this is, and we hope you'll give us another look once we have something to show, we’ll save your usernames!

I think it's partly human. But ex:

> Network effects aren't just a moat, they're a wall.

isn't a natural sentence.

"This is not...this is" is a tell

If you use the old. site you don't get notifications.

Digg has gone to live on a farm in the countryside where it can run around and play with aol, myspace and all the other websites.

No you can't visit.