alt Hacker NewsMost of this is caused by incentives:
YouTube and others pay for clicks/views, so obviously you can maximize this by producing lots of mediocre content.
LinkedIn is a place to sell, either a service/product to companies or yourself to a future employer. Again, the incentive is to produce more content for less effort.
Even HN has the incentive of promoting people's startups.
Is it possible to create a social network (or "discussion community", if you prefer) that doesn't have any incentive except human-to-human interaction? I don't mean a place where AI is banned, I mean a place where AI is useless, so people don't bother.
The closest thing would probably be private friend groups, but that's probably already well-served by text messaging and in-person gatherings. Are there any other possibilities?
Replies
> Is it possible to create a social network (or "discussion community", if you prefer) that doesn't have any incentive except human-to-human interaction? I don't mean a place where AI is banned, I mean a place where AI is useless, so people don't bother.
Yes, but its size must be limited by Dunbar's number[0]. This is the maximum size of a group of people where everyone can know everyone else on a personal basis. Beyond this, it becomes impossible to organically enforce social norms, and so abstractions like moderators and administrators and codes of conduct become necessary, and still fail to keep everyone on the same page.
>incentives
spot on. The number of times I've came across a poorly made video where half the comments are calling out its inaccuracies. In the end Youtube (or any other platform) and the creator get paid. Any kind of negative interaction with the video either counts as engagement or just means move on to the next whack-a-mole variant.
None of these big tech platforms that involve UGC were ever meant to scale. They are beyond accountable.
I don't think it's doable with the current model of social media but:
1. prohibit all sorts of advertising, explicit and implicit, and actually ban users for it. The reason most people try to get big on SM is so they can land sponsorships outside of the app. But we'd still have the problem of telling whether something is sponsored or not.
2. no global feed, show users what their friends/followers are doing only. You can still have discovery through groups, directories, etc. But it would definitely be worse UX than what we currently have.
Exactly. People spend less time thinking about the underlying structure at play here. Scratch enough at the surface and the problem is always the ads model of internet. Until that is broken or is economically pointless the existing problem will persist.
Elon Musk cops a lot for the degradation of twitter to people who care about that sort of thing, and he definitely plays a part there, but its the monetisation aspect that was the real tilt to all noise in a signal to noise ratio perspective
We've taken a version of the problem in the physical world to the digital world. It runs along the same lines of how high rents (commercial or residential) limit the diversity of people or commercial offering in a place simply because only a certain thing can work or be economically viable. People always want different mixes of things and offering but if the structure (in this case rent) only permits one type of thing then that's all you're going to get
I think incentives is the right way to think about it. Authentic interactions are not monetized. So where are people writing online without expecting payment?
Blogs can have ads, but blogs with RSS feeds are a safer bet as it's hard to monetize an RSS feed. Blogs are a great place to find people who are writing just because they want to write. As I see more AI slop on social media, I spend more time in my feed reader.
Filtering out bots is prohibitive, as bots are currently so close to human text that the false positive rate will curtail human participation.
Any community that ends up creating utility to its users, will attract automation, as someone tries to extract, or even destroy that utility.
A potential option could be figuring out community rules that ensure all content. including bot generated content, provides utility to users. Something like the rules on change my view, or r/AITA. Theres also tests being run to see if LLMs can identify or provide bridges across flamewars.
I remember participating on *free* phpBB forums, or IRC channels. I was amazed that I could chat with people smarter than me, on a wide range of topics, all for the cost of having an internet subscription.
It's only recently, when I was considering to revive the old-school forum interaction, that I have realized that while I got the platforms for free, there were people behind them who paid for the hosting and the storage, and were responsible to moderate the content in order to not derail every discussion to low level accusation and name calling contest.
I can't imagine the amount of time, and tools, it takes to keep discussion forums free of trolls, more so nowadays, with LLMs.