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> I think someone should start a community online where AI isnt allowed. In case you haven't followed the saga, the latest[1] digg.com relaunch failed because

> I think someone should start a community online where AI isnt allowed. In case you haven't followed the saga, the latest[1] digg.com relaunch failed because they couldn't deal with the bot onslaught [2]. Whoever finds a reliable way to keep AI out of an online community first is likely to become a very rich person. [1] Second-to-last, actually, seeing as there seems to be a new homepage right now. [2] https://www.techspot.com/news/111698-digg-relaunch-fails-two-months-ai-agents-spambots.html https://www.techspot.com/news/111698-digg-relaunch-fails-two...

geokon 4mo ago
lobste.rs uses a web-of-trust referral system. I guess it still involves a moderator killing off bad nodes, but it seems to scale well
- dust-jacket 4mo ago
  yeah but I can't post there because I don't know anyone with an account and frankly CBA traipsing around looking for someone who has an account. does seem like more things will have to go this way though
  - ramon156 4mo ago
    +1, if anyone wants to help me I'd be honored. mail me at ramon(@)odeva(.)nl
  - Timwi 4mo ago
    I actually hung out in their IRC for a while hoping to maybe form a social connection and then get an invite, but somehow it just never materialized, and the chat wasn't engaging, so I stopped coming back...
- usefulcat 4mo ago
  > it seems to scale well This seems hard to say without knowing how large it is. To me, it seems like a relatively small community, far smaller than HN anyway.
  - zipy124 4mo ago
    You can see how large it is at https://lobste.rs/stats https://lobste.rs/stats
    - usefulcat 4mo ago
      Maybe you have to be logged in to see that? Because I don't have a login and all it shows me is a bunch of "no data".
    - akoboldfrying 4mo ago
      It shows "No data" for each of the 5 metrics though?
dwedge 4mo ago
> In case you haven't followed the saga, the latest[1] digg.com relaunch failed because they couldn't deal with the bot onslaught [2] Given that they wrote their goodbye post using LLMs and gave up after such a short amount of time, I don't take that at face value the same way I don't believe AI layoffs
ponkpanda 4mo ago
Perhaps requiring webauthn credential for any post/comment with a whitelist of permitted webauthn hardware devices which must have touch/interaction enabled. I'd have to read the FIDO specs, however the only place I've seen webauthn hardware pinning in the wild is with Azure AD/Entra which is ostensibly based on token GUID. If this is the only enforcement mechanism available, it's spoofable.
- tialaramex 4mo ago
  FIDO tokens are designed to able (if authorized by the software, your web browser typically offers a pop-up where you can decline this) to prove their membership of a batch of tokens, but not their individual identity. The Entra feature you thinking of lets somebody say "Only things which can prove they're in this list work". This could make sense if you, as their employer, issue every employee a custom DoodadCorp Doodad FIDO key and so you don't want somebody's Yubikey or off-brand generic device to work. It's stupid and you shouldn't do it in other scenarios, but your "this is how we detect humans" idea is arguably a scenario where that could make sense. [Edited to add: This feature is called "Attestation"]
- nkrisc 4mo ago
  Then you’ll end up with a forum of only bots because they’ll spoof it and real people won’t put up with the hassle.
- layer8 4mo ago
  This would result in hardware farms of such devices being automatically operated, like the existing iPhone farms used for similar purposes.
- wbl 4mo ago
  Doesn't actually work that well. Browsers hate this, the hardware isn't actually difficult for bots to access, and privacy story is bad. There are solutions being worked on.
pbronez 4mo ago
Isn’t the solution high-quality identity verification? There are piles of digital identity companies out there. They make money selling to banks for KYC compliance. Heck, there are background check as a service companies designed to add trust to gig economy platforms. I used to think that a small payment could accomplish the same thing, but X selling blue check marks proved that doesn’t help much. Well, at least it’s a much weaker signal than the previous curated version. The challenge is any barrier to entry high enough to discourage motivated spammers is also high enough to discourage casual users. That disrupts the network effects you’ve traditionally needed to bootstrap a social website. If I was trying to get a new social site off the ground right now, I would try: 1) secure a good brand from the pre-AI era. Twitter, Digg, Friendster, MySpace. Something that motivates a first look. 2) Require third party identity verification on sign up, configured so the social site is never the custodian of PII, though require enough demographics to support high-value advertising later. Verification is free to the user, ideally provide multiple verification options- one US and one EU at minimum. 3) Target a few core communities and invest. Find the people who moderate historically great subreddits, were active in twitter communities during the good years, etc. get them in your platform. Maybe even pay them. That should be enough to tell you if it’s going to work or not.
21asdffdsa12 4mo ago
Pay per interaction model? 1 cent per post.
- intrasight 4mo ago
  Probably the only solution. But the penny has been deprecated so it will have to be a nickel.
  - imglorp 4mo ago
    Only copper was deprecated. Real $0.01 absolutely exists in your bank etc. Anyway, marketers see a popular site like a physical billboard, where they would pay thousands a month for their message to be seen by thousands of people. If you made it cost pennies to post, and a few more pennies to boost and astroturf, AND that the post would be seen by millions of people, they'd say "By Grabthar's hammer, what a bargain!!" and order a hundred more per day...
- phainopepla2 4mo ago
  I think pay per account (like the Metafilter model) would be better. If you charge $10 for lifetime access and ban slop-posters, it quickly becomes expensive to be a slop merchant
flir 4mo ago
We've already got models that can handle it - eg web of trust. We don't want to use them. Plus "AI" is a spectrum, with "the AI fixed a typo for me" at one end, and "the AI writes my posts for me" at the other.
- makkes 4mo ago
  Web of trust has been a miserable failure because of the GPG's horrible UX and high entry barrier. It's dead, Jim.
  - andrewflnr 4mo ago
    I think they were referring to invitation trees like lobste.rs.
    - ASalazarMX 4mo ago
      That's for children. Make the Pope a certification authority, and he can certify people he trusts, and so on, until the chain reaches you. When you commit a sin, your certificate gets revoked, along with its children. It would give the web of trust a flair of biblical damnnation, and after your fall you could always seek a new certification authority more aligned with your values, like Milei or Putin. When a world leader dies, the tree pruning would be almost apocaliptic.
kitd 4mo ago
Age verification with facial ID? ;)
layer8 4mo ago
> Whoever finds a reliable way to keep AI out of an online community first is likely to become a very rich person. I believe it’s the opposite: You have to pay competent human moderators. Like here on HN.
- LtWorf 4mo ago
  Half the posts here are AI grifting.
  - whyenot 4mo ago
    That’s a pretty extraordinary claim. Do you have anything quantitative to back it up? HN has bots, I think that is a fair assumption, but half? How do you know that for sure?
    - GroksBarnacles 4mo ago
      [flagged]
      - dcuthbertson 4mo ago
        TIL that statements of obvious exaggeration are called causal, hyperbolic statements. Who knew? All kidding aside, I've never heard them called causal hyperbolic before. It's a good term.
      - deleted 4mo ago
        [deleted]
Decabytes 4mo ago
Blizzard's Real ID system would fix all of this. It was ahead of it's time /s
andrewflnr 4mo ago
I suspect real ways to keep AI out of a community, or really to have an online community at all, are going to be structurally incompatible with making anyone rich. The possibility of getting rich poisons the incentives.
- CobrastanJorji 4mo ago
  It can't just be money. It also has to remove any notion of score or ranking. There should be NO incentive to artificially increase anything. Look at Advent of Code. Free site, fun community, but it had a leaderboard. The moment AI was advanced enough, it began dominating the leaderboard. The solution: kill the leaderboard. Sure, you can still solve all the problems with AI and get yourself full points, but you're not competing against anybody, so why bother? As soon as you can get ahead of others at something, even for something as stupid as a karma score on Reddit or on Hacker News, somebody's going to want to increase it badly enough to start cheating.
  - andrewflnr 4mo ago
    Maybe. That's a bit of a different problem: similar mechanic, but much weaker forces with some different pros and cons. Maximizing imaginary internet points is qualitatively different from maximizing actual power in the form of money. I think there's still room to experiment with aligning the incentives on things like karma for community-driven moderation.
    - klez 4mo ago
      If moderation is the problem maybe only allow downvoting? Of course that may bring to the surface a different set of problems (no solution is without drawbacks), but it removes the "numbers go up" incentives.
Caracas288 4mo ago
Altman’s orb is as terrifying as it is because businesses might see it as a solution to a real problem—a problem he helped to create.
- throwway120385 4mo ago
  The reason we didn't see it in the US first is because he was probably gathering data from a pilot system. When he finishes his moonbase and/or volcano lab then we should probably start moving to the Northern Territories or the Yukon.

geokon 4mo ago

lobste.rs uses a web-of-trust referral system. I guess it still involves a moderator killing off bad nodes, but it seems to scale well

dust-jacket 4mo ago
yeah but I can't post there because I don't know anyone with an account and frankly CBA traipsing around looking for someone who has an account. does seem like more things will have to go this way though
- ramon156 4mo ago
  +1, if anyone wants to help me I'd be honored. mail me at ramon(@)odeva(.)nl
- Timwi 4mo ago
  I actually hung out in their IRC for a while hoping to maybe form a social connection and then get an invite, but somehow it just never materialized, and the chat wasn't engaging, so I stopped coming back...
usefulcat 4mo ago
> it seems to scale well This seems hard to say without knowing how large it is. To me, it seems like a relatively small community, far smaller than HN anyway.
- zipy124 4mo ago
  You can see how large it is at https://lobste.rs/stats https://lobste.rs/stats
  - usefulcat 4mo ago
    Maybe you have to be logged in to see that? Because I don't have a login and all it shows me is a bunch of "no data".
  - akoboldfrying 4mo ago
    It shows "No data" for each of the 5 metrics though?

dwedge 4mo ago

> In case you haven't followed the saga, the latest[1] digg.com relaunch failed because they couldn't deal with the bot onslaught [2] Given that they wrote their goodbye post using LLMs and gave up after such a short amount of time, I don't take that at face value the same way I don't believe AI layoffs

ponkpanda 4mo ago

Perhaps requiring webauthn credential for any post/comment with a whitelist of permitted webauthn hardware devices which must have touch/interaction enabled. I'd have to read the FIDO specs, however the only place I've seen webauthn hardware pinning in the wild is with Azure AD/Entra which is ostensibly based on token GUID. If this is the only enforcement mechanism available, it's spoofable.

tialaramex 4mo ago
FIDO tokens are designed to able (if authorized by the software, your web browser typically offers a pop-up where you can decline this) to prove their membership of a batch of tokens, but not their individual identity. The Entra feature you thinking of lets somebody say "Only things which can prove they're in this list work". This could make sense if you, as their employer, issue every employee a custom DoodadCorp Doodad FIDO key and so you don't want somebody's Yubikey or off-brand generic device to work. It's stupid and you shouldn't do it in other scenarios, but your "this is how we detect humans" idea is arguably a scenario where that could make sense. [Edited to add: This feature is called "Attestation"]
nkrisc 4mo ago
Then you’ll end up with a forum of only bots because they’ll spoof it and real people won’t put up with the hassle.
layer8 4mo ago
This would result in hardware farms of such devices being automatically operated, like the existing iPhone farms used for similar purposes.
wbl 4mo ago
Doesn't actually work that well. Browsers hate this, the hardware isn't actually difficult for bots to access, and privacy story is bad. There are solutions being worked on.

pbronez 4mo ago

Isn’t the solution high-quality identity verification? There are piles of digital identity companies out there. They make money selling to banks for KYC compliance. Heck, there are background check as a service companies designed to add trust to gig economy platforms. I used to think that a small payment could accomplish the same thing, but X selling blue check marks proved that doesn’t help much. Well, at least it’s a much weaker signal than the previous curated version. The challenge is any barrier to entry high enough to discourage motivated spammers is also high enough to discourage casual users. That disrupts the network effects you’ve traditionally needed to bootstrap a social website. If I was trying to get a new social site off the ground right now, I would try: 1) secure a good brand from the pre-AI era. Twitter, Digg, Friendster, MySpace. Something that motivates a first look. 2) Require third party identity verification on sign up, configured so the social site is never the custodian of PII, though require enough demographics to support high-value advertising later. Verification is free to the user, ideally provide multiple verification options- one US and one EU at minimum. 3) Target a few core communities and invest. Find the people who moderate historically great subreddits, were active in twitter communities during the good years, etc. get them in your platform. Maybe even pay them. That should be enough to tell you if it’s going to work or not.

21asdffdsa12 4mo ago

Pay per interaction model? 1 cent per post.

intrasight 4mo ago
Probably the only solution. But the penny has been deprecated so it will have to be a nickel.
- imglorp 4mo ago
  Only copper was deprecated. Real $0.01 absolutely exists in your bank etc. Anyway, marketers see a popular site like a physical billboard, where they would pay thousands a month for their message to be seen by thousands of people. If you made it cost pennies to post, and a few more pennies to boost and astroturf, AND that the post would be seen by millions of people, they'd say "By Grabthar's hammer, what a bargain!!" and order a hundred more per day...
phainopepla2 4mo ago
I think pay per account (like the Metafilter model) would be better. If you charge $10 for lifetime access and ban slop-posters, it quickly becomes expensive to be a slop merchant

flir 4mo ago

We've already got models that can handle it - eg web of trust. We don't want to use them. Plus "AI" is a spectrum, with "the AI fixed a typo for me" at one end, and "the AI writes my posts for me" at the other.

makkes 4mo ago
Web of trust has been a miserable failure because of the GPG's horrible UX and high entry barrier. It's dead, Jim.
- andrewflnr 4mo ago
  I think they were referring to invitation trees like lobste.rs.
  - ASalazarMX 4mo ago
    That's for children. Make the Pope a certification authority, and he can certify people he trusts, and so on, until the chain reaches you. When you commit a sin, your certificate gets revoked, along with its children. It would give the web of trust a flair of biblical damnnation, and after your fall you could always seek a new certification authority more aligned with your values, like Milei or Putin. When a world leader dies, the tree pruning would be almost apocaliptic.

kitd 4mo ago

Age verification with facial ID? ;)

layer8 4mo ago

> Whoever finds a reliable way to keep AI out of an online community first is likely to become a very rich person. I believe it’s the opposite: You have to pay competent human moderators. Like here on HN.

LtWorf 4mo ago
Half the posts here are AI grifting.
- whyenot 4mo ago
  That’s a pretty extraordinary claim. Do you have anything quantitative to back it up? HN has bots, I think that is a fair assumption, but half? How do you know that for sure?
  - GroksBarnacles 4mo ago
    [flagged]
    - dcuthbertson 4mo ago
      TIL that statements of obvious exaggeration are called causal, hyperbolic statements. Who knew? All kidding aside, I've never heard them called causal hyperbolic before. It's a good term.
    - deleted 4mo ago
      [deleted]

Decabytes 4mo ago

Blizzard's Real ID system would fix all of this. It was ahead of it's time /s

andrewflnr 4mo ago

I suspect real ways to keep AI out of a community, or really to have an online community at all, are going to be structurally incompatible with making anyone rich. The possibility of getting rich poisons the incentives.

CobrastanJorji 4mo ago
It can't just be money. It also has to remove any notion of score or ranking. There should be NO incentive to artificially increase anything. Look at Advent of Code. Free site, fun community, but it had a leaderboard. The moment AI was advanced enough, it began dominating the leaderboard. The solution: kill the leaderboard. Sure, you can still solve all the problems with AI and get yourself full points, but you're not competing against anybody, so why bother? As soon as you can get ahead of others at something, even for something as stupid as a karma score on Reddit or on Hacker News, somebody's going to want to increase it badly enough to start cheating.
- andrewflnr 4mo ago
  Maybe. That's a bit of a different problem: similar mechanic, but much weaker forces with some different pros and cons. Maximizing imaginary internet points is qualitatively different from maximizing actual power in the form of money. I think there's still room to experiment with aligning the incentives on things like karma for community-driven moderation.
  - klez 4mo ago
    If moderation is the problem maybe only allow downvoting? Of course that may bring to the surface a different set of problems (no solution is without drawbacks), but it removes the "numbers go up" incentives.

Caracas288 4mo ago

Altman’s orb is as terrifying as it is because businesses might see it as a solution to a real problem—a problem he helped to create.

throwway120385 4mo ago
The reason we didn't see it in the US first is because he was probably gathering data from a pilot system. When he finishes his moonbase and/or volcano lab then we should probably start moving to the Northern Territories or the Yukon.