I don't think these things follow from each other.

Smaller-scale, pre-social-media forums and such in many ways took things more seriously, not less. The poster-to-moderator ratio was WAY lower than somewhere like Facebook or Twitter, and things got handled faster. Internet content was generally not taken too seriously, but internet communities were still serious, and they had better tools for enforcement than they do if they live inside of Twitter.

In a world where someone could spin up a bunch of generative AI bots and target them at a forum to screw with people (whether commercial spam or trolling or just subtle disinformation) that seems a lot harder to maintain.

>> The poster-to-moderator ratio was WAY lower than somewhere like Facebook or Twitter, and things got handled faster.

But, honestly and genuinely asking here: isn't that exacly what happens when all you think is about scale, money and growth, at all costs? (I mean, on the big social networks side)

I would definitely say that the big social network sites are bad for the internet and bad for "real world" society as well; I think it's a perfect example of an externality that they ignore in going for money at all costs.

The tools for a community to self-moderate is the key here, along with communities being able to define their own boundaries.

Reddit communities with active moderators are often great places to have respectful conversations. Twitter, on the other extreme, has virtually zero moderation tools for any group. You get to live with whatever rules Twitter sets for the entire platform (and die by the group that's able to hack them)

The biggest question for me right now is "can Reddit [or similar] survive hordes of generative AI spam/troll/abuse bots without changing to a paid membership model?"

I don't know if the current tools are up to the task.

Good point. It doesn't necessarily have to be a paid membership, but it would need some type of reputation formation. Ability to pay money is one way to grant you a "prob not a bot" reputation.

There's many other ways to set reputation thought:

- I've seen private online communities where you need one or two members to "vouch" for you

- StackOverflow has it's own reputation model based on how helpful you've been in the past

- Bitcoin et-all use proof-of-work as a reputation model.

I'm sure there are many more just waiting to be discovered

I think generative AI is a game changer here. The more easily people can be fooled into thinking the bot is alive and sentient, the more easy it is to scale reputation-gathering.

StackOverflow and such are probably fine since they are generally "testable" answers.

Otherwise, we've already seen marketers figure out how to deal with reputation - "influencer marketing" is far higher-reputation, in terms of whether or not people want to interact with the marketing/marketers, than email spam was a decade ago. So imagine a forum about Toyotas. Have a bunch of mostly-chatbot-powered members hang out for a while, talking about how they like Toyotas, each with distinct voices and personalities and hobbies and (AI-generated) photos of their cars in different parts of the country... then over the next year, they slowly all start realizing that man, that new Honda is making them rethink their Toyota fandom!

You could do this today without generative AI - and people do, especially for things with huge marketing budgets like political campaigns! - but it's gonna be a LOT cheaper very soon. So it'll happen a lot more.

Vouching would certainly slow things down, but if someone is managing a fleet of 50 GPT bots, once they convince 2 real people to let the first ones in, they can start bringing their others in on their own.

then they get elected and your like...whaaat?