>On the other hand, the stuff in private Facebook groups has a shelf life of a few days at best.

>If your goal is to share useful knowledge with the broadest possible audience, Discord groups are a significant regression.

Exactly; open web is better because everything is public and "easy" to find....well if you have a good search engine.

Deep web is huge: Facebook, Instagram, Discord etc. and unfortunately unsearchable.

Right, the issue is not that people don't appreciate good content. The issue is that it's harder for people to find it.

It's an entrenching of the existing phenomenon where the only way to know what to trust on the Web is word of mouth.

That's always been the case. Surely you didn't used to trust random information? Ask any schoolteacher how to decide what to trust on the internet at any point in time. They're not going to say "If it's at the top of Google results" or "If it's a well-designed website", or "If it seems legit".

"Sharing useful knowledge with the broadest possible audience," unfortunately, is the worst possible thing you can do nowadays.

I hate that the internet is turning me into that guy, but everything is turning into shit and cancer, and AI is only making an already bad situation worse. Bots, trolls, psychopaths, psyops and all else aside, anything put on to the public web now only contributes to its metastasis by feeding the AI machine. It's all poisoned now.

Closed, gatekept communities with ephemeral posts and aggressive moderation, which only share knowledge within a limited and trusted circle of confirmed humans, and only for a limited time, designed to be as hostile as possible to sharing and interacting the open web, seem to be the only possible way forward. At least until AI inevitably consumes that as well.

But what about people that are not yet in the community? Are we going to make "it's not what you know but who you know" our default mode of finding answers?

What alternative do you suggest? Everything you expose to the public internet is now feeding AI, and every interaction is more and more likely to be with an AI than a real human.

This isn't a matter of elitism, but vetting direct personal connections and gatekeeping access seems like the only way to keep AI quarantined and guarantee that real human knowledge and art don't get polluted. Every time I see someone on Twitter post something interesting, usually art, it makes me sad. I know that's now a part of the AI machine. That bit of uniqueness and creativity and humanity has been commoditized and assimilated and forever blighted from the universe. Even AI "poisoning" programs will fail over time. The only answer is to never share anything of value over the open internet.

Corporations are already pouring billions of dollars into "going all in" on AI. Video game and software companies are using AI art. Steam is allowing AI content. SAG-AFTRA has signed an agreement allowing the use of AI. Someone is trying to publish a new "tour" of George Carlin with an AI. All of our resources of "knowledge" and "expertise" have been poisoned by AI hallucinations and nonsense. Even everything we're writing here is feeding the beast.

I'm fine with feeding AI if I absolutely have to. I'm not fine with feeding only AI.

I'd think this depends heavily on the subject. Someone asking about fundamental math and physics is likely to get the same answer now as 50 years from now. Immigration law and policy can change quickly and answers from 5 years ago may no longer present accurate information.