[jsheard]

> This doesn't work at scale.

See also: the Clarkesworld saga of them being bombarded with mediocre AI-generated short stories. Filtering out bad submissions has always come with the territory, but they're suddenly drowning in them with the advent of LLMs which make it trivial to churn out vaguely story-shaped text on an industrial scale. The generated content isn't good by any measure, but it's "good enough" to pass the smell test and waste a curators time before they realise it has zero actual merit, and there's so much that it becomes a sisyphean task to sort through it.

Likewise with image generation, it's now incredibly easy to churn out images that look like something a person might make to express themselves, which are actually just a loosely guided slice through a statistical model of pre-existing images, passing the smell test for "good art" despite having zero actual intent or substance. It's spam, but for culture.

[Taek]

This seems like a problem you can only solve with an invite or credential system. If you are an invited writer (or have some sort of literary degree) you can submit content, otherwise you gotta let people invite you. AI content is still allowed, and if you post garbage you lose your posting privileges.

[JdeBP]

Has that observably worked for Citizendium or lobste.rs, which have tried exactly that for years, though? Have they been widely recognized as superior to Wikipedia and Hacker News? Have they in fact been widely recognized?

If your answer is that Wikipedia and Hacker News still get the recognition and haven't collapsed, then I suggest that there are already examples to learn from that the same idea for Stack Exchange won't work.