[roadside_picnic]

Thankfully social media is getting so much worse so fast it's making this easier and easier. HN is the last social media platform I still participate in... and I suspect that might not be for too much longer.

I recently logged onto Facebook and Instagram to update my 2-factor auth settings after having too many notifications of malicious login attempts. It was incredible to see what a transformation has happened there, it's like going to a decaying suburban shopping mall with only a few stores left open (and sort of sad to see the remaining users so continually desperate for a drop of approval from some imagined community).

Reddit is mostly bots, astro-turfers and people so brainwashed it's hard to tell the difference. I remember disagreeing with people on there (this in the pre-Digg migration era) you would get interesting divergent points of view. Now it's like people are reading from a script.

Twitter used to be my strongest addiction, but it's almost unbelievable how big a transformation has occurred since it became X. It's almost a parody of everyone's dystopian social media fears.

HN has obviously held up a bit better, but the AI driven mass hallucination impacting this community, combined with the increasingly aggressive manipulation of the home page, is continually making logging out for good seem like the best option.

[epistasis]

> Reddit is mostly bots, astro-turfers and people so brainwashed it's hard to tell the difference. I remember disagreeing with people on there (this in the pre-Digg migration era) you would get interesting divergent points of view. Now it's like people are reading from a script.

It's hard to classify Reddit as one thing, the communities are all so different.

The subreddit for my town has led to several new friends that I meet with in person. Most of that came from coming together to advocate for something at a city council meeting or similar, where there was a directed meat space purpose. Getting together for hobbies like hiking or other things happens once in a while too.

On other, technical subreddits dedicated to digging deep into details, there are few bots. It's all real people with shared interests. Reddit is far better than most forums that I frequent for finding those communities.

The few times I have been swarmed by bots on Reddit was when I touched on a topic where, say, Russia had a strategic interest, then the subreddit would get tons of new commentators from other subreddits, which was the indication of bots. Fortunately the mods took swift action when this happened, becuase my god the discourse is awful when bots flood the zone with their babble.

[michaelt]

> The few times I have been swarmed by bots on Reddit was when I touched on a topic where, say, Russia had a strategic interest

The thing is, bot operators know they can’t just post on Russia-related topics - they need a smokescreen of other ‘normal human’ activity, to avoid getting detected and banned.

If the bots that swarmed you want to appear as only 5% pro-russian, for every response you got they had to make 19 other posts. Predictable advice in advice subs, lukewarm takes in entertainment subs, reposts in image subs, repetitive worn out jokes everywhere.

[nervousvarun]

Totally agree. When people say "Reddit is mostly bots" I find they're really talking about political subs.

Niche/hobby subs are mostly bot-free.

[Imustaskforhelp]

Yes I feel the same way too. This exactly captures what I am feeling right now. I wish there was a way to upvote this twice, thank you so much for writing this!

The only place I am usually active is on Hackernews and on bluesky as wel

> HN has obviously held up a bit better, but the AI driven mass hallucination impacting this community, combined with the increasingly aggressive manipulation of the home page, is continually making logging out for good seem like the best option.

I am not kidding, this is so true. I don't know if I can get flagged again but oh well, The amount of manipulation happening in HN is insane and flagging and just about everything

People called me bots twice on Hackernews for no apparent reason which really hurt and then I created a post about it which got flagged again as well and the responses were.. well not so sympathetic

I feel like I would be better off being an robot than a human in hackernews at this point smh. You get called bots for simply existing and showing your viewpoint or having a viewpoint (different?) or just no apparent reason and I genuinely don't know.

Bluesky has some faults as well but It's (I must admit) more focused on politics. i like the weeds of things in coding. I found some coding spaces in bluesky but they are just not there yet. I ended up spending 2 hours or something trying to build an extension which can automatically create threads for large posts because (you can see) i love writing large posts and bluesky has 300 characters limit and that annoyed me

I don't know what to do as well. I am thinking of still using Hackernews and bluesky but to an degree of moderation. I have tried discord and that doesn't work as well.

Honestly I just don't know as well but right now I atleast feel that I am not alone in this. I am not feeling lonely about feeling like this so once again massive thank you man, these are the comments which lure me into entering hackernews. Not people accusing me of being bots for no apparent reason and this happened on both bluesky and hackernews where pople called me bot and I actually try to be respectful and uh in bluesky someone went on 10 thread comment saying silence AI or silence bot when I was trying to be reasonable for the most part until I trolled them back

And in all of this questioning myself what did I do wrong, did I have a stance and they wanted to deny it and said something, the HN instance just mentioned my name as the reason I am a clanker. All of these things genuinely made me feel like people just wont trust me in being part of this community if someone (even after being a year in) trying to respond nicely and following the rules mostly can call me clanker

Like I just don't know what to do with either bots or people who accuse (you) of being bots. Both just feel the worst in social media and are actively rotting both HN and many other communties to the point that I dont even know what are some good alternatives

I think the biggest negative impact of AI is the fact that we aren't able to trust each other online in my opinion or trust art and other issues as well.

Once again thank you man for writing this. Your comment gets what I am talking about as well and I didn't know how to summarize what I wanted to say!