do you think small, invite-only communities will end up being the last holdout for genuine human conversation online? or will bots eventually infiltrate those too?
Bots will absolutely infiltrate them eventually, but I think it's the only solution.
Internet promised ability to connect with anyone anywhere around the world. It felt limitless and infinite.
Turns out in an infinite world, the loudest voices are the ragebaits, the algorithmically-amplified, or the outright scammers.
Human social brain doesn't work in an infinite world, it works for a Dunbar's Number world. And we all like our psuedo-anonymous soapboxes (I'm standing on one right now), but trick will be to realize that the glitter of infinite quantity isn't the same as small-scale connection.
At least for some time I imagine a hybridization may pop up. For example you grow a community of humans that keeps bots under control. Because of this all actors are humans, and valuable because of that.
Hence you'll end up with defectors getting paid to siphon off all the conversations to some ad companies that will work on tying them with real world identities and then serving them more detailed ads in the places they cannot avoid interfacing with the open internet.
I think most small communities will stand bot-free because there's little incentive to have bot engage with it.
But I wonder if there's a size of conversation after which people will still choose AI assisted summaries. Discord had/(has?) a feature where it used LLMs summarize and then notify you about a discussion happening.
The Discord thing sounds like a reasonable and acceptable use case to me. Fuzzy search is basically the only thing LLMs are really useful for, and a feature like that actually serves the user. Help them find stuff that's interesting to them, instead of trying to replace it with a pale imitation of real thought and conversation. My most optimistic view of the future is that features like that will be what sticks around after the hype and bubble.
Internet promised ability to connect with anyone anywhere around the world. It felt limitless and infinite.
Turns out in an infinite world, the loudest voices are the ragebaits, the algorithmically-amplified, or the outright scammers.
Human social brain doesn't work in an infinite world, it works for a Dunbar's Number world. And we all like our psuedo-anonymous soapboxes (I'm standing on one right now), but trick will be to realize that the glitter of infinite quantity isn't the same as small-scale connection.