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by refulgentis 2 hours ago
12 minute article.

70% AI.

The only content not flagged?

Copy and pasted PR comments.

Invisible Unicode characters, triads, unnecessary markdown.

Good work, obviated by bloviating. Readers dropping off near-instantly.

A company leaving a slop trail behind its wake.

AI DDOSing should be shameful.

https://www.folklore.org/Saving_Lives.html

4 comments

Yes very LLM (Chatgpt?) style, short sentences e.g.:

    "The app goes away. The proxy does not."
    "The app is the wrapper. The residential IP is the product."
Headers are very chatgpt style too: "Why this is dangerous"

The information in the article is valid and they've done the work to get the data, but the LLM style is irritating.

It’s exhausting. It’s like every article is written by the same author and that author is also your coworker and personal assistant and also moonlights as Brian, a waiter at Chotchkie’s.
Exactly. This is like that Sci fi show where the whole world is taken over by an alien organism and everyone you meet is basically the same one person. The AI is also off-puttingly nice, just like the alien.
The page has scroll hijacking, too.
Here's a bookmarklet which fixes that:

  javascript:(function(){const e=['wheel','mousewheel','DOMMouseScroll','touchmove'];e.forEach(e=>{window.addEventListener(e,function(e){e.stopPropagation()},{capture:true,passive:true})});const t=e=>{if(!e)return;e.style.setProperty('overflow','auto','important');e.style.setProperty('overflow-y','auto','important');e.style.setProperty('overflow-x','visible','important');e.style.setProperty('scroll-behavior','auto','important');e.style.setProperty('position','static','important')};t(document.documentElement);t(document.body);const o=document.createElement('style');o.innerHTML='html, body { overflow: auto !important; overflow-y: auto !important; scroll-behavior: auto !important; position: static !important; height: auto !important; } ::-webkit-scrollbar { width: 12px !important; display: block !important; }';document.head.appendChild(o);})();
Yeah, wading through an endless stream of AI slop articles posted here (and elsewhere like on reddit) is exhausting. I suspect I won't be coming here as often anymore, which is a shame, because I used to find this site very informative and engaging.

Though we've always had our fair share of marketing and growth hack posts this turn with AI is just a different level of frustrating. The dead internet theory is unfortunately very real.