zlacker

>>kaeruc+(OP)
Goodhart's law: if you rely on a social signal to tell you what's good, you'll break that signal.

Very soon, the domain of bullshit will extend to actual text. We'll be able to buy HN comments by the thousand -- expertly wordsmithed, lucid AI comments -- and you can get them to say "this GitHub repo is the best", or "this startup is the real deal". Won't that be fun?

>>perihe+ca
Now is the time to cultivate friendships and to make networks that persist online, and are verified via irl meetups / contacts. People who pull that off now will be in much, much better shape in the future. GPT's output is apparent to a discernible eye right now, but according to the power law, it won't take much "novel" input to train upon to make that discernment useless. Then, the only internet community that could be dependably reliable would be your group of irl verified people.

>>precom+FD
I would phrase it more as we're pretty much out of time to have initiated online-only relationships.

>>passwo+PE
Agreed. It's very difficult now to build communities that have lasting impact, because everyone's saturated with info as-is. Contributions to niche communities now rely on a societal "outsider" status, which means there's basically a couple of people that contribute heavily and very few onlookers. Everything else is either gamified or comes from video games / gambling.

On the bright side, it's THE time to cultivate close friendships and to seek like-minded people. The entire phenomenon of popular attention hugging a community to death does not exist any longer. You can now have OG members persisting with notions for a long time and building a shared mythos with a small group of friends, because information is now more accessible than ever.

Obviously, most people aren't part of these communities. The people that are "drifting" alone are given to wasting their time on charismatic attention-seekers that talk a big game (twitch/e-celebs) but deliver nothing of value. So there's also room in the market for charismatic folk with some technical expertise to rally people to their cause, but only very briefly. This is because the number of people half-committing and then jumping ship is likely the highest it's ever been. Also, platforms have now resorted to paying people to stay on their platform (youtube / tiktok / sponsorships / twitch boosting streamers / etc.) to combat occasional ennui, ironically exacerbating the issue.