The Future of Comments Is Lies, I Guess

This keeps me up at night too. I’d like to stake the position that LLMs are antagonistic to the (beleaguered) idea of an internet.<p>LLMs increase the burden of effort on users to successfully share information with <i>other humans</i>.<p>LLMs are already close to indistinguishable from humans in chat; Bots are already better at persuading humans[1]. Suggesting that users who feel ineffective at conveying their ideas online, are better served by having a bot do it for them.<p>All of this, is effectively putting a fitness function on online interactions, increasing the cognitive effort required for <i>humans</i> to interact or be heard. I dont see this playing out in a healthy manner. The only steady state I can envision is where we assume that we ONLY talk to bots online.<p>Free speech and the market place of ideas, sees us bouncing ideas off of each other. Our way of refining our thoughts and forcing ourselves to test our ideas. This is the conversation that is meant to be the bedrock of democratic societies.<p>It does not envisage an environment where the exchange of ideas is <i>into</i> a bot.<p>Yes yes, this is a sky is falling view - not everyone is going to fall off the deep end, and not everyone is going to use a bot.<p>In a funny way, LLMs will outcompete average forum critters and trolls for their ecological niches.<p>[1] (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;arxiv.org&#x2F;pdf&#x2F;2505.09662" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;arxiv.org&#x2F;pdf&#x2F;2505.09662</a>)

In Peter Watts&#x27; <i>Maelstrom</i> (2002) it&#x27;s ultimately self replicating code that pushes the internet from a brutal and rough and competitive infoscape into something worse &amp; even more rawly aggressive. But the book and it&#x27;s tattered wasteland of the internet still has such tone setting power for me, set such an image up of an internet after humans: where the competing forces of exploitation have degraded and degraded and degraded the situation, pushing humans out.<p>Recently revisited on Peter&#x27;s blog: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.rifters.com&#x2F;crawl&#x2F;?p=11220" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.rifters.com&#x2F;crawl&#x2F;?p=11220</a>

The only way to solve it for decentralized messaging systems is a decentralized system for verification of identities based on chain of trust and use of digital signatures by default. It must be a legal framework supported by technical means. For example, id providers may be given a responsibility to confirm certain assumptions about their clients (is a real human, is adult etc) while keeping their identity confidential. The government and the corporations will know only what this person allows the id provider to disclose (unless there’s a legal basis for more, like a decision of the court to accept a lawsuit or a court order to identify suspect or witness). Id provider can issue an ID card that can be used as authentication factor. As long as a real person can be confirmed behind the nickname or email address, the cost of abuse will be permanent ban on a platform or on a network. Not many people will risk it. Natural candidates for id providers can be notaries.

Having links in comments has always been problematic.<p>For myself, I usually link to my own stuff; not because I am interested in promoting it, but as relevant backup&#x2F;enhancement of what I am writing about. I think that a link to an article that goes into depth, or to a GitHub repo, is better than a rough (and lengthy) summary in a comment. It also gives others the opportunity to verify what I say. I like to stand behind my words.<p>I suspect that more than a few HN members have written karmabots, and also attackbots.

The one comment is either a splendid illustration or a great piece of sarcasm.

No worries, this won&#x27;t last long.<p>Once the algorithms predominantly feed on their own shit the bazillion dollar clown party is over.

Google discovered the only way to ultimately resolve spam is to raise the cost to create it.<p>For web spam this was HTTPS. For account spam this is phone # 2fa. I think requiring a form of id or payment card is the next step.

What if we charged a small toll for comments. We create a web standard where you can precharge an amount to your browser account, then you get charged $0.02 for making a comment. The price could be progressively raised until the spammers stop. The profit could pay for website hosting. This would be affordable for users but prohibitively expensive for spammers.

<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;archive.ph&#x2F;Vyasv" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;archive.ph&#x2F;Vyasv</a>

Amused that the third comment is the Tirreno guy continuing to spam his project [0]. Good ol&#x27; human spam will never go out of style!<p>[0]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;hn.algolia.com&#x2F;?dateRange=all&amp;page=0&amp;prefix=false&amp;query=tirreno&amp;sort=byDate&amp;type=comment" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;hn.algolia.com&#x2F;?dateRange=all&amp;page=0&amp;prefix=false&amp;qu...</a>

Since detecting LLMs is a silly end goal, the future of moderation probably needs LLMs too, but to evaluate text and see if it fits into blatant commercial speech. It will ruin places where some kinds of commercial speech is wanted (say, asking for a recommendation on reddit). Still, the mindless recommendation of crypto rugpulls and other similar scams will go away.<p>I am more concerned about voice alignment efforts, like someone creating over time 10k real-ish accounts attempt to contribute, but are doing so to just abuse upvote features to change perception. Ultimately figuring out what is a real measure of popularity , and what is just a campaign to, say, send people to your play is going to get even harder than it is now

There&#x27;s a lot of people downplaying the importance of genuine online comments but the reality is that (outside of the bubbles lives in by many HN users) millions upon millions of people are meaningfully participating and forming their viewpoints based on them.<p>I suspect even the &#x27;well I never trust online comments!&#x27; crowd here is not as immune to propaganda as they&#x27;d like to believe themselves to be

On Reddit I’m seeing a ton of what seems like engagement or karma spam that seem LLM generated.<p>It will be a story or question with just enough hints at personal drama and non specifics to engage the community. The stories always seem like a mishmash of past popular posts.<p>They’re usually posted by brand new accounts that rarely if ever post a comment.<p>Some subs seem relatively free of them, others inundated with them.

LLMs do seem like a major issue for spam, does hackernews deal with any of this? I presume yes but how do you deal with it if so.

This reminds me of the first time someone recommended Mr. Beast’s Feastables™ milk chocolate bars as a comment on one of my posts.<p>I ended up going to my local Walmart to try one, and boy was it delicious! Sometimes things work out in life.

I think that, ultimately, systems that humans use to interact on the internet will have to ditch anonymity. If people can&#x27;t cheaply and reliably distinguish human output from LLM output, <i>and people care about only talking to humans</i>, we will need to establish authenticity via other mechanisms. In practice that means PKI or web of trust (or variants&#x2F;combinations), plus reputation systems.<p>Nobody wants this, because it&#x27;s a pain, it hurts privacy (or easily can hurt it) and has other social negatives (cliques forming, people being fake to build their reputation, that episode of Black Mirror, etc.). Anonymity is useful like cash is useful. But if someone invents a machine that can print banknotes that fool 80% of people, eventually cash will go out of circulation.<p>I think the big question is: How much do most people actually care about distinguishing real and fake comments? It hurts moderators a lot, but most people (myself included) don&#x27;t see this pain directly and are highly motivated by convenience.

Doesn’t it seem like LLMs can assist with moderation rather than making it harder?<p>I’m not sure exactly why we are still waiting for the obviously possible ad-hominem and sunk cost fallacy detectors, etc. For the first time we now have the ability to actually build a threaded comment system that (tries to) insist on rational and on topic discussion. Maybe part of that is that we haven’t actually made the leap yet to wanting to censor non contributing but still-human “ contributers” in addition to spam. I guess shit posting is still part of the “real” attention economy and important for engagement.<p>The apparently on topic but subtly wrong stuff is certainly annoying and in the case of vaguely relevant and not obviously commercial misinformation or misapprehension, I’m not sure how to tell humans from bots. But otoh you wouldn’t actually need that level of sophistication to clean up the cesspool of most YouTube or twitter threads.

There is, as ever, an XKCD for this: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;xkcd.com&#x2F;810&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;xkcd.com&#x2F;810&#x2F;</a>

I&#x27;m not that worried because most content and content moderation became heavily homogenized through censorship and political manipulation to the point that a sizeable number of conversations and posts provided very little space for &quot;breakthrough value&quot; or &quot;original value&quot;. Of course, if you&#x27;re part of the Overton window you&#x27;re just now concerned but if you weren&#x27;t, you&#x27;re actually excited to see the disruption.<p>I do recognize the capabilities to hurt from bots in many spaces and cause cost are a real thing to contend with but the paradigm shift is fascinating. Suddenly people need to question authority (LLM output). Awesome. You should&#x27;ve been doing that all along.

The internet sometimes feels like living in a holographic world, as in &quot;The Invention of Morel&quot; [1].<p>A recent anecdote: an acquaintance of mine automated parts of his LinkedIn activity. After I liked one of his posts, I received an automatic message asking how I was doing. I recognized that the message didn&#x27;t match a personal tone, but I replied anyway to catch up. He never responded, highlighting how people are automating the engagement process but can&#x27;t really keep up with the manual follow-through.<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;The_Invention_of_Morel" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;The_Invention_of_Morel</a>

&quot;Unavailable Due to the UK Online Safety Act&quot;

I&#x27;ve got a spouse who works in marketing&#x2F;communications who has spent the weekend working after hours moderating comments on posts about Pride events, and I was musing with her about this -- the days of comments being a thing at all, are numbered. As a means of getting engagement, it gets increasingly the wrong kind not just because of generative AI automation, but because being an asshole is now considered virtuous by many of our highest leaders and the masses are following.<p>What&#x27;s the point in even having comments sections? The CBC here in Canada shut theirs off years ago and frankly the world is better for it. News articles are a swamp of garbage comments, generally.<p>The future of social engagement online is to go back to smaller, registration-required, moderated forums.

See also <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;aphyr.com&#x2F;posts&#x2F;387-the-future-of-customer-support-is-lies-i-guess" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;aphyr.com&#x2F;posts&#x2F;387-the-future-of-customer-support-i...</a> for more AI slop nonsense.

Comments have always been &quot;bullshitting&quot;, and LLM&#x27;s are a tool to help bullshitters quickly generated additional bullshit.<p>LLMs are going to reduce the value of bullshit. Look at how it&#x27;s already decimating the marketing industry!<p>I just bullshitted those last couple sentences though.