Donation button?

dsio
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I think there's going to be a point where people just get completely sick of generated content and come to view it the same way they do talking to a chatbot or automated assistant when trying to get in contact with a phone company. At that point services that exclusively produce original content will have a bit of a renaissance, but in the interim a lot of existing creators and sites will have died off.

In the mean time though nobody really knows where we're headed, and it could be due for a correction sooner rather than later:

https://www.investors.com/news/ai-stocks-stock-market-tech-bubble-valuations/

The P/E ratios of these companies is now beyond dotcom bubble hysteria levels, and money is still pouring in our of fear or being left behind.

https://markets.businessinsider.com...ook-shiller-pe-ratio-dot-com-bubble-ai-2025-9

But yea for us, we just need to find a way to survive for now and develop and evolve our way out of it in the medium term.
 
Trev
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The perceived value in genuine human-created services and products is going to increase dramatically, IMO. This is already happening. My wife's calligraphy/engraving business a good example. No amount of "AI" tech or robots can touch it. The backlash against AI-slop and automation has started.
 
Dan S
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Years ago I truly believed that people would eventually tire of misinformation on free websites and that there would be a resurgence of subscription sites with vetted information. Obviously that did not happen.

I hope that this AI surge is transient but I wouldn’t bet on it.
 
pdxleaf
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dsio dsio
There an extremely well written and thought out article here in Nplusone magazine that gives me some hope that the rejection of generated content will eventually happen but the timing remains an open question

https://www.nplusonemag.com/issue-51/the-intellectual-situation/large-language-muddle/

The article accurately summarizes the threat, but the suggested responses make me more pessimistic, as they feel quixotic.

The Threat, summarized:

"The temptation to resign ourselves to resignation is never stronger than at a time of overlapping crises. The AI upheaval is unique in its ability to metabolize any number of dread-inducing transformations. The university is becoming more corporate, more politically oppressive, and all but hostile to the humanities? Yes - and every student gets their own personal chatbot. The second coming of the Trump Administration has exposed the civic sclerosis of the US body politic? Time to turn the Social Security Administration over to Grok. Climate apocalypse now feels less like a distant terror than a fact of life? In three years, roughly a tenth of US energy demand will come from data centers alone.1 ..."

How to Resist, according to the author:

"Learn to tell - to read closely enough to tell - the work of people from the work of bots."

"Don’t publish AI bullshit. Don’t even publish mealymouthed essays about the temptation to produce AI bullshit....Promote and produce original work of value, work that’s cliché-resistant and unreplicable..,"

"Pedagogically, alternatives to acquiescence remain available. Some are old, like blue-book exams, in-class writing, or one-on-one tutoring."

"Stigmatization is a powerful force, and disgust and shame are among our greatest tools. Put plainly, you should feel bad for using AI."

These are valid responses, but they sound anemic, (not that I have any better solution.) At best, it means human creativity will survive AI, if only cloistered in Gertrude Stein-like Salons. But if these are our best available responses, it's inevitable that we are about to be steam-rolled by AI.

Of the summarized threats, as terrible is the threat to the humanities, nothing is as chilling as the threat to the "US body politic."
 
Jakeys
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Great thread. As a millennial who works in technology and is frankly perpetually online though I'm trying to reduce it, I'm pretty sickened by what the internet has become. The "AI slop" problem already discussed is one major issue, but another is just that the internet used to be a collection of smaller sites and often communities, but now it's been hyperfocused into massive multi billion dollar "platforms" where everything is algorithmically fed. Most people day to day really only interact with a very small number of companies, who don't actually want to help users but rather capture them, get them addicted, and then extract everything they can in the form of ads, data, time and money.

This forum is a bastion of the old internet, genuinely. There was a period in the early 2000's where communities existed in many distinct web forums and IRC servers, most of which have been long gone and their user bases absorbed into Reddit or Discord, both of which are guilty of the above. Neither of those is a suitable replacement for a web forum, Reddit is just about the latest algorithmic content and is currently well along the path of platform decay (enshittification) with very little tangible information buried behind a very poor quality search feature. Discord is even worse for knowledge, but does at least offer the ability to form a community like a forum and isn't quite as far along the enshittification path yet.

If Omega Forums disappeared tomorrow, a massive wealth of information would be lost forever and no current platforms can replace it.

Trev Trev
The perceived value in genuine human-created services and products is going to increase dramatically, IMO. This is already happening. My wife's calligraphy/engraving business a good example. No amount of "AI" tech or robots can touch it. The backlash against AI-slop and automation has started.

I'm hopeful of this too, but I'm pessimistic. AI generated content is wildly popular and I'm finding it harder every day to avoid it. It's super insidious too, I've come across news articles written by AI where it wasn't apparent, videos which seem to be actual informational content but when you click on it it's just stock footage and AI voice, and I've seen a big rise in AI generated comments on Reddit as well. The last one is the scariest to me, they appear to be real users and they respond to the current topic, with no obvious motive. I figure I'm only spotting the obvious ones, but there must be more I'm missing. I'm starting to think the dead internet theory might be coming true.

AI assistance was not used to generate this reply. 😜
 
ErichKeane
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I was thinking today... if you were to charge a dollar for every new contributor who asks "Is this a fake?" on the forum, you wouldn't need memberships 😁
 
dsio
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ErichKeane ErichKeane
I was thinking today... if you were to charge a dollar for every new contributor who asks "Is this a fake?" on the forum, you wouldn't need memberships 😁
Well that’s how we get people in the door, get them into watches, by the second one they’re addicted and then we have another watch collector trying to justify their habit to loved ones.

People need a few good watches under their belt to find the place worth it, or at least to avoid one bad one.
 
dsio
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If the site feels slightly slow at the moment it's because we're getting hammered by another bunch of AI scrapers that aren't adhering to the rules. We're working to block them all now.
 
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