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Don't you remember the endless SEO spam that swamped the Net even before GPT, allegedly written by real humans?
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You joke, but I bet every person in this forum, when presented the choice between a bot-filled forum and a guaranteed human-only* forum, they'd go with the latter.

* this is a hypothetical scenario. I don't know any guaranteed human-only digital forums.

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I converse enough with LLMs for research at this point where I feel I have a good enough structure to hop on/off them to primary sources and stuff, so I don't get annoyed with them too easily.

Whereas I haven't seriously reflected on my social media consumption habits for over 15 years, and over the years I'm getting more and more annoyed at social media.

Not to be a bit misanthropic, but there's something seriously wrong with my social media usage, especially when I know there's a real human on the other side, combined with ever increasing annoyance towards commenters and just the feelings I get after reading social media.

It may be dopamine / self-help related, but no actually, I think all of that is part of the issue (discovered that in high school when it was taking off). Something about the way I'm fundamentally interacting with the medium seems so horrible and icky the more I mature.

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I agree with you, but as to your addendum:

Niche hobbyist forums are still safe, for now. There's just not enough commercial interest in petroleum lantern restoration to make it worth anyone's time to poison this particular well.

Even some larger niche hobbies like the saltwater aquarium community seemspretty safe for now (though it also helps that many forums have members who visit each other to trade corals and admire each others tanks).

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On the contrary! The dead-day theorem established earlier states that an 11/22 date filter is a necessary condition for verifiable human-only content, when filtered by content-creation date.

A weaker theorem can be postulated that any such filter provides a second order sufficient condition.

This means we can filter content by account creation date, for example, by hiding all posts and comments from accounts created after the digital death event. This won’t always guarantee human-only content but certainly more than otherwise.

But then we wouldn’t be having this most definitively human-to-human conversation, right?

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