[pardoned_turkey]

> how great was a community to begin with if as the only thing keeping it from becoming a hotbed of fake content is that the users didn't have the tools to fake it.

Do online communities need to be great by some HN metric in order to be deemed worthy of survival?

Some knitters had fun sharing their work online. Now that's ruined by ML. If it was ruined by cryptocurrency mining instead, would we be posting similar "they had it coming" defenses of this destruction? There is a heavy bias on HN toward excusing the externalities of generative AI.

[ltbarcly3]

My hypothesis is that the community is not the community the earnest users thought it was. There is no metric I'm proposing apart from whether the people complaining would actually value the community in the first place if they had an accurate understanding of the type of people the community was made up of.

Lets say you go to the local comedy club and do your act. You aren't a professional comedian, but you want to do comedy for fun, and it's a social experience where you get to interact with people. You work from home and social outlets are very important!

You do this for years, getting feedback from other comedians and enjoying yourself. Later you decide to buckle down and watch the great comedians at work. You watch the top performances by the top comedians, and to your horror you notice something disturbing. The other 'comedians' at your social club are just reading lines they copied down from famous comedy acts they watched on Youtube, verbatim. In fact, out of hundreds of other amateur comedians you had been having drinks with, and being proud when they praised your act or gave feedback, maybe one or two of them were actually writing their own material. They are all faking it to get social credit in this club.

At what point was the club ruined, all along or when you found out?