Can we stop building communities in non-indexable locations? The death of forums and hence “google-ability” for problems and solutions is so depressing. The UX is worse in every way
I think this is largely a consequence of the escalating commoditization of human attention, political polarization, marketing yadda yadda.
Communities disperse, and are drawn to solutions that make them a little trickier to bot into and be absorbed by the marketing apparatus. A little friction that makes it harder for sock puppets / gpt bots carpet bombing your communities wholesale is an ephemeral competitive advantage right now. Not a perfect defense, but what is anymore? Is it even possible to build an effective captcha now?
Tell you what would really gum them up, make some communities require people buy a physical X$ RSA token. Sure you could make bots for that, but how long to automate the unboxing of those tokens? It could become an arms race where the packaging becomes the captcha.
Some humans are going to always try to keep moving ahead of the noise wavefront. I'm rooting for them.
Wanting all things to be index-able these days kind of feels like asking early 90's internet kids to be normal and go hang out at the mall.
Bingo! I changed my mind about this after AI. (Specifically that they are allowed to train & commercialize any IP they want without license - I have nothing against AI itself)
Negative. Communities need not be findable by bots on the public web, in fact many should not be. Nobody has a right to read, index, analyze, or resell my conversations with friends. Anyone who wants to has plenty of options for posting in public forums, and the movement away from that behavior indicates a growing awareness of its problems.
Not arguing with what you said (not agreeing either) but i want to add a perspective.
Not all human discussion can happen in forum-like format. Quick disposable chats are also usefull for when you're in a state of "figuring things out" where quick and short feedback help you navigate a problem rather than reading long well-researched well-formatted replies.
There must be room for both modes: the "thinking about it now" is in chat and the "having thought about it" is in SO, forums, documentation etc etc.
