Around a week or two ago, there was a stretch of several days in which no new accounts put up posts announcing AI-related projects.
I don’t know about you, but for me it was like a breath of fresh air.
Now the unnaturally persistent flood of AI-related project announcement posts has started up again. It’s making me think of the anecdote regarding reddit’s decision to ban AI as a topic on their r/programming subforum. Apparently the users there all decided it was a very positive improvement.
I’d like to suggest that new users be prevented from posting anything to the Project Announcements subforum until they’ve been here for at least 30 days. This does not seem like an unreasonable restriction, and it should reduce the rate of spam-like posts that seem to be of artificially high frequency and very little interest to the general population here.
Agreed, but I would restrict this ability to not only a certain amount of time, but also a Members status or a similar thing proving that they’re willing to engage with the community outside of shilling their own software.
Edit to add: so many of the NEW SHINY SOFTWARE MADE WITH AI posts are full of people asking why they cannot post links. Now, I joined this forum more than two ago by this point and I barely remember the process, but I’m fairly sure you are given an explanation about links in all of the things you’re meant to read before you register, so it’s infuriating to see yet another Savior Of The Genre stroll in and admit that they didn’t even read what they were meant to read. This is why I think putting the “posting in project announcements” ability behind a gate might be a great thing.
Would it be a good idea to have a sub-forum for such announcements? And maybe people can mute that sub-forum?
I totally agree, but I must admit that I don’t read most parts of all the long texts you get whenever you join a forum. It’s just too much text. I, too, don’t remember the process at joining, but I hope the text for new members is short!
I have experimentally set the project announcement group to require level 1 trust. This is not difficult to obtain unless you’re not interested in participating anywhere else.
New users start at Trust Level 0. To gain level 1 they must…
View five separate topics (click on topics to view)
Read 30 posts (scrolling through counts as “reading”)
I’ve heard the subreddits are at war with anti-AI and pro-AI factions. You couldn’t pay me enough to moderate either.
I’ll also remind everyone that there is a clear distinction between using GenAI to create tools and using it for creative output. That’s the line I draw and maybe we can figure out a way to tag posts as such.
#ai-tools - GenAI used to generate code of an IF tool. Authors and Players never touch GenAI. #ai-integrations - GenAI embedded in a tool. Authors touch GenAI within the tool. #ai-stories - GenAI embedded in a story or used to develop a story. Players touch GenAI directly or the story is generated using GenAI.
I don’t think this is a matter of AI project themselves. I think it’s a matter of the frequency with which AI projects are being published, mostly by people completely new to the forum. This creates a feeling that there’s a large amount of people who don’t care much for the community itself and would rather use the forum to further the reach for the projects they’re creating. The solution isn’t more AI tags in this case.
Yeah, trying to get people to have the courtesy to show up and engage a little with the community, and discourage them from just using us to shill their thing with absolutely no community involvement whatsoever… that’s been a point of etiquette for about as long as I’ve been on the internet.
Nothing to do with AI except that they drastically scale up the number of people doing it.
I actually think its quite rude of us to ignore these people. many enthusiastic posts get no replies. ok, the people shilling their commercial endeavors, i totally agree.
However;
Many are just enthusiastic spods that are under the illusion that AI can somehow work magic and make a next gen system all on its own. Obviously, it can’t and they’ll figure that out eventually.
Maybe there should be some sort of boilerplate reply about this, or a guide. Earlier someone suggested a set of Q&A for new systems. That was a step in the right direction, but it wasn’t an answer to this phenomenon.
Nah, it’s not rude of us to ignore them – no one owes any time or attention to some rando who can’t even be bothered to spend ten minutes reading five other people’s threads to see what this forum is about before demanding attention for their project. That’s the rude behavior. On plenty of forums or sub-reddits there’s a rule that it gets you instantly banned because it’s bad for community. Ignoring them is way more lenient.
On the contrary, what I think is rude is expecting people to read something you didn’t even bother to write. Especially when they’re posting in a community they clearly know nothing about.
Personally I don’t mind the new project announcements in general so I’m glad the decided-upon restrictions ended up being quite mild and reasonable.
What I do mind (and hopefully these modest restrictions will curb!) is when someone is basically spamming. It is discouraging for me to respond to one of these posts and then never receive any acknowledgement or reply from the original poster because they posted once and never came back.
This may have the unintended consequence of people posting in the wrong categories, though. I suspect that people come to the platform to promote first and engage second, so they’ll look for any place to do so.
Yeah, I mean, there are structures in place to deal with that situation regardless of whether it’s happening now for this reason or for other reasons, yeah?
FWIW, I’ve always muted ai tags since I got here. So I’m not experiencing the volume. And it seems I made the right choice.
