tree-style invite systems reduce AI slop
69 points by j3s
69 points by j3s
This is interesting. I do not think I agree with this take.
lobste.rs is where I see the overwhelming majority of AI slop that I am exposed to. People post slopped articles here all the time. They generally (but not always) seem to be posted in good faith... however, identifying and removing slop just doesn't seem to be something the moderation team here is that concerned about. A "slop" flagging mechanism has been proposed several times, changes to the murky vibecoding tag have been proposed and ignored... it's really rather unfortunate.
I wish the admins here would engage with the community posts on this at all, even if they're not going to do anything about it. I get less slop from browsing news.ycombinator.com, even.
(that is to say, i think moderation is a much more important factor than invites re: slop)
Maybe this post is talking only about user comments, in which case, sure, yeah, I agree. Tree style invites are a cool and effective way to keep heuristics on a community at scale. Though an alternative approach is to not have scale... I see this handled on the Fediverse by many instances being invite-only-on-request -- without any tree stuff needed, because the instance-level communities there are often small enough that everyone knows everyone else.
I think you are (deliberately?) mixing two things together, that we should keep separate.
It seems you are against both, but that's not necessarily the case for everyone.
Don't forget LLM written comments, which plague the orange site, but don't seem to be a thing here (or maybe our user's LLMs are better).
Ah, that's not my intention -- I bring up the vibecoding tag just because its murkiness means it has (wrongly?) been used to flag AI slop (articles produced by an LLM). I don't have many thoughts on vibecoded software / practices or discussion thereof, certainly not anything relevant here.
I am somewhat deliberately mixing together user submissions and user comments. I think both of these are an important aspect of a link aggregator. It may be the case that news.ycombinator.com has an AI-powered astroturfing problem -- wouldn't be surprising to me, it's had an astroturfing problem since far before LLMs -- but I don't really read the comments over there anymore so I wouldn't know. When it comes to user submissions, however, I observe lobste.rs to have more slop.
I see what you mean. Personally I haven't experienced the same frustration others do for the vibecoding tag. At times there are too many of them on the front page, and not many of them particularly interesting, but I think it's kind of inevitable given the rather extreme impact this tech is currently having on almost everyone in our trade.
I think in a few months this will go away when the novelty wears off. We will see less of "OMG I coded a website in a weekend and here are my personal thoughts on vibe coding"
I think the key idea is that the tree-style invitation system is necessary, but not sufficient to keep AI slop out. There also has to be a "constitutional" need for it. That is to say, the community actively not wanting to see content like this and moderation actively stepping in to enforce such content not being posted.
Lobste.rs' system does well to make people think double before they post, but because there is a tacit endorsement of posting AI content (due to there being two tags for it), the system doesn't keep it out.
Neither of these are what I meant, actually. I do not encounter AI slop on news.ycombinator.com, and they do not have tree-style invites, so tree-style invites are neither necessary nor sufficient.
By AI slop, also, I mean LLM-written blog posts. These posts are usually not about AI itself.
I wish the admins here would engage
Note that there is only one admin and two of the three other moderators appear not to be involved anymore.
karma increases the frequency at which you receive registration invites
The invite interface on your profile says:
Invitations are unlimited, but persons you invite will be associated with your account in the user tree and you may be responsible for them if they cause problems.
Yeah, I don’t believe the periodic “registration invite” system described has ever existed here. Looking at /about#invitations now and historically (I sampled from the Wayback Machine’s first capture in 2014 and then every couple of years since), it has always said that “invitations are unlimited” or “there’s no limit on how many invitations a user can send”.
Invitation quota systems have definitely been done, but not here, I think? My suspicion is that the user tree being public may help avoid invitation abuse; just as an invitation quota will.
There was never a limit on invites and I had to do things like this (2) just to encourage people to use them.
At one point we had an invitation queue so non-members could request to receive an invite when they didn't know anyone to ask directly, but I think the new guy disabled that feature.
oh dang, my apologies! I'll correct this in the article quick, i must have conflated it with another system in my memory. annoyed at myself for missing that blurb.
edit: corrected!
That’s improved it, but I think these two items still contain echoes of the error:
* if an account is 70+ days old, the ability to send "registration invites" is unlocked
* registration invites may be gifted to people to register their own account
They’d be clearer as just
* once your account is 70 days old, you can invite others
(And consider merging the next point, about invitations not being limited, into it too.)
Isn't this what @mitchellh wanted to do with Ghostty's contributions? Submit them to a tree-style invite reputation system?
I say go even more extreme with snail mail sign-ups ;)
(Not self promotion, just odd timing that both were published so close together)
I'm pretty sure this is how Nextdoor verifies accounts in the U.S. to make you prove you live in a particular neighborhood. You enter a physical address, they mail you a code, and you use that code to verify your account.
That’s awesome. At least that’s practical as well, since a physical address is part of the requirement.
You can verify your account on SDF.org this way. Send $2 in an envelope with your username as the return address. I just did it and it works fine!
It can be exclusionary and it’s hard to detect. Someone with a lot to offer could be reading this comment as a guest and they wouldn’t be able to upvote to signal their exclusion.
I've applied this system to the Pyramid Nostr relay: https://github.com/fiatjaf/pyramid, totally inspired by Lobsters, and I must say it's been working great.
Here's my instance, for example: https://pyramid.fiatjaf.com/