Discussion
RE: https://mastodon.social/@verge/117501788476778885
These bans deputize random busybodies into hall monitors, replacing communities built by people who contribute with hierarchies ruled by people who have nothing to offer but the power to stop others.
r/opensource just banned AI, non-English speakers and more https://www.theverge.com/ai-artificial-intelligence/1018217/reddit-opensource-ai-ban
@hbons we don’t see eye to eye on this. That list shows a lot of missed opportunities to engage, mentor, steer, grow the community and deliver outcomes to users.
@Migueldeicaza @hbons my observation is that mentoring these days is “ask the llm, good luck” and no actual building of shared understanding let alone community. Even from people who either have a business incentive to do otherwise or people whose organisational mantra centres community. It is dire out there.
@Migueldeicaza indeed.
pushing back on slop infiltrating every bit of our lives doesn't make a "hallway monitor".
I have a lot of respect for you and the things that you've done. one of the reasons I joined Xamarin was because you were there and you cared about design.
but seeing you embracing this and even having a generated mascotte for your new main effort (Xodot) whilst me and my designer friends are being laid off to feed the slop machine, makes me doubt this.
it feels like a gut punch.
@hbons this post contains a lot of different topics, happy to discuss them separately, but as bundle it seems hard to address
@Migueldeicaza as someone who actually navigates through these subreddits, the language ban is terrible but the AI ban is ABSOLUTELY justified, although there is a ton of room for improvement on the policy and exceptions
all FOSS related communities there have been spammed with vibe-coded apps made in a couple of minutes trying to get media attention and to get "SEO'd" into being recommended by AI agents that scrape those pages
@joojmachine if only we had some kind of rating system for interest. Some kind of voting.
I guess we will never know.
@Migueldeicaza also not necessarily a good way to measure things considering how much of the internet is bots nowadays, it just turns into a feedback loop where these types of posts get a ton of comments debating the LLM usage, thus get pushed more to the top of the pages, thus get more attention and usually more upvotes from people that are either unaware or just deep into the AI trend
I'd much rather be on the side of people doing the volunteer work of having to moderate and contain the spam of content instead of the people spamming this content
@joojmachine the first is a Reddit issue that they have to deal at at scale.
You seem to inhabit a world where people go out of their way to pay for votes to give out free software. You do you.
@Migueldeicaza nah, moderation is good actually. Let communities define their own norms
@klausi if only history had something to teach us, alas, it is beyond our means.
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@Migueldeicaza One thing that I've learned over the course of my life is that helping people succeed should be everyone's default mode.
AI has unlocked a huge segment of people that want to contribute to the open source community. Maybe they're not professional software developers, but maybe they are experts in biology, math, finance, or medicine. This should be seen as an opportunity, not a threat.