> That may be, but it's also exposing a lot of gatekeeping

"Gatekeeping" became a trendy term for a while, but in the post-LLM world people are recognizing that "gatekeeping" is not the same as "having a set of standards or rules by which a community abides".

If you have a nice community where anyone can come in and do whatever they want, you no longer have a community, you have a garbage dump. A gate to keep out the people who arrive with bags of garbage is not a bad thing.

While at first glance LLMs do help expose and even circumvent gatekeeping, often it turns out that gatekeeping might have been there for a reason.

We have always relied on superficial cues to tell us about some deeper quality (good faith, willingness to comply with code of conduct, and so on). This is useful and is a necessary shortcut, as if we had to assess everyone and everything from first principles every time things would grind to a halt. Once a cue becomes unviable, the “gate” is not eliminated (except if briefly); the cue is just replaced with something else that is more difficult to circumvent.

I think that brief time after Internet enabled global communication and before LLMs devalued communication signals was pretty cool; now it seems like there’s more and more closed, private or paid communities.

I think that having some difficulty and having to "bloody your forehead" acts as a filter that you cared enough to put a lot of effort into it. From a consumer side, someone having spent a lot of time on something certainly isn't a guarantee that it is good, but it provides _some_ signal about the sincerity of the producer's belief in it. IMO it's not gatekeeping to only want to pay attention to things that care went into: it's just normal human behavior to avoid unreasonable asymmetries of effort.

Most ideas aren't interesting. Implementations are interesting. I don't care if you worked hard on your implementation or not, but I do care if it solves the problem in a novel or especially efficient way. These are not the hallmarks of AI solutions.

It's not a hazing ritual, it's a valuable learning experience. Yes, it's nice to have the option of foregoing it, but it's a tradeoff.

Gatekeeping can be a good thing -- if you have to put effort into what you create, you're going to be more selective about what ideas you invest in. I wouldn't call that "bloodying your forehead", I'd call it putting work into something before demanding attention

It's not about having to put in effort for the sake of it, the point is that building something by hand you will gain insight into the problem, which insight then becomes a valuable contribution.

What if the AI produces writing that better accomplishes my goal than writing it myself? Why do you feel differently about these two acts?

For what it's worth, the unifying idea behind both is basically a "hazing ritual", or more neutrally phrased, skin in the game. It takes time and energy to look at things people produce. You should spend time and energy making sure I'm not looking at a pile of shit. Doesn't matter if it's a website or prose.

Obviously some people don't. And that's why the signal to noise ratio is becoming shit very quickly.

Nothing wrong with some degree of gatekeeping though. A measured amount of elitism is a force for good.

Some people here enjoy solutions to difficult technical problems? It's not product hunt

> what was interesting about a "Show HN" post was that someone had the technical competence to put something together

Wouldn't the masses of Show HN posts that have gotten no interest pre-AI refute that?

gatekeeping is just a synonym for curration by people who don't like the currators choice.

And we are going to need more curration so goddamned badly....

I can't believe the mods at /r/screenprinting took down my post on the CustomInk shirt I ordered.