alt Hacker NewsI have found that the only way to deal with this these days is basically to only use my time to discuss things with people in private, invitation only forums. HN is a rare exception for "I am pretty sure you all are not bots (yet)" and yet anonymous.
Everything else that I care about is in private Signal groups or an equivalent of same with anywhere from 15 to 200 people, and adding any new member means they need to be vouched for by an existing one. And at least 55-75% of the people know each other face to face through industry vertical specific events, trade shows, conferences and similar.
I can't even imagine trying to engage with people on something like x/twitter or other social media. Not knowing whether the 'person' you're replying to is somebody's LLM authoried bot farm.
Replies
That feels like the intellectual equivalent of limiting your career opportunities within a small tiny villages vs. a large city. There is so much more in the city.
> discuss things with people in private, invitation only forums
One of the great things about not having ads on rangerovers.pub is that Google is just not interested in indexing it, because it doesn't make them any money. It shows up here and there in search results, sporadically, especially if you know a username or phrase specific to the site, but other than that if you want to know about it you need to be told about it.
I was never a fan of web forums but they are a nice compromise between really oldschool mailing lists and FAANG content-to-eyeball transformers.
> And at least 55-75% of the people know each other face to face through industry vertical specific events, trade shows, conferences and similar.
Tbh, my experience with _that_ has been worse than with a random sample of internet background radiation, as people seem to have no idea how to filter correctly and who to vouch for and why.
_Especially_ with people they know via work, conferences, etc. Spaces that do not filter for "genuinely relevant contributer to a conversation" at all, but encourage faking that.