Funnily enough, I was just talking about this with someone a few days ago. I've definitely retreated into my fair share of dark forests to escape the spam, bots, and astroturfing. I do wonder if the Fediverse gets popular enough, if we'll have to retreat into a whitelist federation model with invite-only instances. It definitely feels like anything that's open and accessible (and anonymous) is just asking to get turned into a steaming dumpsterfire at this point.
I wonder, what will happen to mainstream platforms.
If you talk to "regular" people without our background, they often enough don't believe that even astroturfing exists, especially not on "their" platform. So there will inevitably be a large amount of people who are oblivious to the fact, that they're talking to machines and feel like this is the real world. That's scary.
AI is trying to model human text, so of course it is capable of degeneracy. It's never going to change so I don't think that's a useful measurement of when we are ready.
