1 Month of Service
With all this talk about the internet being “dead” and social media (Twitter, YouTube, etc.) being flooded with more and more bots—making it harder to tell whether interactions are with real people or just AI—I feel like we might be in for a second boom in forums. Since they’re run by people rather than companies, it’s harder for those kinds of bots to infiltrate them (though not impossible).
In terms of the dead internet theory, what frustrates me more is that my parents taught me not to speak to strangers online or to believe everything I read on the internet because it was still new and scary to them, and they were relentless about this in my upbringing.
Yet somehow, these days in the big 26, I get a new Facebook Messenger message with obvious AI slop that has her convinced a cruise ship tipped over, people were jumping off, and the giant megalodons ate them, and she's spamming me about how it's the End Times. So I have to try and explain to her that it's not real and it's AI-generated. But no matter how many times I explain it, within 24 hours, it's new AI slop that has her freaking out.
I really enjoyed Marilland Forums back when I was a kid, so I do hope Forums make an eventual comeback. Discord has always felt very impersonal and way too fast to really contribute in large settings. But I have no doubt there will be infestations of AI personalities invading forums as well if they (somehow) get big again.