this post was submitted on 22 Feb 2024
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My prediction: for the uninformed, public watering holes like Reddit.com will resemble broadcast cable, like tiny islands of signal in a vast ocean of noise. For the rest: people will scatter to private and pseudo-private (think Discord) services, resembling the fragmented 'web' of bulletin boards in the 1980's. The Fediverse as it exists today sits in between the two latter examples, but needs a lot more anti-bot measures when it comes to onboarding and monitoring identities.
Overcoming this would require armies of moderators pushing back against noise, bots, intolerance, and more. Basically what everyone is doing now, but with many more people. It might even make sense to get some non-profit businesses off the ground that are trained and crowd-supported to do this kind of dirtywork, full-time.
What's troubling is that this effectively rolls back the clock for public organization-at-scale. Like a kind of "jamming" for discourse powerful parties don't like. For instance, the kind of grassroots support that the Arab Spring had, might not be possible anymore. The idea that this is either the entire point, or something that has manifest itself as a weak-point in the web, is something we should all be concerned about.
Why do you think Reddit would remain a valuable source of humans talking to each other?
Niche communities, mostly. Anything with tiny membership that's initimate and easily patrolled for interlocutors. But outside that, no, it won't be that useful outside a historical database from before everything blew up.
I think the bots will be hard to detect unless they make one of those bizarre AI statements. And with enough different usernames, there will be plenty that are never caught.