Are you excited to generate an account and communicate with experts such as the ones in the article today?
Where? I admittedly hadn't heard of PhysicsForum before this, so I don't know what it looked liked before, but at time of writing it seems to be structured a lot like HN or most other online forums where there is no semblance of human activity, just computer avatars. Last time I checked human activity comes with humans. Anthropomorphizing software does not make it human.
> Are you excited to generate an account and communicate with experts such as the ones in the article today?
If it is interesting and enjoyable, why not? I don't care about how the software works. I know HN accounts tend to get caught up in comments expressing things like nobody will use software unless it is written in Rust and stuff like that, but interested parties of a product don't think like that. They evaluate a product for what it is, not how it works beneath the sheets.
If you are asking if PhysicsForum in particular is a good product, I cannot meaningfully answer. It is not something that would have floated my boat at any point. From my point of view it never was, but it is apparent that sentiment hasn't been shared, although apparently there has been a meaningful decline in interest so it seems it hasn't held up as a product over time. Key here is that whatever controversial changes were made were made because interest in the product had declined so much already.
What's curious is that nobody was complaining about how bad it had become amid that long decline. They just walked away when it wasn't good anymore. Yet here we are, where you can still walk away all the same, but somehow that's the end of the world?
In my mind this destroys the core value proposition of the site: reputation. If this is a clever pivot than I could use some help understanding the intended direction.
The question was: Where is anything on PhysicsForum presented as human activity? Because I don't see it. It is modelled like most other online message forums, including HN, which explicitly remove any suggestion that there could be humans involved behind the scenes. Which is the whole point! Online forums are for when you want something other than the human experience. When one wants the human experience they go where humans are found.
> If this is a clever pivot than I could use some help understanding the intended direction.
Allegedly the site was effectively dead and this was the operator's attempt to resurrect it. Was it clever? Probably not, but if the operator was clever it wouldn't have reached the point of near death in the first place. What are we expecting here? A miracle worker to come along and give the operator supernatural powers to abate his natural limitations? Not everyone is going to be as smart or capable as you are.
Right, that's the question I struggle to interpret as good faith, but I'll try to answer! For me, the whole concept of online forums is interacting with semi-anonymous humans (and I believe that's why many (most?) ban bots), but also the slogan is "science by humans" and that seems to be their general brand direction:
https://www.physicsforums.com/
But I worry the focus is on the word "human" too much. My complaint is attribution, which applies to any account on the site, human or otherwise.
Since you continue to sidestep the implications of my rhetorical question, I'd ask it non-rhetorically:
Why would anybody make an account on an "expert discussion" site to be misrepresented? Why would anybody, be it you or me or whoever you like, want that?
This is where things break down for me. You want to take humans out of the equation by making any humans that may exist in the process anonymous, to disassociate their involvement, but then worry that the anonymous computer avatars may not be human?
I could at least have a bit more appreciation if you were talking about Facebook Groups, where there is greater effort to make those computer avatars appear human (real names, photos, etc.), but PhysicsForum, HN, and the like chose, seemingly on purpose, to not go in that direction.
If you really want to have discussions with humans, which is valid, why not go outside and meet them where they are found?
> but also the slogan is "science by humans"
If an automotive forum's slogan was "All About Cars" you would disavow any human who uses it? Science by humans can be discussed by non-humans, no? Something and the discussion of something are logically not the same thing.
> Why would anybody make an account on an "expert discussion" site to be misrepresented?
What do you believe is being misrepresented when AI content is posted on a forum? There is no promise of human activity on the typical online forum. To return us to the top, since maybe you've lost sight of what we were talking about, "Using AI to fake posting activity is bad." — but it remains unclear to me why it is bad. I can see how it might end up being low quality "slop", but that is for the users to decide. There is the possibility that users don't find it to be of poor quality and actually enjoy it.
> Using AI to fake posting activity is bad.
This is not what I'm saying! I think I've been quite clear on this point. It's also not the intent of the original comment you replied to, which made clear points beyond the sentence you quoted. I'm not really sure who you're talking to.
It is not what you said, but it is the context that defines what we're talking about. I reiterated it to remind you of what the original reply isolated from a bunch of other ideas that were also thrown around as it was starting to look like you had forgotten what we were discussing, perhaps confused by parallel discussions that branched off in different directions. This seems to confirm that you had forgotten, although perhaps that is a misinterpretation on my part. So that we're clear, are you implying here that you've been trying to change the subject in bad faith?
It's clear you're either unable or unwilling to communicate as equals. Have a good day.
The larger context is a completely different discussion, and one that isn't particularly interesting to have, at least on my side. It wasn't narrowed arbitrarily. I can appreciate that you might find that other topic interesting, but there are plenty of other parallel discussions taking place about that. You don't need to shit up this one with more of the same in order to engage with it. Let's leave the bad faith at the door.