Do you believe what we are doing now is working? Because with the exception of places like this the internet sure looks pretty Dead to me.

You always have to show people their own edits. It's a common form of proofreading. But what's added and how often does matter. Misinformation is one thing. External links are potentially something much worse. I used to think SO had it figured out as far as mutual policing, but that's not working so well now either.

I'm not sure what e.g. showing one one's own change answers. Do you manually review submissions or how does get one out of this initial "put everyone in quarantine" state?

I'm also not sure what "we" are doing now that makes the web look dead to you. I receive no more email spam than ten years ago, less if anything, and I haven't seen any spam on the places that I frequent like HN, stackexchange, wikipedia, mastodon, signal, github, etc.

> and I haven't seen any spam on the places that I frequent like HN, stackexchange, wikipedia, mastodon, signal, github, etc.

Could that just be because the modern LLM generated spam doesn't look like old-school spam? Just recently we learnt that a university conducted a study on Reddit changemyview subreddit using LLM generated comments without getting caught.

If you let good old spam bots loose on a forum, it will outnumber legit messages ten to one easily. If someone uses an LLM to argue about certain topics, that's not spam. It's manipulative, and clearly abusive if there is no human in the loop, but there's no commercial message they're spreading, or at least I'm not seeing any 'buy xyz here <link>', nor off-topic messages

Then again, I noticed a few years ago in a previous "when to report as spam" discussion on HN that this is a lost cause. People will label things they signed up for as spam because they didn't want to receive it anymore, and others defended that behavior. Abuse and manipulation might as well go in that same category of "anything I don't want to read == spam", just know that when you say "spam", there's some people like me who will understand what it used to mean and try to interpret the message as referring to things such as the stereotypical viagra spam

They may not exactly be posting 'buy xyz here <link>' but they can use LLM's human like sentences to advocate for/against whichever product some company wants. A lot of people rely on google searching "best monitor for Mac Reddit" to get reddit results. However, with LLM, these no longer seem reliable.

I guess that can be spam but I'm not seeing a ton of that either, so it's still not obvious to me we're losing this or that war

The thing we're losing is the open web where anyone can view any page and buy any product they can afford without being banned (edit: or, reading back up what this was about, contributing to projects without the input going to /dev/null apparently)