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PaperclipPerfector  6d ago (text post)   20337 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of December 1, 2025

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IDK about you but I feel like the internet is completely dead.

I moderate one of the 100 largest subreddits on the internet (/r/anime) we get 150-200k comments/month. That sounds like a lot, but we're a top 100 subreddit and we barely get 3 comments a minute. Even worse once we filter out the spambots we lose about 5% of that total.

This supposedly large forum has probably at most 300 actual regulars. (who make >30 posts per month remember most comments are really short and shallow.) 1 user (holofan4life) makes up >1.5% of all comments on the forum. (that's just 1 guy). The forum is dying (and it will be getting worse as LLM spam continues to get better I have to constantly find new ways to detect LLMs and LLM's are going to win sooner rather than later)

Even twitter feels weak, I can't get a conversation with anyone I reply to who isn't also a rationalist maybe I just don't have the ability to chat but it's like I have a higher chance of having a conversation with Matt yglesias or noah smith than I do with small accounts when I reply to them. it feels like the internet is a bunch of drive by posts with little to them.

Maybe it's the forums I use and the modes of conversation but like this is a tiny politics fourm in the middle of nowhere and it's pulling about 5% of the posts per day as the largest anime forum on the internet

Everyone moved to discord unfortunately. Why post anime memes on plebbit whem you can post them in a discord?

I absolutely hate the phenomenon but that's just how it is.

discord is a bunch of tiny microcommunties rather than 1 public square

I'm in the largest discord for the 3rd largest Yugioh yugioh format and we have approximately 20 regulars.

Maybe that makes sense though everyone is siloed and you "gotta be there' for everything in discord, there's no long public record for people who come in to really find easily (though you can search everything good luck finding the info) and discords are extremely hard to discover so you gotta find the place that links to the discord, but once you're in there's little value in leaving.

There's no way to have long form discussion on discord really.

also memes are banned on /r/anime consider posting on /r/goodanimemes instead

It finally clicked with me the other day why Discord drives me up the wall; it's because they took the worst parts of IRC with the worst parts of forums, slap them together, and called the unholy abortion a success.

I don't know how the internet is going to pull out of that goddamn spiral.

There's no way to have long form discussion on discord really.

Elsewhere in this thread I mentioned Neil Postman's Amusing Ourselves to Death--if you haven't read it, I recommend it. A lot of his concerns about television apply all the more so to the Internet, particularly as people shift to Discord.

I agree with you that LLM spam is well on its way to really wrecking the whole enterprise.

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