Something happened over the past couple of days since I'm suddenly been playing whack-a-mole with a handful of VS forums I belong to. (A couple, I belonged well before they were bought up.) It's all those "recent activity" emails, all the same format, from different forums. I considered flagging them as spam but instead, went and unsubscribed from everything (it's two steps). Either these were going into the spam folders for months? years?, or they're getting desperate.
To be honest, this was bound to happen. For years, they’ve been buying up great, unique forums by the dozens, only to turn them into soulless, ad-choked assembly lines on their Fora platform. Corporate management almost always kills that cozy, tight-knit vibe of old-school communities the exact reason people joined them in the first place.
I heart my ad blocker.
There was one forum that used to feel kind of cozy since it was started by someone on the other side of our state, and I knew the site owner from the late 90s when we were using the same hosting company. (The host had a private newsgroup server we all participated in.) It's not the same forum anymore; he retired and sold the forum to VS. It was a "hobby" forum. Used to have quite a few things that interested me. Now, all of those interests have been shoved in a corner in favor of a couple other things that don't really interest me. (The older hobbies were more hands-on; the newer ones are more about collecting certain categories of items.)
Another was a music forum (for a specific instrument) out of France. (
@Mr Lucky probably knows it well.) It is still somewhat intact, and my forum ID dates back to 2003. VS must be doing something else now, as it has some sort of automated forum sensor that flagged a photo of a part of an instrument as being NSFW.
Wouldn't surprise me if they created AI tools to auto-moderate all of their forums.
A lot of companies shoved these features in purely to generate investor hype, but we're starting to see it backfire. Ford Motor company just hired back Engineers they fired after realizing the A.I. wasn't getting the job done!
AI is shooting so many industries in the foot. Some corporations using it are now finding the same thing (AI can't create any usable work), or once they get the bill for using AI engines, they realize it costs more than the employees they sacked. Serves them right.
At the end of the day, speculative buzz can only take a platform so far before the actual users push back.
Thankfully that pushback is happening now. In the series of articles I'm starting to work on, I call it an AI arms race. It's basically Big Tech pushing hard to get people to like and adopt it, yet many people (especially Gen Z) mistrust it or refuse to have any part of it. Small businesses are learning that when they take shortcuts with AI to produce flyers, posters, menus, etc., that customers are repelled by those and damage control takes a while. (Customers wonder if that same restaurant that created an AI slop flyer is taking shortcuts with their ingredients or service.)
The datacenters themselves are making more residents angry since nobody wants to live by something that creates noise pollution, generates heat, and/or uses precious water reserves, while getting tax breaks and straining the grid (where many consumers, including yours truly, have seen electricity rates jump 20-25% in the past 18 months). Just north of us on the outskirts of our metro area, which I would call near-rural area with farmlands, there are signs along the main roads saying "No AI."
It makes me wonder why we suddenly need all these dozens if not hundreds of resource-intensive AI datacenters, and what's going to happen when enough of us in society cause a huge drop in AI usage. Are we going to have all these abandoned buildings sitting unused? I feel it may take another year or two before we hit a breaking point.
And yep, bringing this full circle, we're seeing that even VS can't add AI without people complaining about it, and their stock is still tanking.
In today's internet you can get slop posted to your forum for free.
Too true!
Thankfully a lot of the youngsters raised on social media don't last long, and our forums skew older anyway. The few young stragglers who remain actually come around and start posting more like the rest of us do. They enjoy being there. There's still hope for us antique forum owners yet.
), their AI bot ForaFrank is replying to threads with the typical slop that is AI. It's all nonsense replies, basically restating what was already said. Thankfully they didn't make ForaFrank a staff member, so it can be ignored. It's not just there--the other forum I used to frequent for a car brand/model is similarly infested with the slop, and the "welcome" threads all receive the exact same reply.
