Technology

This is basically the case with any community that isn't one of the broad topic/mass appeal subreddits. If you're looking for discussion on anything even slightly specific Lemmy and other alternatives just completely fall on their face. Whether that's support for a specific addiction or even just conversation about one particular video game series, your options are Reddit, discord, Twitter, or nothing.

I used to think "smaller subs can't be infested with bots, right?" Then, over time, I noticed a slight, but ever-increasing trickle of mistakes a human would never make, often in seemingly well-thought out and empathetic replies. At closer inspection, they turn out to be just very nicely phrased, mundane truisms, or their facade totally falls apart, revealing weird, bland, pointless nonsense.
LLMs seem to be doing very well for English and, I keep reading, Chinese, because there is so much material to train them on. Their quality rapidly decreases with the number of speakers a given language has, though. I've learned to quickly spot LLM output (or so I tell myself) in my native language, and it's always so disappointing.

Years and years before the pandemic, I frequented a popular sort of self-help forum. There was always this one "guy" that had a perfect response for every and any question you threw at him, usually within 30 minutes or so. Always at least one full paragraph. 24/7/365. At one point, I remember seeing that he had given more than a million responses. In hindsight, that's clearly not human behavior, but at that time, I had no idea what was going on.