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Culture War Roundup for the week of January 27, 2025

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Yes but that’s why we had a bare links repository.

The volume of effort posts has been diminishing anyway.

Bare links and aislop are routes toward similar ends you described, but it’s not the outcome that solely makes them bad. It’s that AI slop is an inferior low effort entry point into a topic, for the reasons I described.

Now ideally we would have nothing but effortful and timely top posts, sure. But my point is that in the event that someone wants to juice the conversation without the effort post, the bare link is a far superior and more earnest, and less empty way to do so.

That said of course bare links as top posts are bad roughly on par (well…) with AIsloptopposting. But nobody is advocating for that. The people are asking for the repository back.

If we want an experiment, let’s have the BLR and an AISlopTopShop that is exactly the same, but for AI posts. Let’s see which produces more fruit, while keeping the rest of the CWR thread clean

that’s why we had a bare links repository

Mods: please consider bringing it back.