AI Slop Is a Commitment Problem

By Håkon Åmdal · May 2026

The Hacker News thread has hundreds of points. The title: "\"AI slop is killing online communities.\" The top comments are almost all correct."

Forums are filling with plausible-sounding content that costs nothing to generate. Stack Overflow is shutting down hot questions faster than ever. Subreddits are adding proof-of-humanity gates. The problem isn't that the content is wrong — it's that you can no longer use effort as a proxy for legitimacy.

That proxy used to work.

Before LLMs, writing a thoughtful comment required something: time, knowledge, the willingness to be judged publicly. The effort was small — maybe five minutes — but it was real and correlated with having something to say. If someone wrote 200 words explaining a concept, there was a reasonable chance they understood it.…