A respect system to encourage human interaction

Community Building
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AI-generated summary

The discussion explores a proposal to implement a ‘respect system’ to distinguish and encourage human interaction while discouraging AI-generated content. Andrew_Rowe suggests leveraging Discourse’s workflows and gamification plugins to allow users to cast ‘respect votes’ for humans and down-votes for AI. In this system, a user’s voting power would scale with their accumulated respect, creating a self-policing mechanism that could reduce administrative workload. Andrew notes that current spam tactics involve AI posting topics and up-voting themselves, and asks if such a system would be vulnerable to similar gaming.

NateDhaliwal agrees that the Post Voting plugin could facilitate this approach but raises a critical concern: the potential for AI accounts to artificially inflate their reputation by liking posts and interacting until they reach higher trust levels (e.g., TL3). To mitigate this, Nate proposes changing promotion criteria to be based on the amount of points collected through human interaction rather than traditional metrics. This would represent a fundamental shift toward more aggressive gamification, incentivizing users to produce high-quality, non-AI content to earn status.

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The other topic which asked community administrators if they allow AI responses got me to thinking. With the new workflows feature and a few other goodies like a customized gamification plugin, it wouldn’t be hard to knock something together where real humans get respect votes from other users and AI gets down-voted. The more respect a user has, the more powerful the vote they cast, up or down.

The trust system built into Discourse is basically the same thing

I’ve seen first hand how the spammers try to game the system. They post an AI topic, then up-vote their own topic using another account. The AI spams itself :rofl:

Would my ‘respect’ system just get gamed or do you think it could self-police the forum and encourage human interaction while relieving administrative workload?

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Seems like the Post Voting plugin would work really well with this.

I wonder, have there been AI-powered accounts so much so that they like posts, intersct and reach TL3? Because then that could be a problem.

Perhaps then the solution is to change promotion criteria to amount of points collected. But that will be a fundamental shift in the whole system. It would promote a more aggressive gamification (literally) of the forum to earn points. But you know, aggressively posting good, non-AI content could also be a good thing…