Are The Good Days Gone?

While gathering my thoughts for the post, an old joke came to my mind, according to which, two friends meet after years. After greeting each other, one asks the other: "What do you do for a living?", to which the other says: "I'm pretending to be someone else." Yes, he was an actor and acting means always playing a role, impersonating someone.

Are The Good Days Gone.jpg

I've been thinking about this, of how many of these we have on Hive. Not actors, but impersonators, one way or another and there's something I don't understand.

There was a time, at the beginning of the legacy chain, when we had genuine users and you could make good friendships, that could even last today. You found plenty of interesting posts, commented on posts you liked, connected with people from (literally) all over the world and had a place where you could write about what you wanted.

Commenting was not really incentivized financially as not many had considerable stake, to be able to vote comments too and many times you had to pay dustbunny to save you from losing the dust value comments.

You can argue that we still have all this today, which, technically might be true, but it's not the same.

Over the years I met a lot of people on the platform. Some have left, some are still here. I'm in contact with some, and lost contact with others. I'm among the lucky ones as I get a good few comments on almost each of my posts, organically. Some of the commenters are my old friends I know for years and many are new, but even so, the result is shocking.

Yesterday I got two AI generated comments and it's not the first time. I'm sure it's not the last time either. After so many years, I can spot AI generated comments from a mile and if you're expecting me to stay silent and do nothing about these, you're wrong.

What I don't understand is, why? Why does someone need AI to write comment? You either have something to say, or you don't. It is this simple. If you don't know what to write, then the topic or the post is not for you. Move on! What are they after with this? Why do they think we're interested in conversing with a bot?

If you think a little deeper, you most likely are wondering how these people live their lives. I am. Using artificial intelligence to say something because they are not capable ... it's shocking to say the least. When you confront them with reality, the first and most obvious reaction you get is: "I didn't know it's not allowed". Seriously? Then they apologize for their mistake. Seriously? Since when is a conscious choice called mistake?

Hive is what you make it to be honestly. It can be a place to make friends, it can be your digital diary, where you share what you think you can or want to share, a digital saving wallet, or a place where you can learn a lot, literally. You can even practice your English, or learn English if you don't master it.

Yet, so many are looking for shortcuts, cheat, steal and impersonate others, lie just to make a few bucks, instead of working on learning something to be better.

Imagine these people walking on the street, meeting someone they know and after greeting them, taking out their phone and asking ChatGPT, what to tell the person they met, then the other person does the same. Is this how you want to live your life? Did you know that the less you use your brain the faster you lose your brain cells?

So again, the question is:

What do you do on Hive?
Pretending to be someone else?

Because using AI is not you and it will not be you, even if you copy paste whatever crap the app gives you. It doesn't make you smarter, it doesn't make you look better, on the contrary.

I miss the early days for many reasons. Yes, we have a lot of development going on and the platform is way better but ... some things are worse. We had a bunch of spammer, comment spammer the, but what I see these days is ... 🤦‍♀

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