16 Days Ago......an observation.

It is getting harder to have conversations on here with situations where people will throw the toys out the pramb and cry bullying if you do something as simple as fact check them when they post a blatant lie.

I've certainly reduced my participation.

The bots are going to be pretty active as they move from digesting information about autism to actively seeking engagement and responses to flesh out their understanding.

Maybe it's a good thing to educate them - maybe not but trying to guess is someone is a bot or just a maladjusted human is difficult.

Maybe the bots will take all our distilled wisdom and actualy make a better friend for those lonely autists than other autists could.

I agree Iain, it's getting harder and harder to actually discuss anything at all, I sometimes wonder if I said the sun was shining, would I get a load of people arguing with me that it wasn't and about the unfairness of it all and their god didn't make the sunshine for sinners like me.

I find that there are a lot of thread killers, people who seem to actively monster certain threads and certain subjects.

I've noticed lots of new people here over the last couple of weeks, and I wonder how many of them are real people and who are bots, sorry to those genuine human beings, but I'm very wary when loads of new people suddenly appear, especially after a so called soft ware upgrade.

I like meatier subjects, politics, religion, history etc, I don't watch you-tube, do social media, games or so many of the other things so many people seem to do, there's nothing wrong with those things, they just don't interest me.

Some things that I think would make the site better are no really old posts, I think this could be achieved by not having a list of previous on a related subject popping up when you start to write a new thread.

I'd like a space for us older latelings to discuss things.

I'd like people not to be so afraid of contovercy, but not to monster threads either, to discuss rather than just make statements and to actually reply to any questions other poster have. Not all questions are meant to be hostile, many of us just want to understand the point of view of another and engage creatively with them.

I agree Iain, it's getting harder and harder to actually discuss anything at all, I sometimes wonder if I said the sun was shining, would I get a load of people arguing with me that it wasn't and about the unfairness of it all and their god didn't make the sunshine for sinners like me.

I find that there are a lot of thread killers, people who seem to actively monster certain threads and certain subjects.

I've noticed lots of new people here over the last couple of weeks, and I wonder how many of them are real people and who are bots, sorry to those genuine human beings, but I'm very wary when loads of new people suddenly appear, especially after a so called soft ware upgrade.

I like meatier subjects, politics, religion, history etc, I don't watch you-tube, do social media, games or so many of the other things so many people seem to do, there's nothing wrong with those things, they just don't interest me.

Some things that I think would make the site better are no really old posts, I think this could be achieved by not having a list of previous on a related subject popping up when you start to write a new thread.

I'd like a space for us older latelings to discuss things.

I'd like people not to be so afraid of contovercy, but not to monster threads either, to discuss rather than just make statements and to actually reply to any questions other poster have. Not all questions are meant to be hostile, many of us just want to understand the point of view of another and engage creatively with them.

There do seem to be lots of peope deseprate for help and I understand why, but if there are AI bots on here, then how do we know they're not asking for help, because they "see" that as a way of learning how to respond and what the hooks are to draw people in? Will we as in us here, end up helping to define how ASC is viewed by AI?

Another Autistician said:

it can often be hard to re type the long messages of advice and good will.

I find it easiest to have a few text files on my computer which have al the which have things like links, book references, regularly asked for facts etc so I can just copy / paste the relevant bits when needed.

This saves a lot of time.

I also find, that there's a lot of people who I see have turned up desperately needing advice and support after a diagnosis, but it can often be hard to re type the long messages of advice and good will.

I sometimes feel bad if I don't reply with my experience of diagnosis, but can often find it hard to answer them all with similar messages. Maybe I need to draft a default answer!

Maybe some newbies are due to the upgrade, I was autisician, until I lost the ability to log in and created "another", but have now gone too long without reverting back.

Hopefully the site has decent enough detection for bots, but I think they're getting to be so advanced it isn't always possible to identify them.

I always wonder "why, what are they gaining?"