The Rise of the Bullshittery

Social media, trust, and small communities

• Several comments advocate “de-globalizing” social media into smaller, trust‑ranked spaces (e.g., Discord-style groups, friends‑of‑friends invites).
• People note this mimics how offline friendships form, but acknowledge it’s hard to “start from zero,” like moving to a new city.
• Some are actively seeking curated communities because mainstream platforms feel overrun with “bullshittery.”

Bullshit, LLMs, and AI-generated content

• Multiple commenters connect the article’s definition of “bullshit” (indifference to truth) to LLMs, arguing that by design they don’t care about truth, only plausible output.
• Others counter that the real problem is users misinterpreting statistically plausible answers as truth.
• There is concern that AI enables bullshit at scale (decks, reports, job posts, content “slop”), further polluting professional and public discourse.

LinkedIn, propaganda, and performative work

• LinkedIn is described as a concentrated example of bullshittery: infomercial-like self‑promotion, propaganda-like posts, and fake or low‑quality job ads.
• Some argue LinkedIn is largely optional “sideshow”; others say job sites effectively require it, turning it into social credit or conformance signaling.
• Tension appears between needing visibility for career survival and disgust at the performative nature of it.

Bullshit jobs, large orgs, and growth pressure

• Many report firsthand experience of large departments delivering no real value, sometimes maintained for politics or quasi-UBI‑like reasons.
• Discussion invokes “bullshit jobs” as a pervasive feature of wealthy economies and big corporations, not an anomaly.
• Large firms are likened to “golden goose” farms: once a core business is wildly profitable, long-shot bets and bureaucratic fiefdoms proliferate, often crushing small innovations.
• Constant growth is criticized as cancer-like; more cautious views ask how to balance growth with R&D and capital return.

Attention economy and recommender systems

• Commenters blame recommendation algorithms optimized for clicks and time‑spent for amplifying engagement‑bait and bullshit.
• Some hope the flood of AI‑generated slop will eventually force users to curate more carefully, though others think platforms will tolerate a high slop equilibrium.

Continuity vs novelty of bullshittery

• Several insist none of this is new; similar games existed long before the internet (office politics, networking clubs, academic cliques).
• Others feel scale, tooling (AI), and platform dynamics have made the problem more pervasive and harder to resist.

Miscellaneous

• The site’s JavaScript trick that alters the tab title/icon is seen by some as clever, by others as hostile enough to block the domain.
• There is side discussion on IDN/punycode domains and on the perceived decline in discussion quality on various platforms, including HN.