[extropy-chat] Busy Boards

[Adrian Tymes]

--- Sean Diggins  <sean at valuationpartners.com.au>
wrote:
> www.raptureready.com
> 
> www.raptureready.com/rap2.html
> 
> www.rr-bb.com/
> 
> 
> The third link above is easily the busiest bulletin
> board I have ever seen
> on the web, by several orders of magnitude.

It's busy, but I've seen a few busier.
http://forums.megatokyo.com/
is the busiest one I've seen anywhere, even more than
any of the Usenet groups I've checked.  (Perhaps
Usenet as a whole is busier, but that doesn't really
count as a single BB since people who can get to
certain parts of it can't necessarily get to others,
especially in the alt.* hierarchy, even leaving out
the cases where restricted access is intentional.)

Partly to put the Rapture Ready stuff into
perspective, but also partly to ponder about the
feasability of AI agents that might wade into these
highly-busy spaces on behalf of their users, where
merely reading most of what is said - to say nothing
of understanding a good portion of it, or responding
to a significant percent of whatever fraction of the
discussions one might be able to usefully contribute
to - would take far more time per day than most people
have available to allocate to such things, even if
they - being human beings - might gain from or yearn
for said socialization.  The agents would have to not
simply pass for a human being, but for a specific
human being, and be able to download what they learn
into their human being in a highly compressed form
(relative to how they took this information in).

(One might even wonder about such an agent that got
disconnected from its human, but then went on to do
things - charm people, philosophize, perhaps even find
out that two sides of an offline war frequented the
same online space, so introduced them and negotiated
peace between them - differently than the human being,
who possibly might have wound up drawn into criminal
activity - not the human's fault at first, until
repeated exposure lead to enjoyment, perhaps even
sociopathy.  Then again, I suspect that someone's
already written that story.)