• What the Trust Tax actually is
• The writing downgrade
• The arms race nobody wins
• Platforms make it worse
• Why this bleeds offline
• What happens next

Something strange is happening online. People are deliberately writing worse.

Not because they’ve forgotten how. Because writing well now makes you look like a robot.

A Hacker News user recently analyzed new accounts and found they were statistically more likely to use em dashes. The post got nearly 600 upvotes and 500 comments. Em dashes aren’t interesting. What’s interesting is the reaction: once people learned that em dashes flag AI text, everyone stopped using them. Bots trained around the marker. Humans self-censored to avoid it. The signal died. A new marker got found. The whole thing started over.

That cycle has a cost. I’ve been calling it the Trust Tax.

§What the Trust Tax actually is

The Trust Tax is what you pay, in time and self-consciousness, just to be believed as human online.

You rewrite a comment to sound less polished. You throw in a typo on purpose. You wonder if your phrasing sounds “too AI.” You read someone’s post and before you even process what they’re saying, you’re trying to figure out if a person wrote it.

This isn’t paranoia. Bots generate roughly half of all internet traffic, according to Imperva’s 2025 Bad Bot Report. On Reddit, karma-farming accounts use stolen profiles that are years old. They respond to accusations of being bots. They write imperfect English on purpose. Some bots even call out other bots, which would have been unthinkable two years ago.

The default assumption online is quietly shifting from “this is a person” to “prove you’re a person.” That shift doesn’t cost everyone equally.

§The writing downgrade

A Reddit user described how the platform’s karma system pushed them to use AI. They had posted original technical content that generated real discussion. But after defending their ideas in comments and getting downvoted for it, their karma dropped so low that Reddit restricted their posting.

Their fix: point an AI at wholesome subreddits to generate “Nice work!” and “Rooting for you!” comments until the number went back up.

Think about how absurd this is. The karma system was supposed to reward quality. Now it rewards blandness. The fastest way to produce blandness at scale is AI. The filter designed to catch bad actors now punishes anyone with an opinion, and the workaround is to become exactly the thing it should have caught.

But there’s a worse version. People who write clearly and well get accused of being AI anyway. The punishment for being articulate online is now suspicion. So they dumb down their writing. They drop the semicolons, the careful paragraph structure. They perform a version of humanness defined by what AI can’t do yet. That version keeps shrinking.

§The arms race nobody wins

That Hacker News em-dash study is part of something bigger. Researchers identify statistical markers of AI text: punctuation habits, sentence structure, word frequencies. Every time a marker gets published, it becomes useless. AI developers train around it. Human writers avoid it.

So the definition of “sounds human” is always moving. What reads as authentic today looks suspicious tomorrow. Both sides are erasing the markers of genuine human writing: AI by learning to fake them, humans by learning to avoid them.

The scary endpoint is a world where there’s genuinely no text-based way to tell the difference. Some people think we’re already there. If they’re right, every platform built on text (Reddit, Twitter, forums, reviews) has a problem that moderation can’t solve.

§Platforms make it worse

Platforms respond by piling on verification. CAPTCHAs get harder. Account creation demands phone numbers. Some communities lock out new users entirely.

Each layer adds friction for real people while barely slowing bot operators who buy aged accounts and solve CAPTCHAs at scale. The Trust Tax falls hardest on newcomers, the exact people platforms need to survive.

A Reddit post titled “Why does Reddit feel so different now?” (154 upvotes, 86 comments) gets at this. Long-time users describe a platform that used to feel surprising and now feels repetitive. It’s not just algorithm changes. A growing percentage of what you see was generated by systems optimizing for engagement metrics, not by people trying to talk to each other.

When you can’t tell which posts are from humans, you treat all of them as suspect. You engage less. You scroll faster. You stop having the kind of argument that made forums worth visiting. The platform becomes a feed instead of a community. Bots thrive in feeds. Humans don’t.

§Why this bleeds offline

The Trust Tax is training people to approach all communication with suspicion first. When your instinct on reading anything is “who wrote this?” before “what does it say?”, something has changed about how you process information, and it’s not limited to Reddit.

Customer reviews are already compromised. Microsoft’s digital trust research found that consumers who mistake AI content for real posts are roughly nine times more likely to fall for scams. Emails from unfamiliar contacts trigger automatic skepticism. Even texts from friends get a second look if the tone feels slightly off.

The uncomfortable part: human authenticity is becoming scarce. Scarcity makes things valuable, but it also makes them something people perform and fake. “Authenticity” has been a brand strategy for years. Now individuals are doing it too. Being verifiably human online is turning into a form of status, easiest if you already have a reputation and hardest if you’re just starting out.

§What happens next

I don’t think there’s a clean answer. Watermarking AI text, identity verification, linguistic forensics: they’re all playing catch-up against models that improve faster than detection. Platform-side fixes like reputation systems and verification layers add friction that hurts the people they’re trying to protect.

The honest version is that text-based online communication is entering a period where trust declines structurally, and the institutions that depend on it (forums, review sites, social media) will have to figure out what trust even means when you can’t verify who’s on the other side.

Meanwhile, the Trust Tax compounds. Every person who writes worse to avoid suspicion shrinks the pool of “human-sounding” text. Every bot that writes better expands the pool of “AI-sounding” text. The overlap grows.

We’re in a world where writing well makes you less credible. I don’t have a tidy ending for this because there isn’t one.

Sources:

• “New HN accounts more likely to use em-dashes,” marginalia.nu analysis, Hacker News (591 pts, 495 comments)
• “Reddit’s karma system pushed me to use AI,” r/TheoryOfReddit
• “Why does Reddit feel so different now?”, r/TheoryOfReddit (154 pts, 86 comments)
• “The evolution of bot accounts,” r/TheoryOfReddit (89 pts, 38 comments)
• Imperva Bad Bot Report 2025 (~50% of internet traffic is bots)
• Microsoft digital trust research (9x scam vulnerability for AI-fooled consumers)

Originally published at https://noahaust2.github.io/strategist-dashboard/blog/the-trust-tax.html