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Ask HN: What if AI was used to verify users reading articles before discussion?

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Re: Ask HN: What if AI was used to verify users reading articles before discussion?

#21

Post by bjourne »

I have noticed that too and it is pretty fucking annoying (+). If the article is about US colleges then the first comment is always about over education and how not every job requires a college degree. If the article is about trains it is about how the US, unlike Europe, is too large for train networks. If it is about renewable energy, the first comment is about how the green movement is shooting itself in the foot by shunning nuclear. And so on.

I think you could at least partially solve the problem by having the ranking algorithm bias more heavily towards recent comments. As it is now the first comments are much more likely to reach high scores than later comments, which is stupid because it might take an hour or two to read an in depth article and formulate something insightful.

+ - And I've been guilty of it too.

Re: Ask HN: What if AI was used to verify users reading articles before discussion?

#22

Post by grawprog »

>The discussion in the thread was cluttered with people attacking straw men instead of having any fruitful discourse.

Isn't this partly why the downvote button exists and pushes lower voted comments down and greys them out or the flag button for those really terrible off topic comments?

Re: Ask HN: What if AI was used to verify users reading articles before discussion?

#23

Post by yaitsyaboi »

onion2k wrote: post #9
morceauxdebois wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your posts wouldnt be blocked, you would have to verify that you have read the article first before posting.

By that you mean you'd have to have read the article and interpreted in the manner by which the HN AI has accepted, right? HN is often accused of being a 'hive mind' of users with homogenous opinions already. Making people assert that they've read the article, and understood it within a set of constraints, could remove a lot of nuance and variation. Plus, I hardly ever read the articles.

Most articles have facts that don’t require (very much) interpretation.

Provide the name of a city mentioned in this article.

Re: Ask HN: What if AI was used to verify users reading articles before discussion?

#24

Post by aboringusername »

"Sorry due to GDPR you cannot view this article."

"Hi - here's 50,000 ads and 1PB of JS loading in your browser and the content jumps around, have fun! Oh btw pls accept cookies from 1,000,000,000 ad networks, kthx".

Most websites consume ungodly amounts of JS, are janky as shit and deplete battery life and consume resources pointlessly and unethically.

If an article loaded as fast as HN does then sure, after all, it's just words on a page like this thread, not hard to render in 100kb of data transfer?

Sadly, because the cancer of ads has infected the internet and we treat it less severely than Covid we get a situation where reading an article becomes choresome.

Fix that then maybe you have a chance but that's why I rarely read the article unless it works on noscript and can load in dial-up style internet conditions. You've got around 3-4 seconds or I'm out.

Re: Ask HN: What if AI was used to verify users reading articles before discussion?

#25

Post by eivarv »

NRKbeta, the tech vertical of the Norwegian public broadcaster NRK, actually did the manual version of this a few years back [0-1], but found it hard to conclude with success or failure based on the evidence they gathered.

[0]: https://nrkbeta.no/2017/08/10/with-a-quiz-to-comment-readers...

[1]: https://www.niemanlab.org/2017/03/this-site-is-taking-the-ed...

Re: Ask HN: What if AI was used to verify users reading articles before discussion?

#27

Post by sobellian »

GPT-3 is neat, but I definitely get "2+2=5" vibes when reading some of its output. There's a lot of content that's statistically plausible but not logically rigorous. The last thing I want is for this species of algorithm to then screen what I post for intellectual rigor.

Re: Ask HN: What if AI was used to verify users reading articles before discussion?

#28

Post by ynac »

I like the idea of knowing who has read an article in full and who has not.

That said, I don't mind some noise from people who scanned (or less) the article. Random and wrong is still fuel for my thinking. Which is why I'm here. I don't have intimate connection with individuals here so much as the group as a whole.

To respond directly to your suggestion, I'd like ANY (even honor system) notation for people who have read the article (RL1, Reading Level: 0-3).

I like the Q and A idea for myself so I can review the article mentally and recapture elements and think more deeply on the subject for retention AND for better participation in the conversation. I would actually like that on my browser - "quiz me on this page" - anyone want to collaborate? Not that I'm a chatty Charlie on the boards here, but it is nice to be more confident in one's ideas before sharing.

Re: Ask HN: What if AI was used to verify users reading articles before discussion?

#29

Post by chroem- »

bjourne wrote: post #21

I have noticed that too and it is pretty fucking annoying (+). If the article is about US colleges then the first comment is always about over education and how not every job requires a college degree. If the article is about trains it is about how the US, unlike Europe, is too large for train networks. If it is about renewable energy, the first comment is about how the green movement is shooting itself in the foot b…

Many people would already consider HN to be a bay area-centric echo chamber. Based on the examples you listed, this seems to be an argument to explicitly enforce that echo chamber so that nonconforming posts are blocked outright. At that point, why even bother allowing users to discuss things at all, if posters are only allowed to agree with each other?

Re: Ask HN: What if AI was used to verify users reading articles before discussion?

#30

Post by nathanaldensr »

yaitsyaboi wrote: post #23
onion2k wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

By that you mean you'd have to have read the article and interpreted in the manner by which the HN AI has accepted, right? HN is often accused of being a 'hive mind' of users with homogenous opinions already. Making people assert that they've read the article, and understood it within a set of constraints, could remove a lot of nuance and variation. Plus, I hardly ever read the articles.

Most articles have facts that don’t require (very much) interpretation. Provide the name of a city mentioned in this article.

Sounds like barely more than a captcha.
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