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Ask HN: Please restrict new accounts from posting

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Re: Ask HN: Please restrict new accounts from posting

#451

Post by theshrike79 »

MikeTheGreat wrote: post #86
tasuki wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think your comment was generated by an LLM and hereby vote for your immediate and permanent instant ban.

I think that your comment was generated by Eliza, and hereby vote for you to get a karma boost for being Legit Old School, then an immediate and permanent instant ban. I'm joking, of course. If your comment was generated by Eliza it would have started with "How do you feel about 'I think your comment...'" :)

Joke's on you, all of my comments have been written by Dr. Sbaitso[0] since forever =)

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dr._Sbaitso

Re: Ask HN: Please restrict new accounts from posting

#452

Post by i_think_so »

atoav wrote: post #124
layer8 wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you elaborate on that?

Eliza was one of the first chatbots from the mid to late 60s: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ELIZA

Whooosh! I think you missed the joke. :-)

(I didn't, and I thank everyone involved for the nostalgic moment. Also, shout out to Dr. Sbaitso!)

Re: Ask HN: Please restrict new accounts from posting

#453

Post by i_think_so »

vel0city wrote: post #79
BalinKing wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sorry, updated my original comment—I meant to qualify it to only those cases where it's blatantly obvious. Obviously a lot of ambiguous comments will slip through as a result, but I agree with you that false negatives are better than false positives.

Your comments use em dashes. Many would claim those are vastly overrepresented in AI language and thus an account overly using them are blatantly AI. I don't think your account is AI just by these few comments, but I would like to point out that most rubrics one might use to determine what is obviously AI might end up including the way you talk. If there was a truly accurate tell, some algorithm you could feed a few…

I will never, ever forgive these techbros for ruining emdashes. I will also never stop using them -- they are a permanent part of my writing style -- no matter the personal consequences.

Re: Ask HN: Please restrict new accounts from posting

#454

Post by i_think_so »

foltik wrote: post #367
sfn42 wrote: post #338

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you show an example of "blatantly obvious"?

https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=naomi_kynes https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=aplomb1026 https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=CloakHQ https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=decker_dev

Oof. Some of those seemed reasonable at first. Ex: CloakHQ's comment on Compaq/DEC...

....until you start scrolling down the page and it becomes screamingly obvious that everything it says comes from the same template.

Maybe the problem isn't just that AI produces gobs of useless crap. Maybe what's worse is that it can produce even more mediocre crap that crowds out the good?

All oatmeal, no steak, leads to "starvation" by poor nutrition.

Re: Ask HN: Please restrict new accounts from posting

#455

Post by i_think_so »

ThrowawayR2 wrote: post #15
BalinKing wrote: post #7

I furthermore wish that "posting an LLM-generated comment (i.e. and passing it off as your own)" was worthy of an instant ban, because I see this sort of behavior from non-green accounts as well. EDIT: I meant (but totally forgot) to qualify that my "proposal" would only apply when the LLM-ness is self-obvious—idk, make up a "reasonable person" standard or something. Presumably, the moderators would err on the side o…

The guidelines haven't even been updated to say that AI generated posts and submission aren't permitted even though it's been the policy for a couple of years now if one searches for postings by the moderators. So outsiders and new HN users have no reason to know that it's not allowed. I'm sure there are reasons for it but the inaction is all very mysterious from an outsider perspective.

This obviously should have been done years ago. @dang is there a reason it hasn't?

Re: Ask HN: Please restrict new accounts from posting

#456

Post by i_think_so »

edanm wrote: post #441
christofosho wrote: post #316

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Aren't down votes on this forum restricted to 500+ karma? And how would those compare to flagging? I'd hate for people under 500 karma to think they need to flag a post in order to have it get any attention by moderation. And, with your idea that LLMs help folks write, wouldn't that make the community worse for them? And what about users like this, whose comment are very much entirely LLM generated and possibly even…

I should clarify — I disagree with disallowing any comments that used LLMs in the writing. I think comments should be judged on their quality, not on how they were written. I might agree (don't know) with the idea of limiting new accounts more heavily.

> I disagree with disallowing any comments that used LLMs in the writing.

I think the point here is that the community doesn't want to read AI slop, not that using an LLM to clean up your writing contains some inherent evil that prevents quality.

I don't want to accuse you of strawmanning the argument, but honestly, where did you ever see someone advocating the latter?

Re: Ask HN: Please restrict new accounts from posting

#457

Post by thinkingemote »

dang wrote: post #432
Terretta wrote: post #387

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Interesting litmus test, as the post isn't just green, it's riddled with LLM copyediting. Doesn't read as if originally composed by an LLM, so there's that. Would seem to require some discernment to classify. Not all assistive use is slop.

I mean I guess you're right - I didn't notice it, because the community reaction to the project was so positive. > Not all assistive use is slop. That's right, and the key is to discern which posts/projects are interesting.

The discussion about the LLM assisted/written submission at the time, with replies by the author: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47055300 The defence given was essentially "just reformatted it for better grammar"

It's obviously says LLM to me at first read through.

I suspect that:

a) less people are willing to expend a bit of energy to notice LLM usage given how much of it is. ("we've lost" theory)

b) that people are losing the ability to detect LLM submissions. ("we're cooked" theory)

or c) that people don't care about the use of LLM. ("who cares" theory).

Personally I've been feeling less invested, because it seems as if most users don't care and even the main users of the site don't notice it.

Re: Ask HN: Please restrict new accounts from posting

#458

Post by i_think_so »

edanm wrote: post #440
lovich wrote: post #337

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> LLM-assisted-writing doesn't have to be low effort, it can help people express themselves better in many cases. Hard disagree. I have been learning another language and wouldn’t pretend to write posts after an LLM rewrote it because it is literally lower effort than learning the language correctly. Like definitionally, you are using a machine to offload effort. I don’t know how you could claim that is not “low effo…

I wasn't talking about someone learning the language and using this instead of learning it. There are a lot of people who understand English fairly well, but are not actively learning the language, are not native speakers, and can use LLMs to catch grammar mistakes that they otherwise wouldn't notice. Or catch small nuances in what they are saying, small implications that could otherwise go unnoticed. In general, I p…

> In general, I push back on people saying "I can't find a good/legitimate use for this technology, therefore there are no good/legitimate use for it".

Is that genuinely what you think most of the complaints on HN are saying?

IMNSHO that's an absurd statement to make about the other side of the argument. I'm still giving the benefit of the doubt here but jeeze, this really smells like a strawman.

There are dozens of whole classes of criticism of these tools that I see made on HN, and none of them fall into the category you described.

Ex: Saying "juniors who rely on Copilot/Claud/etc become lazy and can create low quality code without learning how to do better" is night and day different from what you're saying. And that's a criticism that must be addressed or the entire global software industry will destroy itself in two generations.

Surely the difference between that and "we don't want anybody to use Grammarly in their subs that show up here" is completely obvious, yes?

Re: Ask HN: Please restrict new accounts from posting

#459

Post by abnercoimbre »

Aurornis wrote: post #199
dextrous wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One way that I could imagine a human-only HN could evolve in the coming AI wasteland: motivated individuals join small local groups and are validated face-to-face at meet-ups. Local trusted leads gatekeep their chapter’s posts, and this scalable moderation works up the tree. Bad leaves get culled out reasonably fast, maybe there’s some controls at the top level that let you see more content “lower down the tree” if y…

In my recent experience, local meetups and groups are unexpectedly more prone to self promotion and low effort spamming. Local groups have a problem where members admit their friends or pressure others into inviting their friends who are not a net positive, but it feels too impolite to refuse or to kick someone out. Meeting someone in person also develops a sense of a social bond that makes it harder to downvote or f…

This sounds like failure of leadership. Our coding meetups are already implementing what the GP suggested [0] and we also enforce our written guidelines (in this case, politely removing the bad eggs.)

[0] https://handmadecities.com/memos/HMC-Memo-004-Meetup-Hosts.p...

Re: Ask HN: Please restrict new accounts from posting

#460

Post by HendrikHensen »

gnabgib wrote: post #401
HendrikHensen wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I rotate accounts on "social media" (mostly Reddit and Hacker News, the others don't interest me) every few weeks or months to make sure not too much of my post history accumulates in one account. I would dislike it very much if there would be high friction to create new accounts. On the other hand my behavior is probably a major outlier.

You are aware of the guidelines? (You are not fostering community) > Throwaway accounts are ok for sensitive information, but please don't create accounts routinely. HN is a community—users should have an identity that others can relate to. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Thanks, I was not aware. They seem to be guidelines, and not rules. I find my privacy and the prevention of anyone to build a full profile of me (especially how easy that is now in the age of LLMs) a bit more important than the vague concept of "fostering community". I am sorry.
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