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Reddit is OpenAI’s moat

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Re: Reddit is OpenAI’s moat

#261

Post by ineedasername »

eggbrain wrote: post #42

I think from Reddit's perspective, they are extremely upset with OpenAI, in the same way that I'm sure StackOverflow is upset -- OpenAI took: - The entire corpus of data the community had curated over the last XX years - The "goodwill" that these platforms had developed towards third party developers in allowing developers to work with their data - Potentially large amounts of traffic that would normally come to thei…

>a company that potentially destroyed a ton of their value

I'm not so sure that's the case, for two reasons:

1) I have not stopped appending "reddit" to my searches or stopped visiting StackOverflow or other Stack* sites. ChatGPT is simply now an additional tool, and while there's some overlap in use cases there's also plenty I can do with *GPT that I couldn't with other sites.

2) To the extent that a training corpus relies on these (or any other) data sources, OpenAI has just made them much much more valuable! It's sort of like a mining company discovering that someone has an extremely valuable use case for decades of the mining company's tailings. This "someone" may have been allowed to haul away some of it without payment to the mining company, but now they know its value, now they can build a very lucrative business selling access to what remains, and what will be generates in the future.

That's all highly simplified though. It's of course much more complex than this, much more complex than can be captured in an HN discussion, but we can explore the outlines a bit, and even disagreement will reveal more and more of it.*

Re: Reddit is OpenAI’s moat

#262

Post by dang »

Veen wrote: post #251
dang wrote: post #236

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We sometimes put question marks on titles when a claim in a title is controversial. This is a longstanding practice: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que... . > The answer to any headline with a ? at the end is “no.” There's a popular meme that says that, but it's not true. Edit: after reading everyone's objections I think the easiest thing to do is just reverse all of this. Sorry for the trou…

It may be a longstanding practice, but it's a foolish and aggravating one. Do you think HN's readers are so silly they don't understand claims made in headlines are not to be taken at face value? The article advances a position and argues for it, which is reflected in the original headline formatted as a statement. It doesn't ask a question and then provide answers; the editorialized headline misrepresents the articl…

> even less representative of the content

On the contrary, I changed it to the article's own statement of what it is about. (Note that it happens to be a question - in other words, the mod who put the question mark in the title was on the right track.) More explanation here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36328562.

Replacing a baity title with representative language from the article itself is just about the most common thing mods do on HN. If you think that HN is worth being a regular reader of, then you're benefiting from this practice whether you feel aggravated by it or not; it's foundational to this community.

I know people love to hate HN's title editing practices - I've been hearing about it for well over 10 years - but of all the things we do on HN this is the one I feel most confident about and am happy to defend until the cows come home. This may seem counterintuitive (how can the best thing be what people love to hate?) but there's a simple reason for that: people notice the cases they dislike and overlook the others.

Re: Reddit is OpenAI’s moat

#263

Post by angryasian »

Reddit shut down their api for one reason IPO has to show growth and the only growth left for reddit is *FORCING* users to their own app.

They shut down i.reddit and reddit.compact so theres no optimized mobile web format.

Now they shut down api access to apps. Its as clear as day. I don't think they give a sh*t about AI

Re: Reddit is OpenAI’s moat

#264

Post by dang »

dmazin wrote: post #249
dang wrote: post #246

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I promise you that no one here is incentivized to please Reddit. Have you seen HN lately? Same point if you mean OpenAI. Titles on HN aren't the property of the submitter nor of the author of an article (though the author's opinion carries more weight). They're shared pointers and we edit them to be as neutral as possible. Mods do this all the time and have been doing it since HN began 16 years ago. It's primarily be…

Look, I just don’t think you should editorialize without making it clear. Why is the claim controversial, for example? Edit: I guess we went too deep in the thread, so we're resorting to edits. that was a rhetorical question. It's sort of like the Twitter community notes feature: making the edit, and its reason clear, builds trust. Otherwise, you just look like you're doing something shady (given that, again, the peo…

> I guess we went too deep in the thread, so we're resorting to edits

You can keep replying - you just need to click on the comment's timestamp to go to its page and the reply box will appear there.

> given that, again, the people in the article literally own HN [...] Again, given your incentives, that's worrying.

What people and what incentives are you talking about here?

> that is what upvotes are for

HN has never operated by upvotes alone. It would be a completely different site if it were (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...). HN a curated, moderated site and always has been, and we've always been completely open about this.

Re: Reddit is OpenAI’s moat

#265

Post by Veen »

dang wrote: post #262
Veen wrote: post #251

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It may be a longstanding practice, but it's a foolish and aggravating one. Do you think HN's readers are so silly they don't understand claims made in headlines are not to be taken at face value? The article advances a position and argues for it, which is reflected in the original headline formatted as a statement. It doesn't ask a question and then provide answers; the editorialized headline misrepresents the articl…

> even less representative of the content On the contrary, I changed it to the article's own statement of what it is about. (Note that it happens to be a question - in other words, the mod who put the question mark in the title was on the right track.) More explanation here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36328562 . Replacing a baity title with representative language from the article itself is just about the m…

I have no issue with editing click-bait titles in general, but specifically with adding a "?" where none is required and where it misrepresents the article's content. Your further title edit just strikes me as retaliatory and punitive; it does not encapsulate the article's position in the way the original did and is so uninteresting it's likely to discourage any further attention. You may not think the article deserves attention, but the users apparently disagree—no one in the thread has complained that it is a click-bait article, and people here have a hair-trigger for that sort of stuff.

Re: Reddit is OpenAI’s moat

#266

Post by jacamera »

dang wrote: post #239
jacamera wrote: post #216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I really don't understand the policy of altering headlines here. It's such petty, obnoxious behavior! I really wish they would stop doing it and I would be really annoyed if it happened to an article that I wrote and submitted myself. Thank you for calling it out.

People get upset about title editing on HN because they only notice the cases they dislike. Any practice will seem obnoxious if you only count the things it gets wrong. I can tell you after over a decade doing this job that the title moderation on HN is probably the single most beneficial thing we do. Without that, the front page would consist of linkbait, sensationalism, and rage. In other words, HN wouldn't exist.

> People get upset about title editing on HN because they only notice the cases they dislike. Any practice will seem obnoxious if you only count the things it gets wrong.

I don't like or dislike any particular title or headline. I dislike the policy of selectively altering an author or publisher's chosen headline in general.

> I can tell you after over a decade doing this job that the title moderation on HN is probably the single most beneficial thing we do. Without that, the front page would consist of linkbait, sensationalism, and rage.

I appreciate the insight. Is the plan to keep this policy in place indefinitely in order to protect us from ourselves? I find it very depressing that a community like HN cannot be trusted to look at an unedited list of headlines. Do you think there is any hope of eventually developing something like a collective immunity (or even resistance) to clickbait? If it can't happen here, what does that say about the prospects for media literacy more broadly?

Re: Reddit is OpenAI’s moat

#267

Post by dmazin »

Veen wrote: post #265
dang wrote: post #262

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> even less representative of the content On the contrary, I changed it to the article's own statement of what it is about. (Note that it happens to be a question - in other words, the mod who put the question mark in the title was on the right track.) More explanation here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36328562 . Replacing a baity title with representative language from the article itself is just about the m…

I have no issue with editing click-bait titles in general, but specifically with adding a "?" where none is required and where it misrepresents the article's content. Your further title edit just strikes me as retaliatory and punitive; it does not encapsulate the article's position in the way the original did and is so uninteresting it's likely to discourage any further attention. You may not think the article deserv…

Veen, thanks.

dang, I see the value in what you're going for, but I think making the edit clear would go a long way. Consider it a feature request.

The new title sucks, but it doesn't matter – the story is off the front page for some reason.

Re: Reddit is OpenAI’s moat

#268

Post by dmazin »

dang wrote: post #264
dmazin wrote: post #249

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Look, I just don’t think you should editorialize without making it clear. Why is the claim controversial, for example? Edit: I guess we went too deep in the thread, so we're resorting to edits. that was a rhetorical question. It's sort of like the Twitter community notes feature: making the edit, and its reason clear, builds trust. Otherwise, you just look like you're doing something shady (given that, again, the peo…

> I guess we went too deep in the thread, so we're resorting to edits You can keep replying - you just need to click on the comment's timestamp to go to its page and the reply box will appear there. > given that, again, the people in the article literally own HN [...] Again, given your incentives, that's worrying. What people and what incentives are you talking about here? > that is what upvotes are for HN has never…

dang, just so I don't sound crazy: Michael Seibel is on the board of directors of Reddit. I don't know what sama's involvement is with YC anymore, but I would imagine that his wishes are taken pretty seriously in SV.

This is why I think the editorializing should be made clear: even if your title edits are in good faith – which I totally buy – you want to protect community trust.

Re: Reddit is OpenAI’s moat

#269

Post by marcosdumay »

mguerville wrote: post #83
refulgentis wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Simple: get the search results, have LLM read and evaluate them. It's devilishly difficult to get citations in there, you're not going to do it with langchain, but its possible (c.f. Bing). Python x langchain x LLMs makes it very easy to create demos so there's been an initial influx of meh stuff, I'm very excited for 6 months from now.

A niche provider that doesn't do generative AI very well but does "AI powered search with citations" is perplexity.ai I've used for rather obscure queries and liked the summary the AI wrote as well as the links to dive deeper. I imagine that's what AI search will look like across all providers before long.

That site looks incredibly good.

I threw in a question Wikipedia does kinda answer but leaves a lot of details off, and it enumerated a set of possible answers, with my favored option linking into a forum where it looks like less than a dozen people post, but with people that tried all variations of it and know all of the details.

DDG and Google would never show me that site (yeah, I've tried).

Re: Reddit is OpenAI’s moat

#270

Post by dang »

jacamera wrote: post #266
dang wrote: post #239

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People get upset about title editing on HN because they only notice the cases they dislike. Any practice will seem obnoxious if you only count the things it gets wrong. I can tell you after over a decade doing this job that the title moderation on HN is probably the single most beneficial thing we do. Without that, the front page would consist of linkbait, sensationalism, and rage. In other words, HN wouldn't exist.

> People get upset about title editing on HN because they only notice the cases they dislike. Any practice will seem obnoxious if you only count the things it gets wrong. I don't like or dislike any particular title or headline. I dislike the policy of selectively altering an author or publisher's chosen headline in general. > I can tell you after over a decade doing this job that the title moderation on HN is probab…

The benefits of having a neutral, bookish (to use pg's old word) front page are so priced-in to everyone's experience of HN that people assume it just happens. Au contraire! It is laboriously maintained with daily effort. The default of homo internetus, especially at scale, is clickbait and outrage. That's what the arrow of entropy points to, so if we stopped putting energy into maintaining order here, it would quickly revert.

HN's quality, such as it is, very much includes "selectively altering an author or publisher's chosen headline" - publishers and authors (and headline specialists, at media sites) are incentivized to take advantage of the default dynamics to get attention. It's their job to sex up their titles and our job to knock them down to size, if we can. That takes sustained moderator attention.

That's not to criticize the community. HN's system consists of community, software, and moderation, and the community is by far the most valuable of the three. But all three must be active in order to keep HN from deteriorating (or at least to stave it off - https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...). Moderation's job isn't to determine discussion, it's to serve the community by jiggling the system out of its failure modes when it gets stuck in one of them.

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