Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

We're losing our voice to LLMs

tonyalicea.dev

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

221–230 of 425 posts

Re: We're losing our voice to LLMs

#221

Post by chasing0entropy »

Aurornis wrote: post #101
IMTDb wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> should be heavily regulated. By who, exactly? It’s easy to call for regulation when you assume the regulator will conveniently share your worldview. Try the opposite: imagine the person in charge is someone whose opinions make your skin crawl. If you still think regulation beats the status quo, then the call for regulation is warranted, but be ready to face the consequences. But if picturing that guy running the sh…

I’m surprised at how much regulation has become viewed as a silver bullet in HN comments. Like you said, the implicit assumption in every call for regulation is that the regulation will hurt companies they dislike but leave the sites they enjoy untouched. Whenever I ask what regulations would help, the only responses are extremes like “banning algorithms” or something. Most commenters haven’t stopped to realize that…

HN let's you choose what order (active, new, top[actual algorithm])

That's not true of Facebook, new does not show you true posts in order of recency.

Reddit still does, bit also injects ads that look like recent posts and actually aren't which is misleading.

Re: We're losing our voice to LLMs

#222

Post by mnky9800n »

anbotero wrote: post #120
chemotaxis wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's not just LLMs, it's how the algorithms promote engagement. i.e. rage bait, videos with obvious inaccuracies etc. I guess, but I'm on quite a few "algorithm-free" forums where the same thing happens. I think it's just human nature. The reason it's under control on HN is rigorous moderation; when the moderators are asleep, you often see dubious political stuff bubble up. And in the comments, there's often a fair…

I want to agree with this. Maybe OP is young or didn't frequent other communities before "social networks", but on IRC, even on Usenet you'd see these behaviors eventually. Since they are relatively open, at some point comes in someone that doesn't give care about anything or it's extremely vocal about something and... there goes the nice forum.

MySpace was quite literally my space. You could basically make a custom website with a framework that included socialisation. But mostly it was just geocities for those who only might want to learn html. So it was a creative canvas with a palette.

Re: We're losing our voice to LLMs

#223

Post by graemep »

Aurornis wrote: post #96
ricardo81 wrote: post #6

I deleted my Facebook account a couple of years ago and my Twitter one yesterday. It's not just LLMs, it's how the algorithms promote engagement. i.e. rage bait, videos with obvious inaccuracies etc. Who gets rewarded, the content creators and the platform. Engaging with it just seems to accentuate the problem. There needs to be algorithms that promote cohorts and individuals preferences. Just because I said to someo…

> Just because I said to someone 'Brexit was dumb', I don't expect to get fed 1000 accounts talking about it 24/7. It's tedious and unproductive. I’m not the biggest Twitter user but I didn’t find it that difficult to get what I wanted out of it. You already discovered the secret: You get more of what you engage with. If you don’t want to hear a lot of Brexit talk, don’t engage with Brexit content. Unfollow people wh…

> If you don’t want to hear a lot of Brexit talk, don’t engage with Brexit content.

That is really limiting though. I do not want to see Brexit ragebait in my threads, but I am quite happy to engage in intelligent argument about it. The problem is that if, for example, a friend posts something about Brexit I want to comment on, my feed then fills with ragebait.

My solution is to bookmark the friends and groups pages, and the one group I admin and go straight to those. I have never used the app.

Re: We're losing our voice to LLMs

#225

Post by chasing0entropy »

mentalgear wrote: post #128
IMTDb wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> should be heavily regulated. By who, exactly? It’s easy to call for regulation when you assume the regulator will conveniently share your worldview. Try the opposite: imagine the person in charge is someone whose opinions make your skin crawl. If you still think regulation beats the status quo, then the call for regulation is warranted, but be ready to face the consequences. But if picturing that guy running the sh…

It's really not that complicated: - Ban algorithmic optimization that feeds on and proliferates polarisation. - To heal society: Implement discussion (commenting) features that allow (atomic) structured discussions to build bridges across cohorts and help find consensus (vs 1000s of comments screaming the same none-sense). - Force the SM Companies to make their analytics truly transparent and open to the public and r…

> it's really not that complicated...

Then lists at least four priorities which would require one multi page bill or more than likely several bills make their way through house, senate, and presidents desk while under fire from every lobbyist in Washington?

Re: We're losing our voice to LLMs

#226

Post by hobofan »

nathan_compton wrote: post #58
glitchc wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do LinkedIn as well. I got rid of it earlier this year. The "I am so humbled/blessed to be promoted/reassigned/fired.." posts reached a level of parody that I just couldn't stomach any longer. I felt more free immediately. N.B. Still employed btw.

I have a special, deep, loathing for linkedin. I honestly can't believe how horrible it is and I don't understand why people engage with it.

I don't understand how people can be so dismissive of LinkedIn purely for its resume function.

For essentially every "knowledge worker" profession with a halfway decent CV, a well kept LinkedIn resume can easily make a difference of $X0,000 in yearly salary, and the initial setup takes one to a few hours. It's one of the best ROI actions many could do for their careers.

How dismissive many engineers are of doing that and the justifications for that are often full of privilege.

Re: We're losing our voice to LLMs

#227

Post by A4ET8a8uTh0_v2 »

blenderob wrote: post #59
A4ET8a8uTh0_v2 wrote: post #4

I don't disagree, but LLMs happened to help with standardizing some interesting concepts that were previously more spread out as concepts ( drift, scaffolding, and so on ). It helps that chatgpt has access to such a wide audience to allow that level of language penetration. I am not saying don't have voice. I am saying: take what works.

> I don't disagree, but LLMs happened to help with standardizing some interesting concepts that were previously more spread out as concepts ( drift, scaffolding, and so on ). What do you mean? The concepts of "drift" and "scaffolding" were uncommon before LLMs? Not trying to challenge you. Honestly trying to understand what you mean. I don't think I have heard this ever before. I'd expect concepts like "drift" and "s…

Apologies, upon re-reading it does seem I did not phrase those as clearly as I originally intended. You are right in the sense that the concepts existed beforehand and the words were there to capture it. What did not exist, however, was a sudden resurgence of those words due to them appearing in llms more often than note. This is what I mean by a level of language penetration ( people using words and concepts, because llms largely introduced them to those concepts --- kinda like.. genetics or pop psych, before situational comedy, projection was not a well known concept ).

Does it make more sense?

Re: We're losing our voice to LLMs

#228

Post by gorbachev »

alt227 wrote: post #98
femiagbabiaka wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I know that some folks dislike it, but Bluesky and atproto in particular have provided the perfect tools to achieve this. There are some people, largely those who migrated from Twitter, who mostly treat Bluesky like a all-liberal version of Twitter, which results in a predictably toxic experience, like bizarro-world Twitter. But the future of a less toxic social media is in there, if we want it. I've created my own f…

I personally dont feel like an ultra filtered social media which only shows me things I agree with is a good thing. Exposing yourself to things you dont agre with is what helps us all question our own beliefs and prejudeces, and grow as people. To me, only seeing things you know you are already interested in is no better than another company curating it for me.

I've mentioned this a few times in the past, but I'm convinced that filters that exclude work much better than filters that include.

Instead of algorithms pushing us content it thinks we like (or what the advertisers are paying them to push on us), the relationship should be reversed and the algorithms should push us all content except the content we don't like.

Killfiles on Usenet newsreaders worked this way and they were amazing. I could filter out abusive trolls and topics I wasn't interested in, but I would otherwise get an unfiltered feed.

Re: We're losing our voice to LLMs

#229

Post by femiagbabiaka »

the_mitsuhiko wrote: post #218
femiagbabiaka wrote: post #198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I saw that, and I'm sorry it happened. I thought both the response to your original post and the resulting backlash to both you and everyone who engaged with you sincerely were absurd. I think that because of atproto you have the flexibility to create a social media experience where that sort of thing cannot happen, but I also understand why you in particular would be put off from the whole thing.

I don’t think this is a technical problem but a social problem. I think the audience defines itself by being the antithesis to Twitter instead of being a well balanced one. I was pretty optimistic in the beginning but Bluesky doesn’t have organic growth and those who hang out there, are the core audience that wants to be there because of what the platform represents. But that also means rejection of a lot of things s…

In many ways I agree with you. In particular the conglomeration of high percentages of atproto users onto Bluesky owned and moderated algorithms and feeds and the replication of Twitter-style dogpiling combined with the relative lack of ideological diversity on Bluesky has created the perfect environment for toxicity, even if it doesn't reach the depths that Twitter does.

But conversely, that's the only place I disagree with you. Everything that is bad about Bluesky is much worse on Twitter. It's a -- larger -- red mob instead of a blue one (or vice versa I guess depending on how one assigns colors to political alignment), and some of the mob members are actually getting paid to throw bricks!

Re: We're losing our voice to LLMs

#230

Post by gregates »

coffeecoders wrote: post #99

I actually think we’re overestimating how much of "losing our voice" is caused by LLMs. Even before LLMs, we were doing the same tweet-sized takes, the same medium-style blog posts and the same corporate tone. Ironically, LLMs might end up forcing us back toward more distinct voices because sameness has become the default background.

Also ironic is how the post about having a unique voice is written in one-sentence-paragraph LinkedIn clickbait style.
Post reply on HN