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We're losing our voice to LLMs

tonyalicea.dev

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Re: We're losing our voice to LLMs

#301

Post by macintux »

krapp wrote: post #270
macintux wrote: post #253

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And HN doesn't choose to show you targeted, inflammatory content based on your history. That's a huge difference from Facebook.

Most people on HN who advocate regulating social media don't only want to prevent those platforms from showing targeted inflammatory content, they want to make all algorithmic feeds other than strictly chronological illegal, as well as moderation of any legal content. From that point of view, Hacker News is little different than Facebook. One could even argue that HN's karma system is a dark pattern designed to breed…

I would be astonished if a majority of people opposed to social media algorithms consider HN's approach to be sufficiently objectionable to be regulated or in any way similar to Facebook.

Re: We're losing our voice to LLMs

#302

Post by actualwitch »

ryandrake wrote: post #216
actualwitch wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Only when certain people don't decide to band together and hide posts from everyone's feed by abusing "flag" function. Coincidentally those posts often fit neatly in the categories you outlined.

Abuse of the flagging system is probably one of the worst problems currently facing HN. It looks like mods might be trying to do something about it, as I've occasionally seen improperly-flagged posts get resuscitated, but it appears to take manual action by moderators, and by the time they get to it, the damage is done: The article was censored off the front page.

Even with addition of tomhow, they are clearly stretched too thin to make any meaningful impact. Their official answer to this issue by the way is to point out that you can message them on email to elicit this manual action, which if you ask me is a fucking joke and clearly shows the mammoth age stack in which this site is written and lack of resources allocated to its support is having a massive impact on their ability to keep up with massive traffic. But then again, this site only exists to funnel attention to yc's startups, and it is something that you need to keep in mind while trying to answer any questions about its current state.

Re: We're losing our voice to LLMs

#303

Post by vanviegen »

afavour wrote: post #232
actualwitch wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Only when certain people don't decide to band together and hide posts from everyone's feed by abusing "flag" function. Coincidentally those posts often fit neatly in the categories you outlined.

I don’t know why this is being downvoted, I’ve witnessed it many times myself. It’s true that HN has a good level of discussion but one of the methods used to get that is to remove conversation on controversial topics. So I’m skeptical this is a model that could fit all of society’s needs, to say the least.

The comment consists of criticism on flagging behavior. Though it might have a point, it seems only vaguely related to its parent comment about non-personalized ordering.

Re: We're losing our voice to LLMs

#304

Post by TeMPOraL »

Frieren wrote: post #209
TeMPOraL wrote: post #137

> Social media has become a reminder of something precious we are losing in the age of LLMs: unique voices. Social media already lost that nearly two decades ago - it died as content marketing rose to life. Don't blame on LLMs what we've long lost due to cancer that is advertising[0]. And don't confuse GenAI as a technology with what the cancer of advertising coopts it to. The root of the problem isn't in the generat…

> The root of the problem isn't in the generative models, it's in what they're used for That's like giving weapons to everybody in the world for free, and asking to be blamed for the increased deaths and violence.

No, that's like pretending the weapons weren't already available. Everyone had assault rifles for two decades, giving access to smart rifles isn't really changing anything about the nature of the problem.

Re: We're losing our voice to LLMs

#305

Post by actualwitch »

afavour wrote: post #232
actualwitch wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Only when certain people don't decide to band together and hide posts from everyone's feed by abusing "flag" function. Coincidentally those posts often fit neatly in the categories you outlined.

I don’t know why this is being downvoted, I’ve witnessed it many times myself. It’s true that HN has a good level of discussion but one of the methods used to get that is to remove conversation on controversial topics. So I’m skeptical this is a model that could fit all of society’s needs, to say the least.

In downvoting it, they are proving me right. For posterity, there is a mastodon account [0] collecting flagged posts in an easily digestible form, it really does paint a certain picture if you ask me.

[0] https://mastodon.social/@hn_flagged

Re: We're losing our voice to LLMs

#306

Post by tptacek »

lambda wrote: post #289
tptacek wrote: post #274

If you care about voice, you still can get a lot of value from LLMs. You just have to be careful not to use a single word they generate. I've had a lot of luck using GPT5 to interrogate my own writing. A prompt I use (there are certainly better ones): "I'm an editor considering a submitted piece for a publication {describe audience here}. Is this piece worth the effort I'll need to put in, and how far will I need to…

All of this sounds like something you could just do yourself after putting a piece down for a day or two and coming back to it with fresh eyes. What benefit is there of cooking the oceans with a bullshit generator? Like, sure, it's possible to do this with an LLM, but it's also possible to do it without, at roughly similar levels of effort, without contributing to all of the negative externalities of the LLM/genAI ec…

If you don't want to eat meat on Fridays, I'm certainly not going to tell you that you should. You do you.

Re: We're losing our voice to LLMs

#307

Post by LogicFailsMe »

randcraw wrote: post #292
LogicFailsMe wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would be intrigued by using an LLM to detect content like this and hold it for moderation. The elevator pitch would be training an LLM to be the moderator because that's what people want to hear, but it's most likely going to end up a moderator's assistant.

I think the curation of all media content using your own LLM that has been tuned using your own custom criteria _must_ become the future of media. We've long done this personally at the level of a TV news network, magazine, newspaper, or website -- choosing info sources that were curated and shaped by gatekeeper editors. But with the demise of curated news, it's becoming necessary for each of us to somehow filter the…

That's the government regulation I want but it's probably not the government regulation we will get because both major constituencies have a vested interest in forcing their viewpoints on people. Then there's the endless pablum hitting both sides, giving us important vital cutting edge updates about influencers and reality TV stars whether we want to hear about them or not...

We say we want to win the AI arms race with China, but instead of educating our people about the pros and cons of AI as well as STEM, we know more than we want to know about Kim Kardashian's law degree misadventures and her belief that we faked the moon landing.

Re: We're losing our voice to LLMs

#308

Post by nechalnikaSama »

it's not the voice. it's the lack of need to talk tough about the hard problems. if you accept what is and just babble, anything you write will sound like babbling.

there's enough potential and wiggle room but people align, even when they don't, just to align.

when Rome was flourishing, only a few saw what was lingering in the cracks but when in flourishing Rome ...

Re: We're losing our voice to LLMs

#309

Post by afavour »

actualwitch wrote: post #305
afavour wrote: post #232

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t know why this is being downvoted, I’ve witnessed it many times myself. It’s true that HN has a good level of discussion but one of the methods used to get that is to remove conversation on controversial topics. So I’m skeptical this is a model that could fit all of society’s needs, to say the least.

In downvoting it, they are proving me right. For posterity, there is a mastodon account [0] collecting flagged posts in an easily digestible form, it really does paint a certain picture if you ask me. [0] https://mastodon.social/@hn_flagged

The DOGE topics are a perfect example. HN users are uniquely placed to provide useful perspectives on DOGE but it gets flagged very regularly.

Re: We're losing our voice to LLMs

#310

Post by krapp »

macintux wrote: post #301
krapp wrote: post #270

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most people on HN who advocate regulating social media don't only want to prevent those platforms from showing targeted inflammatory content, they want to make all algorithmic feeds other than strictly chronological illegal, as well as moderation of any legal content. From that point of view, Hacker News is little different than Facebook. One could even argue that HN's karma system is a dark pattern designed to breed…

I would be astonished if a majority of people opposed to social media algorithms consider HN's approach to be sufficiently objectionable to be regulated or in any way similar to Facebook.

Hacker News doesn't use a strictly chronological feed. Hacker News manipulates the feed to promote certain items over others. Hacker News moderates legal content. Those are all features of social media algorithms that people are opposed to. It just isn't "objectionable" when HN does it.

And regulations of this kind always creep out of scope. We've seen it happen countless times. But people hate social media so much around here that they simply don't think it through, or else don't care.

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