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

Ask HN: Should HN ban ChatGPT/generated responses?

news.ycombinator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

371–380 of 677 posts

Re: Ask HN: Should HN ban ChatGPT/generated responses?

#371

Post by verisimi »

gorgoiler wrote: post #252

One thing I’m guilty of on this site is not upvoting enough. I vote down the banality and flag the pollution. Upvoting doesn’t seem to come as naturally — whenever I read an interesting response it’s the last thing on my mind. It’s a good thing really. Interesting stories and comments are the norm. I wonder what the userDB says about any scarcity of upvoters? Are there many others like me? Am I not pulling my weight?…

If you downvote, I think that should come with an explanation of your downvote.

There may be genuine reasons for downvoting, errors in what is presented, etc. Fair enough.

But if you downvote because you don't like something, all you are doing is attempting to create an echo chamber of views and opinions you already believe. Is that what you want? If so, you are now in a war for control of the echo chamber you want to see with others of like mind - its a race to the bottom.

In reverse, if you value alternative, unusual and/or creative ideas, perhaps this is something that should consider giving an upvote to, even if you disagree with it.

That's my opinion anyway. And I try to do as I suggest.

Re: Ask HN: Should HN ban ChatGPT/generated responses?

#372

Post by solarkraft »

FpUser wrote: post #364
nobrains wrote: post #353

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am the opposite. I vote up easily, but think a hundred times before downvoting. Downvoting feels like censorship to me.

I never downvote at all. It reminds me for some reasons faceless mob with the clubs. But I have to admit that I do not upvote enough. Definitely not all the deserving posts.

I rarely downvote here, but that's because the quality is already high. A part of keeping it this way is vigorously downvoting unrelated/lazy/overly emotional comments, so maybe a faceless mob with clubs is actually what it needs :-)

Only unproductive comments, of course. Different opinions should be welcome.

Re: Ask HN: Should HN ban ChatGPT/generated responses?

#373

Post by OhioMan2943 »

SoftTalker wrote: post #96
kossTKR wrote: post #24

The fact that soon the internet will be so flooded with bots that you'll be floating eternally alone in a sea of imposters unless we create some draconian real person ID system is a tragedy so great it's crazy it has not dawned on people yet. I started out loving the net because of the feelings of connection and partly because of the honesty and discussions stemming from at least pseudo anonymity, both silly stuff an…

> Back to local community and family i guess, it was amazing while it lasted. I see that as a positive thing really. I have no desire to be entertained by generated content. Best bet is to start disengaging and learning to have civil interactions with real people again.

Me too, I believe that it will make us put more faith in the real world and see things from a real world centric perspective once again, as well as not caring about what the outrage of the day is online because it could very well be synthetic.

Re: Ask HN: Should HN ban ChatGPT/generated responses?

#374

Post by asne11 »

andy_ppp wrote: post #318
gorgoiler wrote: post #252

One thing I’m guilty of on this site is not upvoting enough. I vote down the banality and flag the pollution. Upvoting doesn’t seem to come as naturally — whenever I read an interesting response it’s the last thing on my mind. It’s a good thing really. Interesting stories and comments are the norm. I wonder what the userDB says about any scarcity of upvoters? Are there many others like me? Am I not pulling my weight?…

The UI for voting in general isn’t great and gives me anxiety on mobile so I almost never click it. With my sausage fingers it’d be good if the clickable area was bigger and up voting had some CTA…

There are plenty of simpler solutions:

- zoom into the button, then click

- override the css yourself, e.g,: using your one of the many userstyles extensions or browser developer tools

- inject custom JavaScript using GreaseMonkey or Tampermonkey

- use a third party HN client. As you would imagine, there's a sea of those - one of them must be halfways decent :-D

- purchase a new device with better touch precision. Pixel 3/6 with display scaled down handles the problem of adjacent links smaller than a fingertip exceptionally well

- If able, try to reduce the finger sausages. Otherwise, use a stylus.

Why should YC change it for everyone to make it more attractive on your device?

Re: Ask HN: Should HN ban ChatGPT/generated responses?

#375

Post by jfoster »

randomsearch wrote: post #308
jfoster wrote: post #110

Can generated responses even be reliably detected? How does that work?

For all but the shortest fragments of text, I suspect the answer to this will be "yes" and this will be achieved in a short timeframe. Interact with Chat-GPT enough and you soon begin to tire of its middle-of-the-road prose. Because it is in some sense a statistical average of its inputs, its writing feels very monotonous. Of course, you can try to push it in the direction of something more interesting... "write in t…

If that's so, where is the GPT detector?

Re: Ask HN: Should HN ban ChatGPT/generated responses?

#376

Post by noirscape »

joeldo wrote: post #93
rglullis wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's doesn't even have to be $5/month. Make a $10 deposit required for creating an account, and for each offense against the guidelines, you get a "fine" that proportional for the severity of the infraction (uncivil discussion? $0.10 cents, participating in hell-threads? $0.50. Comparing HN with reddit? $1.337 Obvious spam? Your whole $10 is gone.) Repeat offenses get exponentially more expensive, and you only get to…

On the surface I like this idea, but this makes it harder for participants from poorer countries from, well, participating. For some countries this is more than a week of the average wage!

It's difficult to balance; unfortunately from experience in moderating, the poorer countries with a large anglo internet presence also tend to be the biggest sources of spam (not so much low-effort trolling, Americans do that wayyy more).

You could to some extent make an argument that gatekeeping poorer economies is one way to prevent those bots from signing up. It's not one I necessarily agree with, but it is one way to mitigate the spam.

My solution would probably be to permit users from poorer countries to request a signup from someone else at a discount appropriate to their economy using an invite chain. That way you can still offer a fair way for users from poor economies to engage, whilst allowing for easy banning of spambots simply by treebanning the original inviter if you get the spam issue.

Re: Ask HN: Should HN ban ChatGPT/generated responses?

#377

Post by UberFly »

nobrains wrote: post #353
gorgoiler wrote: post #252

One thing I’m guilty of on this site is not upvoting enough. I vote down the banality and flag the pollution. Upvoting doesn’t seem to come as naturally — whenever I read an interesting response it’s the last thing on my mind. It’s a good thing really. Interesting stories and comments are the norm. I wonder what the userDB says about any scarcity of upvoters? Are there many others like me? Am I not pulling my weight?…

I am the opposite. I vote up easily, but think a hundred times before downvoting. Downvoting feels like censorship to me.

That's good because I always wonder about the dynamic of the establishment "old guard" voting down everything they don't agree with.

Re: Ask HN: Should HN ban ChatGPT/generated responses?

#378

Post by yccs27 »

dr_dshiv wrote: post #284
ChrisRR wrote: post #277

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think that puts too much faith in the average person

But it’s exactly the right expectation for a Hacker News comment. Already HN excels because comments avoid auto-outrage and meme-commentary.

How high the comment quality here usually is becomes really noticeable when it's lacking under a post. The most common offenders are political posts with outrage potential, especially while knee-jerk responses are flooding in and before measured comments have had time to rise to the top.

Recent example was https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33931384 about cash limits - Sooo many comments are just "Tyranny!", "EU bad!" and overall unmitigated cynicism.

Re: Ask HN: Should HN ban ChatGPT/generated responses?

#379

Post by t0bia_s »

gorgoiler wrote: post #252

One thing I’m guilty of on this site is not upvoting enough. I vote down the banality and flag the pollution. Upvoting doesn’t seem to come as naturally — whenever I read an interesting response it’s the last thing on my mind. It’s a good thing really. Interesting stories and comments are the norm. I wonder what the userDB says about any scarcity of upvoters? Are there many others like me? Am I not pulling my weight?…

I don't use up/downvote at all. It kills "organic" conversations and shape it unnaturally.

It also makes me biased to downvoted posts.

I would completely disable voting system in any kind of conversations.

Re: Ask HN: Should HN ban ChatGPT/generated responses?

#380

Post by asimpletune »

kossTKR wrote: post #24

The fact that soon the internet will be so flooded with bots that you'll be floating eternally alone in a sea of imposters unless we create some draconian real person ID system is a tragedy so great it's crazy it has not dawned on people yet. I started out loving the net because of the feelings of connection and partly because of the honesty and discussions stemming from at least pseudo anonymity, both silly stuff an…

Yeah, I think this will actually do a lot to push people one day to spend more time in the real world, and that will be fine. A lot of people though may enjoy talking to bots, and that's also fine.
Post reply on HN