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I then came upon the idea that perhaps something like GPT-3 could be used to have users answer 3 questions about the article's content before being able to comment.
[1] Some people might argue this is a benefit.
- People won't answer the questions like you suggest, they'll just leave. In a hypothetical world where your feature is implemented, it will destroy the site instantly.
- You're making very generous assumptions about what language models can do.
- HN is a website with very minimal features. We don't even have dark mode. I wouldn't expect complex AI features any time soon. Or ever.
- Seriously, take a second to think about the user experience of a discussion site that asks you to take a test before writing a comment.
If I found my posts were blocked because some AI said I wasn't posting correctly I'd leave and never come back[1]. The chilling effect this would have on discussions here would have a much more detrimental impact than any benefit from preventing bad posts. [1] Some people might argue this is a benefit.
- The contents of the article are less important than you're implying, most people are here for the discussion. Yes, sometimes not reading the article is a problem but many other times it isn't and this can be clarified in the course of the discussion. Very often the article itself is just a starting point to discuss a broader topic. - People won't answer the questions like you suggest, they'll just leave. In a hypot…
The goal of this community is to gratify intellectual curiosity. If most people the forum and never engage with the posted content, preferring only to engage with other, similarly unenlightened commenters, how is that curiosity ever going to be gratified?
It's as if Hacker News were a book club and you said it wasn't that important to actually read the books. Yes, it's possible to discuss A Confederacy of Dunces by only having read the cover and back blurb and hoping someone else in the group actually did the legwork, but why join a book club in the first place if you care so little about reading?
Unfortunately, I think your other points are correct. It isn't possible or even feasible to force people to read the articles. More people have to want to put in the effort and if they don't, they don't. There should at least be as much social pressure within the community to expect people to engage with content as there is to suppress humor or incivility, but the insularity and elitism of the culture here makes that infeasible. There's no way to engineer this, people have to care more.
So how are you going to protect against this? ANNs are great at answering these questions, and the AI can't outsmart itself. By making it harder to comment you'd actually lose more human commenters, because like others say what you suggest is frustrating, most people wouldn't bother. We'd be left worse off.
Imo rather than putting computers in charge, we might soon have to consider the opposite: Checks for users to verify that they're human. This will probably have to be done by humans themselves, but I've not seen a really practical idea of how it could be done yet.
If I found my posts were blocked because some AI said I wasn't posting correctly I'd leave and never come back[1]. The chilling effect this would have on discussions here would have a much more detrimental impact than any benefit from preventing bad posts. [1] Some people might argue this is a benefit.
Your posts wouldnt be blocked, you would have to verify that you have read the article first before posting.
HN is often accused of being a 'hive mind' of users with homogenous opinions already. Making people assert that they've read the article, and understood it within a set of constraints, could remove a lot of nuance and variation.
Plus, I hardly ever read the articles.
I share the view of others here, the article is just a seed crystal for discussion. Sometimes the most valuable comments are found in the misunderstanding and tangents that arise.