HN is very cult-of-personality based. People see SimonW they upvote without reading, while at the same time a much better article could be posted on the same topic and get zero traction. Not trying to single Simon out here, I generally find his posts good, just a statement of the herdthink and cognitive laziness of this community (and humans in general, to be fair).

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TiredOfLife 5 days ago | parent | next [-]

It's not personality, but source. Like i see a post from The Register or Ars Technica I know that it will be at best completely wrong. While posts from simonwilson (for a long time I thought it was like Anandtech. A group of people posting under one domain) are usually good

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stephen_cagle 4 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I mean if you have a better idea for how to assign your attention, then I am all ears. :]

I'd say trust is a pretty reasonable way to assign attention.

I guess the fairest way might theoretically be to require everything to be submitted anonymously, with maybe authorship (maybe submissionship) only being revealed after some assigned period?

This is better for the incubants, but would require a huge amount of energy compared to "Oh, simon finds this interesting, I'll take a looksy".

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haswell 5 days ago | parent | prev [-]

I don’t think this framing quite captures what’s going on.

The AI space is full of BS and grift, which makes reputation and the resulting trust built on that reputation important. I think the popularity of certain authors has as much to do with trust as anything else.

If I see one of Simon’s posts, I know there’s a good chance it’s more signal than noise, and I know how to contextualize what he’s saying based on his past work. This is far more difficult with a random “better” article from someone I don’t know.

People tend to post what they follow, and I don’t think it’s lazy to follow the known voices in the field who have proven not to be grifting hype people.

I do think this has some potential negatives, i.e. sure, there might be “much better” content that doesn’t get highlighted. But if the person writing that better content keeps doing so consistently, chances are they’ll eventually find their audience, and maybe it’ll make its way here.

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politelemon 5 days ago | parent [-]

You're not negating anything they've said, but given some insight into why the case might be. However the cult of personality and brand still exists and as a result heavily distorts what could appear here.

Saying that someone ought to write better consistently for them to "make its way here" leans completely into the cult of personality.

I think following people would be better served though personal RSS feeds, and letting content rise based on its merit ought to be an HN goal. How that can be achieved, I don't know. What I am saying is that the potential negatives are far far understated than they ought to be.

	▲	haswell 5 days ago \| parent [-]
		I think you’re mistaking my comment for an endorsement when it was primarily attempting to reframe and describe the dynamic. > Saying that someone ought to write better I did not say someone ought to write better. I described what I believed the dynamic is. > I think following people would be better served though personal RSS feeds My point was that this is exactly what people are doing, and that people tend to post content here from the people they follow. > letting content rise based on its merit ought to be an HN goal My point was that merit is earned, and people tend to attach weight to certain voices who have already earned it. Don’t get me wrong. I’m not saying there are no downsides, and I said as much in the original comment. HN regularly upvotes obscure content from people who are certainly not the center of a cult of personality. I was attempting to explain why I think this is more prevalent with AI and why I think that’s understandable in a landscape filled with slop.