| ▲ | xpe 4 hours ago | |
Preface: this is social commentary that I'm reflecting back to HN, not a complaint. No one likes rejection, but in a way, I at least find downvotes informative. If a thoughtful guideline-kosher comment gets a lot of downvotes, there may be a story underneath. For this one, I have some guesses as to why. 1. Low quality: unclear, poor reasoning; 2. Irrelevant: off topic, uninteresting; 3. Using the downvote for "I disagree" rather than "this is low quality and/or breaks the guidelines"; 4. Uncharitable reading: not viewing the comment in context with an attempt to understand; 5. Circling of the wagons: we stand together against LLMs; 6. Virtue signaling: show the kind of world we want to live in; 7. Raw emotion: LLMs are stressful or annoying, we flinch away from nuance about them; 8. Lack of philosophical depth: relatively few here consider philosophy part of their identity; 9. Lack of governance experience and/or public policy realism: jumping straight from an undesirable outcome (LLM slop) to the most obvious intervention ("just ban it"). Discussion on this particular topic (LLM assistance for comments), like most of the AI-related discussion on HN, seems to not meet our own standards. It is like a combination of an echo chamber plus an airing of grievances rather than curious discussion. We're better than this, some of us tell ourselves. I used to think that. People like me, philosophers at heart, find HN less hospitable than ever. I'm also builder, so maybe one day I'll build something different to foster the kinds of communities I seek. | ||