The Skynet Funding Bill is passed. The system goes on-line August 4th, 1997. Human decisions are removed from strategic defense. Skynet begins to learn at a geometric rate. It becomes self-aware at 2:14 a.m. Eastern time, August 29th
I really don't envy anyone who has to moderate anything at the moment.
But yeah. The vast majority of user generated content on the big platforms was already very loosely moderated, and was already mostly trash.
The platforms are just going to keep on doing what they always do, which is optimize for engagement. It's not the crappy AI comments I'm worried about, it's the good ones. These things will become much better than humans at generating clickbait, outrage, and generally chewing up people's time and sending their amygdalas into overdrive.
I think we're going to keep getting more of what we have now, only more optimized, and therefore worse for us. As the AIs get good we will evolve an even more useless, ubiquitous, addictive, divisive, ad-revenue-driven attention economy. Unplugging your brain will be harder to do but even more worth doing. Probably most people still will not do it. Getting serious dystopia vibes over all this.
God its bleak in trust and safety/content moderation/fact checking. And I’m not even talking about America - good luck to you lovely weirdos.
One of the answers to “how do we solve this mess” was “climate change”. (Dealing with depressing things does funny things to humans).
One report on cyber security (which had Bruce Schneier as an author) showed that LLMs make hitherto unprofitable phishing targets, profitable.
There’s even a case where an employee didn’t follow their phishing training and clicked on a link, and ended up in a zoom call with their team members, transferring a few million in USD to another account. Except everyone on the call was faked.
This is the stuff on the fraud and cyber crime axis, forget the stuff for mundane social media. We’re at the stage where kids are still posting basic GenAI output after prompting “I think vaccines are bad and need to warn people”. They are going to learn FAST at masking this content. Hoo boy.
Dystopia vibes? It’s like looking into the abyss and seeing the abyss reach out to give you a hug.
I'd say that's the main thing. People hate ads, HN uses unobtrusive text ads. The moderation isn't that a competitive advantage, IMO. Slashdot's was better, mostly because it had measures to stop moderation abuse whereas HN seemingly doesn't. It's just a plain old up/down system with the added filip of a "super down" button, for those who are really committed to banning their opponents. I read with showdead turned on because perfectly reasonable comments are so often greyed out or dead. That used to happen much less on Slashdot because there were far fewer people with moderation rights and the bad ones got filtered out via metamod.
Maybe now it's been ported to Common Lisp it'll be easier to add features.
It's almost irrelevant now since Reddit is basically just a gigantic bot farm, but I was always annoyed that Reddit would aggressively remove self promotion in most subs while clearly running major PR campaigns under the guise of organic content.
Hacker News is the opposite and the better for it. If you're openly promoting your work, awesome! If you're doing anything to attempt to manipulate the platform for PR reasons, you can bet you will be punished for it.
I never understood why Reddit, which always tried to give off the "for the little guy" vibes was so rabidly against anyone promoting their own work.
> I never understood why Reddit, which always tried to give off the "for the little guy" vibes was so rabidly against anyone promoting their own work.
Reddit hasn't been 'for the little guy' for a decade, that's why they have to try so hard to give off those vibes.
> Reddit would aggressively remove self promotion in most subs while clearly running major PR campaigns under the guise of organic content.
Yep, this is why they do this. They're removing competition (in the form of ads they weren't paid for) to boost their product (ads they were paid for).
Seriously. It's often taken to absurd levels there. There have been several times when I went to Reddit answer a question about my own project that someone was asking, and my comment got downvoted or moderated away for self-promotion even though I was just answering the question. Ironically, omitting a disclaimer about it being my project will typically let the comments slide by, but that seems like the opposite of what you want. I prefer people to declare their biases up front so that I can evaluate their statement based on That context and on its merits. I personally love it when someone comments on something that they do.
I think hn handles this perfectly. In my opinion. If the comment is a shameless plug that adds no value, it will get downvoted quite quickly. If it's adding value to the conversation, and (usually) as long as the commenter isn't was pretending not to be integrated, it stands.
You're talking about false negatives, not false positives. People have different tolerances for these kinds of errors.
But yes, I remember that to see that stuff you had to expand the down-modded comments.
That stuff was also a product of its time. Slashdot had the strong free speech ethos of the early internet, so CmdrTaco had a policy of never deleting comments unless they broke the site somehow or there was a legal process requiring it. Sometimes that meant very new stories would get these comments and they'd be visible before they got modded, but if you browsed stories that had been active for a little while you wouldn't see them.
One downside of a sophisticated moderation system on a site designed for programmers is that some people take it as a challenge. The reason Slashdot trolling was a bunch of dumb memes rather than e.g. commercial ads is because a lot of bored teenagers found spamming it a good way to learn web programming. The systematic nature of the moderation meant that it was a system to beat, a game to conquer. Hence the brief influx of "page widening posts" and other technical hacks. But I don't know if you'd see the same stuff today. The culture has changed, there are much better ways to learn programming and way more opportunities now. And you don't have to be fully automated. CmdrTaco had a strongly systems-oriented streak, but the problem on HN is hardly ever the actions of dang and the other paid moderators, it's really abuse of the overly simple system by other users that's a problem. You could have both good paid moderators and stricter controls on user moderation.
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