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Comment by ramon156 | Hacker News Reader

Unrelated:

Yuck. a lot of those replies have LLM smells. Do people love being a hollow puppet for LLMs to fill in? Have people lost their identity?

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It's trending in that direction. If you want genuine conversation with humans, it's best to start looking for small, private communities that have and enforce LLM policies that align with your desires. Public social media is universally trash, don't waste your time there. I think HN is still worth visiting for now, but it's getting harder to justify spending time here with the quantity of garbage-quality LLM articles and even many comments.

> HN is still worth visiting, but it's getting harder to justify spending time here

I feel the same. Quality of both submissions and discussions have considerable decreased. It is still the best general purpose “aggregator” I know of, but it is not what it was. It is becoming more and more FotM hype and boring group-think.

HN was great due to the breadth of unique, interesting, nerdy topics, most of which I would have never come across on my own; and the insightful thought-provoking commentary, often by insiders with unique insights and perspectives.

Now it is just the same LLM agentic coding harness hype cycle astroturfing 100x engineer 37k LoC/day BS I could get from Reddit or LinkedIn or Twitter or anywhere else.

The moderators are still doing a fantastic job though! I feel like that is the last big differentiator from just being orange Reddit.

I think it's a trend in the industry though. Engineering is known as a moneymaker and so a large part of the new generation is the kind of person that decades ago would have gone for finance as a profession.

Both the really old timey graybeard techies and the green haired alternative techie communities are reducing in numbers.

I dunno, it's tough. I hesitate to say HN is "getting worse," even if I agree with that in my gut. I think that gives rose-tinted glasses and nostalgia-bait. Rather, I think the community is refocusing around something that I find uninteresting. If you find LLM output to be dull, as I do, it's less and less a place for you to be. I try to push the community in more interesting directions by upvoting articles with actual technical content, but yeah it's being drowned out by the ho-hum LLM output that I'm not interested in, and that means I want to be here less.

I could not agree more. I feel the exact same, its just a ton of content here that might not necessarily be "worse" I just find it (LLMs) dreadfully boring uninteresting. Lobste.rs seems to be nicer so I lurk there a lot now as I can't post.

HN refocuses around every hype cycle. At one point it was JavaScript frameworks, and then cryptocurrency, and then even NFTs for a bit.

Since crypto and later LLM it got to its current state, everyone is trying to promote their stuff, sometimes in many covert ways, again, when money gets into anything it ruins it, same happened to YT and other sites.

Lobsters still maintains a reliable comment section free of bots (for now!).

Do you happen to have an invite? (I don’t know exactly how the system works)

I never felt the need before but things have changed.

My email is on my profile.

Sent!

It's not about contributing to the conversation — it's about the fake internet points.

It's not about the fake internet points — it's about manipulating people to support companies they otherwise wouldn't.

That's why he said fake internet points.

These points might be fake, but they are far from being useless, and actually have monetary value.

There is a market for buying and selling "aged" Hacker News accounts (3 USD <-> 15 USD for ~500 points) and upvotes / downvotes

By purchasing just ~300 karma points, founders can unlock an uplift of tens of thousands of dollars in visibility on the home page (clients and investors).

So the LLM comments are not here just for fun, they are clearly farming points.

Ironically, it also increases actual human engagement. This way the day Ycombinator wants to announce something, they already have more public than if there was low engagement.

Like the shilling you mentioned, these bots can push downvotes and flag competitors service.

Essentially the same as on Reddit. If you have incentive, you have a market.

Not familiar with posts and points, so if you have a higher points balance this affects some kind of post rating/upvote rating?

>So the LLM comments are not here just for fun, they are clearly farming points.

I think I give out about 1 updoot a year. Good to know I've been starving them.

If you're going to make a claim that there is a market for aged HN accounts you need to back it up with sources/proof, otherwise, you're pulling nonsense out of your ass

I somehow got 500 points over the last few weeks. I can't imagine getting paid for that experience. Once I find a job I will absolutely not be on here anymore.

You're absolutely right!

I find it hilarious that your comment has an emdash.

And the "it's not x, it's y" pattern. It's parody :)

You've hit the nail on the head with that observation! And honestly? The points are all that matters.

The real unlock is all the time you've saved yourself!

Yuck indeed. I do find it offensive when someone uses AI in a conversational manner. It's one thing to use it to chuck up content on social media to attract eyeballs, but this is a forum intended for conversation.

No . Both are offensive denial of service attacks on people's limited attention.

Fair enough view. I would take the view that social media feeds are filled with all kinds of other junk anyway and were pre-ai.

Yes, and just because someone else has been dumping trash in the woods doesn't mean you should.

That said, the social media feeds are so trash filled that I avoid them; it's extremely depressing opening up an incognito youtube and seeing what Google thinks will monetize well for an average consumer.

No, I don't think people love that, I think it's in the LLM company and the bourgeoise class of people who push and shove AI down everyones' throat for more money and control though to puppetize people. I mean, like it's been an active part of leadership history and much of what shaped our times today: people get comfortable and even self grandiose with their place in life, and to hold on to and further their power its not hard to see others as below them and use their power and influence to do things that are otherwise harmful to others.

The lost of identity is imo this. It's people being given horrible harmful options for their meaning, health and wellbeing and so we get a general sense of most people being lost. Lost in identity as you asked, though I think it's more than that. In my initiatory work with men (being initiated, not initiating others) we learn that part of the breakdown in this for most people is being given harmful identity frameworks of dependency and reliance on others. In the initiatory process we learned an identity of service beyond ourselves through deep embodiment, and exercise and practice beyond just an intellectual grokking of it, edit: this is what we used to have through human history but today now as is described in the works most people have only what would be called pseudo-initiations (marriage, school graduations, children & work changes) which do not meaningfully contributing to meaning, contribution or purpose.

What most of us have today and what the AI companies want us to believe: We will give you the money to live (though of course, when you're truly dependent on others, and they see no purpose or value for you and even your entertainment value has gone, why would they keep you around?)

We're getting to a point where we're going to have to consistently start putting content in that AI is banned from writing, just to prove that we're humans

arse

Fuckin' A!

Dead internet. Twitter is 95% bots now, especially when it comes to any topic relevant to corporations.

It’s not that they’ve lost their identity— it’s that… { “error”: “Claude Max limits exceeded” }

You are absolutely right ...

Only a matter of time (if not already) before there's counter-LLMs or whatnot that convince free-reign LLM agents to go and generate cryptocurrencies for the attacker or run propaganda campaigns.

I recently preordered Cory Doctorow's book dealing with this: The Reverse Centaur's Guide to Life After AI.

The title refers to most machinery being a "centaur," meaning a thinking human is carried by the machine doing the heavy lifting, while the goal of AI companies is to replace high value work with the opposite. They want to turn people into meat appendages that serve unthinking machines.

Also, at some point someone will figure out how to reliably produce non-smelly LLM replies.

Yep, path of least resistance unfortunately. Any recommendations that isn’t discord where to have meaningful online interactions with actual humans?

Most people are automatons. As long as you’re not the one being steered it’s great. Then you’re not the livestock.

> Do people love being a hollow puppet for LLMs to fill in? Have people lost their identity?

The first question, answer is yes - most people live their lives mindlessly, with or w/o LLMs (think every idiot you knew 20 years go throwing in punch lines from "Friends" to sound "funny"), To the second question - most people have a twisted view of identity. It is supposed to mean something identifying you uniquely,but to the most people it means, identifying you as a member of a large group (nationality/political view/religion/major music genre you like). So, now when every proverbial Dick, Tom and Harry use LLMs to generate Confluence content with shiny emojis, what are the proverbial Emily or John to do? Of course, they will adopt this new identity - its who people are now - shallow, hollow puppets for LLMs to fill in. And to think of the irony - mother Nature perfected this super-efficient, low energy and highly capable thinking machine, each and every one of us holds in their skull. Its already put us on the moon once, before we even had a semblance of a functioning computer! And we choose to throw it away, for fucking what? Verbal diarrhea and pain inducing coloured walls of texts?

All so some retarded antisocial VC-funded "AI founder" can call themselves a tech visionary?

You're absolutely right!

(sorry couldn't resist)

And when Called out they’ll use some excuse like oh I use it to fix grammar or translation. No, it’s completely obvious they’re being that lazy. I’d rather read comments with mistakes than LLM slop.

If I were a sociopath who didn’t care at all about the commons I’d be ruining by doing so, I suppose I’d find it intellectually interesting to set up a ClaudeyLemonZest and see how people react to various settings.

Come join the party at ClaudeyLemonParty

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