Comment by phoghed | Hacker News Reader

Comment by phoghed | Hacker News Reader

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Another problem with user content sites, these numbers are completely pulled from the ass and are a meme that just gets repeated ad nauseam. They mean nothing, but there will be people that take it seriously.

Is 80/20 ever generally correct? Why is it favored over the 90/10 meme? Why would it apply to this? Why wouldn’t the numbers be vastly different for different domains of content generation? Etc.

If you pay attention, so much user content is just repetition of something they read on the same fucking website and uncritically checked into their brain.

Current HN top post is Roblox downloaded 145GB models from us (including adult content) without asking. I fully expect to start seeing comments to the tune of “Roblox is stealing porno to train AI for children” within the day in any discussion Roblox comes up in.

Why would these folk’s contribution to any other user content site be any more thoughtful?

> Is 80/20 ever generally correct?

Sometimes. But it, or 90/10, or sometimes 75/25, is understood to main “a large part of the time”/“a significantly smaller but still crucial amount off the time”.

> If you pay attention, so much user content is just repetition of something they read on the same fucking website and uncritically checked into their brain.

Which is exactly the problem. We now have LLMs doing the same thing, flooding everywhere with more of that noise, further hiding what good signal remains. Even if some of that good signal is by chance almost entirely LLM generated too, it appears to be at best a vanishingly small amount.

80/20 doesn’t mean literally 80% and 20%

It’s just a rough way to say “mostly this with a decent bit of that” because 20% seems like a medium-small percent that could or could not matter depending on the context

That’s all anyone means when they say 80/20

To your second point, the 80% could be lots of basic things and the 20% could be the important facts, so it’s not always meant as a dismissal that the 20 doesn’t matter

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