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Comment by j-bos | Hacker News Reader

The post was interesting, but I also noticed something in the blog that had the same flavor. Even though the link was for a specific post, the page layout neatly flowed into another post. So smooth I thought the second post's title was a subheading of the original article. A strange thing, but maybe that's just me making connections that aren't there.

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I listened to the playlist and it's definitely the same song over and over again with slight tweaks. Imagine finding dozens of blogs where posts are all the same, but with very slight changes to vocabulary used in each blog.

There has actually been a lot of that showing up in my google search results for the past few years… there are thousands of sites out there that were created by scraping news articles and blog posts and replacing random words with thesaurus alternatives.

The results vary from incomprehensible to some kind of uncanny valley “is this just…really terrible writing or am I having a brain problem?” territory.

I’ve actually encountered lively discussions of these sorts of cloned articles with nary a mention of the weird writing.

With what we’ve seen from AI text and image generators recently, it’s only going to get weirder soon.

> The results vary from incomprehensible to some kind of uncanny valley “is this just…really terrible writing or am I having a brain problem?” territory.

I’m glad it’s not just me! But for me, it’s not just random searches. It also happens with news articles from major outlets. Can they really not afford to pay a single person to just proof read the story and make sure whatever’s auto-generated is at least coherent?

YouTube is also full of this, with bots narrating the story using text-to-speech, some of them sound passable as humans...

Websites that scrape StackOverflow are the WORST!

It's always giving me false hopes that my problem got resolved until I notice that I've alrezdy read the question before.

There's one site that scrapes GitHub as well - it does at least have a link to the original page, but I've only ever opened it by mistake...

There is a community-maintained list of these stackoverflow / github / npm / wikipedia clones, and adblocking rules to hide them from search results: https://github.com/quenhus/uBlock-Origin-dev-filter

These lists are supported as presets in https://letsblock.it/filters/search-results

I recall reading an article on HN a while ago about how recipe/cooking blogs are basically becoming just that—centrally run networks of independently branded sites that just serve to drive clicks on affiliate links. But then again, I can't find that link, so it's probably a conspiracy theory I just made up

Or the original whistleblower was offed by Big Recipe.

I listened to the playlist too and it's definitely the same song with small variations. Imagine finding dozens of threads where comments are all the same, but with very slight changes of words used in each comment.

I'm sure that would never happen.

I listened to that playlist as well and it is nearly the same song with slight variations. Imagine finding dozens of threads where comments are all the same, but with very small changes of phrasing used in each comment.

I listened to that comment thread as well and it is very similar to the playlist, only with slight variations. Imagine finding hundreds of threads where the colors are all the same, but with very small changes in the pattern as they are all woven into a blanket.

I listened to the users also and it's nearly the same comment with minor variations. Imagine finding dozens of threads where the jokes are all the same, but with very unsubstantive changes in phrasing as the site is turning into Reddit.

> I listened to the users ...

No way! No one ever listens to the users.

There's some obvious random word shuffling happening and that gave it away.

I listened to what gave it away and it's definitely the same obvious random word shuffling. Imagine finding users who all have been listened to, but only partially and in the same way, perhaps with slight changes.

I listened to what it gave away and it's definitely the same random obvious word shuffling. Imagine users finding who have all been listened to, but only partially in and the same way, perhaps slightly changed.

just like colossal cave [0]

    YOU ARE IN A MAZE OF TWISTY LITTLE PASSAGES, ALL DIFFERENT.
    YOU ARE IN A LITTLE MAZE OF TWISTING PASSAGES, ALL DIFFERENT.

i remember getting lost in that maze, and didn't realise that the subtle change in wording for the room description was the trick to identifying them, so i dropped objects to help me make a map - which is what you are supposed to do in the other maze

    YOU ARE IN A MAZE OF TWISTY LITTLE PASSAGES, ALL ALIKE.

0. https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Colossal_Cave_Adventure lists all the different descriptions

I listened to mgdlbp also and it's nearly the same comment with minor variations. Imagine finding dozens of posts where the rants are all the same, but with very unsubstantive reasons in phrasing, as the old userbase complains about the new userbase ad nauseam.

I didn't listen :)

The "horn instrument" being reused in every song is a giveaway that they're using the same generator, without even changing the parameters of the instruments.

It's like they're basically using a fancy "arpeggiator" to generate these songs.

That was the web circa 2010, when people were still using spinbots and link wheels as an SEO technique. They were the same articles, but with occasional words swapped out so it wasn't duplicate content in the eyes of Google. The Panda update for Google was largely responsible for cutting down on that behavior.

What's fascinating about natural language models for me, is that I assume it is already being applied to "spin" articles, and I imagine that is part of why Google kinda sucks to use right now.

Looks like this is a link to an issue of a newsletter and it's divided into sections.

I think OP is being ironic..

Haha, sadly I was only being confused.

Robin sends out a weekly(?) newsletter with a variety of topics.

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