Ask HN: Why is bad grammar tolerated on social media given recent AI advances? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Why is bad grammar tolerated on social media given recent AI advances?

1 pointamichail17 comments

Shouldn't people without flawless grammar be required to use an AI to check their grammar?

What’s so bad about bad grammar?

Sure, I’d prefer it if people didn’t use bad grammar, but here are some things that are higher priority:

- keeping spam off the platform

- keeping harassment off the platform

- keeping porn off the platform (unless you’re a porn social network, I guess, in which case you need to keep child porn off your platform, which in context is a harder problem)

- keeping sock puppets / psychops / etc off the platform

Also, I wouldn’t like it if people were prevented from posting due to bad grammar, and I wouldn’t like it if people were forced to rewrite their posts because of bad grammar. If people want to opt in to having their grammar corrected, then great, but don’t force it on them.

Grammar changes over time and is an expression of peoples place and background. Hence there is no 'true' grammar. Just like in programming languages, correctness is based on the language. To attempt to control grammar and expression is an attempt to marginalize and disinherit the 'other'. New communities on the internet have raised and used their own forms of expression and grammar from the earliest days. It serves to know who is in your group and what ones background is.

Should people without flawless grammar be required to use AI to check their grammar before speaking? Using proper grammar is all well and good but being a hard nosed grammar cop? Get real. Either let it slide or stop using social media.

Bad grammar helps let me know I'm talking to a human rather than a LLM

Nobody should be required to use an AI for anything, ever. People who think that's a good idea should probably be ignored.

lolz - grammar and protocols appropriate to the forum m'lud

  - not e.e.cummings

No. Why squelch a person's individuality? And with Clippy on steroids, of all things.

> be required

By who?

Social media sites could suspend users who post with bad grammar.

That would just result in an overly toxic userbase where being a grammar Nazi is actually encouraged.

Why would they do that?

But social media sites rely on the illiterate masses to as impressionable targets for ad revenue. Why would any rational business enforce that when a competing and indiscriminate alternative would be guaranteed more successful?

Have you seen any such advertising at all on the fediverse?

No, but as a Fediverse user I can tell you firsthand that it's a less successful or attractive platform than X or Facebook.

Not that I mind, but I think the statement still stands.

X is dying and a series of terrible decisions are contributing towards it. Most recently allowing people who are blocked to view posts.

Twitter has been dying since the moment it was born. It never turned a profit under Dorsey, sure as hell won't turn a profit under Musk, and will likely die after being traded around as a hot-potato asset after Elon liquidates. Maybe Zuckerburg will wake up with a chip on his shoulder and buy it to make "Twitter: A Meta Product". HN would sure get a kick out of that.

None of that really changes the popularity or adoption of federated alternatives, though. I think people are getting tired of social media and are cutting it out of their lives whether they realize it or not. Musk's politically-motivated ramblings definitely drove the knife in the back, but I'm not going to smile and pretend that @jack incorporating crypto features into Twitter wasn't cringeworthy and drove people away too. I never made a Twitter account specifically because I knew this would happen, and now that it's gone up in flames I don't find myself being more active on the fediverse. I think I just resent the whole thing as a vain and poorly commercialized popularity contest.

*by whom

(Come on, it’s on topic)

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