Hacker News Reader

Comment by s_dev | Hacker News Reader

Currently on the internet people skip the article and go straight to the comments. Soon people will skip the comments and go striaght to an AI summary reading neither the original article nor the comments.

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But then there will be no comments to summarize.

But what if the AI just hallucinates the comments? People will never know.

They could actually be better than reality. Who knows?

I went to this thought too but then I remembered the 90-9-1 rule. The AI summary is for some portion of the 90. The 9 are still going to comment. What they comment on and how they generate the comments might change though.

Our digital twins will write the comments. They will be us, but with none of our flaws. They will never experience the shame of posting a dumb joke, getting flamed, and then deleting it, for they will have tested all ideas to prevent such an oversight. They will never experience the satisfaction-turned-to-puzzlement of posting an expertly crafted, well-researched comment that took 2 hours of the workday to draft - only to receive one upvote, for their research will be instantaneous and their outputs efficient. Of course they will never need to humbly reply, 'Ah, I missed that, good catch!' to a child comment indicating the entire premise of their question would be answered with a simple reading of the linked article - for they will have deeply and instantly read the article. Yes, our digital twins will be us, but better - and we will finally be free to play in the mud.

We all are, since a long time. The mud just doesn't shine so bright.

Well by definition the vast majority of comments written, anywhere, cannot be memorable.

Assuming the median reader reads a few tens of thousands comments in a year, only a few hundred would likely stick without being muddled. At best.

> will finally be free to play in the mud

As long as we can still have a few sticks, and some string, or a cardboard box...

Cripes [1].

[1] https://qntm.org/perso

You will be given 3 A.I. generated comments to choose as your comment

if reality turns into a Ubisoft game I think I might log out

would you like to play again?

I wonder about Amazon reviews right now.

Part of the utility of writing a review is that it is read, but the primary search for keywords in reviews now requires the user to wait for AI generated responses first.

Then the user must tap through another link and then expand an individual matching review. It’s absolutely buried.

I think people generally like writing comments. Reading articles, in their entirety, less so.

Glad it’s not just me who does this. :)

I wanted to listen to a podcast where a profesor explains a new drug for ADHD. Instead of spending 2h of my time I spent 5 min reading a summary generated by gpt from a youtube transcript.

Which drug? Who's the professor? Can you share the summary please?

I’ve done this with extracted audio from YouTube videos, -> STT -> LLM summary.

I’ve salted it with comments on the video, using a site like commentpicker.com or running JS and loading more and expanding threads manually.

Here’s an example I did for a pal:

You are an expert on building retaining walls. Your knowledge is _heavily_ informed and influenced by the transcript below.

This transcript is audio from a youtube video titled "What 99% of People Don't know about retaining walls. #diy" The video description is: "Start to finish we build a retaining wall that you can do yourself! How to Dig for a wall, How to Base a retaining wall, how to backfill, and MORE!. #retainingwall #diy"

Additional information may be included in comments, which are in the attached CSV. Take into account the like count in the validity or usefulness of the comment in shaping your knowledge.

In giving your replies, try to be specific, terse and opinionated. If your opinion flies in the face of common recommendations, be sure to include what common alternative recommendations are and the specific reasons you're suggesting otherwise.

----

# Transcript

""" [paste transcript] """

# Comments See attached .csv

That would be an actual improvement. Reading the comments section usually just leads to personal energy waste.

Yes, but who will comment then and on what?

On both HN & Reddit, I find the comments more informative and less frustrating than reading the article usually. But I guess YMMV.

You need to read the article first to know that. But most people won't.

You can read the article after the comments.

If the comments say it's worth it I read it, but often (especially on HN) the top comment starts with a summary of errors/inconsistencies in the article and then I don't really feel the need.

You do you, but hivemind thinking is a real thing. I have seen highly upvoted comments seemingly "debunk" an article where on closer examination it becomes clear they actually didn't read the article either.

It quickly becomes this weird bubble of people just acting on what everything "thinks" the content is about without ever having looked at the content.

I get that is easier, but intellectually you are doing yourself no favors by having this be your default.

But often the top comment debunks what you think is true, and then you learn something.

> It quickly becomes this weird bubble of people just acting on what everything "thinks" the content is about without ever having looked at the content.

That isn't an issue though since the important part is what you learn or not, not whether you think an imaginary article is true or not. If you learn something from someone debunking an imaginary article, that is just as good as learning something from debunking a real article.

The only issue here is attribution, but why should a reader care about that?

Edit: And it isn't an issue that people will think it actually debunks the linked article, since there will always be a sub comment stating that the commenter didn't read the article and therefore missed the mark.

> If you learn something from someone debunking an imaginary article, that is just as good as learning something from debunking a real article.

An argument for synthetic corpi (plural of corpus..esses?) - AI ingesting AI.

Commenter's doesn't live isolated only getting information from other commenters, they have lives outside of HN and use that to inform their comments.

So no, it isn't the same as AI ingesting AI content at all.

The plural is "corpora" :-)

That is the biggest problem on this website, people want to feel smart by 'debunking' things they don't really understand. It leads to a lot of contrarian views with poor signal to noise ratio, especially when the topic is slightly outside of average user experience (midwit programming)

not to mention walls of text as people argue back and fourth

usually the top comment these days is a diversion to push an agenda.

I agree, they are! But reading through them, or even worse, engaging with them, is a serious energy drain.

Especially if somebody is being wrong.

Yeah, but is your mission to correct anything wrong on the internet?

https://xkcd.com/386/

Sounds exhausting.

Yes, that was the joke.

Hard to tell nowdays..

Occasionally the article is wrong.

Even more occasionally commenters are too.

But extremely rare for a popular wrong comment to not have sub comments debunking them, they are much more reliable than articles therefore.

I’ve found the more I know about the topic at hand, the more wildly many of the comments seem off base, even the highly upvoted undebunked ones. Its harder for me to judge topics I don’t know much about, but I have to assume it’s something similar.

That is true for articles as well though, I find comments typically have better info than the articles. It is more likely for some of the comments to have been written by real experts than that the article is.

Lmfao you forgot the fact that especially on reddit and hn people tend to say a lot of bullshit especially if it goes hand in hand with their biases

So do the writers of the articles, however, with them I cannot interact.

10 years ago Reddit used to be a place where you would get informed opinions and less spam. 5 years ago, HN used to be a place where you would get informed opinions and less spam. Neither of them will go back to the same level of quality. Not anymore.

you need to expend resources (e.g. "proof of work") to post, to drive away low effort spam. https://stacker.news/ is an interesting experiment in that regard.

Luckily I am not a LLM and can read and select things rather fast without processing the crap. Both HN and some subreddits still are fine for quality if you know the users and their reputations; just skip the rest. Worse than 10 years ago, still a lot better than mostly anywhere else.

This has been said by every long term user of these sites. And not at the same time. It was always better in the past. It's probably partly true... yeah, quality can decrease as things get better. But it's also partly an illusion of aging in a changing world. Ten years is long enough to completely change the way we write and express ourselves.

It's actually sort of in the Hacker News Guidelines (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html):

"Please don't post comments saying that HN is turning into Reddit. It's a semi-noob illusion, as old as the hills."

And yet the comments still provide more value than the article, almost always.

They definitely used to be, but haven't been much good for years. At least 8 years in the case of reddit, maybe 3 in the case of hackernews.

Though at this point it's a habit I cannot quite bring myself to break...

It's worse, but there's nowhere better than here imo.

Except very niche topics maybe

Today is my first day on HN and I came here looking for the comments. I miss intelligent conversations and reasonable interactions and reddit is just a dumpster fire now (and arguably before). Even if you can find a reasonably mature sub you're still exposed to the muck raking of the front page overflowing into everywhere else.

In a way I agree, but the sustainability is shaky.

The intrinsic motivation for providing the comments comes from a mix of - peer interaction, comradery - reputation building

If becomes evident that your outputs are only directly consumed by a sentiment-aggregation-layer that scrub you from the discourse, then it could be harder to put a lot of effort into the thread.

This doesn't even account for the loss of info that results from fewer people actually reading and voting through the thread.

Yes but this assumes human input is the golden goose. Maybe it is at the beginning just to bootstrap the process, and then runaway AI starts to recurse homeruns with its own original comments.

HN comments are good, but the more nested a thread, the more inane they get. You see things like people arguing over punctuation, or the definition of punctuation.

I agree with the first part, but I disagree with the conjecture. There are also people who enjoy writing comments, and inasmuch they have to read a bit of context (at least the comment they are replying to). Those will always exits.

HN comments aren't valuable because of their average quality or content, but because of the feedback vote sorting.

(Aside from the tendency towards first=top. Would be nice to have time-weighted upvote decay instead of absolute count)

Have you ever had to give a demo that no meeting attendee actually cared about, just because management demanded it? Standup meetings with 20 people where maybe 2 people cared about? The future might involve AI updates, summarized by AI into weekly reports, summarized again into monthly reports, then into quarterly departmental reports that nobody actually reads.

Or, the future might be everyone reads summaries, because there are only AI Managers and no human managers, where humans hold occasional meetings and have conversations which are listed to by AI, and we take our lead from the AI summaries. The AI maintains business focus through it monitoring the business performance, updating each summary as needed to maintain performance.

It's a worthwhile experiment for a business school, IMO, automating a layer of bureaucracy.

Ah, good ol' Manna. https://marshallbrain.com/manna1

Doesn't that seem ultimately futile though?

Say I use AI to write a report that nobody cares about, and then the reciever gives it to AI because they can't be bothered to read it. Who is benefiting here other than OpenAI?

Amazon is already forcing this pattern on mobile users not logged in. If you want to see the reviews, all you get is an AI summary, the star rating, maybe 1 or 2 reviews, then you have to log in to see more.

The cure is to stop using Amazon.

It has already caused me to not further investigate purchases. Similar to yelp, if I have to log in to see things, you're dead to me.

There is also no way to disable the AI summaries even if you are logged in.

Soon people will read other people's summary that they copied from AI summary on the web.

I won't. I'm looking for real life human voices.

Sounds about right, as we are post-dead internet in public places.

There was a thread about the US tariffs on Canada I was reading on a stock investment subreddit. The whole page was full of people complaining about Elon Musk, Donald Trump, "Buy Canadian" comments, moralizing about Alberta's conservative government and other unrelated noise. None of this was related to the topic; stocks and funds that seemed well-placed for a post-tariff environment.

There were small, minor points of interest but instead of spending honest vacation time looking at each comment at zoomer internet church, I had an LLM filter out the stuff I didn't care about. Unsurprisingly there was not much left.

> zoomer internet church

Stealing this.

Please do. Don't forget to appreciate the mantra-like repetition of Brian Taylor Cohen and Qasim Rashid Esq memes.

As articles are increasingly published with AI, this becomes yet another example of, to coin a phrase, AI loopidity.

This is so good! Finally the word I need to describe what I'm living. And yes I'm copy pasting articles into LLMs for summary.

If writers are using ai to write articles, and readers are using ai to summarize the same article, what's the underlying inefficiency here? That writers should just be posting brief summaries of the articles in the first place? Or maybe they just need to be prompting ai to create a summary rather than a full article?

Differences in how people want to consume the article, and what information they’re looking for. Some want snippets, some want summaries, some want long form.

We have information compression machines now. Might as well raw dump the information and let the machine package it up in the format we prefer for consumption, instead of pre-packaging it. (Yeah, this is effectively what authors are doing…currently they can still do novel things that the compression machines can’t, but how long will that last?)

What if this is better? If the summary includes all of the key details and people save time AND read both the article and comments wouldn't that be better?

If that was the case, then yes. It's not though, because the AI misses parts (doesn't "include all of the key details") and also fabricates and misrepresents other details

It’s sometimes not now, but likely will be the case quite soon.

I invite everyone to have an open mind about this, as it seems that the part of my comment that said “what if” wasn’t fully absorbed.

Unless there’s another AI breakthrough, the real applications of AI are and will be things that it’s ok to get wrong 10% of the time, usually because prior approaches were wrong more than 10% of the time. This is fine for the Playskool world of entertainment communication, in which there’s no end goal except emotional stimulation, but the opposite of what’s needed in any real attempt to engage with the world, in which we already struggle to capture the complexity of reality.

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