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Comment by johnfn | Hacker News Reader

Yes, the mocking, gleeful negativity really does make me concerned that this place is becoming Reddit. The fact that the highest upvoted post on this thread is just a link to Reddit isn't doing much to help me feel better. And I've been here for at least a decade, so I don't think this is the noob illusion.

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But, I mean… it’s just not good. There is no real way to spin this as anything better than embarrassing.

But why even have a conversation at all? Who cares if Zuckerberg has a demo that goes awry? Does that satisfy your intellectual curiosity somehow? It certainly doesn't satisfy mine.

I mean, I think it is notable that a massive tech company is blowing tens to hundreds of billions on this complete nonsense.

A topic that's notable but has little to discuss can get a lot of upvotes. A lot of the best stuff on this site has exactly that: lots of upvotes, little commentary, because the thing itself is notable. That's definitely not what happens on Meta threads. They usually get lots of votes then lets of repetitive spam-like comments about how ethically bankrupt Zuck or Meta or social media or algorithms or whatever are. A new comment on the behavior would be interesting, but most of the comments are basically just spam. I could probably get an LLM to generate most of them with ease. Perhaps the worst part is, even if there is novel analysis it's buried under an avalanche of "Zuck will grind you to dust" or whatever that gets repeated over and over again.

For a while that was okay, this kind of stuff was just contained in those threads. But it's started leaking out everywhere. Just spam like comments tangentially related to the topic that just bash a big company. That's the lowering of SNR that I find grating.

Oh, no, is someone being mean to the big company? :(

This is absolutely notable, and everyone should be concerned about it. Not so much the potential fakery, but the extreme deficiency of the actual product, which has had the GDP of a small country squandered on it. Like, there is a problem here, and it will have real-world fallout once the wheels fall off.

Most of the discussion here is about (i) what might have gone wrong, technically, and (ii) what this says about the ROI that Facebook and other US tech giants are getting on their AI projects.

I agree that one demo gone awry does not mean much in itself, but the comments here do rise above the level of Nelson Muntz.

I've been here for over a decade. It has become very reddit like in the past few years.

I want to get into YC just to use and browse Bookface instead.

The signal to noise ratio certainly became worse.

You'll see the same folks spamming their hatred towards tesla/microsoft/meta/google over and over with zero substance other than sentimental blabbering.

I"ve not seen that honestly. I think you are looking for it satisfy your internal narrative you've created.

You haven't seen people, on this site, hating on Tesla?

i haven't seen 'spamming'

It's a different world than it was ten years ago. Among the ways it's different are people are far more skeptical of billionaires, Big Tech, and capitalism generally. They're willing to cut them much less slack. This is one of the few ways that the world of today is better than the world of ten years ago.

Bots bots bots... tearing down our stars is good business for a variety of vested interests. Don't let the bastards grind you down.

We are not bots, we just loathe historically bad-faith actors and especially with the current climate, we will take the opportunity of harmless schadenfreude where we can get it.

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