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Comment by bgwalter | Hacker News Reader

"Simon Willison REACTS to Rob Pike's unfiltered opinion on AI". We must have the proper spin.

Is anyone going to say something about him engagement farming on this site?

Simon's posts are not "engagement farming" by any definition of the term. He posts good content frequently which is then upvoted by the Hacker News community, which should be the ideal for a Hacker News contributor.

He has not engaged in clickbait, does not spam his own content (this very submission was not submitted by him), and does not directly financially benefit from pageviews to his content.

You and I disagree on what engagement farming means.

What value do you think this post adds to the conversation?

Simon's post focuses more on the startup/AI Village that caused the issue with citations and quotes, which has been lost in the discussion due to Rob Pike's initial heated message. It is not redundant.

He links to both HN and lobsters which already contained this information, from before he did any research, so "has been lost" is certainly a take...

But if that's value added, why frame it under the heading of popular drama/rage farming? To capture more attention? Do you believe the pop culture news sites would be interested if it discussed the idea and "experiment" without mentioning the rage bait?

"How Rob Pike got spammed with an AI slop 'act of kindness'" is an objectively accurate frame that informs the user what it's related to: the only potentially charged part of it is calling it "AI slop" but that's not inaccurate. It does not fit the definition of ragebait (blatant misleading headline to encourage impulse reactions) nor does it fit the definition of clickbait (blatant omission of information to encourage the user to click though: having a headline with "How" does not fit the definition of clickbait, it just tells you what the article is about)

How do you propose he should have framed it in a way that it is still helpful to the reader?

[flagged]

The simonw haters love to come out of the woodwork. I have to wonder, is it mostly just jealousy? I have to think yes.

I think it's fatigue. His stuff appears on the front page very often, and there's often tons of LLM stuff on the front page, too. Even as an LLM user, it's getting tedious and repetitive.

It's just fatigue from seeing the same people and themes repeatedly, non-stop, for the last X months on the site. Eventually you'd expect some tired reactions.

Better this than 300th React.JS bloatware of the year.

Point out which aspects of my comment you believe are untrue and I'll buy that bridge.

This Hacker News Commenter Made A Devastating Perfect Reply To Simon Willison

Simon Willison: How this Devastating Perfect Reply Changed my Publishing Workflow, featuring Claude Code

Reply on news.ycombinator.com