Hacker News Reader

Comment by abcde666777 | Hacker News Reader

Are these kinds of articles a new breed of rage bait? They keep ending up on the front page with thriving comment sections, but in terms of content they're pretty low in nutritional value.

So I'm guessing they just rise because they spark a debate?

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It’s both rage and hype bait, farming karma.

The optimists upvote and praise this type of content, then the pessimists come to comment why this field is going to the dogs. Rinse and repeat.

There’s barely any debate, people don’t answer each other; It’s rather about invoking the wonder and imagination of everyone’s brain. Like spatial conquest or an economic crisis: It will change everything but you can’t do anything immediately about it, and everyone tries to understand what it will change so they can adapt. It’s more akin to 24hrs junk news cycle, where everything is presented as an alert but your tempted to listen because it might affect you.

I am interested in a post that will teach me how to consume only the news that really relevant for me

Here’s one: just don’t read the news.

Google what you are interested in at the moment, and dive long into what matters to you, rather than being fed engagement bait.

Easier said than done, I understand that.

I guess I'll have an agent for that one day. News agent.

You could even have your 'news agent' print your news every day on some cheap paper.

Like a 'news periodical', shall we say.

I heard The Onion does that!

The hidden fallacy in your comment is that there is such a thing as "news that is really relevant for you".

This isn't all that different than saying that it would be nice if someone else did your thinking for you -- which is a totally fine thing to want, but let's not get confused.

"News that is relevant for you" is a concept made up by advertising companies to legitimize them in having power over what you see. Because if they presented it plainly, you would be rightly alarmed.

It is the meta-level counterpart of the fact that LLMs are difficult to reason about.

Vibe coders are the new eternal september

I didn’t catch this reference, so adding the below for other folks in the same boat:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September

“Eternal September or the September that never ended was a cultural phenomenon during a period beginning around late 1993 and early 1994, when Internet service providers began offering Usenet access to many new users. Before this, the only sudden changes in the volume of new users of Usenet occurred each September, when cohorts of university students would gain access to it for the first time, in sync with the academic calendar.”

More generally, it's whenever the expert to newbie ratio in a community crosses a certain threshold and never returns.

Eternal LLMber

You can get to the front page easily with dozen upvotes, like from your colleagues and friends. Sadly, that's possibly the only way to get your post some attention here now.

I would disagree. It’s true that scouring the New section reveals a lot of hidden gems, but I know from experience that one in every 20-30 of my submissions ends up on the frontpage.

I once read here on HN that a good metric for filtering controversial comment sections is number of upvotes/comments. If it's bellow one, the thread is probably controversial.

Are you saying controversial is good or bad?

Neither, that's up to your individual preference. Although I think that controversial threads have more noise, but sometimes provide a more enjoyable read.

So what use is it to filter them? It seems you still have to judge their worth based on their actual contents.

The front page has an algorithm that is "less noise, more news" but if you go to the /active page, you get more conversation-driven submissions. I tend to load both up and refresh every few hours.

> The FAQ notes that submission rank is impacted by "software which downweights overheated discussions." A good rule of thumb for this effect is when the number of comments on a submission exceeds its score. Moderators can overrule the downranking for appropriate, not-actually-a-flame-war discussions.

https://github.com/minimaxir/hacker-news-undocumented

Consider there are 100 upvotes and 100 downvotes. Net votes: 0. The submission would end up with a lower ranking that you wanted it to have.

Submissions don’t have downvotes, only flagging.

Fair. But it still holds for the comments section.

In common parlance, this would be called "ratioing".

This comment has even lower nutritional value. It's just a "dislike" with more words. You could have offered your counterarguments or if you're too tired of it but still feel you need to be heard, you could have linked to a previous comment or post of yours.

I mean, are you gonna die on a hill defending every low-quality content in HN? Because I think it’s perfectly OK to call it out so that moderators can notice and improve. You seem to think that readers have an inherent responsibility to salvage someone else’s bad article.

It's the top comment. But I'll disengage as this gets too meta. I'd encourage talking about the substance.

Well, I didn't articulate it but behind my comment was a question - who's actually upvoting this stuff and why?

To me the claim of the article was silly on the surface of it, silly enough that I was surprised that folks consider it worthy of discussion.

Is there just a large number of upvoters here without even a basic understanding of the topic at hand? Or is there some other explanation beyond that?

Hacker news is a bit different from Reddit or other social media. This is a good summary, especially the section titled "Comments". https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Edit: I notice I'm talking to a 2 week old account, I should've checked before engaging.

I complained about the same thing, but apparently people take the bait.

Which is why I only quickly scan through the comments to see if there are new insights I haven't seen in the past few months. Surprise, almost never.

Maybe it still could be new to some.

This one didn't contain a sepia tinted ai slop diagram so it beats the average

> So I'm guessing they just rise because they spark a debate?

Precisely. Attention economy. It rules.

What I find interesting is that similar propositions made 2 years ago was ragebait to the same people but they ended up coming true.

It is still a rage bait.

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