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Comment by dxbednarczyk | Hacker News Reader

Every time I've used Gemini models for anything besides code or agentic work they lean so far into the RLHF induced bold lettering and bullet point list barf that everything they output reads as if the model was talking _at_ me and not _with_ me. In my Openclaw experiment(s) and in the Gemini web UI, I've specifically added instructions to avoid this type of behavior, but it only seemed to obey those rules when I reminded the model of them.

For conversational contexts, I don't think the (in some cases significantly) better benchmark results compared to a model like Sonnet 4.6 can convince me to switch to Gemini 3.1. Has anyone else had a similar experience, or is this just a me issue?

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Gemini sounds less personal, but I think that is good. From my experience, the quality of response is much higher than ChatGPT or Grok, and it cites real sources. I want to have a mini-wikipedia response for my questions, not a friend's group chat response

I have the opposite viewpoint:

If a model doesn't optimize the formatting of its output display for readability, I don't want to read it.

Tables, embedded images, use of bulleted lists and bold/italicizing etc.

You just articulated why I struggle to personally connect with Gemini. It feels so unrelatable and exhausting to read its output. I prefer to read Opus/Deepseek/GLM over Gemini, Qwen and the open source GPT models. Maybe it is RLHF that is creating my distaste from using it. (I pay for Gemini; I should be using it more... but the outputs just bug me and feel more work to get actionable insight.)

> feel more work to get actionable insight

WHAT?! I find that exactly the nice sharp formatting are what makes it EASIER to get actionable insight from it...

(Plus the weird-but-cute unrequested analogies are nice to occassionally elicit a smile and keep you motivated :P)

I'm not familiar with Openclaw and but the trick to solve this would be to embed a style reminder at the bottom of each user message and ideally hide that from the user with the UI.

This is how roleplay apps like Sillytavern customize the experience for power users by allowing hidden style reminders as part of the user message that accompany each chat message.

I think they all output that bold lettering, point by point style output. I strongly suspect it's part of a synthetic data pipeline all these AI companies have, and it improves performance. Claude seems to be the least of them, but it will start writing code at the drop of a hat. What annoys me in Gemini is that it has a really strange tendency to come up with weird analogies, especially in Pro mode. You'll be asking it about something like red black trees and it'll say "Red Black Trees (The F1 of Tree Data Structures)".

Yes, the analogy habit is the most annoying of all. Overall formatting for me is doable, if it didn't divide up an answer into these silly arbitrary categories with useless analogies. I've tried adding in my user preferences to never use analogies but it inevitably falls back into that habit.

It definitely has the worst "voice" in my opinion. Feels very overachieving McKinsey intern to me.

I have no issues adjusting gemini tone & style with system prompt content

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