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Comment by Teever | Hacker News Reader

But the problem is that people with poor written language / english skills are 'competing' with people who have superb skills in this domain.

There are people here who sit at a desk all day banging out multipage emails for work who decide to write posts of a similar linguistic calibre for funsies.

Meanwhile you have someone in a developing country who just got off a brutal twelve hour shift doing manual labour in the sun who wants to participate in the conversation with an insightful message that they bang-out on a shitty little cellphone onscreen keyboard while riding on bumpy public transit.

You could have a great idea and express it poorly and be penalized for doing so here while someone could have a blah idea expressed excellently and it's showered in replies despite being in some metrics (the ones I think are most important) worse than the other post.

What's the solution for that?

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> What's the solution for that?

Remember that you're on a message board and you're not actually 'competing' for anything?

This is a perfect example of what I'm talking about.

I knew someone was going to comment on my use of the word there despite me putting it in quotes which was intended to let the reader know that I meant that word as an approximation of what I was meaning.

When I say competing I mean competing in the space of ideas here. There is a ranking system here that raises or lowers the visibility and prominance of your comments and it's based on upvotes by other uses. For better or worse people penalize comments with grammatical errors over ones that don't and that affects how much exposure other users have to the ideas that people write and how much interaction they get from them.

If that's the case why would somebody who has good ideas but poor expressive capability bother posting here if their comments are just going to get ignored over relatively vapid comments that are grammatically correct?

No, I get your point. Unfortunately, alot of people here try to act high and mighty like they are posting here for some altruistic reason. The reason why I, you, and everyone else posts here is the human reason that we want others to engage with our posts. In order to do that, you have to put your best foot forward, which includes making sure the spelling and grammar of your posts is correct. While I do not use an LLM for this, I think that it is vaild to use these tools to make sure nothing gets in the way of whatever point you are trying to make.

> In order to do that, you have to put your best foot forward

In English. You have to put your best foot forward in English. And in your environment with the resources you have at your disposal.

For example, I'm currently engaging with you between steps in a chemistry process that's happening under the fumehood next to me while wearing a respirator, a muggy plastic chemical resistant gown and disposable gloves nitrile globes.

I am absolutely certain that these conditions are different than the ones I would need to 'put my best food forward' in this discussion. I'm also certain that quite certain that you and I would both absolutely stumble if we were obligated to particpate in this forum in a language that we're not proficient in as many users often attempt to do and are unfairly penalized for by other members of the community.

I'm with you on the LLM usage for grammatical issues for non-native speakers. I bet more in this community would feel the same way if Dang whimsically mandated that people had to use a language other than English on certain days of the week.

Oh shit that would be fun. Tuesday, we're going to do it in Mongolian, see how that goes.

> If that's the case why would somebody who has good ideas but poor expressive capability bother posting here if their comments are just going to get ignored over relatively vapid comments that are grammatically correct?

The main problem is that ai consistently is seeing making things worse. Take a look at the examples in Dang's link in their comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47342616

In the ones I read the AI editing is either hurting or needs to be much, much better to help.

> You could have a great idea and express it poorly and be penalized for doing so here while someone could have a blah idea expressed excellently and it's showered in replies despite being in some metrics (the ones I think are most important) worse than the other post.

I absolutely do not understand this comment. Are you saying that posting is competitive and that comments have "metrics"?

Yes! If my comment is above yours in a thread, it means I got more upvotes than you did, which means I get special bonuses and more to eat and you go hungry in Internet land. Also it means I'm better than you (obviously) and I get to go to this secret club with all the pretty people and you're not invited. Isn't that how this all works?

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