Comment by Aurornis | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Aurornis | Hacker News Reader

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For a while there were a lot of posts from people experimenting with ChatGPT to write anger bait posts on Reddit where they would later edit the post to say it was fake, written by ChatGPT.

I assume they thought they'd be teaching people a lesson by making them feel foolish for responding to AI stories, most of which were too fake to be believable.

However it did not matter. The posts remained popular and continued to bring in comments even after the admission that they were fake. In advice subreddits, commenters continue to give advice on the situation. Some comments would say they saw the notice that it was fake but continue arguing about it anyway.

This makes a feature of Reddit very clear: The truthiness of a post doesn't matter. The active commenter base on popular subreddits just wants something to discuss and, usually, be angry about.

In retrospect it's obvious given that misinfo posts were the easiest way to karma farm for years even before AI.

We do precisely the same thing here. Here's a relatively recent post that, to me, seems obviously LLM-written. It just rattles off some management platitudes:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47913650

It had 639 comments and 866 upvotes. And that's not a one-off.

I wish there was an internet-wide "don't show again" button for such slop pages

You can ban a domain from search results with Kagi

You you can bend a handful with duck duck go as well. However, it's only a handful and you run out and you're stuck.

Yeah, the trick is to do your own curation and go from there.

If you like some authors or journalists or bloggers, go see who they read (trust me they all say who they follow in their own niches) and build from there. You can develop quite a good RSS feed following this method in like an hours tops.

Sufficiently advanced "AI" is indistinguishable from a linkedin true believer koolaid drinker middle management type.

Even the title is in "x, not y" format.

>However it did not matter. The posts remained popular and continued to bring in comments even after the admission that they were fake

That's 90% of current Facebook pages and groups.

The decline of Facebook is sad. I liked it early on. I used it primarily to follow family and casual friends from high school. When they posted, it would show up on my feed, I read all the posts, and that was that.

After awhile I had to wade through all sorts of nonsense to get to the posts I actually wanted to see, and even later Facebook stopped putting posts from people I follow in my feed. It was 100% garbage. I can't imagine why anyone uses Facebook for anything other than the marketplace.

I primarily use it for browsing memes now, and occasionally interaction with friends.

It's sad, but car stuff (new aftermarket stuff) is now mainly on facebook for my car.. That, and messenger to chat with siblings is about it..

I often hear that about Facebook, but at least it has a "feeds" button that you can press to get the sources you actually subscribe to. The default "home" feed is useless.

Facebook is fine if you join groups based on your interests (hobbies etc) and then aggressively unfollow/block anything you don't want to see. It's not really conducive to discussions like Reddit, though. Mostly drive-by comments.

This. But damn it’s effing hard work!

> then aggressively unfollow/block anything you don't want to see

That is hard work. I have a few friends in the trans world and occasionally interact with relevant groups on FB. The attention algorithm thinks that this means I might want to see random posts from pricks who literally want to see people like my friends herded up into concentration camps. Most of it is far less extreme than that, but the system is definitely optimised in favour of rage-bait because that ticks up the engagement metrics.

>and then aggressively unfollow/block anything you don't want to see

It keeps showing shit I didn't ask for and don't follow anyway

Even without AI slop I've noticed this happen on Reddit.

I once made a rather boisterously-argued comment on a political issue I'm passionate about, and I realised that I'd made a serious error of reading comprehension when it came to my opponent's argument. I apologised to them for being an abrasive arse over my own mistake, then edited my comment to say that I was mistaken.

My incorrect comment which literally said at the bottom it was incorrect continued to be upvoted while my opponent who had made the stronger argument continued to be downvoted.

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