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Comment by thaumasiotes | Hacker News Reader

This headline has been seeing some popularity. But it's never made any sense. This is just the labor theory of value, applied to documents.

The labor theory of value doesn't work for documents any more than it works for anything else. If I do something that's easy for me, and it's valuable to you, you'll still want it. If I do something that's difficult for me, it will be less valuable to you, because the difficulty I have with it implies that what I produce will be of lower quality.

This is all equally true of automatically-generated documents. If they're valuable, people will want to read them. Whether it was unpleasant for someone to create them isn't a factor.

So where is this slogan coming from? Are people just afraid to admit that the documents they're getting are valueless?

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The problem is that I don't know before I read a doc whether or not it will be useful and valuable.

If someone wants me to spend my time and attention on something they have shared, I would like them to demonstrate that they put a proportionate amount of time and effort into its production.

> If someone wants me to spend my time and attention on something they have shared, I would like them to demonstrate that they put a proportionate amount of time and effort into its production.

First: why? How does that help you?

Second: Is that actually true? Do you ever watch videos that a friend recommends to you? Even if the amount of time and effort your friend put into producing that video is zero? Do you ever read anything that a friend recommends? Even if they didn't write it?

How much time and effort, in your estimation, did jjfoooo4 put into producing this article on tombedor.dev?

I think the point is that automatically-generated documents by LLM is lower quality the manually-generated ones or at least guaranteed lower quality than automatically-generated + manually-reviewed.

Therefor if you are not putting human effort on the document it is low-value.

We have seen this before when big data started to be a thing, tons and tons of reports being auto-produced weekly (or even daily), but even if they contain relevant information they are low-value because no one can take action on so much information.

> Therefor if you are not putting human effort on the document it is low-value.

That's true. The document is low-value.

Asking people to put in personal effort isn't going to change that. If they comply, the document they produce will still be worthless, and you still won't want it.

You're diagnosing a problem unrelated to the problem you actually face.

I am offering a product (via MCP) that interacts with LLMs and user data. Every single day I get user support emails to my inbox written by their LLMs with LLM hallucinations. If the user (a human) would have read them before, that would save me a lot of time and anger!

Your post sounds logical at the first glance, but has nothing to do with the reality. The topic title is totally on point! If the user would put human effort in it, I wouldn't get those crappy emails.

If you get a document from someone and they say "I have no idea if this has any value and I couldn't be arsed to check," it's not unreasonable to presume that it probably has no value.

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