Comment by Jtsummers | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Jtsummers | Hacker News Reader

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https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=swordlucky666 - Sort of embarrassing that anyone vouched for this comment. Reading their history, they copy/paste the same comment or use an autogenerator (probably not an LLM, that'd produce better results) to generate comments like this one.

Here's a comical one:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48445529

> The discussion on Spanish traders set the standa raises interesting points. In practical applications, the key challenge is balancing performance with maintainability. Would be valuable to see more concrete examples of trade-offs. [emphasis added]

They glob out part of the submission title (and took too much and cut off in the middle of a word) generating a delightful nonsense descriptor (the italicized bit). The title being:

> Spanish traders set the standard for GnuCash database design

> Sort of embarrassing that anyone vouched for this comment

I'm the one who vouched it. I don't check commenters' history before doing it. Maybe I should. My LLM-detector is apparently broken (especially on short posts). At face value I saw nothing wrong with it, so I vouched it.

I often check the history for comments that start off [dead] because I like to see if:

1. There's a problem with the account (and then inform them and maybe notify the mods myself). Sometimes people get shadowbanned without good reason (usually the result of automoderation, not an explicit human moderator action) or for something that happened years ago, but their history is pretty clean since.

2. To see if the person is just a spammer (as is the case here).

Though I only do this if the comment seems like something that oughtn't be dead (as this one does on a first glance). The comment is shallow, but not necessarily wrong or bad. It just adds little to the discussion since it boils down to "The book is an introductory text." which we also get from reading the submission title.

Yeah, I take the same approach, and as much as I'm generally very pro AI use, to the point I wouldn't really mind AI comments if they added value (but it's fine it'll remain against the rules here), it really has become necessary to read the comments history before vouching, sadly, given they all seem to be low quality noise.

>(probably not an LLM, that'd produce better results)

The last 3 years was a paradigm shift. How do you know if a comment was generated by AI? If it's written Better than a human comment... if it's too good.

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