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Comment by dang | Hacker News Reader

Plenty of HN readers feel this way and it's a good point, but it has also become an entirely cliché response which pops up like mushrooms anytime "distillation" appears. That means it's against the site guidelines, which ask:

"Eschew flamebait. Avoid generic tangents. Omit internet tropes." - https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

I don't mean to pick on you personally! It's just that reflexive responses always tend to show up first in a thread, when what we really want are reflective responses [1]. Similarly, there's a strong tendency for threads to turn into generic discussions, whereas what we really want are specific ones [2].

[1] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...

[2] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

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> it has also become an entirely cliché response

To be fair, that's also the case for the link itself we're discussing.

I think then we should ban these sorts of posts about the allegation of distillation, since being able to post the story but then warning accounts with comments about the hypocrisy, is not the correct way to go about it.

I agree in the abstract, but perhaps the way to avoid generic responses is to disallow (or segment) generic submissions. This website is no longer HN, it should be renamed AIN. There is only so much to say about the subject, and if cliché submissions keep getting accepted and upvoted and shoved to every visitor without a way to avoid them (barring leaving the website entirely), then people will eventually gravitate to the same responses. If your neighbours play loud music every night, they don’t get to complain that everyone is always mentioning the loud music to them.

You are a fantastic moderator, but there’s only so much even you can do. If nothing changes about the website, the problem will only get worse. I warned years ago that this would happen, the signs were on the wall immediately.

In the controversy over AI and intellectual property rights, the notion of asymmetrical enforcement of those rights is presently an active and dynamic rhetorical position. If you suppress responses espousing that position, how am I to judge the breadth of the position in the debate?

When I see a lot of the responses, even cliche ones, it tells me people are passionate about the issue. Right now I think that's an interesting piece of information.

Laughing at the idea of distillation being bad is exactly as cliche/flamebaity as complaining that your model got distilled.

No more, no less.

At this point distillation is part of the ecosystem and everyone should embrace it. If distillation is a threat to one’s business model, then the business strategy needs to shift.

I have to agree. I've flagged the post.

sure but anthropic is not literally in the comments complaining, so it's not quite apples to apples, right?

You just told on yourself big time about being a lapdog for the US Feds. Easily one of the worst moderation decisions you’ve ever made and that’s impressive given your track record.

Telling someone to have more than 20 characters in a comment on HN is bootlicking?

Absolute lunacy.

Requiring someone to have more than 20 characters, when 20 or fewer will do perfectly? Yes.

Exact steps from https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html to US Fed asset are left as an exercise to the reader?

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