I understand the motivation - running a mini bot farm would allow you to make sure your posts get a number of quick upvotes - or manipulate the conversation about your startup, or some other field one has a vested interest in. But seeing this infestation, and the rate at which it is growing is very demoralizing.
There probably aren't any solutions that don't involve significant privacy invasions or a fundamental change in how the site operates, so maybe this is more of a vent post - but I'm curious if anyone has any suggestions? What happens next? The entire internet becomes (even more) of a greed-manipulated psychological nightmare?
On the flip side, the AI infestation makes the New Internet, at least for me, less addictive.
A ten years ago, code-completion was intellectually interesting.
A five years ago, images from text was.
Today, none of them generally are except occasionally at the leading edge.
Or to put it another way, there’s an ice machine on the airplane taking you to Dallas Fort Worth and we just take it for granted.
I came here from Slashdot, after it turned into too much of a cesspool. And HN was a wonderful place. But over a decade, it slowly became less wonderful. More people showed up just to argue, rather than to have curious conversations. More zealots and shills, less thought.
I think what happened is that HN became a place that was worth influencing. Some people decided they'd do that rather than enjoying it for what it was. The more people on HN, the more valuable it was to manipulate, and so the more people did.
So one solution is just to find smaller forums - ones that aren't big enough to be worth trying to manipulate. That doesn't same HN, though. It doesn't get it back to what I loved.
What is the difference? Just curious...
There's a difference between "why?" to try to understand, and "why?" trying to prove the other person wrong. (If you have kids, you've probably seen this.)
There's a difference between good-faith questions and "gotcha" questions.
There's a difference between thoughtful statements and talking points. (The presence or absence of nuance is a big part of it.)
People who are here to score points don't talk the same way as people who are here for conversation. (Now, it's not quite that simple, because some people here aren't neurotypical, and they don't always talk like good-faith people, even when they're in good faith. Still, most of us here have heard neurodiverse people, and we've heard politicians, and we can often tell which is which. Neurodiverse people are usually committed to the truth. They may be nitpicky, but they will acknowledge an accurate point when one gets made. Politicians are committed to their side; they won't acknowledge that the other side has had a valid point ever in history.)
Are those comments ranking on the top spots?