Since I just recently asked you to stop posting unsubstantive flamebait and you've continued to do it non-stop, I've banned this account. Please don't create accounts to break HN's rules with.
p.s. I suppose I'd better add that (1) no, this has nothing to do with your political views, and (2) yes, we ban accounts who are doing the same thing with different politics. Oh and (3) yes, if other accounts keep doing this after we ask them to stop, we'll end up banning them as well.
This whole place only stands up because of dang. Someday (too) soon, AI moderators will be all we have to keep the peace in our forums... and dang is our most precious training resource. I'm grateful he's so transparent in explaining his process.
Sure their posts are hidden now, but why are they able to post at all? Why is anyone able to post like this? It's not good for the site, but it's endemic. Equating opinionated and acerbic comments like the one above with flamebait while saying and doing nothing about overtly abusive behavior makes no sense, and is not good for HN.
> Maybe you should be focusing more effort on users like this one, who has been posing nothing but abuse for a month
That account has been banned since the day it was created. Its comments have never been anything but [dead]. That's the maximum penalty that exists on HN. Several other accounts related to that one are also banned. This is standard.
(For readers who don't have "showdead" turned on in their profile: the account anigbrowl mentioned has been posting things like "Shut up, $SLUR", "Fuck off, $SLUR", and worse. They are banned and all their comments are killed automatically. This means that no one sees them unless they turn the 'showdead' setting on in their profile. Any user is welcome to turn that setting on, but please don't forget that if you do, you're signing up to see the worst that the internet has to offer on HN.)
Banned accounts can continue to post, but their comments are killed by default. Why? Because otherwise they'd just create new accounts and pick up where they left off. Since new accounts are unbanned at first, there would be a time lag before we could catch those and ban them again. In the meantime, more abusive posts would get through.
In other words, allowing banned accounts to post (but making their posts default-invisible) is the way to minimize their effect on a large open forum like HN, where there's no barrier to creating accounts. Attempting to restrict them further would just end up exposing more people to the abusive posts.
HN would have ceased to exist long ago if we were "doing nothing about overtly abusive behavior", so I was a little taken aback at your assumption there.
I agree, of course, that 13_9_7_7_5_18's posts were worse than computerthings's. That's why we banned the former immediately, and the latter only after warning them (many warnings, actually, if you count previous accounts that we banned) and only after they'd broken the site guidelines many times.
> Banned accounts can continue to post, but their comments are killed by default. Why? Because otherwise they'd just create new accounts and pick up where they left off. Since new accounts are unbanned at first, there would be a time lag before we could catch those and ban them again. In the meantime, more abusive posts would get through.
In other words, allowing banned accounts to post (but making their posts default-invisible) is the way to minimize their effect on a large open forum like HN, where there's no barrier to creating accounts. Attempting to restrict them further would just end up exposing more people to the abusive posts.
But maybe there should be some friction to creating accounts, like requiring a few worthwhile submissions before granting commenting privileges (which is already how it works with downvoting and flagging), or revealing the email addresses of persistently abusive accounts. Just wiping he accounts and forcing them to create new ones increases the friction, which lowers the incentive to keep doing it.
HN would have ceased to exist long ago if we were "doing nothing about overtly abusive behavior", so I'm a little taken aback at your assumption that we were doing nothing about these.
But you're not, really. Shadowbanning abuse accounts with a keyword filter is the weakest possible response, and that's why there's an endless influx of them. Since you can't really impose consequences (because usage is anonymous, any email address will do and VPNs make it impossible to track abusers), there should be some more friction to make casual abuse a less attractive pastime.
> no, this has nothing to do with your political views
Who believes that at this point? Speak up.
> Please don't create accounts to break HN's rules with.
If you want to order me to tolerate the fascism apologists has been having a field day on this site since over a month, you have to say that to my face. You do not have the personal capital or credibility to say "please". You made your bed, you sided with the anonymous, hooded executioners; we heard it the first time, now STFU already! And I'll speak my mind throttled to the showdead crowd, and if you make that impossible, of course I'll make new accounts. I'll make fake websites to have fake emails at JUST to not take orders from you.
So, what's this story getting unfairly penalized for? It's been bumping around between page and 2 and 3 after it had more than 80 upvotes and not even half the comments; meanwhile there's a story with not even half the votes, that is also older, which is firmly near the top.
There is also no qualitative difference between one water drop and a billion. One dropped on your head you wouldn't notice, a billion dropped on your head would drown you.
It isn't though? But the stuff that is fake has a corrosive effect on out ability to interact with that which isn't.
For example the fine article.. reading it, it didn't seem off to me, at all. Then I see a lot of people in the comments saying it "feels generated". The author is also in the comments saying it's not generated.
> So braindead and stereotypical are these comments that you might think they are themselves AI generated. But, picking a few at random, I checked out their profiles and they seem genuine.
Maybe I don't read enough LLM slop, but that doesn't read like LLM slop to me. I have a hard time imagining the prompt that would create it, I have an easy time seeing a human write it, so to me "it doesn't feel generated". But that's all just us "feeling" something. Like in that well known Carl Sagan quote: "unable to distinguish between what feels good and what’s true"
Can I or the author prove that it's not generated? No, so that is enough to cast anything into doubt. And I don't think that destroying all trust between humans would make them super-resilient and rational and experts in spotting disinfo. I think it could isolate people completely, not even cut the bonds between them but singe the ability to even make bonds, and that might be to the horrors that the rootlessness of industrialized mass societies gave birth to what blindness is to darkness. Without the village it takes to raise a child, and also to "make" a mind, and a heart, there might be no more hearts and minds as we understand and cherish them.
When I talk to some old folks I know and they insist on "knowing" something from Facebook, and have to step on egg shells to not hurt their feelings, while my alarms are tingling because of what they tell me, and all of that without "AI" crap involved... man, there's so many vulnerable people out there, who are lonely enough as is. They will learn nothing from being assaulted like this, it will just make life more painful and confusing and misleading for them. All because their "engagement" is worth a few cents to someone. As if the brains and lifespans of people are just fruit to squeeze juice and pulp from.
Do I seem down on LLM slop? Because I'm super down on it and I want that to come across :)
I'd say the owner is making it worse, and it's not the responsibility of people to invest more of their effort into his platform when they can build up something they can feel way more ownership of. Bigger isn't always better. The people who would miss out on things they don't want to miss out on aren't switching, but I haven't seen a single person who did switch expressing regret. Logically speaking, that's not what you see when people do something motivated purely on emotion ;)
luckily, all I needed to know is in the page source:
> Discover your dream career with Career Dreamer. An AI-powered tool to help you uncover career potential and analyze your skills to suggest new career paths!
