You want other people to deal with the things you don't like and filter stuff for you, to improve your own experience and shield you from the filthy masses. God beware you have to endure a comment you don't like, your royal highness.
I'd rather see you gone than the people you complain about.
Core function of HN Front page is based on "other people filtering stuff for others". Filtering out by any criteria (karma, account color, first letter of the nickname, whatever) doesn't automatically mean that someone is a jerk as you have stated in the comments nearby. It just means that someone is selecting the information to consume and does not harm anyone (perhaps besides the selective person who might miss interesting info due to selection).
The filtering is supposed to be based on the quality of the content, and it's only useful to the extent that people filter either on quality directly or closely correlated metrics.
If everyone votes purely on basis of the first letter of the username, to use your example, then the votes provide no useful information and you may as well abolish it.
Filtering is a valid form of improving signals. If there there was a reliable heuristic for users posting low effort content that was better then the user would be considering that instead.
If someone in a chatroom for example is being spammy with their messages at the expense of noticing posts one finds more relevant then blocking them isn't due to considering them some filthy pleb but improving their experience. If the user being filtered never becomes aware there's no reason to be offended, either.
Edit: also I wasn't the one to downvote you if that makes any difference.
HN is already heavily moderated. Low-effort posters and spammers get downranked immediately, based on their behavior. OP is simply intolerant and unable to function in a social setting.
Minimum karma and account age filters are discriminatory, anti-social features that should not exist on any social site. The people asking for such features are intolerant jerks, no different from ageists or ableists. They are parasites, because they want the people who are not intolerant jerks to do their filtering for them, and keep the site alive by doing so.
What would happen if every single user enabled their minimum karma filter?
This thread is evidence that some are unhappy with the state of a core HN feature due to users posting what they judge to be low effort content, so it does get through.
The comments here are about possible mitigations. Based on this feedback dang has apparently now restricted new accounts from posting Show HN threads, so globally now there is a form of filtering users from being seen by others based on a heuristic.
Your initial comment is written with the impression that the poster wanting to improve their chances of higher effort content is making some judgement on the posters themselves as though they're conceited ('filthy masses', 'your royal highness') when they're merely considering one approach to reducing noise from their feed.
I myself in this very comment chain have already posted that I disagree that filtering by karma would help due to gaming issues but I don't see the problem with the user's goal.
>What would happen if every single user enabled their minimum karma filter?
Hacker News would be a much better place.
In fact, filter stories as well as users. I want to filter out any story with fewer than three upvotes and any flagged comments. That would improve quality tremendously.
How would any new user earn karma in that system? How would any story get upvoted?
Again, this system can only work if there are at least _some_ people that are willing to upvote newbies and read new posts.
It sounds like what you want isn't a community with collaborative filtering, like Hacker News, but a newsletter with editors, like Slashdot for example.
People will need to participate otherwise there won't be any new content. I see it as just like vouching, except someone has to vouch for green accounts. A slightly more equitable (and easier to implement) version of lobste.rs' invite tree.
What I want is for green accounts not to be abused as much as they are. The number of noxious, vitriolic troll alt accounts and bots is getting ridiculous. That is almost entirely the fault of established users of course, but there's no way to deal with them poisoning the well without affecting new users.
I think you missed @sltkr's point. HN wouldn't just have less new content; it would fail to develop new users. That kind of stagnation is how sites like this die.
Aggressively filtering to raise the average post quality is a sugar rush and it has the metaphorical long term consequences of type-2 diabetes. Things start out feeling great but the acceleration of death is effectively guaranteed.
My system has been working pretty well: using some extension or another that has mute functionality, if I see a person post an extremely low quality comment, I look at their comment history for two or three pages. If there is no comment of value in that set, I mute the user. The board gets better each day.
It doesn't. I don't have a link for you right now but there was a post on reddit recently showing that SynthID is removed from images by passing the image through a diffusion model for a single step at low denoise. The output image is identical to the input image (to the human eye).
My intention with this was that HN users are 30+ (Millenials and Baby boomers and Gen X) and some of the HN users are baby boomers and oldest gen X who are close to retirement/retiring as you mention.
I should've written it (or what was my intention) instead is that "most HN users are millenials, they joined programming decades ago & some HN users might be close to retirement/already retired" (I didn't mean that millenial population is retiring)
I skip forward whenever someone starts singing, or there's a prolonged dance scene, or pointless montages with music. For example the Zion dance party in The Matrix Reloaded. Or the many movies showing people dancing at the wedding party for several minutes.
Taylor Sheridan shows: let's show a bit of nature with some country music playing for 20-30 seconds for no reason at all -- five times in a 42 minutes episode.
Because there is no other way to effectively say "I'm not interested in this kind of content". You say it in the comments, you get punished. There is no downvoting posts, flagging is the only thing that has an effect.
AI has rekindled the fun of technology for me. Going past the cliché of "type a prompt in 5 seconds, get results", inventing, using and mastering different workflows and approaches to create, rearrange, improvise and reinterpret images, text, sound, video, music, speech or 3d models can be incredibly fun and rewarding.
Still, no matter how much work you put into something, ignorant haters will try and ruin it for you. That's a little depressing.
Most tech savvy people find enjoyment in having depth and understanding of _how_ a problem is solved and that aligns with the authors stance. AI just makes it more accessible, and that's fine just makes for shallow conversations with people that "don't know why" something works.
Now, if that accessibility Kindles a love of technology and forces someone to dive deeper, then right on!
An alternative example
Person A: "Had a fun weekend. Cooked an authentic Vietnamese meal. Made Pho.
Person B: What proportions of spices did you use? What fish sauce or noodle do you recommend? Mine always comes out tasting off.
Person A: Oh, I just ordered at the Vietnamese restaurant, but I described exactly what I wanted.
This is only funny to you because your limited view is that using AI = enter prompt, get result, be done. This is what most people think and what most users of AI do, but there is a lot more depth to making creative use of AI that you don't seem to know about.
One example: You can use a diffusion model as a render engine in Blender, with all the modeling and sculpting and related work, but using a diffusion engine to render the scene instead of a pathtracer/raytracer.
Another example: Composing all pieces of music manually and using AI to create different instrumentation or arrangements of your piece.
Even just prompting and bulding workflows for a diffusion model in ComfyUI to make exactly the scene you want and not just crappy slop requires knowledge and a certain amount of skill. There is a lot of overlap with photography and photo editing, and you have to know how the diffusion process works to get good results. Many casual "no effort please" users want to do it, but give up fast because the topic is complex with a somewhat steep learning curve. Their only alternative is to beg for access to workflows others have created.
It's not all just zero-effort, ChatGPT piss-colored images.
I apologize if I sound dismissive. Some things that can be produced by AI amaze me and I do see your point about being knowledgeable with your tools.
My point is, in general, it seems lowering the barrier to entry has overwhelming produced a lot of low effort things, but also some very high quality things as well (as you've argued). Unfortunately, low effort output dwarfs other things. And on the whole, it seems things are made to be bought & sold, not enjoyed.
While we're at it: my own work 2 years ago in creating an entire workflow for turning Midjourney or DALL-E dropcaps into attractive, lightweight, easy-to-create dropcaps for web pages: https://gwern.net/dropcap We use it for the cat, Gene Wolfe, and holiday pages.
I'd rather see you gone than the people you complain about.
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