Comment by ramraj07

There are many types of contributions to discussions on HN, of course. But I will tell you the contributions that resonate most with me: Personal experiences and anecdotes that illuminate the general issue being discussed. Sometimes a single post is enough for that illumination, and sometimes it is the sum of many such posts that sheds the brightest light.

An example of the latter: Since March 2020, there have been many, many discussions on HN about work-from-home versus work-at-office. I myself started working from home at the same time, and articles about working from home started to appear in the media around then, too. But my own experience was a sample of one, and many of the media articles seemed to be based on samples not much larger. It was thus difficult judge which most people preferred, what the effects on overall productivity, family life, and mental health might be, how employers might respond when the pandemic cooled down, etc. The discussions on HN revealed better and more quickly what the range of experiences with WFH was, which types of people preferred it and which types didn’t, the possible advantages and disadvantages from the point of view of employers, etc.

In contrast, discussions that focus only on general principles—freedom of this versus freedom of that, foo rights versus bar obligations, crypto flim versus fiat flam—yield less of interest, at least to me.

That’s my personal experience and/or anecdote.

I don't think that thread quality and the process of humans debating and learning from each other are opposing concepts.

On the contrary. It's precisely when people aren't willing to learn, or to debate respectfully and with an open mind, when thread quality deteriorates.

If I can’t determine your comment is by a bot, does it make a difference? You are just a random name on the internet.

Yeah. Overemphasis on wanting "smart thoughtful comments" coul create a chilling effect where people might refrain from asking simple questions or posting succinct (yet valuable!) responses. Sometimes dumb questions are okay (because it's all relative).

I like thinking about the purpose, because I doubt there is a defined purpose right now. I have absolutely no idea why whoever hosts this site (ycombinator?) wants comments - if they're like reddit or twitter, though, it's to build a community and post history, because you can put that down as an asset and, idk, do money stuff with it. Count it in valuations and whatnot. And maybe do marketing and data mining. Or sell APIs. Stuff like that. So in this case, for the host, the "purpose" is "generate content that attracts more users to register and post, that is in a format that we can pitch as having Value to the people who decide valuations, or is in a format that we can pitch as having Value to the people who may want to pay for an API to access it, or is valuable for data mining, or, gives us enough information about the users that, combined with their contact info, functions as something we can sell for targeted ads."

For me the "purpose" of discussion on HN is to fill a dopamine addiction niche that I've closed off by blocking reddit, twitter, and youtube, and, to hone ideas I have against a more-educated-than-normal and partially misaligned-against-my-values audience (I love when the pot gets stirred with stuff we aren't supposed to talk about that much such as politics and political philosophy, though I try not to be the first one to stir), and occasionally to ask a question that I'd like answered or just see what other people think about something.

Do you think there's much "learning from eachother" on HN? I'm skeptical that really happens much on the chat-internet outside of huge knowledge-swaps happening on stackoverflow. I typically see confident value statements: "that's why xyz sucks," "that's not how that works," "it wasn't xyz, it was zyx," etc. Are we all doing the "say something wrong on the internet to get more answers" thing to eachother? What's the purpose of discussion on HN to you? Why are you here?

The purpose of my comment is I wanna see what other people think about my reasons for posting, whether others share it, maybe some thoughts on that weird dopamine hit some of us get from posting at eachother, and see why others are here.

There's the quality of the written commentary (which is all that matters for anyone only reading, never posting on HN) and the quality of the engagement of people that do write comments (which include how much their learned, the emotions they had, and other less tangible stuff)

I think HN is optimizing for the former quality aspects and not the latter. So in that sense, if you can't tell if it's written by a bot, does it matter? (cue Westworld https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kaahx4hMxmw)

Intelligent debate can happen in high-quality threads. And when we are intelligently debating subjective matters, the debate is targeted towards the reader, not the opposing party. On the other hand, when we are debating objective matters, the debate leads to the parties learning from the other. So I don't think these things are opposites.

I don’t think so, at least, I find that process to be very educational, especially when some one changes their mind or an otherwise strong argument gets an unusually compelling critique.

Basically I think those two things are synonymous.

If there’s a bot that can take a topic and research the argument you feed it, all without hallucinating any data and made up references… please please point me to it.

Oh yeah? So maybe you would like to be the object of supervised-by-AI learning? :-)

I don't think it is so important whether a comment is written by a man, a woman, a child, or a <machine>, or some combination thereof. What is important is that the comment stands on its own, and has merit

This feels wrong for some reasons. A generalized knowledge that AI can express may be useful. But if it makes things up convincingly, the result that someone may follow its line of thought may be worse for them? With all shit humans say, it’s their real human experience formulated through a prism of their mood, intelligence and other states and characteristics. It’s a reflection of a real world somewhere. AI statements in this sense are minced realities cooked into something that may only look like a solid one. Maybe for some communities it would be irrelevant because participants are expected to judge logically and to check all facts, but it would require to keep awareness at all times.

By “real human” I don’t mean that they are better (or worse) in a discussion, only that I am a human too, a real experience is applicable to me in principle and I could meet it irl. AI’s experience applicability has yet to be proven, if it makes sense at all.

Note: Alan Turing's Imitiation Game pretty much directly involves Men, Women, Machines, Teletypes.

These days of course we use such things as IRC clients, Discord, Web Browsers etc, instead of teletypes. If you substitute in these modern technologies, the Imitation Game still applies to much online interaction today.

I've often applied the lessons gleaned from this to my own online interactions with other people. I don't think I ever quite imagined it might start applying directly to <machines>!

I think it would be really interesting to see threads on Hackernews start with an AI digestion of the article and surrounding discussion. This could provide a helpful summary and context for readers, and also potentially highlight important points and counterpoints in the conversation. It would be a great way to use AI to enhance the user experience on the site.

I routinely use AI to help me communicate. Like Aaron to my Moses.

When I compare the ChatGPT-generated comments to those written by real humans on most web forums, I could easily see myself preferring to only interact with AIs in the future rather than humans, where I have to deal with all kinds of stupidity and bad and rude behavior.

The AIs aren't going to take over by force, it'll be because they're just nicer to deal with than real humans. Before long, we'll let AIs govern us, because the leaders we choose for ourselves (e.g. Trump) are so awful that it'll be easier to compromise on an AI.

Before long, we'll all be happy to line up to get installed into Matrix pods.