Comment by tomhow
3 hours ago
We buried the post for seeming obviously-LLM-generated. But please email us about these (hn@ycombinator.com) rather than posting public accusations.
There are two reasons why emailing us is better:
First, the negative consequences of a false allegation outweigh the benefits of a valid accusation.
Second and more important: we'll likely see an email sooner than we'll see a comment, so we can nip it in the bud quickly, rather leaving it sitting on the front page for hours.
Not sure if I should mail this question but, is there any chance those 400+ votes are artificially inflated?
There’s no evidence of this, but a title that’s easy to agree with can often attract upvotes from people who don’t read the article.
You buried a popular post because of the public accusation or just your "hunch"?
Why not let your audience decide what it wants to read?
I say this as a long time HN reader, who feels like the community has become grumpier over the years. Which I feel like is a shame. But maybe that's just me.
You're welcome to email us about this.
It's my job to read HN posts and comments all day, every day, and these days that means spending a lot of time evaluating whether a post seems LLM-generated. In this case the post seems LLM-generated or heavily LLM-edited.
We have been asking the community not to publicly call out posts for being LLM-generated, for the reasons I explained in the latest edit of the comment you replied to. But if we're going to ask the community that, we also need to ask submitters to not post obviously-LLM-influenced articles. We've been asking that ever since LLMs became commonplace.
> I say this as a long time HN reader, who feels like the community has become grumpier over the years. Which I feel like is a shame. But maybe that's just me.
We've recently added this line to the guidelines: Don't be curmudgeonly. Thoughtful criticism is fine, but please don't be rigidly or generically negative.
HN has become grumpier, and we don't like that. But a lot of it is in reaction to the HN audience being disappointed at a lot of what modern tech companies are serving up, both in terms of products and content, and it doesn't work for us to tell them they're wrong to feel that way. We can try, but we can't force anyone to feel differently. It's just as much up to product creators and content creators to keep working to raise the standards of what they offer the audience.
Thanks Tom, I appreciate the openness. You are seemingly overriding the wishes of the community, but it your community and you have the right to do so. I still think it's a shame, but that's my problem.
3 replies →
I’d be grumpy over wasting my time on an HN post that’s LLM generated which doesn’t state that it is. If I wanted this, I could be prompting N number of chat models available to me instead of meandering over here.
There are also 200+ comments on here and a good discussion IMO which is now unfortunately buried.
Feels like a net negative for the HN community.