Comment by _DeadFred_
7 days ago
Every time these sorts of articles get posted people that express a differing opinion from the standard get flagged (making it so you can't read their post at all) pretty quickly making it seem more like the intention isn't to start discussion. It seems like it's gotten to the point that the people that just get flagged into oblivion stopped trying to post.
It's not just these articles. Having any differing opinions on basically anything now.
It's as far from hacking interest as it gets for me.
This is IMHO the most unfortunate thing about how HN has changed in the last 10 years or so. People downvote now as a form of disagreement, rather than using it as a form of collective moderation. The net result is that the popular opinions rise, while unpopular opinions tend to fall or die out.
On the plus side, it does make for an interesting barely scientific way to poll for popularity of a topic on HN. Absolutely not worth it IMHO, but it is at least a bit interesting.
FWIW, you can read flagged posts and comments by turning on “showdead” in your profile.
IMHO showdead often surfaces a lot of interesting info. It's one of my favorite things about HN, and I love and appreciate that HN has that feature.
One example: If you want to see how bad the LLM slop commenting is, showdead is very helpful. It's not as bad as some people think, but it's certainly non-zero. On the plus side, those comments do seem to get identified and flagged/killed pretty quickly.