Comment by quaintdev
11 hours ago
Offtopic. I have a concern that this forum is removing stories that have negative connotation on AI.
Few days back, I posted an article[1] that was about how AI threatens natural resources for billions. This was from United Nations and it was flagged. I did not think much about it until I saw two other stories [2] & [3] today that were doing fairly good on front page but they suddenly disappeared. They are not even on 2nd or 3rd page. I have seen this happening at other times as well but did not document it. Just thought you all should know about this.
I was going to create Tell HN thread but I thought the same would happen with it too. I am pretty sure this thread is not going anywhere so I'm posting my concern here.
> how AI threatens natural resources for billions.
The article rests on the claim that water usage of data centers on continent X threaten water availability for humans on continent Y.
I hope you can see how self-evidently illogical that is. The article tries to bend logic into a narrative it is trying to push.
> This was from United Nations and it was flagged.
Indeed! It exposes a level of lack of rigor and critical thinking which is astounding - this is meant to be an organization that thinks clearly, which it clearly does not.
What do you think people on continent x are going to do if there is water on continent y but not continent x…?
Since you think it's so obvious, please elaborate on what those people on continent x will do
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desalinate.
It is still surprising that it was flagged. I’d have read it if it appeared — and the comments would be nice to read.
Usually things are flagged on HN for firm reasons and not emotional ones, even if the reasoning isn't transparent.
And while we are off topic, if we could get 1% of the ire of data center haters pointed at the fast fashion / textile industry, lawns or alfalfa production... we might gain some meaningful ground on sane water usage.
Flags on HN are user submitted. they are just as emotional as reddit downvotes. If something reveals an uncomfortable truth it gets flagged.
Flags also require a minimum karma, and members with yet higher karma can also undead posts, if needed.
HN is actually surprisingly good about this, so I disagree with your assertion.
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This forum tends to be visited by an intersection of technologists and the VC crowd. The HN algorithm is more open and transparent than Reddit's, but any Reddit-like platform suffers from the whims of the community. Currently, it seems like a disproportionate amount of HN users are hyped up about generative AI compared to people in the real world, so you'll see those whims back in voting and flagging tendencies.
That said, there is also a vocal anti-AI crowd here, or at least there used to be. Most of those people seemed to have left for greener pastures seeing how half the HN front page is "someone made XYZ but now with AI" these days.
There are other places that discuss tech that aren't so focused on making money, and those are probably less biased in favour of the latest AI gadget.
On the other hand, since the day ChatGPT was unleashed upon the general public, you should assume all online interaction is happening through AI and should probably be ignored. The human internet died the day we taught computers how to write a coherent paragraph.
What are these other places?
Language forums (ocaml for example).
lobste.rs
> That said, there is also a vocal anti-AI crowd here, or at least there used to be. Most of those people seemed to have left for greener pastures seeing how half the HN front page is "someone made XYZ but now with AI" these days.
There is still a vocal anti-AI crowd here. The problem is that they don't seem to be very good, overall, at upholding HN commenting guidelines. (This is probably just a fatigue effect.) I keep seeing green accounts making pithy, uncivil snipes on this topic, with heavy use of sarcasm and reference to anti-AI "thought-terminating cliches" (e.g. mentioning the topic of water use and expecting that mention to stand in for an entire argument, while not acknowledging any of the well-established refutations).
But the thing about "someone made XYZ but now with AI" is that most of it is posted by "someone", or someone with a connection to "someone". Hence the complaints about the state of Show HN. And the thing about "someone"s is that they do not care how many anti-AI people are lurking around. There's nothing the anti-AI people could do, in principle, to stop it. Consequently, the presence of those posts is not evidence that the anti-AI people are leaving.
> On the other hand, since the day ChatGPT was unleashed upon the general public, you should assume all online interaction is happening through AI and should probably be ignored.
…And yet you're still here?
My clear-eyed perspective is that AI companies and their supporters are getting away with a massive crime against humanity, so it’s probably relatively more difficult for me to contain my frustrations than the people who are happy about it. When you plunder a little you get punished according to the rules, but these companies have proved when you plunder enough you get to start writing the rules.
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There’s a lot of different new usernames with those non-constructive comments, but I wouldn’t be surprised if it’s just a couple very persistent people making new accounts after given a suspension or something.
Your second two had high comments to upvotes, which tends to get articles downranked more quickly. It may simply be that the stuff you're posting is generating disagreement without corresponding upvotes.
It happened to this Flock post from yesterday https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49314962
Just in case people didn't know - Flock is a YC company
That explains their newbie mistake of getting too much publicity. Municipalities are replacing their Flock cameras with Axon cameras, which are just as bad but don't announce their presence.
There was one about NHS giving all of UK's medical data to Palantir by accident last week that got pulled from the front page about 20mins after it was posted too, feels fishy af
Actually, I found the phenomenon too. I think there are two main reasons:
1. ycombinator supports many AI companies.
2. There are too many marketers from AI companies.
> Offtopic. I have a concern that this forum is removing stories that have negative connotation on AI.
The first example was flagged by users. It fits the pattern of other political clickbait stories. The top comment is calling out problems with it. This type of story pops up and gets flagged all the time on different topics.
Some people assume a conspiracy or moderation misbehavior, but when most of the comments in the thread are people calling out obvious problems with the article it leads to a lot of users clicking the flag button. Articles with poor logic or tortured claims don't last long here.
The second one is an Ask HN on a contentious topic with more comments than upvotes. There’s an automatic filter on this website designed to detect flame wars and I suspect it down ranks threads that aren’t getting many upvotes but are attracting a lot of comments. Happens to many Ask HN threads.
The third one doesn't even strike me as anti-AI. I don't know why you included it as an example of an anti-AI agenda because it's still about a future where everyone is using AI. It has other problems though because it's willfully ignoring the fact that inference is getting cheaper at a fast rate. It probably got dropped from the front page because the ratio of comments to upvotes was bad, like the other story.
There isn’t a conspiracy theory to be found in these examples. This is just what happens to tired topics on this site.
Anti-AI topics are on the front page all the time. I think that story you tried to post was just a badly written anger bait piece, it got called out in the comments, and people started flagging it.
> The first example was flagged by users. It fits the pattern of other political clickbait stories. The top comment is calling out problems with it. This type of story pops up and gets flagged all the time on different topics.
If anything, they don't get flagged nearly consistently enough.
In my opinion anthropic doing product feature reveals is a tired topic but it hits the front page every day. This website has a clear pro-AI bias (which is fine).
> The first example was flagged by users. It fits the pattern of other political clickbait stories.
That’s what they mean. It’s too easy to flag something here, as it is too easy to downvote.
>That’s what they mean. It’s too easy to flag something here
He didn’t say that at all. He said there was bias towards removing negative AI posts. He showed no knowledge of the flagging system and that it could just be working as intended.
And yet submissions don't get flagged nearly as much as ought to happen.
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All flagged stories are flagged by users that are part of an interest group. unric.org is political clickbait? Give me a break, Mr. "nothing to see here".
What "interest group" are you referring to, and how do you know that it's not individual users with a legitimate good faith disagreement?
> "All flagged stories are flagged by users that are part of an interest group."
False. I occasionally flag items, never as part of nor acting on behalf of any particular interest group.
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Yes; the group of people who have an interest in the submission guidelines being upheld.
> All flagged stories are flagged by users that are part of an interest group.
Read the comments. People were actually reading the topic and calling it out. This gets topics flagged.
It’s not coordinated interest groups conspiring to remove stories.
> Give me a break, Mr. "nothing to see here".
Okay, Mr. “I just created an alt account for this comment”
Thanks for sharing! I’m super skeptical of the claims, but it really deserves careful discussion.
Hope they make comparisons to food and fashion. I measure my AI usage in terms of hamburgers. Makes me feel better about AI and worse about eating meat.
But why do you think this isn’t the flagging system working as intended?
Were they caught here? https://news.social-protocols.org/stats?id=49319582
Edit: previous sibling comments explain pretty well + imagine moving the needle on AI on HN with negative coverage of it!
It’s really fascinating to me how when the community dislikes certain content people always jump to conspiratorial justifications rather than the much more mundane “this content is not very good”. The first article is poor and all the comments on it say exactly that. The second one actually did fairly well for what is a fairly middle-of-the-road Ask HN. There’s no shadowy cabal removing anti-AI content from the front page.
Concerns of this sort are best emailed to hn@ycombinator.com .
Seeing the reception on the first one, maybe "removing stories that have negative connotation on AI" is not the most honest description of what happened there.
It reminds me to how various political movements will complain about being unfairly censored, pointing at their posts being disproportionately removed as evidence of this, then you look at said posts, and discover that they're simply disproportionately questionable in the first place.
There's definitely merit to monitoring something like this, so I do appreciate you surfacing this here, but there's also definitely a wheat and a chaff to this, and so based on just this much I have to disagree.
I understand this is not enough but I don't see a story here that paints AI negatively. If one is posted it gets removed swiftly. And I have seen this happen enough times that I'm considering taking periodic snapshots of the front page and prove this definitively.
> I understand this is not enough but I don't see a story here that paints AI negatively. If one is posted it gets removed swiftly.
Are we reading the same site? There is constant anti-AI content on the front page.
I know you're upset that your submission got flagged, but as most of the comments pointed out it wasn't even a well-argued piece. It got flagged because users here expect to read reasonable arguments, but the commenters called out real problems with the article and the arguments it was failing to make.
I would take it as feedback about what types of articles aren't welcome by the users here, not an indictment of the specific topic you submitted.
You have a point. Check /active and you'll see some posts
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It's a good weekend project, just gotta be careful not to fall for motivated reasoning and not to overreach. A heavy prior suspicion of conspiracy doesn't help.
A sibling comment mentioned a few details already, but there's a good amount of information out there about how HN's post ranking system and moderation works, that'd probably be good to also consider. Maybe reaching out to the mods would also be helpful in the way of this.
To give you an anecdotal example, if I see a post mentioning how LLMs are "just next token predictors", I'm basically flagging that by reflex at this point. Not because it'd be literally untrue, but because it's asinine overall. But you won't be able to infer this from data, only the fact that a post using "AI-critical language" was flagged.
Or there was another post about how Ireland's electricity use is so-and-so % data center driven, further suggesting that this is trending up. This was not true, and the article was further horribly unhelpful in actually putting this fact into context, or properly conveying the trends. I think I ended up flagging that one as a result, after posting - what I thought - was a lot fairer picture (and even that was awfully lacking in context). Once again, an "AI-critical" post which on the face of it would have been simply censored if enough flags gathered.
There's also the mundane human angle to this, where people enthusiastic about <thing> won't necessarily be the most receptive to criticism to it, and will be more likely to try and pick that criticism apart. Gotta match the audience on some level.
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Like 1/3 of HN posts are people complaining or crashing out about AI, and so are all the comments.
The mods (& many users) like to flag anything that could be "controversial" or lead to "flame wars". It's possible they thought that article could get people "fired up" and it could result in "arguments" in the comments. And this doesn't just apply to stories - if you have an opinion that the mods or some user doesn't like, you'll be accused of posting flame bait.
This "community" (as the mods like to call it) is really a business tool for YC. Attract nerds to the site, funnel them into the YC program, make startups, collect billions. If this was your money-making tool, you'd probably want to quash all controversy too.
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there is absolutely no forum without biases. Least of all, a VC forum like this one.
Yup. And if someone tells you they're making a "free speech app", prepare for the most aggressive monoculture you've ever seen
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Plus it was too wordy
During the DOGE massacres last year where various tech bros were destroying the federal government, most of the stories were flagged from the front page of this site.
There is a strong bias at play here, please remember when discussing anything pro- worker or environment.
Yes, because most of them were annoying "look how awful my political outgroup is" ragebait without substantive argument or insight.
> Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, or celebrities, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon. If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic.
This forum skews heavily skeptical and cynical on AI. HN is very skeptical of anything corporate and always highlights the cynical angle on anything.
This is actually true.