Comment by Iuz
1 day ago
Every time I open one of the multiple daily posts about Anthropic or OpenAI and read the comments, I get this weird feeling.
Astroturfing is obviously common in political spaces, whether to normalize certain views, manufacture consensus, or shift public opinion. It seems to me that HN would be a prime target for tech companies to do the same thing, and lately I can't shake the impression that there's a lot of it going on here.
This site might be dying.
The death of HN has been lamented since at least 2007 (in addition to the cliche that it's turning into Reddit, mentioned in the guidelines).
So far, it hasn't died nor turned into Reddit.
The political posts have definitely increased and the front page is increasingly filled with negative sentiment posts that leaves one angered and not filled with a positive light. For years I didn’t flag anything. Now I’m daily flagging political posts.
> filled with negative sentiment posts that leaves one angered and not filled with a positive light
You mean the negative sentiments that you get when people uncover how big tech/monopolies/government really works ? I guess you would rather read la-la-land stories about the entrepreneurial aces of the 2010s when techies and the general populace were still gullible for that.
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As I'm always telling people, the phenomenon you're noticing is that the President of the United States wishes to increase negative sentiment and widen the scope of things which are subject to politics. It's not something that HN or its users get a choice in. If you don't like it, I'm with you, but you're going to have to take it up with him.
What you’re noticing is called fifth generation warfare. Get people to feel bad about their country, government, community, etc.
When it gets to politics or economics there are an increasingly large amount of reddit like socialism comments. It seems ironic given its run by a VC firm.
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Yeah I’m gonna have to go ahead and push back on this. It’s getting worse and trending towards Reddit and using that guideline to tell people to stop talking about it is making things worse. We need to shame and downvote and flag the Reddit-tier posts and comments here.
> So far, it hasn't died nor turned into Reddit.
Depends how you define it. I mean, just because you or the moderators say so doesn't make it true - I've used this site for more than 10 years and I've never seen a higher proportion of political posts nor a higher proportion of blatantly partisan comments on most (not just political) threads.
It isn't like this site would be likely to die in the sense of 0 people visit it, so I'm not sure what you even mean by it dying and have no clue how you'd even measure that. For all you know, most of the commenters are bots - I could be a bot for all you know. But the quality of discourse has definitely become less tech-focused since I first started coming here, and as a Reddit user from early on it very much reminds me of that. Reddit in the beginning was basically to Digg what HN is to Reddit today, and the trajectory is - subjectively to me at least - very similar. What started out as a nerdy tech space slowly over time has and is morphing into political bullshit that never would have made the front page 10 years ago.
Having said that, there's no doubt all these sites have astroturfing issues, and tech in particular tends to have very vociferous users as a rule.
> What started out as a nerdy tech space slowly over time has and is morphing into political bullshit that never would have made the front page 10 years ago.
Don't you see how we're propagating the problem here? It would be easy for someone who wants a nerdy tech space to read and discuss the contents of the source article, describing how a new technology might change the experimental process for quantum computing research. Instead we're engaging in political meta-commentary, under an OP comment speculating that "[t]his site might be dying" because they don't like hearing about the company who published it.
Generally the comments are heavily anti AI to the point where it almost seems like it’s a foreign adversary trying to mold the public opinion to be anti ai to slow the progress of AI advancement in the USA
I think this is some sort of built-in bias we all have. I'm pretty bearish on AI, and to me I get the impression that generally most comments are heavily pro-AI, or pro-OpenAI/Anthropic. I think we're just biased to see and remember what we disagree with.
Especially since these anti-AI comments completely disappear in posts about Chinese AI progress.
This is total bollocks. The skeptics are all present and just as forceful in any AI thread.
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Just subjectively making it up, but my feeling is that people are not so much against AI in principle as they are against the american-capitalist approach to it: steamroll its rollout everywhere, risk the entire economy (both jobs and stock market), for dubious net benefits to anyone but the wealthy.
The US earned themselves very little goodwill from the world (and many of their own citizen), to the point that people even in the West are happy seeing China challenging the US on the AI front. Whether China is wielding AI for better or worse outcomes than the US is up for hindsight.
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I thought the opposite. I've sensed the gravitational pull from 2 trillion-dollar companies that are hoping to IPO in the near future
That is the most bizarre leap given that the best models bang-for-buck right now are Chinese.
The real issue here is the death of critical thinking.
I'm not anti-AI; I'm anti-centralization of power. If the Chinese models were closed source and developed with the same strategy as the US labs then I'd be rooting against them, too.
Funny you should mention them but not the multiple daily posts about the Chinese models and labs.
The whole thread without a single technical post about the significance (or not) of the announcement. Who want to follow me to create a new site that focus on the substance of the news?
I'm not abandoning HN, I can come back here to make fun of posts I don't like, post shallow comments, snarky ones, vent my conspiracy theories, complain about the evils that are S, A or E, post my personal anecdotes, advocate for my beliefs which I'm convinced as the only truth. Last but not least, feel smug posting about AI sounding posts. HN is a great place for all of that.
There has always been quite a lot of fanboy-ism on HN with regards to certain corporations and there are also certain "celebrities" on this site that get tons of upvotes even on silly takes just because they're well-known, no different to Reddit in this regard. Reddit-style memes are abhorred but the pelican benchmark is considered top-notch and even expected in any new LLM release thread.
I still think there is heavier moderation here (the good kind) and more high quality content to be enjoyed than Reddit.
The worst for astroturfing I think is Kagi. Everytime a post comes up l, every comment is like "Kagi is so great yada yada", often totally unrelated to the article, with little comments mentioning negatives or commenting on the article.
Like, who even use a search engine at this point, let alone pay for it.
If this happens with a minor search engine I'm pretty sure it happens with a lot of other products, starting with AI models.
LLMs are advancing the frontiers of knowledge. Is it really that hard for you to believe that people are simply genuinely fascinated about these developments?
People are burnt twice shy and have become comically cynical. Your discernment has been completely shot.