I felt the front page was too calm. I fixed it. YOU WON'T BELIEVE NUMBER 4.
Prompt: Remember this classic? <snip ... Hacker News 10 Years in Future > OK, i have a new idea. want to try? "Offtopic but this title makes me want to create an alternate-universe version of the HN front page where every title is shrill/spectacular/hysterical/urgent/clickbaity. Such as:
The Absolute State of the Kernel Rust Experiment Right Now
And every comment has its confidence/aggressiveness taken up to 11 (tho still within site rules)." And the HN front page right now is: <snip>
Hey, wait a minute. I think we got something here! What we need is the reverse, i.e. a LLM that recognizes clickbait and "tames" it (ideally by providing the information in the headline, like Techmeme does [kudos to them]).
I had another idea about the same topic a few weeks ago: Creating a news side which uses the clickbait strategy to only share positive news or mentaly opening up news:
“They Said Immigration Was a Crisis — Then THIS Happened to Jobs, Growth, and Local Communities”
“Everyone Expected Chaos… Instead This City Welcomed Newcomers and Its Economy EXPLODED”
“Doctors, Teachers, Builders: The ‘Immigration Problem’ Quietly Fixed a Problem No One Talks About”
“This ‘Risky’ Policy Was Supposed to Fail — Now Other Countries Are Rushing to Copy It”
“From ‘Unmanageable’ to Unstoppable: How One Tough Challenge Became a Surprising Success Story”
np, it is a hobby horse of mine to point this out in case people are reading and haven’t thought about the difference in some of these algorithms and others
(2) people who did see the original post but appreciate the follow-ups as fun and amusing variations on the theme, and therefore want them on the frontpage.
But from a moderation point of view we can't prioritize either of those cases, since doing so would be globally suboptimal, i.e. they would make the site less interesting overall in the long run. This is where it's handy to know what one is optimizing for (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...) and to have clear principles which support it (more on this at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46329337).
Of course, there is always room for occasional exceptions—we don't want to apply the "avoid repetition" principle too repetitively!—but they have to be limited, or the principle no longer holds.
If you* imagine a topic X that you don't find extra interesting, and then consider how much more annoying each Xi in the sequence X1, X2,... becomes if the deltas between Xi and Xi+1 get too small, and then remember that people have quite different feelings about which topics deserve or don't deserve extra attention, it becomes clear that the global optimization is to downweight follow-ups generally. I'm writing this in haste so I hope it makes sense!
Of course it is boring and silly for me. That's why I commented. The downvotes show the community agrees with you and disagrees with me. That's fine. I'm here to speak my opinion. I'm not here to speak your opinion.
I know about lucky 10000. It's the XKCD joke that is increasingly being used as an excuse to support every low-effort banal post. It's like modus operandus now. Party A makes a low-effort banal post. Party B questions why a banal post deserves to be on the front page. Party C says 'lucky 10000'.
There may be lucky 10000 but it's boring and silly for me. Good for the lucky 10000, but it's distracting to me when this kind of AI spam hits the front page every week. Show HN posts already gets special appearance at /show which I think is enough for this kind of stuff.
It is and I said as much. I'm sure these experiments are fun for the creator. From the downvotes I'm getting, I'm sure it's fun for the community too. It was fun for me too the first time. It's not fun if this type of experiments are on the front page every week. There's already a good home for these posts at /show. Pages can reach /show without reaching front page. This could have been one of them. But anyway others here disagree with me. So I'll go take a break now.
What's actually mind-blowing is how mice aren't already living till an age of 100. I mean, they've literally cured cancer, what's your excuse now, huh?
Gotta have the digital laugh track analogue to show people how to react.
(I'm not kidding, a ton of people will watch e.g. movie trailers or live streamed events through one of many reaction streamers so they get prompted on how to feel. I hated laugh tracks back then, I hate reaction streamers now, let me have my own feelings!)
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