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Currently on the internet people skip the article and go straight to the comments. Soon people will skip the comments and go striaght to an AI summary reading n
by s_dev 2y ago
Currently on the internet people skip the article and go straight to the comments. Soon people will skip the comments and go striaght to an AI summary reading neither the original article nor the comments.
- fsmv 2y agoI won't. I'm looking for real life human voices.
- darthrupert 2y agoThat would be an actual improvement. Reading the comments section usually just leads to personal energy waste.
- zapkyeskrill 2y agoYes, but who will comment then and on what?
- anonzzzies 2y agoOn both HN & Reddit, I find the comments more informative and less frustrating than reading the article usually. But I guess YMMV.
- brabel 2y agoYou need to read the article first to know that. But most people won't.
- Jensson 2y agoYou can read the article after the comments.
- anonzzzies 2y agoIf the comments say it's worth it I read it, but often (especially on HN) the top comment starts with a summary of errors/inconsistencies in the article and then I don't really feel the need.
- creesch 2y agoYou do you, but hivemind thinking is a real thing. I have seen highly upvoted comments seemingly "debunk" an article where on closer examination it becomes clear they actually didn't read the article either. It quickly becomes this weird bubble of people just acting on what everything "thinks" the content is about without ever having looked at the content. I get that is easier, but intellectually you are doing yourself no favors by having this be your default.
- Jensson 2y agoBut often the top comment debunks what you think is true, and then you learn something. > It quickly becomes this weird bubble of people just acting on what everything "thinks" the content is about without ever having looked at the content. That isn't an issue though since the important part is what you learn or not, not whether you think an imaginary article is true or not. If you learn something from someone debunking an imaginary article, that is just as good as learning something from debunking a real article. The only issue here is attribution, but why should a reader care about that? Edit: And it isn't an issue that people will think it actually debunks the linked article, since there will always be a sub comment stating that the commenter didn't read the article and therefore missed the mark.
- genewitch 2y ago> If you learn something from someone debunking an imaginary article, that is just as good as learning something from debunking a real article. An argument for synthetic corpi (plural of corpus..esses?) - AI ingesting AI.
- Jensson 2y agoCommenter's doesn't live isolated only getting information from other commenters, they have lives outside of HN and use that to inform their comments. So no, it isn't the same as AI ingesting AI content at all.
- 2y ago
- darthrupert 2y agoI agree, they are! But reading through them, or even worse, engaging with them, is a serious energy drain. Especially if somebody is being wrong.
- lukan 2y agoYeah, but is your mission to correct anything wrong on the internet? https://xkcd.com/386/ https://xkcd.com/386/ Sounds exhausting.
- darthrupert 2y agoYes, that was the joke.
- lukan 2y agoHard to tell nowdays..
- rzzzt 2y agoOccasionally the article is wrong.
- j4coh 2y agoEven more occasionally commenters are too.
- Jensson 2y agoBut extremely rare for a popular wrong comment to not have sub comments debunking them, they are much more reliable than articles therefore.
- j4coh 2y agoI’ve found the more I know about the topic at hand, the more wildly many of the comments seem off base, even the highly upvoted undebunked ones. Its harder for me to judge topics I don’t know much about, but I have to assume it’s something similar.
- kandesbunzler 2y agoLmfao you forgot the fact that especially on reddit and hn people tend to say a lot of bullshit especially if it goes hand in hand with their biases
- anonzzzies 2y agoSo do the writers of the articles, however, with them I cannot interact.
- northern-lights 2y ago10 years ago Reddit used to be a place where you would get informed opinions and less spam. 5 years ago, HN used to be a place where you would get informed opinions and less spam. Neither of them will go back to the same level of quality. Not anymore.
- cft 2y agoyou need to expend resources (e.g. "proof of work") to post, to drive away low effort spam. https://stacker.news/ https://stacker.news/ is an interesting experiment in that regard.
- anonzzzies 2y agoLuckily I am not a LLM and can read and select things rather fast without processing the crap. Both HN and some subreddits still are fine for quality if you know the users and their reputations; just skip the rest. Worse than 10 years ago, still a lot better than mostly anywhere else.
- inciampati 2y agoThis has been said by every long term user of these sites. And not at the same time. It was always better in the past. It's probably partly true... yeah, quality can decrease as things get better. But it's also partly an illusion of aging in a changing world. Ten years is long enough to completely change the way we write and express ourselves.
- schrodinger 2y agoIt's actually sort of in the Hacker News Guidelines (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html): "Please don't post comments saying that HN is turning into Reddit. It's a semi-noob illusion, as old as the hills."
- solumunus 2y agoAnd yet the comments still provide more value than the article, almost always.
- concordDance 2y agoThey definitely used to be, but haven't been much good for years. At least 8 years in the case of reddit, maybe 3 in the case of hackernews. Though at this point it's a habit I cannot quite bring myself to break...
- qup 2y agoIt's worse, but there's nowhere better than here imo. Except very niche topics maybe
- IOUnix 2y agoToday is my first day on HN and I came here looking for the comments. I miss intelligent conversations and reasonable interactions and reddit is just a dumpster fire now (and arguably before). Even if you can find a reasonably mature sub you're still exposed to the muck raking of the front page overflowing into everywhere else.
- NiloCK 2y agoIn a way I agree, but the sustainability is shaky. The intrinsic motivation for providing the comments comes from a mix of - peer interaction, comradery - reputation building If becomes evident that your outputs are only directly consumed by a sentiment-aggregation-layer that scrub you from the discourse, then it could be harder to put a lot of effort into the thread. This doesn't even account for the loss of info that results from fewer people actually reading and voting through the thread.
- CMCDragonkai 2y agoYes but this assumes human input is the golden goose. Maybe it is at the beginning just to bootstrap the process, and then runaway AI starts to recurse homeruns with its own original comments.
- booleandilemma 2y agoHN comments are good, but the more nested a thread, the more inane they get. You see things like people arguing over punctuation, or the definition of punctuation.
- jjallen 2y agoWhat if this is better? If the summary includes all of the key details and people save time AND read both the article and comments wouldn't that be better?
- lionkor 2y agoIf that was the case, then yes. It's not though, because the AI misses parts (doesn't "include all of the key details") and also fabricates and misrepresents other details
- jjallen 2y agoIt’s sometimes not now, but likely will be the case quite soon. I invite everyone to have an open mind about this, as it seems that the part of my comment that said “what if” wasn’t fully absorbed.
- handsclean 2y agoUnless there’s another AI breakthrough, the real applications of AI are and will be things that it’s ok to get wrong 10% of the time, usually because prior approaches were wrong more than 10% of the time. This is fine for the Playskool world of entertainment communication, in which there’s no end goal except emotional stimulation, but the opposite of what’s needed in any real attempt to engage with the world, in which we already struggle to capture the complexity of reality.
- geoffbp 2y agoGlad it’s not just me who does this. :)
- ed_balls 2y agoI wanted to listen to a podcast where a profesor explains a new drug for ADHD. Instead of spending 2h of my time I spent 5 min reading a summary generated by gpt from a youtube transcript.
- cft 2y agoI agree with the first part, but I disagree with the conjecture. There are also people who enjoy writing comments, and inasmuch they have to read a bit of context (at least the comment they are replying to). Those will always exits.
- flakeoil 2y agoBut then there will be no comments to summarize.
- notoverthere 2y agoBut what if the AI just hallucinates the comments? People will never know.
- rcarmo 2y agoThey could actually be better than reality. Who knows?
- jgoodhcg 2y agoI went to this thought too but then I remembered the 90-9-1 rule. The AI summary is for some portion of the 90. The 9 are still going to comment. What they comment on and how they generate the comments might change though.
- jefe_ 2y agoOur digital twins will write the comments. They will be us, but with none of our flaws. They will never experience the shame of posting a dumb joke, getting flamed, and then deleting it, for they will have tested all ideas to prevent such an oversight. They will never experience the satisfaction-turned-to-puzzlement of posting an expertly crafted, well-researched comment that took 2 hours of the workday to draft - only to receive one upvote, for their research will be instantaneous and their outputs efficient. Of course they will never need to humbly reply, 'Ah, I missed that, good catch!' to a child comment indicating the entire premise of their question would be answered with a simple reading of the linked article - for they will have deeply and instantly read the article. Yes, our digital twins will be us, but better - and we will finally be free to play in the mud.
- endofreach 2y agoWe all are, since a long time. The mud just doesn't shine so bright.
- linuxftw 2y agoAmazon is already forcing this pattern on mobile users not logged in. If you want to see the reviews, all you get is an AI summary, the star rating, maybe 1 or 2 reviews, then you have to log in to see more.
- portaouflop 2y agoThe cure is to stop using Amazon.
- linuxftw 2y agoIt has already caused me to not further investigate purchases. Similar to yelp, if I have to log in to see things, you're dead to me.
- Maken 2y agoThere is also no way to disable the AI summaries even if you are logged in.
- tomrod 2y agoAs articles are increasingly published with AI, this becomes yet another example of, to coin a phrase, AI loopidity.
- inciampati 2y agoThis is so good! Finally the word I need to describe what I'm living. And yes I'm copy pasting articles into LLMs for summary.
- IOUnix 2y agoIf writers are using ai to write articles, and readers are using ai to summarize the same article, what's the underlying inefficiency here? That writers should just be posting brief summaries of the articles in the first place? Or maybe they just need to be prompting ai to create a summary rather than a full article?
- cle 2y agoDifferences in how people want to consume the article, and what information they’re looking for. Some want snippets, some want summaries, some want long form. We have information compression machines now. Might as well raw dump the information and let the machine package it up in the format we prefer for consumption, instead of pre-packaging it. (Yeah, this is effectively what authors are doing…currently they can still do novel things that the compression machines can’t, but how long will that last?)
- ethbr1 2y agoHN comments aren't valuable because of their average quality or content, but because of the feedback vote sorting. (Aside from the tendency towards first=top. Would be nice to have time-weighted upvote decay instead of absolute count)
- hibikir 2y agoHave you ever had to give a demo that no meeting attendee actually cared about, just because management demanded it? Standup meetings with 20 people where maybe 2 people cared about? The future might involve AI updates, summarized by AI into weekly reports, summarized again into monthly reports, then into quarterly departmental reports that nobody actually reads.
- ncr100 2y agoOr, the future might be everyone reads summaries, because there are only AI Managers and no human managers, where humans hold occasional meetings and have conversations which are listed to by AI, and we take our lead from the AI summaries. The AI maintains business focus through it monitoring the business performance, updating each summary as needed to maintain performance. It's a worthwhile experiment for a business school, IMO, automating a layer of bureaucracy.
- crooked-v 2y agoAh, good ol' Manna. https://marshallbrain.com/manna1 https://marshallbrain.com/manna1
- nrclark 2y agoDoesn't that seem ultimately futile though? Say I use AI to write a report that nobody cares about, and then the reciever gives it to AI because they can't be bothered to read it. Who is benefiting here other than OpenAI?
- jbm 2y agoSounds about right, as we are post-dead internet in public places. There was a thread about the US tariffs on Canada I was reading on a stock investment subreddit. The whole page was full of people complaining about Elon Musk, Donald Trump, "Buy Canadian" comments, moralizing about Alberta's conservative government and other unrelated noise. None of this was related to the topic; stocks and funds that seemed well-placed for a post-tariff environment. There were small, minor points of interest but instead of spending honest vacation time looking at each comment at zoomer internet church, I had an LLM filter out the stuff I didn't care about. Unsurprisingly there was not much left.
- nyarlathotep_ 2y ago> zoomer internet church Stealing this.
- jbm 2y agoPlease do. Don't forget to appreciate the mantra-like repetition of Brian Taylor Cohen and Qasim Rashid Esq memes.
- flamedoge 2y agoSoon people will read other people's summary that they copied from AI summary on the web.