5 ms·

Self-hosting isn't just about tech choices — it's about who controls access to knowledge. During the Enlightenment, owning a physical copy of a book meant in

Self-hosting isn't just about tech choices — it's about *who controls access to knowledge*. During the Enlightenment, owning a physical copy of a book meant intellectual freedom. You didn’t rent ideas; you had them. Today, most digital knowledge is hosted, locked, or streamed — *leased from platforms*, not owned. We’re in fact drifting into *digital feudalism*, where access to culture, tools, and even history depends on gatekeepers. In a perfect world this should go beyond market logic. It’s not just a question of what's sustainable or profitable. It's about *civic autonomy*. If the infrastructure of knowledge is centralized, then so is control over thought. Self-hosting may not be for everyone, but *distributed, open systems are essential* to preserving a democratic and durable digital commons.

drew_lytle 1y ago
Couldn’t have said it better myself! Thanks for reading!
Aurornis 1y ago
I personally prefer owning my content, physical books, and having local copies. But if I’m being honest, I think this claim that if you don’t own the book you don’t have the knowledge and society will turn into digital feudalism is hyperbole. Knowledge is proliferating faster than ever, becoming more accessible than ever, and it’s easier than ever before to get the info that you’re searching for, even in this streaming world. The idea that I’m going to lose knowledge from a book I read 5 years ago if it disappears from my library just doesn’t track. In fact, it’s rare that I return to my physical books these days because I can find equivalent info faster from a quick search online. Don’t get me wrong: I prefer having my own copies and so on. However, when people start throwing around concepts like “digital feudalism” and trying to draw parallels to the enlightenment it feels like this is all some abstract philosophical debate rather than a discussion of what’s really happening in the world.
- BizarroLand 1y ago
  Knowledge is not proliferating faster than ever. It's being gobbled up and locked down by companies whose sole interest is making as much money as they can instead of improving the world and profiting from the improvement. Media is being deleted or locked in vaults. Games are being shut down with no way to restore them. The written word that has been vetted by people with domain specific knowledge is being locked behind paywalls and not being advertised, while AI machines directly lie to the curious and the seekers of knowledge. I can throw a digital stone in any direction and hit something that is worse off thanks to the modern internet.
- Zak 1y ago
  I think when people say "digital feudalism", they usually mean that the spaces where we do things digitally are increasingly owned by private entities that operate them for their own benefit. It's an analogy which can't be expected to align perfectly with historical feudalism.
  - nine_k 1y ago
    Why, technically very similar acts are known in history: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inclosure_act https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inclosure_act
- veqq 1y ago
  > from a quick search online I would have agreed with you a few years ago. But now Google, DuckDuckGo etc. at most provide 3 pages of results, with many irrelevant or wrong. There are alternatives: https://wiby.me/ https://wiby.me/ https://clew.se/ https://clew.se/ https://kagi.com/ https://kagi.com/ But that's not the majority experience and more importantly, it shows that it really can be "taken" from us.
- Root_Denied 1y ago
  > Knowledge is proliferating faster than ever, becoming more accessible than ever, and it’s easier than ever before to get the info that you’re searching for, even in this streaming world. The idea that I’m going to lose knowledge from a book I read 5 years ago if it disappears from my library just doesn’t track. In fact, it’s rare that I return to my physical books these days because I can find equivalent info faster from a quick search online. The real problem with this is that there are vested interests at play in managing what information you see first - push something to the 2nd or 3rd page of google results and it becomes effectively invisible, especially when you have pages and pages of results that seem to push the narrative that those vested interests want you to see. I tend to think that Huxley was right over Orwell, information is lost in the shuffle of distraction and rigged systems. The "truth" is there to find, but it's a needle in a haystack of believable lies, and those lies were crafted specifically to obfuscate that nugget of truth. So the amount of information moving around is irrelevant if it's not useful, or it's intentionally misleading from something that might upset those who benefit from the status quo.
- autoexec 1y ago
  > Knowledge is proliferating faster than ever, becoming more accessible than ever, and it’s easier than ever before to get the info that you’re searching for Information is proliferating and is more accessible, but a huge amount of that information is lies and manipulation I'm not sure that really counts as knowledge. > The idea that I’m going to lose knowledge from a book I read 5 years ago if it disappears from my library just doesn’t track. You might not forget what you learned from a book you read 5 years ago after it gets stolen from you, but it does mean that others are cut off from that same information. Worse is that what you saw 5 years ago might still be made avilable, but only in censored/altered forms which could easily have you questioning your memory of something you read or saw just 5 years ago. It's not just an abstract philosophical debate that books and other forms of media are being changed, censored, or removed entirely. Or that gatekeepers want to decide what we're allowed to see and extract rent from us every time that we do. The dangers are real and understood and very much present in today's world.
  - MrJohz 1y ago
    > Information is proliferating and is more accessible, but a huge amount of that information is lies and manipulation I'm not sure that really counts as knowledge. I don't think that's any different to any other period of time when communication was suddenly able to expand. Gutenberg's press didn't come with an automatic lie detector that meant the printed word could only contain true facts and nothing else. Instead, it was mainly used for pamphlets and other campaigning propaganda - some of which surely had some truth to it, but much of which was partially or fully fabricated. I think you are romanticising the past's approach to the written word here. It has always been possible to completely rewrite history, if you're willing to put the work in, and totalitarian regimes have had no issues in convincing their populations to burn their own books if necessary.
    - eldaisfish 1y ago
      it has never been easier to poison the well of knowledge at the scale possible today. the internet enabled instantaneous dissemination whatever version of reality tickles your fancy. the effort required is also minimal. This has never been possible in the past.
- ozim 1y ago
  Physical book I can give to my children. Steam library not so much, most likely they will have to re-buy the games because even if they inherit or I just leave credentials and 2FA I can imagine someone there in business thinking "hey this account is 100 years old, we should clean that up, unless guy sends us birth certificate and proof he is still alive.".
- tempodox 1y ago
  > it feels like this is all some abstract philosophical debate rather than a discussion of what’s really happening in the world. To judge what's happening in the world, you need a framework. And the frameworks provided by the ubiquitous commercial and political interests are all biased in comparable ways. Abstract philosophical debate is just what the doctor ordered to get you away from the incessant assault of propaganda and brain washing.
- alexey-salmin 1y ago
  > But if I’m being honest, I think this claim that if you don’t own the book you don’t have the knowledge and society will turn into digital feudalism is hyperbole. I dunno, when Roald Dahl e-books auto-updated to censored versions with no way to rollback it did feel distinctly dystopian. If you think beyond kids, when a certain book is ruled illegal in a certain country it will disappear from internet-connected devices overnight. Seizing physical copies from people's homes is orders of magnitude harder.
  - 3eb7988a1663 1y ago
    Amazon literally deleted 1984 from Kindles.
- jonhohle 1y ago
  /People of North Korea entered the chat Oh wait, they didn’t. As one example, if the Internet Archive goes offline, a massive corpus of the last two decades is gone forever. As another, I had a friend who bought hundreds of dollars of PlaysForSure music only to have the store shut down and the license revoked within the span of 12 months. Hope you didn’t care too much about those 3DS, Wii and Wii-U eshop games. (And on and on.) We currently live in a world of abundance and access. Even with that, there are movies that can no longer be seen, music that can’t be listened to, and books that can’t be read because they were never widely or publicly available.
- fn-mote 1y ago
  > Knowledge is proliferating faster than ever, becoming more accessible than ever […] Thanks to Anna’s Archive and similar sources, but that doesn’t contradict the general trend toward “feudalism” (not generally having permanent unrestricted access to the source of information).
deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
bee_rider 1y ago
The blog post talks about our self-hosting movies, photos, and podcasts, in nice Netflix-like interfaces. Sharing photos. That sort of thing. You are talking about preserving intellectual independence. Both are nice to have, but they are sort of different problems, right? Yours seems more important. And yours could probably be solved by a local copy of Wikipedia and an FTP server full of digital textbooks. IMO one dangerous misstep we can make with self-hosting is to assume we need to start by matching the centralized services look-and-feel and polish (which is getting worse every year anyway).
- whilenot-dev 1y ago
  > one dangerous misstep we can make with self-hosting is to assume we need to start by matching the centralized services look-and-feel and polish That's an interesting take. I think matching these services isn't a necessity, but getting a polished look-and-feels just helps adoption. Adoption isn't an exclusive scenario and everyone is free to choose and mix how they see fit. My private collection won't ever compete with Netflix, Google or the like, and that's completely fine. It will stay a private selection of media with a strong personal preference - it ranges from research to entertainment, and also includes stuff that documents my own individual history. It'll shrink and grow as I want it, and if it reaches a scale that makes the jump from archival to hoarding work I'd simply need to reconsider my preferences. Here's my take: The scaling issues of these tech giants won't ever reach my personal archive and any challenges with re-indexing, data analysis etc. should be completely approachable on SOTA hardware. Running anything that improves the searchability of my own archive can be run locally and in the timely intervals I prefer. To have this kinda quality approachable is a huge thing, and I can't wait until I can self-host some RAG enhanced vector search engine for a personal archive that grew overs years to take shape.
  - movedx 1y ago
    > includes stuff that documents my own individual history. By this do you mean family photos and the like? I'd like to hear more about this. I'm building up a personal library like this too.
wwwtyro 1y ago
I'm not sure. It seems like the harder they squeeze, the less they can hold onto. Books, movies, TV shows, audiobooks, music - you can find it all online for free and acquire it pretty safely (torrents/vpn etc). I think the only thing they can really sell us is convenience - and I buy it! But if that convenience is lost to fragmentation, or lack of offline availability (e.g., books), or price, I think people will stop paying and do the more convenient thing. There's a tension there that I don't think they can ignore.
- eastbound 1y ago
  Beware of believing everything is available over torrents: They’re probably hosting, waiting for every library to dwindle, so one day they will close the tap. There are already very few websites that index torrents. It’s a classing monopoly-then-disappear, Google-Reader-then-no-RSS situation.
  - deleted 1y ago
    [deleted]
dgjl 1y ago
Everyone who relies on digital content, especially served online, will be sorry one day. It is only a matter of time before the grid goes down, the country restricts the internet, or the service you rely on goes away.
- oldpersonintx2 1y ago
  [dead]
drew_lytle 1y ago
Poppin' in just to say thank you for your reading, commenting and inspiring such a thoughtful and interesting discussion!
RamblingCTO 1y ago
While I agree with your comment, is that really just AI output? Doesn't it take away from the content of your comment?
tpmoney 1y ago
> During the Enlightenment, owning a physical copy of a book meant intellectual freedom. You didn’t rent ideas; you had them. Today, most digital knowledge is hosted, locked, or streamed — leased from platforms, not owned. We’re in fact drifting into digital feudalism, where access to culture, tools, and even history depends on gatekeepers. I get your broad point, but I would argue that for the vast majority of time most people did "rent ideas". Most people didn't have massive private libraries of books. Knowledge was locked in public or private institutions where if you were granted access by the owners of that institution, you would be allowed to go there and read the knowledge. If it was a public library you might even be able to take that knowledge home with you temporarily. But you wouldn't be able to keep anything you couldn't keep in your head, or transcribe yourself into your own documents. If the library closed, burned down, or you lost access to the institution, you also lost access to the knowledge contained within. Which seems like then the argument should be for systems that allow you to take advantage of the ease and relative cheapness of copying and archiving digital forms of knowledge. To that end, "Print to PDF" being built into the operating system on mac OS might be one of my most favorite features. I have more than a handful of archived information from pages that don't exist anymore because of it.
jjani 1y ago
At least 3 of your last 4 comments are purely GPT-generated, which isn't great for discussion here. I feel sorry for the 37 others who took the time to genuinely respond. And no, it's not just the em-dashes. I do this for a living, FWIW.
- PKop 1y ago
  Agree, this is annoying, these comments shouldn't get elevated in the threads and moderators must flag these accounts. We can all use LLM's on our own people posting that output here is worthless and just pollutes this website.
PKop 1y ago
This is AI slop. @dang this degrades this forum more than any flame wars. I can't stand people that outsource their entire thought process to an AI then post it like we can't use the tool ourselves. It adds nothing to the conversation.
- fsflover 1y ago
  Even though it may be AI-generated, it clearly received a lot of upvotes, including from me, because it said exactly what I wanted to say. Why is AI a problem? You didn't explain how exactly it degrades the forum or adds nothing to the discussion.
  - PKop 1y ago
    There's no value to this website if we're talking to LLM's, we can do that on our own. I want to come here to engage directly with other actual people and their brains. Not as an interface to ChatGPT. That's not something to be proud of that you upvoted it. It's not a discussion, unless you think talking to an LLM is a discussion or equivalent to HN. And obviously if this is permitted or rewarded with upvotes it's just going to become an endless spam site of people posting low effort cotton candy they didn't need any thought to produce. No signal all noise
    - bluebarbet 1y ago
      >There's no value to this website if we're talking to LLM's we can do that on our own There's at least one value to LLM content: it always outputs correct grammar and punctuation. Unlike this human sentence of yours, which took me two attempts to parse because it's missing a necessary clause separator. But on the substance of your comment, I (generally) agree.
      - toastal 1y ago
        Also it’s LLMs* … apostrophes don’t make words plural

Self-hosting isn't just about tech choices — it's about *who controls access to knowledge*. During the Enlightenment, owning a physical copy of a book meant in

drew_lytle 1y ago

Couldn’t have said it better myself! Thanks for reading!

Aurornis 1y ago

I personally prefer owning my content, physical books, and having local copies. But if I’m being honest, I think this claim that if you don’t own the book you don’t have the knowledge and society will turn into digital feudalism is hyperbole. Knowledge is proliferating faster than ever, becoming more accessible than ever, and it’s easier than ever before to get the info that you’re searching for, even in this streaming world. The idea that I’m going to lose knowledge from a book I read 5 years ago if it disappears from my library just doesn’t track. In fact, it’s rare that I return to my physical books these days because I can find equivalent info faster from a quick search online. Don’t get me wrong: I prefer having my own copies and so on. However, when people start throwing around concepts like “digital feudalism” and trying to draw parallels to the enlightenment it feels like this is all some abstract philosophical debate rather than a discussion of what’s really happening in the world.

BizarroLand 1y ago
Knowledge is not proliferating faster than ever. It's being gobbled up and locked down by companies whose sole interest is making as much money as they can instead of improving the world and profiting from the improvement. Media is being deleted or locked in vaults. Games are being shut down with no way to restore them. The written word that has been vetted by people with domain specific knowledge is being locked behind paywalls and not being advertised, while AI machines directly lie to the curious and the seekers of knowledge. I can throw a digital stone in any direction and hit something that is worse off thanks to the modern internet.
Zak 1y ago
I think when people say "digital feudalism", they usually mean that the spaces where we do things digitally are increasingly owned by private entities that operate them for their own benefit. It's an analogy which can't be expected to align perfectly with historical feudalism.
- nine_k 1y ago
  Why, technically very similar acts are known in history: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inclosure_act https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inclosure_act
veqq 1y ago
> from a quick search online I would have agreed with you a few years ago. But now Google, DuckDuckGo etc. at most provide 3 pages of results, with many irrelevant or wrong. There are alternatives: https://wiby.me/ https://wiby.me/ https://clew.se/ https://clew.se/ https://kagi.com/ https://kagi.com/ But that's not the majority experience and more importantly, it shows that it really can be "taken" from us.
Root_Denied 1y ago
> Knowledge is proliferating faster than ever, becoming more accessible than ever, and it’s easier than ever before to get the info that you’re searching for, even in this streaming world. The idea that I’m going to lose knowledge from a book I read 5 years ago if it disappears from my library just doesn’t track. In fact, it’s rare that I return to my physical books these days because I can find equivalent info faster from a quick search online. The real problem with this is that there are vested interests at play in managing what information you see first - push something to the 2nd or 3rd page of google results and it becomes effectively invisible, especially when you have pages and pages of results that seem to push the narrative that those vested interests want you to see. I tend to think that Huxley was right over Orwell, information is lost in the shuffle of distraction and rigged systems. The "truth" is there to find, but it's a needle in a haystack of believable lies, and those lies were crafted specifically to obfuscate that nugget of truth. So the amount of information moving around is irrelevant if it's not useful, or it's intentionally misleading from something that might upset those who benefit from the status quo.
autoexec 1y ago
> Knowledge is proliferating faster than ever, becoming more accessible than ever, and it’s easier than ever before to get the info that you’re searching for Information is proliferating and is more accessible, but a huge amount of that information is lies and manipulation I'm not sure that really counts as knowledge. > The idea that I’m going to lose knowledge from a book I read 5 years ago if it disappears from my library just doesn’t track. You might not forget what you learned from a book you read 5 years ago after it gets stolen from you, but it does mean that others are cut off from that same information. Worse is that what you saw 5 years ago might still be made avilable, but only in censored/altered forms which could easily have you questioning your memory of something you read or saw just 5 years ago. It's not just an abstract philosophical debate that books and other forms of media are being changed, censored, or removed entirely. Or that gatekeepers want to decide what we're allowed to see and extract rent from us every time that we do. The dangers are real and understood and very much present in today's world.
- MrJohz 1y ago
  > Information is proliferating and is more accessible, but a huge amount of that information is lies and manipulation I'm not sure that really counts as knowledge. I don't think that's any different to any other period of time when communication was suddenly able to expand. Gutenberg's press didn't come with an automatic lie detector that meant the printed word could only contain true facts and nothing else. Instead, it was mainly used for pamphlets and other campaigning propaganda - some of which surely had some truth to it, but much of which was partially or fully fabricated. I think you are romanticising the past's approach to the written word here. It has always been possible to completely rewrite history, if you're willing to put the work in, and totalitarian regimes have had no issues in convincing their populations to burn their own books if necessary.
  - eldaisfish 1y ago
    it has never been easier to poison the well of knowledge at the scale possible today. the internet enabled instantaneous dissemination whatever version of reality tickles your fancy. the effort required is also minimal. This has never been possible in the past.
ozim 1y ago
Physical book I can give to my children. Steam library not so much, most likely they will have to re-buy the games because even if they inherit or I just leave credentials and 2FA I can imagine someone there in business thinking "hey this account is 100 years old, we should clean that up, unless guy sends us birth certificate and proof he is still alive.".
tempodox 1y ago
> it feels like this is all some abstract philosophical debate rather than a discussion of what’s really happening in the world. To judge what's happening in the world, you need a framework. And the frameworks provided by the ubiquitous commercial and political interests are all biased in comparable ways. Abstract philosophical debate is just what the doctor ordered to get you away from the incessant assault of propaganda and brain washing.
alexey-salmin 1y ago
> But if I’m being honest, I think this claim that if you don’t own the book you don’t have the knowledge and society will turn into digital feudalism is hyperbole. I dunno, when Roald Dahl e-books auto-updated to censored versions with no way to rollback it did feel distinctly dystopian. If you think beyond kids, when a certain book is ruled illegal in a certain country it will disappear from internet-connected devices overnight. Seizing physical copies from people's homes is orders of magnitude harder.
- 3eb7988a1663 1y ago
  Amazon literally deleted 1984 from Kindles.
jonhohle 1y ago
/People of North Korea entered the chat Oh wait, they didn’t. As one example, if the Internet Archive goes offline, a massive corpus of the last two decades is gone forever. As another, I had a friend who bought hundreds of dollars of PlaysForSure music only to have the store shut down and the license revoked within the span of 12 months. Hope you didn’t care too much about those 3DS, Wii and Wii-U eshop games. (And on and on.) We currently live in a world of abundance and access. Even with that, there are movies that can no longer be seen, music that can’t be listened to, and books that can’t be read because they were never widely or publicly available.
fn-mote 1y ago
> Knowledge is proliferating faster than ever, becoming more accessible than ever […] Thanks to Anna’s Archive and similar sources, but that doesn’t contradict the general trend toward “feudalism” (not generally having permanent unrestricted access to the source of information).

deleted 1y ago

[deleted]

bee_rider 1y ago

The blog post talks about our self-hosting movies, photos, and podcasts, in nice Netflix-like interfaces. Sharing photos. That sort of thing. You are talking about preserving intellectual independence. Both are nice to have, but they are sort of different problems, right? Yours seems more important. And yours could probably be solved by a local copy of Wikipedia and an FTP server full of digital textbooks. IMO one dangerous misstep we can make with self-hosting is to assume we need to start by matching the centralized services look-and-feel and polish (which is getting worse every year anyway).

whilenot-dev 1y ago
> one dangerous misstep we can make with self-hosting is to assume we need to start by matching the centralized services look-and-feel and polish That's an interesting take. I think matching these services isn't a necessity, but getting a polished look-and-feels just helps adoption. Adoption isn't an exclusive scenario and everyone is free to choose and mix how they see fit. My private collection won't ever compete with Netflix, Google or the like, and that's completely fine. It will stay a private selection of media with a strong personal preference - it ranges from research to entertainment, and also includes stuff that documents my own individual history. It'll shrink and grow as I want it, and if it reaches a scale that makes the jump from archival to hoarding work I'd simply need to reconsider my preferences. Here's my take: The scaling issues of these tech giants won't ever reach my personal archive and any challenges with re-indexing, data analysis etc. should be completely approachable on SOTA hardware. Running anything that improves the searchability of my own archive can be run locally and in the timely intervals I prefer. To have this kinda quality approachable is a huge thing, and I can't wait until I can self-host some RAG enhanced vector search engine for a personal archive that grew overs years to take shape.
- movedx 1y ago
  > includes stuff that documents my own individual history. By this do you mean family photos and the like? I'd like to hear more about this. I'm building up a personal library like this too.

wwwtyro 1y ago

I'm not sure. It seems like the harder they squeeze, the less they can hold onto. Books, movies, TV shows, audiobooks, music - you can find it all online for free and acquire it pretty safely (torrents/vpn etc). I think the only thing they can really sell us is convenience - and I buy it! But if that convenience is lost to fragmentation, or lack of offline availability (e.g., books), or price, I think people will stop paying and do the more convenient thing. There's a tension there that I don't think they can ignore.

eastbound 1y ago
Beware of believing everything is available over torrents: They’re probably hosting, waiting for every library to dwindle, so one day they will close the tap. There are already very few websites that index torrents. It’s a classing monopoly-then-disappear, Google-Reader-then-no-RSS situation.
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]

dgjl 1y ago

Everyone who relies on digital content, especially served online, will be sorry one day. It is only a matter of time before the grid goes down, the country restricts the internet, or the service you rely on goes away.

oldpersonintx2 1y ago
[dead]

drew_lytle 1y ago

Poppin' in just to say thank you for your reading, commenting and inspiring such a thoughtful and interesting discussion!

RamblingCTO 1y ago

While I agree with your comment, is that really just AI output? Doesn't it take away from the content of your comment?

tpmoney 1y ago

> During the Enlightenment, owning a physical copy of a book meant intellectual freedom. You didn’t rent ideas; you had them. Today, most digital knowledge is hosted, locked, or streamed — leased from platforms, not owned. We’re in fact drifting into digital feudalism, where access to culture, tools, and even history depends on gatekeepers. I get your broad point, but I would argue that for the vast majority of time most people did "rent ideas". Most people didn't have massive private libraries of books. Knowledge was locked in public or private institutions where if you were granted access by the owners of that institution, you would be allowed to go there and read the knowledge. If it was a public library you might even be able to take that knowledge home with you temporarily. But you wouldn't be able to keep anything you couldn't keep in your head, or transcribe yourself into your own documents. If the library closed, burned down, or you lost access to the institution, you also lost access to the knowledge contained within. Which seems like then the argument should be for systems that allow you to take advantage of the ease and relative cheapness of copying and archiving digital forms of knowledge. To that end, "Print to PDF" being built into the operating system on mac OS might be one of my most favorite features. I have more than a handful of archived information from pages that don't exist anymore because of it.

jjani 1y ago

At least 3 of your last 4 comments are purely GPT-generated, which isn't great for discussion here. I feel sorry for the 37 others who took the time to genuinely respond. And no, it's not just the em-dashes. I do this for a living, FWIW.

PKop 1y ago
Agree, this is annoying, these comments shouldn't get elevated in the threads and moderators must flag these accounts. We can all use LLM's on our own people posting that output here is worthless and just pollutes this website.

PKop 1y ago

This is AI slop. @dang this degrades this forum more than any flame wars. I can't stand people that outsource their entire thought process to an AI then post it like we can't use the tool ourselves. It adds nothing to the conversation.

fsflover 1y ago
Even though it may be AI-generated, it clearly received a lot of upvotes, including from me, because it said exactly what I wanted to say. Why is AI a problem? You didn't explain how exactly it degrades the forum or adds nothing to the discussion.
- PKop 1y ago
  There's no value to this website if we're talking to LLM's, we can do that on our own. I want to come here to engage directly with other actual people and their brains. Not as an interface to ChatGPT. That's not something to be proud of that you upvoted it. It's not a discussion, unless you think talking to an LLM is a discussion or equivalent to HN. And obviously if this is permitted or rewarded with upvotes it's just going to become an endless spam site of people posting low effort cotton candy they didn't need any thought to produce. No signal all noise
  - bluebarbet 1y ago
    >There's no value to this website if we're talking to LLM's we can do that on our own There's at least one value to LLM content: it always outputs correct grammar and punctuation. Unlike this human sentence of yours, which took me two attempts to parse because it's missing a necessary clause separator. But on the substance of your comment, I (generally) agree.
    - toastal 1y ago
      Also it’s LLMs* … apostrophes don’t make words plural