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By presenting the summary at all, it is presumed to be accurate by good faith readers, but bad faith summarizers will take advantage of this knowledge gap to in

By presenting the summary at all, it is presumed to be accurate by good faith readers, but bad faith summarizers will take advantage of this knowledge gap to invisibly rewrite history, that is, they will present the summary as accurate and not tell you that they’re selective with the truth. The fact of the matter is the original content says what it says. Any summary is inherently subjective in comparison to the objective reality of what OP wrote when they wrote it. In this way, subjective summaries of the objective reality of the original subjective statements by OP have extra subjectivity due to the summarization. It has nothing to do with whether or not OP was making objective statements themselves, though that is also a factor in how much objectivity the summary can work with, but that is kind of a side point and not related to my original comment.

lapcat 1y ago
You're practically making this into a life or death issue, when in fact the issue is relatively trivial: should I bother to read the submitted article or not? When a HN user submits an article link, the intention is that people will click the link and read the article. A "bad faith summarizer" is just shooting themselves in the foot, because if the summary inspires people to read the article, then they'll immediately discover that the summary was bad. So what's the point of the bad faith summary? Your hypothetical scenario doesn't even make sense. The URL is still there. The article title is still there. Everything that's available now would still be available. Moreover, there's nothing now stopping any commenter on a submission from giving a bad faith summary of the article. It's just like the TV guide. You've got a long list of channels, and you've got a bunch of show names, but you don't necessarily know what the show is about, whether it's worth watching, so you read the summary. Are you going to complain about the existence of the TV guide, because it's "subjective"? Hacker News is more or less entertainment, although this conversation is not very entertaining and getting less so as it goes on.
- aspenmayer 1y ago
  [flagged]

lapcat 1y ago

You're practically making this into a life or death issue, when in fact the issue is relatively trivial: should I bother to read the submitted article or not? When a HN user submits an article link, the intention is that people will click the link and read the article. A "bad faith summarizer" is just shooting themselves in the foot, because if the summary inspires people to read the article, then they'll immediately discover that the summary was bad. So what's the point of the bad faith summary? Your hypothetical scenario doesn't even make sense. The URL is still there. The article title is still there. Everything that's available now would still be available. Moreover, there's nothing now stopping any commenter on a submission from giving a bad faith summary of the article. It's just like the TV guide. You've got a long list of channels, and you've got a bunch of show names, but you don't necessarily know what the show is about, whether it's worth watching, so you read the summary. Are you going to complain about the existence of the TV guide, because it's "subjective"? Hacker News is more or less entertainment, although this conversation is not very entertaining and getting less so as it goes on.

aspenmayer 1y ago
[flagged]