4 ms·

The rule has been around for years, but only in case law, i.e. moderation comments (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&query=by%3Adang%20%

• minimaxir 8mo ago
  ...Hacker News could use some more cute animal pictures, though.
  • latchkey 8mo ago
    Interestingly, their CSP policies forbid even an extension from inserting an img tag.
    • toomuchtodo 8mo ago
      Strong opinions strongly held.
  • dev_l1x_be 8mo ago
    Coming to LISP in 2038, just the right time when we hit the 2038 bug.
  • thomassmith65 8mo ago
    One problem with cute animal pictures is that they appeal to almost everyone, including people who are incapable, for whatever reason, of posting well-reasoned, interesting, respectful comments. The fact that HN is a little dry makes it less appealing to dumbasses. At any rate, it's too late. The era of organic 'cute animal' content on the internet is dead. AI slop has killed it.
    • deleted 8mo ago
      [deleted]
    • shagie 8mo ago
      (I was replying to a now deleted response) > Slop has an upside? Not exactly. Rather its is that places where one does want to find pictures of people's cute cats and dogs is now having additional moderation / administration burdens to try to keep the AI generated content out of those places. It's not a "cute pictures of cats overrunning some place" but rather "even in the places where it was appropriate to post pictures of one's pets in #mypets or /r/cuteCatPics because such pictures are appropriate there (so they don't overrun other places), now people are starting fights over AI generated content." An example that I recently encountered was someone who did an AI replacement of a cat that was "loafing" of a loaf of bread that looked like a cat. The cat picture would have been fine (with a dozen "aww" and "cute" comments in reply)... the AI cat loaf picture required moderation actions and some comment defusing over the use of AI.
  • f38 8mo ago
    AI generated "cutest possible animal" (and "make it cuter") might be mildly interesting.
  • dang 8mo ago
    Coming up on 20 years and we clearly went too far the other way.
• zahlman 8mo ago
  I suppose I should put my comment here instead of at top level. Exactly when was this point added? It seems somehow not new, but on the other hand it was missing from an archive.today snapshot I found from last July. (I cannot get archive.org to give me anything useful here.) Edit: > Please don't complain that a submission is inappropriate. If a story is spam or off-topic, flag it. > If you flag, please don't also comment that you did. Perhaps these points (and the thing about trivial annoyances, etc.) should be rolled up into a general "please don't post meta commentary outside of explicit site meta discussion"?
  • dang 8mo ago
    Do you mean when did we add "please don't post generated comments" to the guidelines? A couple days ago IIRC.
    • zahlman 8mo ago
      I did mean that, and thanks.
• abtinf 8mo ago
  FWIW I think “Please don't complain that a submission is inappropriate. If a story is spam or off-topic, flag it.” is different from the others. It’s an instruction for how to use the site. It’s helpful to have it in the guidelines for when the flag feature should be used. Without it, the flag link is much more ominous. Maybe it could be consolidated with the flag-egregious-comments rule? Edit to add: IMHO it is not at all obvious on this site that flagging stories is meant to be roughly the equivalent of downvoting comments (and that flagging comments doesn’t have a counterpart at the story level).
• Wowfunhappy 8mo ago
  > Please don't complain that a submission is inappropriate. If a story is spam or off-topic, flag it. > If you flag, please don't also comment that you did. I don't understand why you cut these, they seem important! (I can understand the others, which feel either implied or too specific.)
  • dang 8mo ago
    Of course they're important, but they're also implicitly encoded into the culture. Cutting something from the guidelines doesn't mean the rule is canceled. HN has countless rules that don't appear explicitly in https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html. I think I'm going to put that one back, though, because it's not a hill I want to die on and I know what arguing with dozens of people simultaneously feels like when you only have 10 minutes.
    • andai 8mo ago
      I seem to recall a rule about "don't downvote something because you disagree with it", but I can't find anything like that. Not sure if that's really solvable with rules, though. My experience with downvotes is that people mostly use it as a "I don't like this" button, which is proxy for "I couldn't think of a counterargument so I don't want to look at it." (I noted recently that downvotes and counterarguments appear to be mutually exclusive, which I found somewhat amusing.) Whereas I will often upvote things I personally disagree with, if they are interesting or well reasoned. (This seems objectively better to me, of course, but maybe it's personality thing.)
      • dang 8mo ago
        Oh that one is a classic case of people 'remembering' a rule that never existed - there's a name for this illusion but I forget what it is. See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16131314 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16131314 and https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&query=by%3Adang%2016131314&sort=byDate&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que... for history...
• deleted 8mo ago
  [deleted]
• SegfaultSeagull 8mo ago
  > I don't think we have to worry about cute animal pictures taking over HN. Challenge accepted.
  • dcminter 8mo ago
    The real challenge is to do it in a way that's intellectually stimulating. Mind you The Economist just had an article about the monkey called Punch so all things are possible...
  • dang 8mo ago
    The laws of unintended consequences and never posting overhastily. You think you know these things and then blam.
  • acuozzo 8mo ago
    I can't reply to your "Isn’t that just fiction?" reply to my comment. To answer your question: No, it's not. Consider e.g. Historical Fiction or fiction set in the present.
• Kim_Bruning 8mo ago
  I'd be a wee bit cautious with the "AI edited" part of it; since that might exclude a number of people with disabilities or for whom english is a second (or third, or later) language. My reading is that the intent is to have a human voice behind the text. Monitor and see how it goes I guess!
  • dang 8mo ago
    I need to say something about this but it might have to be later as I have to run out the door shortly... The short version is that we included it to protect users who don't realize how much damage they're doing to their reception here when they think "I'll just run this through ChatGPT to fix my grammar and spelling". I've seen many cases of people getting flamed for this and I don't want more vulnerable users—e.g. people worried about their English—to get punished for trying to improve their contributions. Certainly that would apply to disabled users as well, though for different reasons. Here are some past cases of these interactions: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&query=by%3Adang%20%22own%20voice%22&sort=byDate&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu.... Edit: uni_baconcat makes the point beautifully: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47346032 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47346032. Most rules in https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html have a lot of grey area, and how we apply them always involves judgment calls. The ones we explicitly list there are mostly so we have a basis for explaining to people the intended use of the site. HN has always been a spirit-of-the-law place, and—contrary to the "technically correct is the best correct" mentality that many of us share—we consciously resist the temptation to make them precise. In other words yes, that bit needs to be applied cautiously and with care, and in this way it's similar to the other rules. Trying to get that caution and care right is something we work at every day.
    • Kim_Bruning 8mo ago
      I was close to one such case, and I really appreciate the care and caution you and Tom applied.
    • deleted 8mo ago
      [deleted]
• dom96 8mo ago
  I’m really curious how this will go. I have a suspicion that we will see more and more accounts all over the internet being controlled by AI agents and no amount of moderation will be able to stop it.
  • nomel 8mo ago
    Because they've long ago passed the Turing test. Moderation won't be able to stop it because humans increasingly can't detect it. I see well written people being called "LLM" here all the time, em-dash or not.
    • jjk166 8mo ago
      The key is to accuse everyone of being an LLM. Those who don't react are bots. Those that fight the charge no matter how much its levied are also bots, but with better programming. Those that complain at first but give up when too much effort is required are the real humans. Any bot able to feel frustration is cool.
      • nomel 8mo ago
        Maybe a reasonable approach would be that people could flag posts with a "probably AI" button to eventually trigger a "bot test" for that account (currently, the "score 5 in this mini game" type seem pretty clanker proof). If they pass, their posts for the hour, week, whatever result in a "not AI" indicator when someone clicks the "probably AI" button.
      • pixl97 8mo ago
        Thus the HN purity tests begin.
    • nitwit005 8mo ago
      Even prior to LLMs, a single comment was rarely enough to identify a bot. Even if nonsensical, there's too little information to separate machine from confused human (plenty of people posting drunk on their phones). On reddit people sometimes go through the comment history and see that it seems to be a bot, but that's fairly high effort.
• 1718627440 8mo ago
  Does that mean that is now ok to e.g. comment that you did flag something?
  • dang 8mo ago
    That is one of those enjoyable questions that is best answered by first generalizing it. Does the absence of a rule against X mean that it's ok to do X? Absolutely not. It's impossible to list all the things that people shouldn't do. Fortunately we've never walked into that trap.
    • 1718627440 8mo ago
      > Does the absence of a rule against X mean that it's ok to do X? Absolutely not. Here it is "Does the lifting of a rule against X implies that it's ok to do X now?" A lot of times, the answer is yes, because that's a likely intention behind lifting a rule. But I got that that was not your intention, because you wrote, that you removed it because they don't pose a risk anymore. That could still mean two things, that people are unlikely to do it or that people doing it now longer poses harm (relatively speaking). Since in my experience people do like to point out to people why they were wrong posting something, this means you need them to know it is not expected to be done here. But I also don't see some other point in the guidelines about "meta-comments" in general, so that makes the second option more likely: it is okay to not forbid this now, because it does not pose that much harm. So either you expect newbies to somehow infer that rule (Why would you remove it then?) or you think it is now ok.
      • dang 8mo ago
        The difference between "a rule has been cut from the list" and "a rule is not on the list" only lasts a day or two. After that, no one will remember. (I wouldn't say "lifted", though, since that implies quite a bit more.) (Btw, I'm going to put some of that language back into the guidelines since so many people protested its removal - so this point is about to get even more theoretical!)
• lowbloodsugar 8mo ago
  Is there a distinction between AI generated and AI edited? I wanted to share some context that might be helpful: I am autistic, and I have often received feedback that my communication is snarky, rude, or tone-deaf. At work, I've found it helpful to run some of my communications through an AI tool to make my messages more accessible to non-autistic colleagues, and this approach has been working well for me.
  • userbinator 8mo ago
    You can interpret it as: We'd rather you be snarky, rude, and tone-deaf, than bland and unhuman. Your work may rather you act like a soulless corporate drone.
    • I_dream_of_Geni 8mo ago
      ...except that "snarky, rude, and tone-deaf" generally gets the downvoting (flagging?) mob to come in and "phoosh".
      • altairprime 8mo ago
        That’s a life lesson worth learning, yes. Presentation matters, even if intent is genuinely positive, because patience is finite. Sometimes it will be awkward. If something gets flagged and it shouldn’t be, email the mods and ask if they would modify the flag so the comment remains visible. Learn, grow, try, fail, retry doesn’t work if you replace ‘try’ with ‘AI’.
        • lowbloodsugar 8mo ago
          This is what I’m talking about. “Why can’t you just communicate like a neurotypical person?” is like saying “why can’t you just take the stairs like a normal person” to someone wheelchair bound. So thanks for confirming that, yes, I need to use AI because “life lesson”.
          • 8mo ago
• morpheuskafka 8mo ago
  I'm curious, just noticed there's no rule requiring comments to be in English, although I've never actually seen any other languages used here. Since the new directive is to write as best you can rather than use AI either to translate or edit, does that imply that one should write either all in another language or in a mix of English and another language? (The latter is especially relevant as many may either only know a technical term in one language, or know the terms in English but not the grammar to connect them.) edit to add -- I completely agree with you that when one's English is "good enough," it's much better to read the original rather than an LLMs guess at how to polish it. It's just hard to define what that line is, especially for the poster themselves who has no idea what a native speaker can figure out. Would some posts be removed because they are too difficult to make sense of? Or would they be allowed in their native language?
  • dang 8mo ago
    HN is an English-language site. That's one of the many things that's not in the explicit list but is a long-established rule: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&query=by%3Adang%20english%20language%20site&sort=byDate&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que.... It's purely for pragmatic reasons. We love other languages and have great admiration for the many community members who participate here despite English not being their first language.