> I am not quite there with Hacker News but I do know for a fact that many "users" here are LLMs.
This just makes me wonder...so what?
Some of the oldest posters here with the most karma continue to post absolute garbage takes on topics ranging from US healthcare to history of USSR, that are trivially disproven by learning the very basics from a Wiki article (e.g. not a high bar).
To be fair, this opinion slop is also present for new users and LLM bots, but is one kind really worse than the other, if both of them contribute to killing the community?
We already know what kills communities. It's the eternal Septembers. Infighting within leadership also doesn't help, but time and time again it's the influx of too many new users that nosedive and drown out quality contributions.
Would you enjoy the experience of telling your LLM “make a HN-style comment thread on $subject with 200 comments, no trolls please”, and then actually spend time reading them?
No? I’m imagining not at least. Because there would be no point to it.
If you would enjoy it, then I’m surprised you’re here and not just simulating the experience with your LLM by yourself.
> Would you enjoy the experience of telling your LLM “make a HN-style comment thread on $subject with 200 comments, no trolls please”
The reason I'm not simulating the experience with an LLM is because:
1. It costs more time to do so, because I have to prompt it to create a single comment. Multiply that by the typical number of an HN thread.
2. I suppose in a way you need bad takes to form your own view of a topic or an issue. LLMs would also be unable to provide truly unique experiences, such as some of the veterans who sometimes post here who were part of the living computing history as we know it.
> I’m surprised you’re here and not just simulating the experience with your LLM by yourself.
That's something you imagined that I claimed I want. If you read my comment again, you'll see there was no such thing.
An irascible human being with "wrong" opinions is still better than a polite and factually correct bot because there's no fucking point in having a conversation with a bot. We're here to have conversations with people, not to prove fact beyond a reasonable doubt.
Do you really not care one way or the other? Would you really rather just be talking to LLMs here? Or would you just script yourself as well and call it a day? Then what?
> We're here to have conversations with people, not to prove fact beyond a reasonable doubt.
Maybe you are. I like getting to a reasonably correct model of a topic or issue. Bad human takes can still be useful here. I just get inevitably tired of the people crying about potential LLM comments all the time.
> Would you really rather just be talking to LLMs here?
Obviously we're not there yet, regardless of what I want. But there is a great number of HN threads posted here that touch on topics that have been discussed so many countless times, that an average LLM summary would do better than most comments.