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Offtopic. I have a concern that this forum is removing stories that have negative connotation on AI. Few days back, I posted an article[1] that was about how A

• perching_aix 1mo ago
  Seeing the reception on the first one, maybe "removing stories that have negative connotation on AI" is not the most honest description of what happened there. It reminds me to how various political movements will complain about being unfairly censored, pointing at their posts being disproportionately removed as evidence of this, then you look at said posts, and discover that they're simply disproportionately questionable in the first place. There's definitely merit to monitoring something like this, so I do appreciate you surfacing this here, but there's also definitely a wheat and a chaff to this, and so based on just this much I have to disagree.
  • quaintdev 1mo ago
    I understand this is not enough but I don't see a story here that paints AI negatively. If one is posted it gets removed swiftly. And I have seen this happen enough times that I'm considering taking periodic snapshots of the front page and prove this definitively.
    • perching_aix 1mo ago
      It's a good weekend project, just gotta be careful not to fall for motivated reasoning and not to overreach. A heavy prior suspicion of conspiracy doesn't help. A sibling comment mentioned a few details already, but there's a good amount of information out there about how HN's post ranking system and moderation works, that'd probably be good to also consider. Maybe reaching out to the mods would also be helpful in the way of this. To give you an anecdotal example, if I see a post mentioning how LLMs are "just next token predictors", I'm basically flagging that by reflex at this point. Not because it'd be literally untrue, but because it's asinine overall. But you won't be able to infer this from data, only the fact that a post using "AI-critical language" was flagged. Or there was another post about how Ireland's electricity use is so-and-so % data center driven, further suggesting that this is trending up. This was not true, and the article was further horribly unhelpful in actually putting this fact into context, or properly conveying the trends. I think I ended up flagging that one as a result, after posting - what I thought - was a lot fairer picture (and even that was awfully lacking in context). Once again, an "AI-critical" post which on the face of it would have been simply censored if enough flags gathered. There's also the mundane human angle to this, where people enthusiastic about <thing> won't necessarily be the most receptive to criticism to it, and will be more likely to try and pick that criticism apart. Gotta match the audience on some level.
      • owebmaster 1mo ago
        > I see a post mentioning how LLMs are "just next token predictors", I'm basically flagging that by reflex at this point. You are doing a disservice as people going through AI psychosis should hear that LLMs are just calculators.
        • perching_aix 1mo ago
          > You are doing a disservice as people going through AI psychosis should hear that LLMs are just calculators. Not any more than I do by not going around telling the depressed to simply chin up, or telling people who are frustrated with Trump that they're simply sick with TDS. There's no world where instigating others through snide insinuations works out in one's favor. You may feel extremely justified in acting like this, but I don't think you'd appreciate if you were met the same way in other subjects either. Unfair as it is, an escalation is an escalation, no matter the context or the justification. It's always a lose-lose. You can remind people that the conversations are simulated and that LLMs are just programs without reductively handwaving how they work. You can express frustration with the overenthusiasm around LLMs without accusing others of mental illness. I guarantee you that it lands a lot better and provides a significantly better "service" than shouting ragebait into the void ever does. Give others a chance to be better than what you think of them. You may be surprised. Consider post [3] that the parent commenter cited as an example for a post that had a "negative connotation to AI". In reality, it doesn't take much reading to confirm it was anything but. But even if we pretend that it was, and assume it was some hit piece about how "all the people who are now willingly having their brain fried will have to wake up to a grim reality", it doesn't take much to see that token frugality and business justification of AI-use is very much in the interest of those who do feel enthused about LLMs. So there'd be no reason to present the topic so maliciously; on the contrary, the author could tailor the article around this other perspective, and they'd reach a new audience with the same fundamental message, and have them cooperate too. Tangentially related in its principle: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s1EVk7k9S7Q https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s1EVk7k9S7Q
• 1qu5476 1mo ago
  [flagged]
  • jansport123 1mo ago
    there is absolutely no forum without biases. Least of all, a VC forum like this one.
    • jackb4040 1mo ago
      Yup. And if someone tells you they're making a "free speech app", prepare for the most aggressive monoculture you've ever seen
• dgacmu 1mo ago
  Your second two had high comments to upvotes, which tends to get articles downranked more quickly. It may simply be that the stuff you're posting is generating disagreement without corresponding upvotes.
  • deleted 1mo ago
    [deleted]
• Aurornis 1mo ago
  > Offtopic. I have a concern that this forum is removing stories that have negative connotation on AI. The first example was flagged by users. It fits the pattern of other political clickbait stories. The top comment is calling out problems with it. This type of story pops up and gets flagged all the time on different topics. Some people assume a conspiracy or moderation misbehavior, but when most of the comments in the thread are people calling out obvious problems with the article it leads to a lot of users clicking the flag button. Articles with poor logic or tortured claims don't last long here. The second one is an Ask HN on a contentious topic with more comments than upvotes. There’s an automatic filter on this website designed to detect flame wars and I suspect it down ranks threads that aren’t getting many upvotes but are attracting a lot of comments. Happens to many Ask HN threads. The third one doesn't even strike me as anti-AI. I don't know why you included it as an example of an anti-AI agenda because it's still about a future where everyone is using AI. It has other problems though because it's willfully ignoring the fact that inference is getting cheaper at a fast rate. It probably got dropped from the front page because the ratio of comments to upvotes was bad, like the other story. There isn’t a conspiracy theory to be found in these examples. This is just what happens to tired topics on this site. Anti-AI topics are on the front page all the time. I think that story you tried to post was just a badly written anger bait piece, it got called out in the comments, and people started flagging it.
  • sat15243 1mo ago
    All flagged stories are flagged by users that are part of an interest group. unric.org is political clickbait? Give me a break, Mr. "nothing to see here".
    • Aurornis 1mo ago
      > All flagged stories are flagged by users that are part of an interest group. Read the comments. People were actually reading the topic and calling it out. This gets topics flagged. It’s not coordinated interest groups conspiring to remove stories. > Give me a break, Mr. "nothing to see here". Okay, Mr. “I just created an alt account for this comment”
    • 1mo ago
• Barbing 1mo ago
  Were they caught here? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39230513 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39230513 See anything below too? https://news.social-protocols.org/stats?id=49290062 https://news.social-protocols.org/stats?id=49290062 https://news.social-protocols.org/stats?id=49318906 https://news.social-protocols.org/stats?id=49318906 https://news.social-protocols.org/stats?id=49319582 https://news.social-protocols.org/stats?id=49319582 Edit: previous sibling comments explain pretty well + imagine moving the needle on AI on HN with negative coverage of it!
• bcjdjsndon 1mo ago
  [flagged]
  • bcjdjsndon 1mo ago
    [flagged]
• andsoitis 1mo ago
  > how AI threatens natural resources for billions. The article rests on the claim that water usage of data centers on continent X threaten water availability for humans on continent Y. I hope you can see how self-evidently illogical that is. The article tries to bend logic into a narrative it is trying to push. > This was from United Nations and it was flagged. Indeed! It exposes a level of lack of rigor and critical thinking which is astounding - this is meant to be an organization that thinks clearly, which it clearly does not.
  • ses1984 1mo ago
    What do you think people on continent x are going to do if there is water on continent y but not continent x…?
    • andsoitis 1mo ago
      desalinate.
      • no-name-here 1mo ago
        Doesn’t desalination require very large amounts of electricity, something that AI also requires large amounts of? Are we at the point where we are no longer concerned with electricity demand outstripping supply? (Let alone the pollution caused by in-place power plants - are we near to getting rid of those?)
        • tancop 1mo ago
          Solar is incredibly cheap and it's a perfect match for desalination because you can scale the water flow based on available power. And the places that need it the most are deserts with a lot of sunshine and empty land. We're at a point where generating power is almost never the issue. The actual problem is making the desalination tech itself cheap and easy to maintain so poor countries can afford it. Right now it's only a large scale thing in relatively rich and tech advanced states like Saudi or Israel.
        • 1mo ago
• nonethewiser 1mo ago
  But why do you think this isn’t the flagging system working as intended?
• jeroenhd 1mo ago
  This forum tends to be visited by an intersection of technologists and the VC crowd. The HN algorithm is more open and transparent than Reddit's, but any Reddit-like platform suffers from the whims of the community. Currently, it seems like a disproportionate amount of HN users are hyped up about generative AI compared to people in the real world, so you'll see those whims back in voting and flagging tendencies. That said, there is also a vocal anti-AI crowd here, or at least there used to be. Most of those people seemed to have left for greener pastures seeing how half the HN front page is "someone made XYZ but now with AI" these days. There are other places that discuss tech that aren't so focused on making money, and those are probably less biased in favour of the latest AI gadget. On the other hand, since the day ChatGPT was unleashed upon the general public, you should assume all online interaction is happening through AI and should probably be ignored. The human internet died the day we taught computers how to write a coherent paragraph.
  • peer2pay 1mo ago
    What are these other places?
    • sebstefan 1mo ago
      lobste.rs
      • astrange 1mo ago
        Is that forum good? I have it mentally associated with "Mastodon people" (incredible pedants and overbearing mods), but that's not exactly based on anything so I may have just confused it with some other site.
        • sebstefan 29d ago
          Lol but Hackernews is the epitome of a forum filled with incredible pedants if anything so it's shocking hearing that. I would say it's the exact same thing over there, maybe with a little less decorum? Are you sure it's not more of an issue you're having with their politics? Because yes, similar to the Mastodon people, it's queer friendly, it's anti-AI, it has a lot of discussions about ethics, ... But as for the rest, yeah, no. Hackernews clone.
• shimman 1mo ago
  During the DOGE massacres last year where various tech bros were destroying the federal government, most of the stories were flagged from the front page of this site. There is a strong bias at play here, please remember when discussing anything pro- worker or environment.
  • zahlman 1mo ago
    Yes, because most of them were annoying "look how awful my political outgroup is" ragebait without substantive argument or insight. > Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, or celebrities, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon. If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic.
• lilerjee 1mo ago
  Actually, I found the phenomenon too. I think there are two main reasons: 1. ycombinator supports many AI companies. 2. There are too many marketers from AI companies.
  • unglaublich 1mo ago
    3. Many anti-ai articles are rooted in pseudoscientific emotional fearmongering.
• driverdan 1mo ago
  It happened to this Flock post from yesterday https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49314962 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49314962
  • fooker 1mo ago
    Just in case people didn't know - Flock is a YC company
    • inigyou 1mo ago
      That explains their newbie mistake of getting too much publicity. Municipalities are replacing their Flock cameras with Axon cameras, which are just as bad but don't announce their presence.
  • jascination 1mo ago
    There was one about NHS giving all of UK's medical data to Palantir by accident last week that got pulled from the front page about 20mins after it was posted too, feels fishy af
• 0xbadcafebee 1mo ago
  The mods (& many users) like to flag anything that could be "controversial" or lead to "flame wars". It's possible they thought that article could get people "fired up" and it could result in "arguments" in the comments. And this doesn't just apply to stories - if you have an opinion that the mods or some user doesn't like, you'll be accused of posting flame bait. This "community" (as the mods like to call it) is really a business tool for YC. Attract nerds to the site, funnel them into the YC program, make startups, collect billions. If this was your money-making tool, you'd probably want to quash all controversy too.
• zahlman 1mo ago
  Concerns of this sort are best emailed to hn@ycombinator.com .
• johnfn 1mo ago
  It’s really fascinating to me how when the community dislikes certain content people always jump to conspiratorial justifications rather than the much more mundane “this content is not very good”. The first article is poor and all the comments on it say exactly that. The second one actually did fairly well for what is a fairly middle-of-the-road Ask HN. There’s no shadowy cabal removing anti-AI content from the front page.
• ceroxylon 1mo ago
  Usually things are flagged on HN for firm reasons and not emotional ones, even if the reasoning isn't transparent. And while we are off topic, if we could get 1% of the ire of data center haters pointed at the fast fashion / textile industry, lawns or alfalfa production... we might gain some meaningful ground on sane water usage.
  • Gigachad 1mo ago
    Flags on HN are user submitted. they are just as emotional as reddit downvotes. If something reveals an uncomfortable truth it gets flagged.
    • borski 1mo ago
      Flags also require a minimum karma, and members with yet higher karma can also undead posts, if needed. HN is actually surprisingly good about this, so I disagree with your assertion.
      • dymk 1mo ago
        What does “high karma” have to do with less emotionally driven voting behavior?
        • borski 1mo ago
          You acquire karma through posting things that are interesting or curious enough that others upvote them. Thus, you build reputation by acquiring karma. It isn’t perfect, but the fact that folks with higher karma can “fix” the emotional flags of folks with lower karma, it helps. Also, I’d recommend re-reading the guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
          • dymk 1mo ago
            You just explained the mechanism by which the karma number goes up, not explained your theory why you think higher number means less emotional voting.
• wilg 1mo ago
  Like 1/3 of HN posts are people complaining or crashing out about AI, and so are all the comments.
• bonoboTP 1mo ago
  This forum skews heavily skeptical and cynical on AI. HN is very skeptical of anything corporate and always highlights the cynical angle on anything.
  • sillysaurusx 1mo ago
    This is actually true.
• dr_dshiv 1mo ago
  Thanks for sharing! I’m super skeptical of the claims, but it really deserves careful discussion. Hope they make comparisons to food and fashion. I measure my AI usage in terms of hamburgers. Makes me feel better about AI and worse about eating meat.
• danqqqq 1mo ago
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