Prompt: Remember this classic? <snip ... Hacker News 10 Years in Future > OK, i have a new idea. want to try? "Offtopic but this title makes me want to create an alternate-universe version of the HN front page where every title is shrill/spectacular/hysterical/urgent/clickbaity. Such as: The Absolute State of the Kernel Rust Experiment Right Now And every comment has its confidence/aggressiveness taken up to 11 (tho still within site rules)." And the HN front page right now is: <snip>
“They Said Immigration Was a Crisis — Then THIS Happened to Jobs, Growth, and Local Communities”
“Everyone Expected Chaos… Instead This City Welcomed Newcomers and Its Economy EXPLODED”
“Doctors, Teachers, Builders: The ‘Immigration Problem’ Quietly Fixed a Problem No One Talks About”
“This ‘Risky’ Policy Was Supposed to Fail — Now Other Countries Are Rushing to Copy It”
“From ‘Unmanageable’ to Unstoppable: How One Tough Challenge Became a Surprising Success Story”
Actually worth a shot, thanks!
Edit: Just found out HN deletes emojis!
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On a more serious note, it's a bit sad how close this is to actual algorithm-driven social media or news-based platforms.
hackernews is algorithm-driven too; the difference is incentives (namely paid ads)
Should instead say personalised algorithms and targeted ads.
At least the HuffPo of the last decade was like this. They haven't been relevant for many years it seems.
As to its founder: http://www.thestacksreader.com/the-many-faces-of-arianna/
This kind of thing is fun once. And it was fun when the AI-generated fake HN was posted last week.
But there's no need to upvote this kind of stuff to front page every week. The novelty wears off. It gets boring and silly pretty quickly.
Yes, this is always the dynamic with follow-ups. Curiosity value diminishes sharply with repetition. More here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46329337
(1) people who didn't see the original post from last week (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46205632), for whom the follow-up is therefore new and interesting;
(2) people who did see the original post but appreciate the follow-ups as fun and amusing variations on the theme, and therefore want them on the frontpage.
But from a moderation point of view we can't prioritize either of those cases, since doing so would be globally suboptimal, i.e. they would make the site less interesting overall in the long run. This is where it's handy to know what one is optimizing for (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...) and to have clear principles which support it (more on this at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46329337).
Of course, there is always room for occasional exceptions—we don't want to apply the "avoid repetition" principle too repetitively!—but they have to be limited, or the principle no longer holds.
If you* imagine a topic X that you don't find extra interesting, and then consider how much more annoying each Xi in the sequence X1, X2,... becomes if the deltas between Xi and Xi+1 get too small, and then remember that people have quite different feelings about which topics deserve or don't deserve extra attention, it becomes clear that the global optimization is to downweight follow-ups generally. I'm writing this in haste so I hope it makes sense!
* (I don't mean you personally, but anyone here)
I know about lucky 10000. It's the XKCD joke that is increasingly being used as an excuse to support every low-effort banal post. It's like modus operandus now. Party A makes a low-effort banal post. Party B questions why a banal post deserves to be on the front page. Party C says 'lucky 10000'.
There may be lucky 10000 but it's boring and silly for me. Good for the lucky 10000, but it's distracting to me when this kind of AI spam hits the front page every week. Show HN posts already gets special appearance at /show which I think is enough for this kind of stuff.
There's something to investigate here.
Made me notice I'm actually exposed to very similar crap on other places. Scary.
Some platforms might buy this as an engagement booster.
What's actually mind-blowing is how mice aren't already living till an age of 100. I mean, they've literally cured cancer, what's your excuse now, huh?
HN ought to indicate these titles in ALL RED.
WSJ, FT, BLM, too many to count.
(I'm not kidding, a ton of people will watch e.g. movie trailers or live streamed events through one of many reaction streamers so they get prompted on how to feel. I hated laugh tracks back then, I hate reaction streamers now, let me have my own feelings!)