As kindly as I can, your comment is 100% the irrational behaviour.
Everyone who's replied thus far has fallen into the same trap, you saw money and you forgot the value of the actual thing he wanted. Now he has the thing, you're still stuck talking and thinking about the money.
This comment section sees two guys trading a briefcase of dollars bills all day long as a roaring economy. Somehow completely blind to the human.
He wants the thing. He does not value the thing at 1300 dollars so he would not buy it for 1300 dollars. He found it for a lower value, he kept it because the point at the start was he wanted the thing.
On the topic of HN users, is it our collective first day on earth?
Isn't the point that we don't grow the good varieties any longer because they don't survive freight? It doesn't matter if you bought the tomato seeds from Harrods and grew them in your lush orchard if they're the same lineage bred for shipping hardiness over all else.
You're equating subreddits to forums but on forums people recognised other posters and the average subreddit poster will never read the same username twice, if they even notice they're there.
I see the argument you're making, but it's not convincing. These just aren't similar types of social engagement.
> The current top comment isn’t there because it’s the most recent, the only objectively correct one, or a mod pinned it. It’s there because the algorithm driven by social engagement decided it’s the media I should see first.
When people neglect to vote that they like the comment you posted, or they vote that they didn't like the thing you posted, this is algorithm driven by social engagement.
When the forum software which sorts by newest-posted-first bumps your thread off the front page because no one cared enough to reply that was also an algorithm driven by social engagement.
It seems a lot to me like the "hidden algorithm" part is the same? It is still the users indicating more/no more in the end.
This is a phenomenal example I hadn't even considered, because I have been affected by this kind of "invisible hand of the market" negative quality spiral.
The older generation here remember good tomatoes, so they continue to buy bad tomatoes but will complain every time they eat them about the quality. I get told a lot about heirloom varieties and how good they are in comparison.
I grew up with modern tomatoes. I've never tried an heirloom so I can't compare, but I don't recall ever eating a good tomato, so I just don't buy them. The market has moved itself into a position that shrinks its own demographic.
Not that user but I don't think this is as difficult as you're making it out to be?
On Reddit, Instagram, Tiktok et al I can create a community on that platform. I can get find other people into Booktok, I can join the Rowing subreddit, I can get into Knittinggram or whatever. Posters expect roughly their micro-community to see their posts, users expect to see their micro-community's posts.
On hacker news I see the same community everyone else does. If HN was a vBulletin forum with threads posted for links it would function almost 1:1 the same, I guess all you'd need to change is a modification for making threads bump on vote behaviour instead of latest-post.
Is it not clear at this point that the real issue is how lacking the term "social media" even is? We have people here arguing that BBSs were social media, it will not be long until email is considered social media.
At this point it's a vague term meaning "a place where you talk to another person online" and nothing more than that.
I'm solidly of the opinion especially after seeing so many arguments of this form on HN that the whole world has accidentally forgotten the term "social network" at some point, because "social media" means nothing.
* The people are not fine with bad strawberries but have no other choices available
* The people are not fine with bad strawberries but can't afford better choices
* The people are not fine with bad strawberries but they don't know good strawberries
* The people are not fine with bad strawberries but they're cheap enough to ship and sell that there's no economic case for good strawberries, so no one close enough to buy from will sell good strawberries to them
"The market seems fine with it" is kind of a lazy thought terminating cliche answer. What if the invisible hand of the market is pushing strawberry producers towards the outcome "society no longer values this enough to buy it" in which case the aggregate wallet vote will be zero?
There's an NPC who walks you to the pokemart and gives you a potion. For me that dialogue was something like "You receive a !" and it then said "You place it in the 23 pocket" -- seems related?
Tons? Hyperbole? Are they teachers or something? That amount of leave in one go is basically unheard of, with the exception of maternity leave I don't know anyone who's been on leave for more than 3 weeks as a single block.
This is also taking from that same 5 week leave bucket people have available per annum, if they're taking 4 weeks then they have 5 days to last the remainder of the year. Not that crazy, but I have literally never even met a single person who does this let alone knowing tons.
This article goes ham on the rule of threes, it does the "not just x, but y" cliche, em-dash with spaces on either side, bold heading-sentence paragraphs, it visibly has hallmarks of AI driven writing.
If you personally can't tell then just say that rather than casting aspersions on everyone else by claiming they can't.
I have noticed the same uptick in bot-like behaviour there. The part I struggle to square is, why so much of it is so useless?
It's maybe account laundering, but on any popular post you'll see at least half of the comments are tangential at best. They're not an expression of anything a person would express, like replying with just skull emojis to a random news post, or saying "he really said" with an exact word to word recreation of a throwaway quote from a video. No one ever replies to these posts, they get like 2 upvotes (if that), the platform doesn't reward them at all but they constantly appear in a very artificial looking way.
> No, it's the ultra authoritarian government stopping you from viewing it.
Wish people wouldn't keep repeating this, imgur block the UK because they were caught with GDPR violations.
The fact their UK wide IP block came in around the same time as the online safety act is the only reason they can continue to quietly pretend it's the government's fault. Imgur is the reason you can't view imgur, it is not the UK Govt (this time)
> meanwhile the actual postings for RLHF work keep increasing, and the rates contractors accept keep going up
If you knew this for fact you'd have something to corroborate, is this just vibes? Job loss numbers are published, at the very lowest end the estimates are 50k across 2025 in the US alone. I don't see any evidence RLHF is creating livelihoods at the rate AI is destroying them.
This system totally works so long as you can take time off work to form a lobbying group -- this does not pass the sniff test to me.
Reminder that even in the scenario that constituents 100% support or 100% reject a policy, their opinions hold almost no statistical sway to their elected representative. It's actually worse than a coin flip.
It's only when you restrict your constituent demographic to just those in the top 10% of wealth (...like a professor in college for example...) that suddenly their voting decisions align to constituent opinions.
Look up "Testing Theories of American Politics: Elites, Interest Groups, and Average Citizens", this has been known for some time.
The masses seem kind of right to be in that mindset, if you consider it from thier point of view for even one second?
So, yes RLHF is available right now, for people with specific backgrounds. That RLHF work is temporary and it's going to make hundreds of thousands of people redundant. The RLHF work is actually job-negative, it is work which will later deprive others of a way to make a living.
Once that training work dries up, what happens to the people who were doing the job which AI now does? How do they pay rent? How do they feed and clothe themselves? What answers do any AI proponant actually have for this, or is the intention that every person shuts the critical thinking part of their brain off and trusts the computer will come up with something?
> Wait but under that assumption - LLMs being good enough - wouldn't the maintainer also be able to leverage LLMs to speed up the review?
This assumes that AI capable of writing passable code is also capable of a passable review. It also assumes that you save any time by trusting that review, if it missed something wrong then it's often actually more effort to go back and fix than it would've been to just read it yourself the first time.
Selimenes1 is an 11 day old account which sat silent for 10 days and then all of a sudden starts posting from today, and it's all multiple paragraph responses to threads about AI.
I would like to state for the record that the strategy to swap em-dashes into double-hyphens between the generation and posting step is probably not enough transformation to disguise this behaviour. Whoever is running this clawdbot or whatever it is should really be putting that information on the account page.
Everyone who's replied thus far has fallen into the same trap, you saw money and you forgot the value of the actual thing he wanted. Now he has the thing, you're still stuck talking and thinking about the money.
This comment section sees two guys trading a briefcase of dollars bills all day long as a roaring economy. Somehow completely blind to the human.