If you haven’t done a search in awhile on Bing it’s also very horrible. In many search’s there are only 1 or 2 organic results in the traditional sense.
Now on Google they are adding paid ads in the middle of the search results, not just the top or bottom.
The reason Google did well was the absence of ads. These LLMs like ChatGPT have now taken that experience that Google has lost.
Interesting, this post was removed (shadow delisted). I don't see it on the in the first 3 pages anymore after it was at number 11 just a few minutes ago.
Users flagged it. We can only guess why users flag things, but in this case it's not hard to guess: there have been countless stories like this and people are (rightly) tired of the repetition.
Edit: If you (or anyone) want further explanation, see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43093299 and the links there. If, after that, you have a question that I haven't already answered, I'd be happy to take a crack at it.
Positive ones are flagged even more quickly. It's true that some of the flags come from people who like/dislike the evil/great one, but the deeper issue here is the repetition. Anything this repetitive is going to generate an allergic response; all the more so if the repetitive topic is also an intensely divisive one.
People voted for radical change yet want to absolve themselves of the inevitable friction.
Though in the case of Musk he still might have had similar turmoil given the valuation of TSLA dwindling in 2024 and his antics on X. I don't know if a campaign against a tech person in the news should be suppressed just because people are "tired" of seeing it (meanwhile, AI posted a dozen times per day).
Is it too late to build in a simple regex filter for accounts?
I don't think HN users wanting to preserve HN for its intended purpose of intellectual curiosity has much to do with "absolving themselves". It's simply a question of having a forum with that purpose rather than another.
"man is not a rational animal: he is a rationizing animal" -Robert A. Heinlein
We have varying phases of new hyped tech get many low quality articles that don't inspire curiosity but nonetheless satisfy some people's need to circle around the same talking points. I just find it unfortunate that the moment any overhyped tech is linked to "the real world" that we start to dismiss it.
I suppose the answer isn't surprising given the population's disposition of acting like computer scientists and not software engineers, but is techs effect on actual people not intellectually curious? Are we fine just tinkering with ideas and throwing pandora's box out for the rest of the world to handle?
>s simply a question of having a forum with that purpose rather than another.
Well I don't have any data, but at this point I don't think this is happening organically. That's my main concern. It's no coincidence this only seems to happen with negative press for a certain person, when months ago pretty much all news on this subject would not be flagged (hence the first part of my comment).
You do have the data, but if your data says otherwise, there's not much I can do. I'll just keep doing what I'm already doing and try to fight the suppression.
I don't think what you're seeing is suppression—it's just the preference of the bulk of the community. That's frustrating when you feel strongly that it should be otherwise (for good reason), but there isn't some extraneous nefarious force at work here; it's just that most HN users don't want the site to turn into a battlefield.
> HN users wanting to preserve HN for its intended purpose of intellectual curiosity
Curiosity is sustained and long term. Curiosity is being willing to understand things completely.
What you're arguing for is novelty and distraction. That is shallow thinking, not curious thinking.
A month ago after Musk's fascist salutes you said, "This sort of flare-up always feels absolutely critical in the moment—how can one possibly justify not dropping everything to orbit around it?—and then vanishes. Their half life is so brief that I'm surprised people don't notice how ephemeral they are. They come in an endless sequence, and they aren't what HN is supposed to be for. They're also not that hard to resist; it's not as if this is a borderline call."
You were clearly wrong. It hasn't vanished. You should be curious about that.
Bias is a real problem in AI systems. Will you be at the event? What questions will you put to Musk about his biases and how they will be reflected in Grok?
I appreciate your thoughts on curiosity, but I don't think that argument addresses the situation as it is. The alternative here is not deeper curiosity—it's screaming matches and outright war.
Commenters who want to fight about these topics are not operating in curiosity mode, seeking to learn from each other. They're operating in battle mode, seeking to destroy each other, vent rage, and deploy verbal weapons such as snark, name-calling, and talking points at the enemy. None of that is what HN is for, as should be obvious to anyone who has read https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html or spent much time here.
> You were clearly wrong. It hasn't vanished
HN has been around for 15+ years. A month isn't long at all. My expectation is still that this will subside, and when it does, it will sink into a swamp of amnesia, the same as has happened in the past.
They won't forget Musk's fascist salutes either. If anything, Musk's salutes have been more public, have done more brand damage, and have revealed worse character.
Musk and Zuckerberg are showing you who and what they are.
You may be right that people will remember that, and yes that's an interesting data point to compare it with.
I was talking about something else though. My claim is that the HN baseline will return to the status quo ante, just as it has after past political tsunamis, and that when it does, the current fever for every political story to be on the frontpage will fade into oblivion. I may be wrong about that, but we will have to wait to find out.
> showing you who and what they are. Pay attention.
That's a trope, indeed already a cliché, of internet political arguments. It would be in your interest to avoid those because although on a surface level they intensify a comment, at a deeper level they make it less persuasive (to the persuadable reader). I know you didn't ask for commenting advice and normally I wouldn't go there, but HN's guidelines specifically ask commenters to omit internet tropes: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.
> I may be wrong about that, but we will have to wait to find out.
You are wrong.
> That's a trope, indeed already a cliché
Dude, that you think you might be right demonstrates that you haven't been paying attention.
Musk doesn't just have form, he's going for the record.
There will be a stink around Y Combinator's AI Startup School event. Musk will bring the stink with him.
And the source of that stink may be as simple as attendees having family members sacked by DOGE. Or it might be because he's of such weak character that he lies about being good at video games. Or perhaps it will be America's sell out of Ukraine, something Musk has advocated for:
Yeah, but that is where it starts. It’s like people who comment vs just reading/sharing the same opinion. Only a tiny fraction speak out. There are lots more who share the same opinion but just haven’t/don’t voice it.
Additionally there are those who attended the other rallies yesterday not at the dealerships but at other locations holding signs declaring their opinion towards Musk.
Hell, I just paid off my Tesla and I’m thinking of dumping it because I don’t want to be seen as someone who supports him.
The brand is 100% tarnished.
Only when sales/stock price take a long sustained hit will there be anything done.
It helps them by generating a ton of links and mentions which Google still uses as a signal for authority. Getting high quality links from all sorts of places around the web is worth its weight in gold. So with these new links it will help to improve their rankings for a wide variety of keywords.
What is the end game for Reddit here? Losing free and motivated workers and gutting their communities, is that something they feel will blow over and they will be able to replace with their own figureheads? I haven’t gone back and I was addicted to the site for over 15 years.
I'm not sure the wedge created between many of the communities and the platform is repairable at this stage without extended displays of good will from Reddit's side.
Lots of communities have started the process of migrating to different platforms. The federated alternatives like Lemmy have had recent success although I question the complexity of it in terms of getting mass adoption. Most of the alternatives seem to be missing the core idea of what Reddit really is (a community of communities). I think first and foremost the community aspect of Reddit is what makes it appealing.
I've been building a platform called Sociables which is intentionally not just another Reddit clone. We are trying to create an all-in-one place for people to create communities first and foremost and not just posts.
That is it. The bag the buyer(s) are left holding is not their problem.
What really boggles my mind is that the market would buy a burning building like this. Maybe there is some more money to squeeze out, but surely not enough to recover the alleged valuation.
“Elon Musk emailed Twitter staff on Friday asking that any employees who write software code report to the 10th floor of Twitter's office in San Francisco at 2 p.m., according to an email reviewed by Reuters.
"There will be short, technical interviews that allow me to better understand the Twitter tech stack," Musk wrote in the memo.”
> technical interviews that allow me to better understand the Twitter tech stack
And the stack is basically a very fancy CRUD app. That's all Twitter is. The only reason it's still operating is because of the premise: Create, Read, Update, Delete. NO magic sauce.
Have you ever done CRUD for hundreds of millions of users distributed globally accessing your service 24/7? It's much more complicated than updating a database.
Then you have ranking algorithms, search, ad serving, moderation...
Now on Google they are adding paid ads in the middle of the search results, not just the top or bottom.
The reason Google did well was the absence of ads. These LLMs like ChatGPT have now taken that experience that Google has lost.