I think you missed @sltkr's point. HN wouldn't just have less new content; it would fail to develop new users. That kind of stagnation is how sites like this die.
Aggressively filtering to raise the average post quality is a sugar rush and it has the metaphorical long term consequences of type-2 diabetes. Things start out feeling great but the acceleration of death is effectively guaranteed.
God help us if we get to the point where we need an LLM agent to do the reading and filtering of all our social content for us. I am completely certain that is a downward spiral that ends with the collapse of our society and I give it 50/50 odds for killing off the entire species.
This is a SNR discussion, the N has just gone up an order of magnitude and may well go up multiple orders of magnitude more to the point that communication between people will be drowned out by non-people attempting to communicate with people. It's the spam problem all over again.
I predict the outcome will be roughly the same: a more or less working set of LLM filters that allow you to filter out LLM output at the price of some false positives and some false negatives. Coming soon to a browser near you: the Bye AI Plugin.
Maybe we need a reverse Turing test and award -- humans write things that are indistinguishable from AI slop.
I have no idea what that could be useful for, but since the Turing test is now essentially beaten maybe its usefulness has come and gone too.
> Imagine if this system was implemented, and one of your comments was identified as LLM-generated and you were instantly banned. How would you feel about it?
It sounds like a fast, efficient, inexpensive and foolproof recipe for destroying a community. Let's use that as a future test: anyone who advocates for it is undeniably trying to destroy HN, so they get downvoted to 1 karma and permanently blocked from voting on anything else.
Another thing that I have raised multiple times on HN: I had a roommate a few years ago that was a non-native English speaker doing research as a post-doc. He would use ChatGPT to improve his writing in scientific papers. He was producing the first draft, then would discuss with ChatGPT about how to improve the grammar. At the time, I thought it was genius. He said it acted like an English tutor for him. When you see the reactionary anti-LLM comments on HN, never once do they mention LLM-assisted -- only all human or all LLM.
> In general, I push back on people saying "I can't find a good/legitimate use for this technology, therefore there are no good/legitimate use for it".
Is that genuinely what you think most of the complaints on HN are saying?
IMNSHO that's an absurd statement to make about the other side of the argument. I'm still giving the benefit of the doubt here but jeeze, this really smells like a strawman.
There are dozens of whole classes of criticism of these tools that I see made on HN, and none of them fall into the category you described.
Ex: Saying "juniors who rely on Copilot/Claud/etc become lazy and can create low quality code without learning how to do better" is night and day different from what you're saying. And that's a criticism that must be addressed or the entire global software industry will destroy itself in two generations.
Surely the difference between that and "we don't want anybody to use Grammarly in their subs that show up here" is completely obvious, yes?
> I disagree with disallowing any comments that used LLMs in the writing.
I think the point here is that the community doesn't want to read AI slop, not that using an LLM to clean up your writing contains some inherent evil that prevents quality.
I don't want to accuse you of strawmanning the argument, but honestly, where did you ever see someone advocating the latter?
Am I too late to get ahead of the curve and stockpile some, while they're still relatively cheap?