Ask HN: Would it be useful to have a slop button in addition to flag?

BBugsJustFindMe about 24 hours ago 11 comments

In these modern harrowing times, more and more posts are proving to be AI slop, and many people are averse to that. Do you think it would it be useful to have a way to indicate that you believe a post is slop separate from the existing flag button? Maybe it's just me but I feel like having a dedicated [AI slop] flag on a post would be useful because I feel differently about posts that have been flagged for other reasons than that. (or something friendlier if value is seen in the general idea but not in that language)

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Discussion (11 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews

hyperhello•about 3 hours ago

This is only an idea, but how about a Summarize button that does use AI to write a very concise blurb of the comment. Then if it looks stupid enough at first glance, just read the summary and move on.

krapp•about 1 hour ago

We already have a problem with people refusing to engage with the content and only commenting on comments or the title. The last thing we need is to discourage people from reading the article even more than they already don't.

kylehotchkiss•44 minutes ago

Too Many Slops and you can't post for a week. Yes.

jgrahamc•about 24 hours ago

Doesn't the flag button serve that purpose?

BugsJustFindMe•about 23 hours ago

I don't think it does exactly. I edited to clarify.

leephillips•32 minutes ago

Of course it does. If it’s slop it should be flagged (I say this after reading the edited submission).

In the meantime you can avoid at least some of the slop by using https://hn-ai.org/ or one of the other anti-slop extensions or alternative sites.

CM30•about 2 hours ago

What if the submission said the most common reason an article was flagged next to the title?

That way if it's AI slop it'll say [AI slop], if it's spam it'll say [Spam], if it's dubiously legal/illegal content it'll say that, etc?

You could use that to decide if you want to give the submission a chance or not.

bell-cot•about 23 hours ago

From HN's FAQ:

> What does [flagged] mean?

> Users flagged the post as breaking the guidelines or otherwise not belonging on HN.

I'd favor having a second type of tag, for submissions, which meant "the linked article is of low quality". Doesn't matter to me whether it's AI slop, or press release puffery, or tedious drivel, or by a painfully unqualified author, or something else.

Yahyaaa•about 22 hours ago

I wonder if the signal people actually want is "low information density" rather than "AI-generated."

A lot of the frustration seems to come from content that takes 2,000 words to say something that could have been said in 200, regardless of whether a human or a model wrote it.

If a post is original, useful, and teaches me something, I don't care much how it was produced. What I notice is when a lot of words are used to communicate very little.

bell-cot•about 17 hours ago

Yes, but low information quality is even worse than low information density. If I happen to know the subject well, and the article contains glaring errors, obvious omissions, or miserable fudges - I'd like a quick way to tag it as dubious.

hyperhello•about 3 hours ago

If you really know it’s dubious post a comment.