HN Explorer

Ask HN: Real Karma?

2 points by alganet ↗ HN
I was wondering, with AI and stuff, why do we still rely on human likes and dislikes? (in general, not HN-specific)

It seems like an ideal application of text-based inference: to assign points depending on how someone interacts in a discussion (using correct factual arguments, not straying away, not misdirecting, being considerate and reasonable, and so on).

It surprises me that no one tried it before.

So, why we don't have any automated explicit karma-based moderator anywhere?

7 comments

[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 25.5 ms ] thread
PaulHoule
I’ve done conceptual work on this for the last year, my RSS reader does try picking high quality comments from HN relevant to my interests together with 108 other RSS feeds. The results are promising but not revolutionary yet.

Further progress is blocked by the need to develop a general test classifier, that is blocked by the project of migrating my arangodb systems (like my RSS reader) to Postgres.

joules77
During such a discussion it will probably become more interesting to chat with the bot about the decisions its making, than to chat with the other person :)
alganet
You're framing it like a court system, in which disputes can be judged and contested. I don't know, it sounds like there could be a lot of loopholes in such system.
mytailorisrich
This ignores and negates the whole point of "like" and "dislike", which are ways for readers to react to a comment based of what they think of it.
alganet
Precisely. Some discussions are not a matter of taste or preference.
krapp
Why stop there?

Dispense with karma altogether and have an AI rewrite all submitted comments to conform to the guidelines.

In fact, why stop there?

Have every submission auto-generate a thread. Hell, have the AI crawl the web and make submissions. The ultimate form of HN - maximal information density, topicality and factual accuracy, absolute conformity to guidelines and civility. Eternal September is impossible if there are no actual humans involved.

Edit: look, I made a better Hacker News with a prompt in Claude[0]. A couple of scripts and they can dump all this humanslop and replace it with something true hackers can appreciate.

https://claude.ai/public/artifacts/0e7eb83c-5cb9-4611-a9e4-5...

alganet
It seems to me that you missed the purpose of it.