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Ask HN: How do we handle the rise of low quality "This is LLM" comments?

9 points by shantnutiwari ↗ HN
Every post that reaches the top of HN will have at least a few comments saying "This is LLM!"

It has become a proxy for "I don't like this article, so it must be a LLM"

To me, it feels like lazy karma farming, as these comments often do get a few upvotes.

And of course, accuse a 100 posts if being LLM, you are guaranteed to be right at least once, then like astrologers you can claim success.

Is there anything we can do to discourage this type of lazy and low effort posting?

12 comments

[ 1.3 ms ] story [ 39.3 ms ] thread
kirykl
add a less severe "Flag, as AI" button
spats1990
When you encounter these comments/sentiment, pretend that LLM = Loweffort Long Mumbling. In other words, poor writing.

Detection of "LLM" is a red herring. Quality is what matters. Always has been. Assess comment quality holistically, and you'll be fine.

6510
HN should add some kind of LLM detection. Preferably something that rates how unhinged a comment is.

Smoke me a kipper i'll be back for breakfast.

mts_building
My honest opinion is just to accept it, move on and continue writing, building, creating stuff that will resonate at least with a bunch of people. Unfortunately, what is karma farming here or on Reddit will be hateful or so comments on YouTube, etc. depending on the platform.
brudgers
Ignore or downvote or flag [1] depending on your confidence in your judgement, your perception of its severity of impact on the HN community, your mood, etc.

Just like any other behavior you don’t like.

[1] logically upvoting is also an option.

carlosjobim
The answer has been the same since the days of Moses:

Drown it out with high quality submissions and high quality comments.

etblg
Maybe people should stop posting shitty LLM-written articles that don't generate any good discussion beyond "I think this was written by an LLM" and we won't have this "problem".
kypro
Is this a new problem?

There's always been low effort comments and content, here and all over the internet. A decade or so ago people used to write comments like "this" a lot to farm upvotes off another popular comment.

In comparison to other places this kind of thing is largely discouraged and unrewarded on HN, although I have noticed the quality of comments here has decreased over the years and low-effort comments are definitely upvoted more often these days.

I guess we all just need to be more proactive in downvoting them when we see them.

neurodiv_dennis
People always find ways to farm engagement or trick the system. I think it's not worth the effort to build something around it to try and prevent it. It will fade again.
muzani
Both should be flagged and violate the guidelines.

"Don't post generated comments or AI-edited comments. HN is for conversation between humans.

If a story is spam or off-topic, flag it. Don't feed egregious comments by replying; flag them instead. If you flag, please don't also comment that you did."