HN Explorer

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

41 points by BugsJustFindMe ↗ HN
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)

12 comments

[ 1.5 ms ] story [ 35.4 ms ] thread
jgrahamc
Doesn't the flag button serve that purpose?
leephillips
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.

bell-cot
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.

hyperhello
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.
CM30
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.

kylehotchkiss
Too Many Slops and you can't post for a week. Yes.
al_borland
I’ve been looking at taking a step back from the internet as a whole, including HN, because I’m so tired of the AI slop.

HN and YouTube are basically the only sites I still use. I disabled my watch history on YouTube to kill the recommendations page to get away from a lot of the trash and just focus on my subscriptions. I’ll be unsubscribing to those writing scripts with AI as well, as I notice them.

I’d like to be able to flag things as AI slop on YouTube, so the person gets that feedback and can hopefully get back on the right track. On here, I’m not so sure if that type of reinforcement will matter, or if will be more obvious to the person why a post was flagged.

nubinetwork
Down voting submissions would be a better feature, so much slop gets posted here as gospel until someone realizes its slop generated.
smithoc
The problem is on a thread where there is 1 AI post, people will identify 10 posts as being AI.

People latch onto the word "delve" or an em-dash or the idiom of "it's not X it's Y" as being proof that something was written by AI, without ever considering that AI is largely just writing in the style of how internet commenters write since that's a lot of the training data.

Now we've got students re-writing their homework to avoid looking like AI and commenters self-censoring against words and phrases that trigger AI suspicion.

I'm deeply skeptical that people can correctly identify human-written vs latest AI model written HN comments with sufficient accuracy.

karakoram
No. The flag is enough and given the change in the user demographics of HN, a proposed "slop" button or anything similar will just be abused in a very tribal manner to push down anything AI related.