While the guidelines were written (and iterated on) during a different time, it seems like it might be time to have a discussion about if those sort of comments should be welcomed on HN or not.
Some examples:
- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46164360
- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46200460
- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46080064
Personally, I'm on HN for the human conversation, and large LLM-generated texts just get in the way of reading real text from real humans (assumed, at least).
What do you think? Should responses that basically boil down to "I asked $LLM about $X, and here is what $LLM said:" be allowed on HN, and the guidelines updated to state that people shouldn't critique it (similar to other guidelines currently), or should a new guideline be added to ask people from refrain from copy-pasting large LLM responses into the comments, or something else completely?
At this point, I make value judgments when folks use AI for their writing, and will continue to do so.
The one exception for me though is when non-native English speakers want to participate in an English language discussion. LLMs produce by far the most natural sounding translations nowadays, but they imbue that "AI style" onto their output. I'm not sure what the solution here is because it's great for non-native speakers to be able to participate, but I find myself discarding any POV that was obviously expressed with AI.
You post in your own language, and the site builds a translation for everyone, but they can also see your original etc.
I think building it as a forum feature rather than a browser feature is maybe worth.
It should be an intentional place you choose, and probably niche, not generic in topic like Reddit.
I'm also open to the thought that it's a terrible idea.
I also suspect that automatically translating a forum would tend to attract a far worse ratio of high-effort to low-effort contributions than simply accepting posts in a specific language. For example, I'd expect programmers who don't speak any english to have on average a far lower skill level than those who know at least basic english.
We heavily use connected translating apps and it feels really great. It would be such a massive pita to copy every message somewhere outside, having to translate it and then back.
Now, discussions usually follow the sun, and when someone not speaking, say, Portuguese wants to join in, they usually use English (sometimes German or Dutch), and just join.
We know it's not perfect but it works. Without the embedded translation? It absolutely wouldn't.
I also used pretty heavily a telegram channel with similar setup, but it was even better, with transparent auto translation.
When I search for something in my native tongue it is almost always because I want the perspective of people living in my country having experience with X. Now the results are riddled with reddit posts that are from all over the world with crappy translation instead.
1. An automatic translation feature.
2. Being able to submit an "original language" version of a post in case the translation is bad/unavailable, or someone can read the original for more nuance.
The only problem I see with #2 involves malicious usage, where the author is out to deliberately sow confusion/outrage or trying to evade moderation by presenting fundamentally different messages.