[ctrlmeta]

Totally unreadable with the all caps. I guess that's the point.

This kind of thing is fun once. And it was fun when the AI-generated fake HN was posted last week.

But there's no need to upvote this kind of stuff to front page every week. The novelty wears off. It gets boring and silly pretty quickly.

[dang]

> This kind of thing is fun once. And it was fun when the AI-generated fake HN was posted last week.

Yes, this is always the dynamic with follow-ups. Curiosity value diminishes sharply with repetition. More here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46329337

[orphea]

It's boring and silly for you. There are always lucky 10,000.

[dang]

That's true and there are at least two disjoint subsets:

(1) people who didn't see the original post from last week (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46205632), for whom the follow-up is therefore new and interesting;

(2) people who did see the original post but appreciate the follow-ups as fun and amusing variations on the theme, and therefore want them on the frontpage.

But from a moderation point of view we can't prioritize either of those cases, since doing so would be globally suboptimal, i.e. they would make the site less interesting overall in the long run. This is where it's handy to know what one is optimizing for (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...) and to have clear principles which support it (more on this at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46329337).

Of course, there is always room for occasional exceptions—we don't want to apply the "avoid repetition" principle too repetitively!—but they have to be limited, or the principle no longer holds.

If you* imagine a topic X that you don't find extra interesting, and then consider how much more annoying each Xi in the sequence X1, X2,... becomes if the deltas between Xi and Xi+1 get too small, and then remember that people have quite different feelings about which topics deserve or don't deserve extra attention, it becomes clear that the global optimization is to downweight follow-ups generally. I'm writing this in haste so I hope it makes sense!

* (I don't mean you personally, but anyone here)

[ctrlmeta]

Of course it is boring and silly for me. That's why I commented. The downvotes show the community agrees with you and disagrees with me. That's fine. I'm here to speak my opinion. I'm not here to speak your opinion.

I know about lucky 10000. It's the XKCD joke that is increasingly being used as an excuse to support every low-effort banal post. It's like modus operandus now. Party A makes a low-effort banal post. Party B questions why a banal post deserves to be on the front page. Party C says 'lucky 10000'.

There may be lucky 10000 but it's boring and silly for me. Good for the lucky 10000, but it's distracting to me when this kind of AI spam hits the front page every week. Show HN posts already gets special appearance at /show which I think is enough for this kind of stuff.

[2026iknewit]

Yes but this is a different experiment

[ctrlmeta]

It is and I said as much. I'm sure these experiments are fun for the creator. From the downvotes I'm getting, I'm sure it's fun for the community too. It was fun for me too the first time. It's not fun if this type of experiments are on the front page every week. There's already a good home for these posts at /show. Pages can reach /show without reaching front page. This could have been one of them. But anyway others here disagree with me. So I'll go take a break now.