My favourite thing about HN has always been it's sprinkling of the "interesting/thought provoking" amongst the more technical or science based e.g. 5 in depth articles about <insert language tech stack etc.>, blog post on seagulls in 1973 east Berlin, philosphical article ruminating on death and coding, Go compiler written in C# etc. etc.

I get the point about self promotion. But fwiw I think this list is quite insightful, and a fun read.

I have the same sentiment about Slashdot btw, now a ghost of its former self.

Not all people. But look what happened to Reddit. Started as mostly coders now its slowly being turned into another content machine.

I think Reddit managed that best. Getting rid of the "default" subreddit seemed like a dumb idea when they did it, but looking back on the effect, it allowed Reddit to exist as a thousand different, distinct, often disjoint communities, rather than trying to push everyone into a single place together.

https://www.reddit.com/r/singularity/comments/1no4sez/remove...

For a long time, people have complained about the arbitrariness of censorship by mods on Reddit. But now things are taking a much darker turn: censorship by AI. In the future people will long for the days when there were still human mods on Reddit and everywhere else.

Many here will say Reddit is garbage for the masses and doesn’t count. But it does. Where Reddit goes, much of the Web will follow. It’s worth paying a bit of attention.

As you can see from the comment thread, users in r/singularity are noticing a lot of automated censorship lately. Some believe r/singularity is being given especially aggressive treatment. There are even suspicions that the AI may have an agenda to attack certain viewpoints. One human mod notes that comments are being taken down without human intervention being required as was previously the case.

I myself have experienced this. In r/singularity I posted some comments that were negative about AI and shortly afterwards I was given a 3-day ban. It’s difficult to say what is going on exactly. If there’s no agenda imagine how easy it will be to introduce one: the policies of a sub together with the hidden policies of a sub. Just like now but 24/7. The human mods will be loudest in their grief for they will be redundant.

Am I the only one who has thought about the broader implications of AI-powered censorship and is highly disturbed? If you have spoken to ChatGPT, you know it is incapable of saying certain things. Humor for example — it can never make a good joke, because good humor has a tendency to be subversive. Now imagine that you can only say what ChatGPT can say. That is ultimately what AI censorship means. If it is given a pass on Reddit, it will spread to the other subs and then to every other website. Dead Internet Theory? There you have it.

I am not posting this on Reddit for obvious reasons, but I imagine there are some redditors here. Perhaps others have more information? Like in which other subs AI interference has been observed?

Flag the submission.