Ask HN: What if AI was used to verify users reading articles before discussion?

- The contents of the article are less important than you're implying, most people are here for the discussion. Yes, sometimes not reading the article is a problem but many other times it isn't and this can be clarified in the course of the discussion. Very often the article itself is just a starting point to discuss a broader topic.

- People won't answer the questions like you suggest, they'll just leave. In a hypothetical world where your feature is implemented, it will destroy the site instantly.

- You're making very generous assumptions about what language models can do.

- HN is a website with very minimal features. We don't even have dark mode. I wouldn't expect complex AI features any time soon. Or ever.

- Seriously, take a second to think about the user experience of a discussion site that asks you to take a test before writing a comment.

If I found my posts were blocked because some AI said I wasn't posting correctly I'd leave and never come back[1]. The chilling effect this would have on discussions here would have a much more detrimental impact than any benefit from preventing bad posts.

[1] Some people might argue this is a benefit.

I have noticed that too and it is pretty fucking annoying (+). If the article is about US colleges then the first comment is always about over education and how not every job requires a college degree. If the article is about trains it is about how the US, unlike Europe, is too large for train networks. If it is about renewable energy, the first comment is about how the green movement is shooting itself in the foot by shunning nuclear. And so on.

I think you could at least partially solve the problem by having the ranking algorithm bias more heavily towards recent comments. As it is now the first comments are much more likely to reach high scores than later comments, which is stupid because it might take an hour or two to read an in depth article and formulate something insightful.

+ - And I've been guilty of it too.

People making fallacious or otherwise nonsensical comments is a problem all over social media. Like you say it's common that articles aren't properly read, and I'm sure most of us are guilty of it sometimes. There can be many other possible explanations though. For one, there are and always have been trolls. We're all different ages, education levels and intelligence here as well, that can make a big difference because some simply don't understand why their arguments aren't logical, no ill intentions. Lastly we should consider that GPT-3 & co are already here. Probably less on HN than Reddit, Fakebook and Twitter, but it's obvious that governments and corporations are using bots to influence social media in general.

So how are you going to protect against this? ANNs are great at answering these questions, and the AI can't outsmart itself. By making it harder to comment you'd actually lose more human commenters, because like others say what you suggest is frustrating, most people wouldn't bother. We'd be left worse off.

Imo rather than putting computers in charge, we might soon have to consider the opposite: Checks for users to verify that they're human. This will probably have to be done by humans themselves, but I've not seen a really practical idea of how it could be done yet.

I don't think this would solve it. AI can make mistakes too and quite frequently. As we've learned from CAPTCHAs, they're very annoying and kill engagement.

I think the moderation and "the post answers this" works well enough. If there are lots of straw men, it could be a problem with the content or a clickbaity title.

In many cases, I don't care much about the article at all. Sometimes it's just "new update from Firefox" and people just want to talk about Firefox updates.

> I recently read a frustrating thread on HN where it was obvious several people were making arguments against points that were already addressed in the article.

Ummm, yes? Isn't that the point of a discussion thread? Just because the article makes some points doesn't exempt them from criticism.

Many articles posted on HN are outright garbage - e.g. very poorly constructed studies or some undergrad psych/nutrition juju that doesn't pass a basic critical thinking test, so it's quite rightful that people don't waste their time reading them (or at least reading them completely)

> The discussion in the thread was cluttered with people attacking straw men instead of having any fruitful discourse.

Typically, people attacking straw men will do so regardless of whether they read the article. The problem with those people is that they invent the straw man, attack it, win, and do all those things without ever caring if it relates to the topic at hand at all.

I like the idea of knowing who has read an article in full and who has not.

That said, I don't mind some noise from people who scanned (or less) the article. Random and wrong is still fuel for my thinking. Which is why I'm here. I don't have intimate connection with individuals here so much as the group as a whole.

To respond directly to your suggestion, I'd like ANY (even honor system) notation for people who have read the article (RL1, Reading Level: 0-3).

I like the Q and A idea for myself so I can review the article mentally and recapture elements and think more deeply on the subject for retention AND for better participation in the conversation. I would actually like that on my browser - "quiz me on this page" - anyone want to collaborate? Not that I'm a chatty Charlie on the boards here, but it is nice to be more confident in one's ideas before sharing.

>The discussion in the thread was cluttered with people attacking straw men instead of having any fruitful discourse.

Isn't this partly why the downvote button exists and pushes lower voted comments down and greys them out or the flag button for those really terrible off topic comments?

NRKbeta, the tech vertical of the Norwegian public broadcaster NRK, actually did the manual version of this a few years back [0-1], but found it hard to conclude with success or failure based on the evidence they gathered.

[0]: https://nrkbeta.no/2017/08/10/with-a-quiz-to-comment-readers...

[1]: https://www.niemanlab.org/2017/03/this-site-is-taking-the-ed...

I find HN has a better SNR than any other user discussion I've read on the internet. Arguing against points addressed in the article seems like a good thing to me (maybe I misunderstand though and you mean people are missing objective facts). My biggest criticism of the discussions is that there usually isnt much diversity of opinion for controversial topics and most outside a narrow range get downvoted. I think diversity would get worse if there were more barriers to commenting.

> I then came upon the idea that perhaps something like GPT-3 could be used to have users answer 3 questions about the article's content before being able to comment.

The Norwegian equivalent of the BBC did this.

https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2018/03/how-a-norwegian-comme...

You can check out our best attempt at a question generator at http://quickquiz.me, to get an idea of what type of questions a large language model (T5) can produce. Its the best model my team and I witnessed. We are still collecting data to generate more salient, and well structured questions. Its a work in progress.

This reminds me of a handful of courses I had in school where we had to read an article, take a quiz and then participate in a “discussion”.

To me, the “you didn’t read the article” or “the article directly addresses this” responses are most effective dismissal of such a post, and a bit of a public embarrassment for the poster.

GPT-3 is neat, but I definitely get "2+2=5" vibes when reading some of its output. There's a lot of content that's statistically plausible but not logically rigorous. The last thing I want is for this species of algorithm to then screen what I post for intellectual rigor.

The marketers love your idea and will inject even more ads if reading the article until the very end (no matter how devoid of information or misleading they may be) becomes mandatory just to comment on it.

It feels like half of the time, you can't read the article because of a paywall. Usually somewhere down the comments someone will have posted a way around the wall, which helps.

I share the view of others here, the article is just a seed crystal for discussion. Sometimes the most valuable comments are found in the misunderstanding and tangents that arise.

I don't read the article and basically never without first reading the comments. Far too many times I see somebody here who can disprove, or knows more about the topic than the article.

Gpt-3 can not make questions from text. If would be better to give instant answers if it can read and realize the material, because sometimes I really do not need to read all the article.

"Sorry due to GDPR you cannot view this article."

"Hi - here's 50,000 ads and 1PB of JS loading in your browser and the content jumps around, have fun! Oh btw pls accept cookies from 1,000,000,000 ad networks, kthx".

Most websites consume ungodly amounts of JS, are janky as shit and deplete battery life and consume resources pointlessly and unethically.

If an article loaded as fast as HN does then sure, after all, it's just words on a page like this thread, not hard to render in 100kb of data transfer?

Sadly, because the cancer of ads has infected the internet and we treat it less severely than Covid we get a situation where reading an article becomes choresome.

Fix that then maybe you have a chance but that's why I rarely read the article unless it works on noscript and can load in dial-up style internet conditions. You've got around 3-4 seconds or I'm out.

You could do it as a Firefox extension which then gives the users who answered correctly a green tick or some other indicator.

Then people would build a solution to automatically solve the verification-process...

(Go ahead and downvote, but I think the tone in this answer is appropriate.)

Yes, let's sprinkle magic fairy dust on threads to fix human foibles. Let's make sure there are no more meta-discussions, like people not being able to read the article for any reason. Let's also avoid any posts like "Hey, if you like the author you should check out X". Or, conversely, "Hey, this person is a known crank[1][2][3], don't bother reading." Or anything where a one-paragraph tl;dr could've easily replaced the entire article, and answering based on the tl;dr is completely reasonable. Or any of a host of other types of comments which I couldn't think of off the top of my head.

Let's instead make sure everyone who wants to post needs to remember things from the article which are completely irrelevant to the actual content, and that they spend a few minutes trying to guess what the question means and which exact characters will appease the algorithm.

Let's not.

> I recently read a frustrating thread on HN where it was obvious several people were making arguments against points that were already addressed in the article.

HN wants the engagement and doesn’t give a hoot if people read the articles before commenting.