Ask HN: Would it be useful to have a slop button in addition to flag?
6 points
5 hours ago
| 2 comments
| 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)
jgrahamc
5 hours ago
[-]
Doesn't the flag button serve that purpose?
reply
BugsJustFindMe
4 hours ago
[-]
I don't think it does exactly. I edited to clarify.
reply
bell-cot
4 hours ago
[-]
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.

reply
Yahyaaa
2 hours ago
[-]
I wonder if the signal people actually want is "low information density" rather than "AI-generated."

A lot of the frustration seems to come from content that takes 2,000 words to say something that could have been said in 200, regardless of whether a human or a model wrote it.

If a post is original, useful, and teaches me something, I don't care much how it was produced. What I notice is when a lot of words are used to communicate very little.

reply