> many who notice don't care, or are willing to overlook it if the premise is interesting enough

I imagine the set of articles that are somehow both interesting-enough-to-read but not interesting-enough-to-write is smaller than you'd think.

In most cases the bar is not "is it worth reading" but "is it worth discussing"

Why even go to this site then? If it is all llm posts and llm comments, just prompt claude to make you a self hosted truman show esque forum to do your venting and what have you’s with the llm fodder.

Why do we need anything more than good/bad?

If there is a great post on a topic and the author used AI when generating it, what’s so bad about that?

Different people weight the slop factor differently, which is the main source of pain at the moment. (For example, another top-level comment in this thread suggests banning AI-generated content outright)

What’s different between “slop” and “bad”

Take any existing article you find insightful and then ask an LLM to "rewrite it, but make better and more engaging". The result is likely "good + slop", assuming the actual content is preserved.

If what people here say is right, and AI usage online is growing and accelerating, then by the end of the year, the vast, vast majority articles posted to the internet (and linked by HN readers) are going to be AI slop, at which point it is not going to matter. "This article is AI" is going to add about as much insight to the conversation as "The author used a spell checker."

A good link aggregator should strive to select the <1% of articles that are actually high quality. Who cares what “everyone” is doing?

Isn't that what the vote system is? If the users are selecting low quality then what exactly?

Then we are fucked. A quality platform must strive for more quality than what the average lurker, likely a bot, decides is worth reading. That’s how you get modern Reddit.

Is the goal of this site to remain high-quality, or to rely on random, anonymous users to discern quality? Consider the possibility that the two options might be incompatible.

It might come as a surprise to you, but "random anonymous users discerning quality" is exactly how this site operates and that's working pretty well.

I agree with you, though you’ll find other old users that will claim people have been moaning about the ‘decline in morals’ of this site since its inception

> Who cares what “everyone” is doing?

FOMO-suffering hype junkies do care if there's enough fellow roof jumpers to join to and sing something like "well, define high quality first" in chorus on their way to the ground.

> a) a sizeable fraction of voters are not able to recognize AI-generated text b) many who notice don't care, or are willing to overlook it if the premise is interesting enough.

agreed.

For me, the issue I have is that a vocal group seems to despise AI-edited content and they can't manage to take their disgust eleswhere.

AI-editing is another tool, just like spellcheck.