There's no such thing, but all content publishing web sites should at the very least provide tools for users to self-moderate, which this forum heavily relies on anyway.
Now that the internet is flooded by machine-generated content, which is often published and promoted autonomously as well, all content should be scanned and labeled with a value that indicates the likelihood of it being machine-generated and published.
I'm thinking of JSON fields like `machine_gen_probability` and `machine_pub_probability` returned by the API. Then the frontend should expose settings to show these labels next to each post and comment, and filtering rules to decide what should be done with content above a certain value (hide, adjust feed rank, etc.). Some people might even want to boost this content, for whatever reason, so making the system flexible would be smart.
The scoring system of course won't be perfect, but I figure that a company like YC should know a few talented individuals that could do a solid job of implementing this. They've certainly profited from investing in companies that cause this problem.
But... considering HN is merely a promotional tool for YC that runs on limited resources as it is, I wouldn't hold my breath that such a system would ever be implemented. So all we're going to get are changes to "guidelines", and hope that the system won't be abused. Which is laughably naive in this day and age. So this forum will most likely be overrun by the noise, and end up with minimal participation from reasonable humans, as is happening and will continue to happen on most online platforms.
alt Hacker News
There's no such thing, but all content publishing web sites should at the very least provide tools for users to self-moderate, which this forum heavily relies on anyway.
Now that the internet is flooded by machine-generated content, which is often published and promoted autonomously as well, all content should be scanned and labeled with a value that indicates the likelihood of it being machine-generated and published.
I'm thinking of JSON fields like `machine_gen_probability` and `machine_pub_probability` returned by the API. Then the frontend should expose settings to show these labels next to each post and comment, and filtering rules to decide what should be done with content above a certain value (hide, adjust feed rank, etc.). Some people might even want to boost this content, for whatever reason, so making the system flexible would be smart.
The scoring system of course won't be perfect, but I figure that a company like YC should know a few talented individuals that could do a solid job of implementing this. They've certainly profited from investing in companies that cause this problem.
But... considering HN is merely a promotional tool for YC that runs on limited resources as it is, I wouldn't hold my breath that such a system would ever be implemented. So all we're going to get are changes to "guidelines", and hope that the system won't be abused. Which is laughably naive in this day and age. So this forum will most likely be overrun by the noise, and end up with minimal participation from reasonable humans, as is happening and will continue to happen on most online platforms.